Not many MMOs have managed to keep such a big fan base for so long and the game is cheaper than pants today. Try it!
For PC users, there are means and ways to tweak the visuals and the UI to some extent, making some game features easier to use and providing some badly-needed convenience. Unlike the guys at Blizzard, though, Square Eenix aren't too keen on people using 3rd party modifications, especially since using them provides an unfair advantage over PS2 and Xbox360 users, who are cross-platform compatible with PC gamers.
Dated UI and visuals or not, FFXI still has quite a few active players today. The main reason, apart from the Final Fantasy title, is probably how Squeenix manage to bring people together like nobody else could. Apart from the aforementioned multi-platform compatibility, the game features a clever translation system, which allows Japanese, English, German, French etc players to form groups and communicate without trouble. All the races and jobs, stuff from "Nice to meet you!" to "I'm sorry, I need to go!", battle orders and tactics, all the important stuff can be translated with a simple press of your tab key. So, if you want to say "Hello!" to your multilingual party, you just type it out and use the translation feature and your message will appear in whichever language the folks in your group have installed their game in. Very cool!
Before you set foot into the world of Vana'Diel, you'll face the single-most tedious installation in gaming history, especially when installing some or all of the available expansion packs. Setting up and patching "PlayOnline", the virtual gaming platform behind FFXI, means a herculean effort in itself. And until you've finally installed everything you need, you may as well go to bed, go watch a movie or mow the lawn or all of that stuff combined, as the auto updater will keep you waiting for several hours, regardless of how powerful your connection might be, since the updater will literally check tens of thousands of files and compare them to possible newer files on the update server. It downloads them afterwards, installs them, compares once more… you get the idea.
After getting all of these annoying procedures out of the way, you get to create your first character, starting off by choosing a race and gender. Unlike many other MMOs, your race will make a huge difference on FFXI and your health, mana, physical strength etc greatly depend on your race of choice. The huge, hulking Galka, for instance, get insane amounts of hit points and they're stronger than any other race. On the other hand, you won't see an awful lot of them becoming serious mages. The tiny Tarutaru are the exact opposite of the Galka and make excellent spellcasters, but they're very fragile and probably not your first choice if you're going to be a warrior type. The other races, Humes (aka humans), Elvaan (elves with ape-like body proportions) and Mithra (a race of sexy cat girls, which inspired more than one piece of dirty fan-art) are all fairly balanced. Once again, the "Humes" are the proverbial jacks of all trades with balanced stats, which neither suck, nor excel at anything. Elvaan lean a bit towards the more physical jobs, but they also make okay spellcasters. And Mithra, you guessed it, are the most agile and dextrous of all the races, making them excellent thief and ninja types.
While your race is a permanent choice for obvious reasons, you may change your class (or "Job", as they're called on FFXI) anytime you wish, simply by entering the nearest Mog House and telling your trusty Moogle you'd like to switch professions. In fact, you'll start out with only a few basic jobs and unlock the more advanced ones by finishing the corresponding job quests. The system is pretty handy, because you may unlock and play all of the available jobs and level them individually. That way, you don't won't have to start a new character in order to try a new job. In fact, playing alternative characters is not the most desirable thing to do, since earning certain privileges and benefits such as the use of airships or chocobos often requires lots of time and patience and most people don't get much fun out of doing this more than once. Besides, each additional character raises your monthly fee by 1 USD (or 1 Euro, respectively), which is kind of a ripoff, considering how many characters you get to create per account on other MMOs without additional costs.
Another interesting twist to the job system is how, upon reaching a certain level, you get to choose a "sub job". In doing so, you'll get certain benefits from other jobs to your main job. For instance, a paladin with a warrior sub job will get to use the warrior's defensive stance and their provoke ability. A black mage "subbing" white mage will benefit from an increased mana pool and gets to cast healing magic. Naturally, not every single main/sub job combo makes sense and chances are, the community won't invite you to parties if your job combination of choice gets too exotic, but it's still a pretty decent system.
Gaining levels on FFXI works strictly through combat. There are missions and quests, but those exclusively raise your faction rankings and level caps and unlock special privileges and jobs. You'll be spending most of your time teaming up with other players to kill baddies for experience points. Unlike other MMOs, though, FFXI is a lot more on the tactical side. Combat is relatively slow-paced and most of the time, your party will be facing a single foe at a time. Basically, the whole strategy isn't all that different from similar games, either. You get your heavy duty fighters to provoke the baddies and take the hits, the healers keep the tank alive and the damage dealers make sure to dish out the best they can, without provoking the monster into attacking them instead of the tank.
