Final Fantasy XI News & Events & Guides

However, the core of FFXI--and most online RPGs, for that matter--is exploration, combat, and leveling up. The game's sprawling environments and initially slow-paced combat makes the underlying action feel like a chore even early on. Inevitably, you'll want to find a group of like-minded players and hunker down to kill the same monsters over and over, in order to gain experience and level up in your chosen job. It's possible to change jobs at any time back at town--so if you're a 20th-level warrior, you can switch to being a black mage or a monk, though you'll wind up back at level one and basically have to start Final Fantasy XI Gil leveling up all over again. As if to force you to change jobs often, the game limits you to just one character slot, unless you pay extra on top of an already fairly steep monthly fee. Considering you're probably already paying for an Xbox Live Gold account, the need to pay a monthly fee is a considerable disincentive. For what it's worth, you don't need to have a paid Xbox Live account to play this game, though.

What you do need is a great deal of spare time and patience...and a USB keyboard, since typing is really the only effective way to communicate with other players in the game. Just beginning play for the very first time literally takes close to three hours, from the hour it takes just to install the game to your Xbox 360 hard drive (the game gobbles up more than a third of the total amount of free space on that thing), to the hour it takes to update the game files once you connect, to the hour it takes to enter about half a dozen registration codes and, finally, spending a few minutes to create your character. Like other versions of FFXI, this game is unfortunately saddled within Square Enix's PlayOnline viewer, a shell that provides you with a free e-mail address and some other completely unnecessary services. It must be an inextricable part of the game, but all it does here is make it more difficult for you to jump into a session of Final Fantasy XI Gil.