User Rating: 4.4 | Final Fantasy XI PC
The Good: Final Fantasy online looks awesome. The only reason I did not give it a 10 was that because it will only look awesome if your system can handle it. Granted you don't need a killer system (I have a 1.5 GHZ AMD and a Geforce 4 64meg card) but if your forced to use the lower detail modes for whatever reason the game looks pretty bad. So if you are planning on playing this game make sure to crank the texture resolution to the max and your screen resolution as well and prey your system isn't too old. The Job system in the game is back from previous games. For the most part it's decent but unfortunately unless your a magic user you won't find many skills available to you in the game. This is pretty much standard for these sorts of online games. The jobs can be switched whenever you want. If your familiar with other online games this would be the equivalent of making a new character but all of the new jab stats stay in tact. It's a little hard to explain but just know that you can be every class in the game at some point using the same character. However you can only play them one at a time. At Level 18 you can go on a quest that allows you to have a sub class in addition to your main class. So if you want to be a Fighter Mage you can be a L20 Fighter and your mage skill will be locked at L10 (Until you level your fighter to 22 then the Mage skill can go to 11). While nice this forces you to have to level up your sub Job separately. The Bad: The game gets pretty boring fast. Unfortunately with these massive online games after a while you will find yourself doing the same thing over, and over, and OVER, AND OVER. Outside of trying to unlock the more advanced Jobs like Samurai and Summonner ( you have to get to L30 with your main class then do a quest to get the job) the game really is the same thing over and over again. However this is pretty much true of the genera it's in so nothing new here. The combat system SEEMS to be a little on the simplistic side. Unfortunately the combat while not in depth tends to play itself. If your a mage you will have thing to do but as a Tank class your left with just knowing when to use your skills in a fight and sitting there and watching your character fight. There is actually a LOT more to it than just that but you will run into a lot of people (especially at the lower levels) who don't really quite grasp this concept and let the game play it self so to speak and never figure out how to properly protect the other players and so on. After Level 15 the game pretty much FORCES you to group. While this isn't really a bad thing my experience isn't that your grouped because you need these other people to get XP, you need them more to survive. After L15 the zones you have to play in to fight the right difficulty monsters tends to also have roaming monsters that are much tougher than you and also your group at times that will attack you while you fight. This is flat out irritating. I mostly saw people grouping just so they would have other people to outrun when the monsters they couldn't kill came. To top it off the XP you get in groups is skewed very badly. In an effort to prevent power-leveling the game scales all the XP based on how hard the monster is to the highest level character in the group. To give you an Idea I was with someone who was my level and the monsters we were fighting gave 30 XP. After he leveled up 1 level the same monsters now gave him 26 xp and me 12. That's a pretty big gap. So playing with your friends is only viable if you all stay on the same EXACT play schedule and or try to play catch up (which eventually fails). As with most of these online games your play experience will only be as good as the company you keep. If you luck out and get into good groups or ally with good players then your going to have a much better time with the game. However if you constantly run into people who are not good at the game or have a bad attitude about things your play time will be pretty abysmal. To make matters worse your more likely to be running into other people that have no Idea what they are doing when you start out so your not really going to get a feel for what you need to be doing until much later in the game. Lastly, because this was originally a PS2 game that was ported to the PC in Japan, the control scheme is tilted for the PS2. The keyboard controls are pretty horrible and the mouse controls flat out are unusable. To make it worse the text doesn't scale if you change to a higher resolution. So when playing the game, while it make look good, you won't be able to read the text as clearly. Also the mouse is so small and oddly colored that it blends in too well and you have a hard time seeing it. If you have a USB PS2-type controller it plays a lot better but still can be irritating. Because things are menu driven getting into and out of combat takes a bit too long. Getting into combat isn't really an issue but when the fight goes bad and you want to run you have to bring up the menu command for getting out of combat (or hotkey it) then wait for your character to put their weapon away, then turn and run. this all gives the monster ample time to get too many swings in on you for your flee to really be successful. Add into that the monsters run about as fast as you do and your only chance for survival becomes a guessing game of how to get the monster hung up on the terrain. Also if your deep in a zone running might not even be a plausible Idea in the first place as you might just end up running right into other monsters. Overall the game shows great potential and was actually a Lot of fun but after a while the tedium of the whole thing left me bored. The tactics don't seem to change much and after getting your sub job having to start over again was irritating. The control scheme is awful. Too many times I found myself having to fight with the controls or camera and less time enjoying the game. But in the end it was the difficulty of the game that really bothered me. I have played both Dark age of Camelot and Everquest. While DAoC is considered by many to be an easier game to play and EQ is the one that's harder, I found FFXI to be harder than EQ by a great deal. The fact that there is so many wandering monsters in the game that attack you while you are trying to level your character is irritating. It's one thing to die because your group wasn't organized or you didn't know what your doing. it's a totally other thing when your fighting a monster that you have the upper hand with or just have good tactics on how to beat it and here comes a monster about 10 levels higher than you that just stomps on you. it's no fun and the fact that you lose a LOT of XP when you die in this game doesn't help matters much. In the End it's a pretty game but that can only take you so far. The game is VERY punishing and overall to me not worth the effort. 
