A very long online adventure

User Rating: 7 | Final Fantasy XI PC
I have been a fan of the Final Fantasy series ever since I first played it on the Playstation. FFVII remains to be one of the best RPGs to date on any platform in my oppinion. The second best RPG experience I had was on the dreamcast playing Phantasy Star Online. Being such a big fan of that game I couldn't wait to have the biggest RPG franchise available as online play. The final product however failed to impress me.

Don't get me wrong Final Fantasy XI is a fantastic game. The graphics look impressive with loads of armor and weapons to get your hands on. The battlesystem works, even though it can be quite dull depending on what job you're playing as. Red mage seemed one of the better jobs to get some excitment on the battlefield. However once you get past level 15 you'll depend on forming parties. And here's where the problem kicks in. It can take ages to form a party online and you'll need to kill mosters over and over again in the same spot untill your level is high enough to move on. The tricky thing is that your teammates need to be no more of less then 1 level form yours.

In other words you'll need to play this game as a full-time job to get some satisfaction out of it. Because if you only play a couple of hours (a day even) you will never find people to hand out with every time you go online. And unfortunatly there's no way to level up on your own. If they would've made this game a bit more accesable for solo play, I would've still been playing it.

Unfortunatly I didn't have the time for it.