Final Fantasy XI Review.

I should start out by admitting that I am a HUGE Final Fantasy fangirl. That is, I love the series a lot, not that I'm just huge.

I originally played FF VI-IX on my old PS1, bought the PS2 solely for playing the vaguely disappointing X, and then scowled with disgust when they brought out the fanservice shit named X-2.

XI is my first experience with Square since the disasterous X-2 (which was, let's face it, basically Charlie's Angels) and I was ready to move on and forgive them for releasing something which had dress-up for the girls, and all-female characters with bouncy assets for the boys, as well as a very linear storyline dressed up to be non-linear and an annoying merge between real-time and turn-based combat that didn't really work.

I know, I'm late to the party with this one, everyone and their dog has already played it. Well, I hadn't, so shush.

So, I bought a copy of the original Final Fantasy XI without the expansions and dedicated around 12 hours to it. That 12 hours saw me installing it, patching it (4-5 hours) and then spending an additional hour working out how to sign up to the stupid thing.

INSTALLATION & SETUP: 0/5

The installation and set up process is ridiculously complex and laborious. Instead, like most MMOs, of simply registering, paying or activating your free trial and away you go, you first need to install Play Online. Once you've installed that, you then install Final Fantasy XI, the game. Then you run both. It looks like you're done, for all intents and purposes, until you get your hopes up and click "play", and are awarded with the information that you have to spend 4 hours patching. Great, thanks for letting me know that earlier when I was prepared to wait instead of letting me think I was done.

Once you're patched, and you've registered - which requires your full name, address, credit card details, e-mail, blahdeblahblah - you click Play again. This time you're greeted with the information that you don't have a ContentID.

Now, any reasonable person at this point wonders what the hell a ContentID is, and why they were never asked to make one during which was obviously the initial set up process. But you're never prompted to get one, just suddenly told that's important when you try to play without one. It's as if Square figured they could just leave that nugget out and let us figure it out when things went wrong, instead of guiding you to set it up in the first place. Given how long the set up process already is, you'd think they'd have added that in, but no.

Turns out, a content ID is basically your registration fee, except that it only allows you to make ONE character. One character per ID, and if you want more you either delete your character or buy a new ID. I'm sorry, what? This game, in addition for charing me for the game, its many expansion packs, AND my monthly registration fee, wants to charge me more if I have the audacity to want to make more than one character, and actually test different races or classes? Yes, yes it does.

As I had a free trial - handy, since I'd never actually pay for this shit - I managed to set up a free ContentID and went to click Play YET AGAIN.

This time, the game finally loaded. Only instead of looking like this:



It looked like a pile of wank so fuzzy and pixellated that I actually couldn't see the cursor. I tried to screenshot that for you guys, but it didn't work, obviously. As the game doesn't come with any kind of manual, I had to actually google and look up Wikipedia in order to find out how to change the damn graphic settings. This is exceptionally poor game design.

I'd already tried all the options in both Play Online and Final Fantasy itself, and that gave me about a thousand ways to change the size of my font and the colour of the background or borders, but nothing about stopping the game from looking like a fuzzy pile of vomit. No, that's in the separate Config set up which is accessible through the Start Menu and cannot be opened while you're in the game. Not to mention, the game is full screen by default and will crash if you alt tab.

Most games would run the config file automatically the first time you play the game. Unsurprisingly, Final Fantasy XI does not. Once you open the config you can change the graphic settings, play in Windowed mode (useful, if you don't want to crash for having the gall to try and do something else with your computer at the same time) and also change the command keys from their defaults. This is also the only way, without a manual, to find out what the default command keys are.

You'd assume the default would be either WASD or directional arrow keys. You'd be wrong. Final Fantasy XI uses the stunningly baffling Number Pad as its default, with - as the menu key.
I'm sorry, what? -? Fucking -? In what world does - as a menu make ANY kind of fucking sense? M, sure, or ESC, or control, or space, or anything other than a fucking minus key. The default controls are also not very left-handed-player friendly. Whatever, I guess the Japanese just hate us.

Remember, I haven't even been able to play the game part of the fucking game yet, and by this point we're about 6 hours in. Finally I finish changing the incomprehensible settings and re-load Play Online and Final Fantasy XI. Again. I click Play. Again.

CHARACTER CREATION: 1/5

One of the things I was most looking forward to was the character customisation. Being able to pick a race, gender, change your skin/hair/eye colour, facial features etc, like any other MMO. Unfortunately, like everything else in this game, I was disappointed.

You can pick from 5 races, and in most cases, either male or female. Then you've a choice of 5-7 different "faces", all which come with different hair. You can't change the hairstyle, that's stuck with whatever face you choose, so there's only about 5-7 different looks. You can change the colour of your hair, but you only have 2 colour options. Then you can change "size"; this isn't explained, you just get a choice between small, medium and large. It turns out this is height, but that's never elaborated on.

To make this limited experience even more unpleasant, your character instead of standing still so you can clearly see the different options, is moving around. Not swaying or rotating, but fucking jumping and rolling around and being surprisingly acrobatic. It took me a good 10 minutes to compare the small amount of options, just because my character kept doing fucking barrel rolls. In the config file you can switch this to a giant stretched avatar instead, but then you can't full-view the character, and a lot of them are only images showing the face in profile, which makes it harder to see the face/hair you've chosen.