With the huge selection of available jobs, these tactics do get some variety, though. For instance, rather than using a defensive paladin to soak up all the monster damage, some people prefer using 1-2 ninjas, who are equally effective against most baddies, with their high evasion rate and their ability to summon shadows, which will take the hits for them. Dragoons are particularly effective against flying baddies, thieves can attack monsters for insane damage, whilst tricking them into believing the attack had been dealt by whatever character they're hiding behind. Melee characters can coordinate their attacks for special group combos and mages can top them off for a little extra damage causing a so-called "Magic Burst".
It's all very tactical and a party is only as powerful as their weakest member. Or the one, who sucks the most at playing their job, to put it bluntly.
This is probably one of the game's greatest flaws. With a very few exceptions, you'll always be forced to team up with other people, as most jobs aren't very capable of doing things without a party. And you had best remember the few players out there, who actually know what they are doing! Unfortunately, you'll run into your fair share of healers, who go afk in the heat of battle without warning, potentially killing off their entire party. There are tanks, who wouldn't provoke monsters if you paid them money to do it. And there are damage dealers, who dish out as much as somehow possible to show off their insane strength, whilst permanently moaning about the "useless tank", who will have a hard time trying to keep the monster focused on them.
Combat can provide insane amounts of fun with a well-organized team of capable players. But it can be equally frustrating when you keep on dying, because people don't know how to do their jobs. And this isn't WoW – death results in harsh experience penalties, which may even cause you to lose a level. This is especially frustrating if you've just geared up on brand new armor for your newly-acquired level and suddenly you'll find yourself unable to wear that stuff after a level-down.
For as strange as it may sound, though, death penalty has its advantages and most people wouldn't want it removed. You will often find yourself in situations, where it's best to sneak past monsters, which would easily beat you in a fight. And instead of just running through, to see how far you'll get and eventually shrug off a couple deaths on the go, you will use stealth and protective spells and potions, which will turn you invisible or make you impossible to hear. And your heart will skip a beat whenever one of these spells wears off or a baddie walks up to you and you're starting to wonder whether your protective magicks are going to work with it or not. You will want to avoid dying at all costs – as it should be.
Sadly, many of the more important quests are incredibly hard to finish without the help of players several levels above your own. The whole sneak/invisibility procedure I've mentioned above is something you'll find yourself doing all too often and gets particularly annoying in full parties of six, with spells such as invisibility having random duration timers, meaning they could last anything from ten seconds to several minutes and you need to get a whole bunch of people through an area alive.
And since you depend on the help of stronger players pretty much all the time until you finally start reaching the level-cap yourself, you will likely feel somewhat weak and powerless throughout the biggest part of the game. But that's just another bit of the "social aspect" within FFXI.
FFXI has a much stronger focus on team play than most other games of its kind and there's an overwhelming amount of friendly, helpful players, who will gladly support you with your missions and quests, just for the fun of it. The downside is, of course, that you won't get any fun out of this game if you want to do things on your own. A useful portion of decent, enjoyable solo content is one of the many areas, where FFXI is sorely lacking by today's standards.
Another one would be crafting and gathering jobs. No matter whether you're into fishing, woodworking or mining, it's all equally tedious, expensive and frustrating for newcomers. Your fishing rod tends to break all too often, you'll run out of bait and you'll catch a fair share of rusty buckets. Due to the insane competition, selling crafted items means offering them at the auctioneer for a price lower than the amount you had to pay for the crafting ingredients, meaning you'll actually LOSE money from crafting, until you start capping your skill levels! On top of all that, there's an overwhelming amount of rules, factors and myths, which may or may not have an influence on the result of your crafting attempts. Rumor has it, that college courses on FFXI are already being planned. :P
The auction-house, whilst being the first of its kind on any MMO, is functional at best, with the maximum amount of auctions a player may set up at a time being only seven. Making money can become a painfully slow process that way, especially with the limited storage and inventory space you get. On top of that, you get to pay insanely high fees for creating an auction, depending on where you are trying to sell your stuff – only the 2 main, "independent" auction houses are linked.
FFXI doesn't use guilds or clans in a traditional sense. Instead, the game utilizes so-called "linkshells" and players can be part of an infinite amount of them and switch back and forth between them by equipping the corresponding link pearl. Basically, they work like guilds and you get to chat with the members of your linkshell, team up and go on quests together, but the possibility to switch from one shell to another at any given time adds a rather unique twist to the system, which can be both a blessing and a curse.
