If your thinking of buying, then read.
At the start of the game you have a choice of races, but you probably know about them, they are hume, elvaan, galka, mithra and tarutaru.
Final Fantasy is a very slow paced, time consuming game, i was mainly dissapointed with the boring battle system, double click, attack and watch your character battle it out with a monster or "mob" if you like. I have played Final Fantasy since last christmas, and lately havnt played much of it, im ashamed to say that the highest level i reached was 35 dark knight, but that was because i could not stand to level for to long and ended up making new chars.
The game is pretty hard, its not really the game itself, its the economy, its pretty damn hard to make alot of money and you will literally bore yourself to sleep when farming, in case you dont know what farming is its fighting endless hordes of mobs and retrieving a stack of items to sell off, a stack is 12 of the same item, yes 12, and you dont get a drop every time you kill something.
Music is rather annoying, not like any other final fantasys, battle music sucks, and some places dont even have music at all, so you will be listening to your footsteps or spells nearby.
The game doesn't have many towns like other final fantasys, the 3 main places are bastok, sandoria, and windurst which you will find pretty dull after a while, and the music really does get to you, the community is OK, there are the occasional dicks running about, also there are gil sellers that camp nm's (notorious monsters) that drop rare things day in day out, and that is another thing that is irritating about the game, notorious monsters, who really wants to sit there for hours on end staring at the same thing on your computer screen waiting for some nm to pop up? and whats worse, you may not even get the nm because there will be so many others camping it.
Overall final fantasy is an OK game but a bit dissapointing compared to its previous games, give it a go if your a die final fantasy fan, or maybe just enjoy playing mmo's, but i can tell you there are alot better games to play out there like World of warcraft, or even Guild wars.