THE GAME: 1.5/5

Now the graphics look more up-to-scratch, and although the controls are still totally unnatural and baffling, I do at least know the portion of the keyboard attributed to them and can mostly fumble around. In some cases, not, though. For instance, I met a player who still hadn't worked out how to equip a sword after he'd been playing for 2 days. I quickly worked it out and told him, and we tried to add one another as friends.

This isn't as simple as you might think, and you're probably realising that with this game, nothing is as simple as you might think. It's relatively easy to open the Friend List menu, but once there... no options. No add, delete, nothing. So I try /friend [Player Name] thinking this might add him. I even try the + key, considering - is menu. Nothing.

Again, I have to turn to google in lack of a manual that actually explains this cryptic shit, and it turns out it's the /befriend command. Ok, it's nice English, but if that's the ONLY WAY to add someone (right clicking didn't work either) how is it a logical jump to think of befriend rather than just /friend?

Aside from the controls, the map drove me slightly mad. It's huge and there's no way to get a nice small mini-map you can keep in the corner of the screen, which is pretty detrimental when the maps and fields are so big. You meet a few NPCs and witness a few seemingly random scenes when you get there, and are given a coupon to give to an NPC. I immediately forgot who I was supposed to find and had to ask the other players, as the coupon and original NPC wouldn't tell me. Oops.

You have a few scurry-and-find quests, and learn the "basics" in-game. It becomes clear that instead of a vast abudancy of healing potions available in every other Final Fantasy game, here, food items grant stat buffs instead and in order to heal you just have to sit down for a while and do bugger all. Terrific. The sit button is, quite logically, *.

BATTLE: 1.5/5

In the starting area there are 3 enemies. Two are similarly weak leveled, and the third will massacre you with one hit, so apparently they don't care if you have to spend the first week killing worms. This is where my other 6 hours of gameplay came in - I got to level 3.

In order to attack a monster you need to be within range, which translates to so-close-it's-standing-on-my-foot and facing the right direction. This is a bit finnicky and the game will decide you're backwards even if you're only slightly turned, so you may have to jiggle about directionally before you can attack it. Sadly, clicking and selecting attack won't make you automatically move within range, you'll just stand there like a lemon unless you start running.

You also can't hit a running target with a melee weapon, so if your little victim is running away, you just get to chase it all over the effing map until it stops. Fun times. The only benefit I can see to being able to run around when in battle mode is the ability to run out of range and dodge attacks, although this is pretty pointless with a melee weapon in the beginning of the game, because the enemy can still hit you as it chases you, and you'll just end up missing when you try to swing.

Once in battle, it's a weird mixture between real-time and turn-based, with abilities you can use once in a blue moon that don't take effect immediately but, in my case, seemed to only activate immediately after the enemy died.

Once you've successfully slaughtered said enemy, there's a chance it may drop a chest. There are two kinds of chests (at least in this early stage of the game).

• Unlocked Chest - these you can open and get items from with relatively little difficulty. Unfortunately, true to Final Fantasy form, if you want to get an item from a chest you have to cycle through 3 menus to get it. For each item. If there's more than one item, you have to do it all again, because they can only be taken out individually, there's no "get all" option.
• Locked Chest - these chests contain goodies, but in order to get at them, you have to guess a random 2 digit number between 10-99. You have 5 attempts, you can use up some of these finding out what three of the likely possibilities for either digit are, or whether you think either digit is odd or even. This narrows the possibilities, but takes away a lot of your 5 chances. Get it right, you get what's inside. This never happened for me. Get it wrong, you get fuck all. This is the game equivalent of blowing raspberries in your face.

OVERALL: 0.5/5

If this were a normal, offline Final Fantasy game, it might score slightly higher. As it is, the only logic I can derive from the ridiculously user-unfriendly interface and bizarre default controls is to make everything that much more difficult to make you play longer, thus making the player pay more for longer registration.

Any game's controls should be relatively obvious, things like ESC or M for menu, E for equipment, I inventory, space to jump, right-click for options, WASD or directional key for movement, et cetera. At the very least, if an experienced gamer can't guess the majority of the basic controls without having to fucking google for them, there should be a menu in the actual game interface to explain or change them, or maybe a manual included to explain the bizarre choices.

It seems that, since the switch from Squaresoft to Square Enix in 2003, they've thrown away a perfectly good formula that they previously just recycled with new characters in a new setting. All right, it was the same basic game, but it worked, and we liked it. Final Fantasy VII, their crowning glory as far as I'm concerned, sold over 8 million copies and was the best selling Playstation 1 game - and for good reason! But instead of keeping up the same winning formula, Enix have churned out more and more crap, and this game seems like half of it was over-thought, making it ridiculously fiddly and unnecessarily complex, and the rest was thrown in last minute, not explained, leaving new players to have to look up the information online.

I may have only spent about 12 hours on this game, so there could be hidden depths I don't appreciate, but hell, if 12 hours isn't long enough to master the basic fucking controls without having to look them up online, you need to go back to Game Design school. That, or jam your hands in a toaster as punishment for this horrible, horrible game.