Excuse me while I spend six months away from civilization.
Square's first Final Fantasy MMORPG (the sole other being Final Fantasy XIV), Final Fantasy XI is pretty good now (or so they say). I say now because it's launch was littered with annoyances. The main reason being Hiromichi Tanaka was in charge. But since it was his first foray into the MMO genre, I'll cut him some slack.
When the game was launched in North America, we were given the availability to play with Japanese players, which was pretty cool. What wasn't cool was that they had already been playing for two years. In MMO-time, that's an insanely big time difference, and most of them had already completed all the quests while we were turning the damn thing on for the first time. They fixed it eventually though, with more servers and additional quests.
I have to praise Square Enix for this game in terms of keeping it alive and well. Every year since 2002, we've gotten updates and expansions. If there's a problem (e.g. running the PS2 version on the early PS3), they fix it. And they do it consistently. Yoichi Wada, Square Enix's president, has stated that Final Fantasy XI is the most profitable Final Fantasy game to date. So it would make sense to keep that thing running smoothly for as long as possible, and I'd say 2002-2013 is a damn good run so far. The game is also able to run cross-console, meaning you can play from any Xbox 360, PC, or PS2/3 as long as you have your info handy.
The game takes place in Vana'diel, twenty years after the Crystal War, where three nations fought a bad guy and did some stuff and blah blah blah. The world has its own mythology and history, and it's really quite expansive. It's one of the most immersive MMO worlds I've experienced, which is its greatest strength and weakness all in one.
The game is a black hole of time. It's really a job. A job you have to pay money to do, and takes up more time than an actual, real-life job. MMOs can take up an insane amount of time if you want to lose yourself, and Final Fantasy XI is no different.
You absolutely have to be playing with a party to get any real work done. Every member is a cog in the machine, and must act and react accordingly. Fighting a battle? Well, I hope you don't die, because if you do, you lose a whopping 10% of your EXP. And EXP will seem more valuable than anything in real life. The game is a constant grind, and it takes forever. Even more so than the 8-bit installments. And it's not fun in the slightest.
Scenario: You get a party together, which takes a loooong time since no one is ever in the spirit of just "helping people out" for fear of death. There has to be definitive benefits to their being in the party. Otherwise, forget it, because they're risking a lot just by going into combat. Oh, and none of your real-life friends will ever play with you. You have to schedule everything around the game's timetable since there are so many time-sensitive factors, and your individual schedules will rarely match up. So once you have a party in order (after an hour), the fun can start, right? Nope. You do the same thing a billion times in a row, following the same routine over and over and over and over again just to kill rabbits. Repeat for three hours (or three days). Then by some fluke or poor preparation, you die. And you scream yourself hoarse, shut the damn thing off, unplug it for good measure, and storm off to do something else. But later that night, you sulk back over and start playing again, feeling nothing but simmering anger. This cycle repeats an insane amount of times.
Oh, and when you died, your party would have preferred you stayed with them after being revived (sans 10% of your EXP, and also would take a half hour), but since you were so blind with rage, you didn't even think about it. It took them another forty minutes to find a replacement. The whole scenerio is very commonplace. Death in the game is roughly equivalent to death in real life. Nobody wants to sit there grinding for days on end, but there's no other way to get ahead, so everyone grumbles and mindlessly repeats the same actions day in and day out. You don't know what I mean until you experience it yourself, but trust me, you don't want to waste months of your life to know that it's not worth it. Think about how much real life sucks sometimes, then imagine you're playing a video game that does only that. How can you possibly say no?
It would be way better if everything didn't take a million years. And I mean everything. Walking to a new location, fighting a battle, waiting for shops to open, waiting for an airship in order to travel, waiting for a phase of the moon to arrive, waiting for a certain day of the week (in real time). There is a lot lot lot to do in this game, it just takes forever to do any of it. And it's not fun. I don't even know why I played it for as long as I did, even though I said repeatedly to myself, "THIS IS NOT FUN AND I DO NOT WANT TO BE DOING IT ANYMORE." It becomes an addiction, and even after you realize you are not having any fun whatsoever, for some reason you still play it. A lot. Why? I don't know why. The same reason people do heavy drugs even though they know it's not a good idea and they'll probably die. The game is another life. Another life you have to live while sacrificing your actual life. So many hours of playtime I will never get back, and will regret it for the rest of my life. Square Enix has created this virtual drug that is ruining people's real lives.
I can't really summarize the whole experience and mindset of this game exactly. Just thinking about it is getting me all worked up. Awesome things like the fact that Final Fantasy XI is very closely related to Final Fantasy III (which is a cool concept even if I didn't really like III all that much), or that the world is huge with a million things to do mean nothing if the game is too much to bear by itself. I gave Final Fantasy XI a good chance, but I'm not a huge MMO person. Maybe that's the problem. I guess there are over a million people who would disagree with me. Or maybe they're just too far gone to ever come back. Who knows? I just hope Final Fantasy XIV is an improvement in terms of enjoying the game.
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