Of course it's fun having the possibility to check out several linkshells if you need help with a mission or you just want to chat and everyone in your shell of choice is busy or offline. Some shells are fun and social and chatty, others focus on endgame content and beating up the toughest baddies and bosses. With shells being less "permanent" than conventional guilds, you're not forced to join and stay with just one.
Of course, with people being able to come and go as they like, you'll rarely ever find any persistent groups of players, as everyone keeps moving on from one shell to the next. It's a double-edged sword.
You might also feel somewhat irritated with the means of transportation on FFXI. It's perfectly normal to spend up to 11 minutes of real earth time waiting for the next boat or airship when you've missed the last one by a few seconds. If your party is waiting for you in another city and you want to reach them by airship to go on a quest together, telling them, "I'm just flying there real quick" usually means they can sit and wait for you for another 20 minutes. Boat trips can become even more time consuming than that and some ferries are popular targets for sea monsters and other baddies.
FFXI is very slow-paced, but every level-up, every piece of class-based armor, every time you get a new airship pass, your chocobo license or just a higher rank, it feels like a real achievement! You don't just go out, kill bad guys and gain levels nonstop. There are situations, where you will have to stop, even if it's just because you've reached your current level-cap and you have to go on a quest to raise it. And there's a good chance you'll have to try some of those quests more than once, because many of them aren't on the easy side.
Patience is required for everything you do, even if it's just looking for people to team up with. While certain jobs are practically wanted in every party, it may take several HOURS (!) for others to get a party invitation, when they don't fit with the regular cookie-cutter setup. Healers and tanks are rare and sought-after, but it's a lot harder for damage dealers to find people to play with, especially dragoons. And with FFXI featuring practically no serious PVP (there are some possibilities here and there, but most people don't bother), class-balancing is practically non-existent. For instance, ninjas and dancers have handy skills, which let them take on strong enemies all by themselves with little to no downtime in between battles. Beast Masters get to tame their own pets and they can very well level up all the way from 1 to 75 (ingame maximum) using only their pets and no parties at all.
The majority of jobs couldn't even dare dream of soloing effectively enough to seriously consider that a possibility to gain levels once you make it past level 20. At the higher stages of the game, it's perfectly normal to get killed by a baddie, which is supposedly "easy prey" to you (the game rates baddies from 'too weak to be worthwhile' to 'impossible to gauge!'), depending on which job you're playing. It's classic Final Fantasy – where the white mages heal, the warriors dish out and the thieves deal the most damage on distracted targets. There are no healers in this game, who kill hordes of monsters with life-draining magic or rogue-types, who jump baddies and shred them to tiny bits in open combat, using only daggers and leather armor. Some jobs specialize in combat, others in support.
Final Fantasy XI is not a game for everyone, even if you're a big fan of the classic, job-based games of the franchise and/or MMOs in general. The game designers are starting to implement features to make the game more accessible to newcomers, allowing veteran players to temporarily lower their levels in order to team up with inexperienced folks (much like the mentor system in Everquest 2), but in terms of depth and complexity, FFXI and the ever-popular World of Warcraft are worlds apart, with the former being rather overwhelming even to the more seasoned gamers. You have to earn the right to use chocobocs and airships, quest for all your class-based armor and unlock higher level caps through quests and the harsh death penalty will slow your progress, keeping you busy for ages on your way to the endgame stuff.
If you take the time to get drawn into the game and you get the hang of its complicated mechanics, then FFXI will truly feel epic – for as overused as that term may be today.
You will never feel like you're just one out of a thousand people on your server, who are whacking monsters all day to level up as quickly as possible. You explore, go on dangerous missions, solve quests full of huge cut-scenes, which feature you as the main hero of the storyline. There's an incredibly wide selection of unique jobs at your disposal, the game world is really huge and the eargasm-inducing soundtrack and the ambient sound effects bring everything to life. You can walk through the fields, look at the sun, which shines through the leaves of the trees with corny lens-flare effects and you can even hear the whispering of the wind in the trees. It's all very basic and simple, yet so effective. It's easy to close your eyes and imagine what Vana'Diel would look like if it was real, despite the dated graphics and the blurry, low-resolution textures.
Like most MMOs, FFXI has been losing players particularly since WoW got so popular and AoC hit the stores, but the community keeps getting new members here and there until this very day, so there must be something about that game, other than just the popular brand name.