1/30/2022
Review of Final Fantasy XI Online
Developed by: Square Enix
2002, PC
An MMORPG is like a theme park designed by a government agency. In this theme park, every ride and attraction is hidden behind obscure prerequisites or busywork. I want to walk you through my experience of playing Final Fantasy XI Online, which was a somewhat early MMORPG, but this experience applies to newer MMORPGs too.
I'm sorry if this is tedious to read, but please imagine how tedious it was to live. After finishing the tutorial, I made a goal of getting to ride a chocobo, or any kind of mount. I looked up online the path to the correct town and started fighting my way across the map, leveling up along the way, returning to town to get new equipment, spells, and AI teammates. It felt about as enjoyable as a normal RPG. When reaching the man who would give me a chocobo license, he told me to go back to an area I had passed a few hours ago to find an escaped chocobo and look for its tracks. I couldn't find the tracks because they were invisible and could only be seen by using the target command in a certain area, which would have taken me a few years to figure out if I hadn't used the internet. After slowly walking back to the man, he told me to return to the town where I started the whole trip and talk to someone there. That person told me to return to the chocobo man. Finally he gave me a chocobo egg, and it turned out this wasn't the right quest to get the chocobo license, I was supposed to decline the first quest he offered me. After looking at the amount of time it would take to find the randomly dropped items that I would need to complete the correct quest, I stopped playing.
Free-to-play games make you spend money to avoid wasting your time, but MMOs make you spend money and then waste your time so you keep paying for longer. Final Fantasy XI does that more blatantly, but the other MMOs I've played do it to some degree. Which is a shame because an open-world RPG where you set your own goals is interesting to me, and Final Fantasy XI has an art style that I like more than others, even its menu design and font looked classic the first time I saw them. The problem is the goals in Final Fantasy XI all work in reverse. Every town has so many things you can do, there's a tailor shop where you can buy twenty different kinds of cloth, a store that sells carpentry materials, every creature you kill can leave behind an item that goes unexplained, and most characters you talk to serve some function. There are a bunch of threads lying around all over the place, but no one tells you which ones to pick up or if they'll lead anywhere you're interested in. Instead of telling you the end goal and then letting you know how to get there, you find a store that sells an absolute plethora of wood but they don't explain how to use it or why you would care if they did.
Final Fantasy XI is like a theme park designed by a government agency because like a theme park, you're in a simulation of an adventure, but still a tourist contained in a sterile place where you have no effect. And like a government agency it makes you feel not like a small cog in a big wheel, but insignificant in how little it's designed to accommodate you, and despised in how it values you and your time.