espiga's Final Fantasy XI review

Hey man. I've tidied a few little things up on the assumption you wouldn't mind. I put the screens on the HG server to save you bandwidth, and the last one was too big for the browser so I resized it. I like to do nice things like this now and then. It keeps people guessing.

In other news, this was a fantastic review. A close friend of mine has been harping on about how I should play FFXI for years now. Literally years. But you made it a much more desirable fate than she, and in significantly less words. Good job.

Why thank you.

The bandwidth issue isn't a super big one. My webspace has unlimited bandwidth so HG could leech the pics until hell freezes over and it wouldn't harm anything.

I really wanted to write a review that does FFXI justice, because it's a game I loved yet sometimes had no idea just why I felt that way about it, but upon revisiting it, the more than warm reception I received from all sides reminded me of what made the game so strong, and that's what I wanted to focus on rather than making a giant list of all the game's mechanics (and there's a lot.)

But yeah, I'm glad you liked it, and thanks for resizing that pic.

Wow. Wow.

Yeah, two wows. Three now. I'm really impressed. I have seen shots of FFXI and it looks like an interesting game. I absolutely love how you worked other FF references in here and the pictures were well choosen to emphasize your points.

I probably will not be playing FFXI, because I'm on a MAC, but you have gotten me even more interested to try out FFXIV when it comes out for PS3. The only problem is that monthly cost... how much was it to play FFXI?

By the way... it's been a while since you've reviewed anything, right? Welcome back Espiga.

Hey there Zipp, I'm glad you enjoyed it. =] FFXI's monthly fee runs you $12.95/month for your first character and an additional buck/month for any additional characters you make. The charge for additional characters may seem like a WTF thing, but due to the nature of FFXI and the job system, creating another character is never necessary unless you want to try the game out as another race, or simply want a backup character to hold all your extra shit.

Also, I have several friends that play FFXI on Mac via a program called Bootcamp. I assume it's a windows emulator of some sort, but should you wish to check the game out, I can speak to some of those Mac friends and see if there's anything special that needs to be done to get the game working.

Edit: also forgot to mention that Square Enix accounts that have both an FFXIV account and FFXI account registered with active characters will get a price reduction for the FFXI account, dropping the price from $12.95 to $7.

I not an MMO kind of person but you did a good job in getting my interest in the game. I really liked the way you ended. I'm also curious about what summons you found and used.

Avatars in FFXI work in a manner similar to the Aeons in FFX.

Each Avatar has an initial MP cost in order to summon it, as well as a perpetuation cost: an MP cost required in order to keep the Avatar summoned. Similar to FFX, the Avatar fights alongside you in battle, with you being able to control both your avatar and your summoner. AvAvatar abilities are divided among offensive and defensive, listed under the headings Blood Pact: Rage and Blood Pact: Ward, respectively. Each time you use a blood pact, you have a one minute cooldown period before you can use another Blood Pact of that type. Naturally, as the summoner levels up, their Avatars will gain additional abilities.

Anyway, the Avatars you can obtain are Carbuncle, Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, Titan, Garuda, Leviathan,Fenrir, Diabolos, Odin, and Alexander.

For a long time, Square has stated that Bahamut would not be summonable (though he plays an important part in the storyline) due to balancing issues. But with plans to increase the level cap to 99, a lot of people feel that Bahamut will one day be usable... and they're probably right.

So the game will continue to see support after the release of FFXIV?

There's at least another year's worth of updates planned at this point, and Square Enix has stated that they'll continue to support the game for as long as the fans do.

Of course, there's always the chance they're full of shit when they say that. It is Square Enix, after all.

I read that FFXIV is not at all like FFXI. So I would imagine they will support both - for little while anyway.

Question: if you wanted to buy FFXI, would you have to buy the original game or do some of the expansions come with the original on the pack?

Clicking!

This package comes with the following:

Final Fantasy XI

The expansion packs: Rise of the Zilart, Chains of Promathia, Treasures of Aht Urghan, Wings of the Goddess, A Crystalline Prophecy, Moogle Kupo d'Etat, A Shantotto Acension.

And it's about $13. That's probably the cheapest you'll find FFXI with all that content, except for maybe on Steam. And I don't know how well that'll work on a mac.

However, this collection doesn't include the two new expansion packs, Vision of Abyssea and Scars of Abyssea, and it (quite obviously) doesn't include the upcoming expansion, Heroes of Abyssea. However, that content is designed for characters Lv. 75+ anyway, so it's unlikely you'd need Abyssea content for a significant time.

Thanks for the advice! Comparitively, what would be the best package to go for if I wanted to play on PS2?

The best advice for FFXI on PS2? Don't do it.

The 360 version is just about servicable, the PS2 version a complete mess.

Oh yeah? That's too bad. Didn't they develop it for the PS2 originally?

It was originally developed for PS2 + PC, sorta like how FFXIV is developed for PS3 + PC.

However, EmP is right. You really don't want to play it on PS2. The PS2 version requires that you get an old PS2 PHAT, the game, the HDD add-on, the old-school network adaptor (assuming you can track all that down), and then you've still got the slowest version, with a crap resolution and tons of lag.

I heard there was some way to get it working on PS3, but that was back when they were still backwards compatible, so as far as that goes, I can't really comment.

It's MUCH easier to just pop the disc in your PC, (and in your case, run it through bootcamp), install it, patch it, and play... And the package I mentioned above allows you to do just that.