Final Fantasy XI

You can't mess with Final Fantasy XI's staying power. While this may have a lot to do with its title, it's not fair to attribute its long-term success to this alone. Back when it first came out in the U.S. for PC, many doubted that the product of by-the-book developers of Japanese RPGs (albeit hugely successful ones) would "get" the MMO thing. But soon after its release, many of these very people ate their words, as they found themselves hopelessly addictive to what was, in many ways, the best MMO at the time.

When FFXI for Xbox 360 was announced at last's year's E3, the game was about three and a half years old. This didn't deter Microsoft from accompanying its announcement with much fanfare. Really, though, why would they? The game has proven to be a success on both PC and PlayStation 2, sniping cynics and jaded journalists be damned. In any event, it was almost immediately apparent that FFXI would come to the 360 effectively unchanged. The recent open beta that Square Enix has invited us to participate in makes this even more evident.

FFXI has always been a bear to install. The fact it can take upwards of three hours from the time you insert your disc to till you get to login isn't indicative of its age; it's more to do with Square Enix insisting that players access the game by means of PlayOnline, a proprietary (and utterly superfluous) suite of internet tools. It lets you e-mail, read in-game news, manage buddy lists, and the like. In short, it does what Xbox Live already does better. But hate it or love it, you have to install it along with the game, and register both pieces of software separately. And it can take a minute.

Once you're done with that, you have to update to the latest version of the game. If you haven't played these kinds of games before, know that they'll go through incremental changes at least once a month, which requires you to download files that are sometimes very large. Of all the MMOs I've played, Final Fantasy XI easily takes the longest in this regard.


Rest assured, though, that once you're in the world, things get better. It's easy to see why FFXI was regarded as highly as it was, back in the day. The developers put in a lot of work to make sure that Vana'diel, the game's world, actually felt like a world. When the game first launched, MMO worlds were like wax museums -- static, and requiring insane amounts of fortitude-of-imagination to become immersed in. But Vana'diel was different. Its cities were populated with characters who felt fully in place within the world, with dialogue that was well-written and often amusing, and animations that were emotively human. The environments themselves were richly detailed and believable, as if every square foot served a purpose more significant than upping your travel time. The outside world was most impressive; most other games of its time had areas that felt featureless, and randomly generated. Vana'diel's lovingly-crafted, landmark-rich vistas were a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Though the graphics aren't very likely to knock your socks off at this point, you'll still certainly appreciate the stylistic flourishes that permeate everything about it. Chances are, anyway, that if you can get into this sort of game, then you'll probably stop caring much about the graphics after your first eighty-or-so hours.