Giving this game, or at the very least its base campaign, any ranking today feels a bit weird I'm gonna be real.
It's clear this experience extends much further and I do intend to discover where it might lead.
But I still do want to put a small recounting of my feelings about this game up until this point so that I may contrast the quality of it later down the road.
It took me a few months to really get into this game, and I don't blame anyone for immediately shafting it in the opening hours. The controls are clunky, the mechanics are poorly explained, the exploration can be gruelingly slow and a lot of QoL features made specifically to cater to novices are very badly tutorialized, which sucks.
A lot of the early game will be spent navigating from wiki page to reddit questions about the most basic bullshit to your more veteran friend's dms, if you're lucky enough to have such a friend (thanks Alise).
However, and this is where I can't really justify myself, once you're past the stage of second guessing every mouse click, and once you begin understanding the patterns under which the game operates, it's...good?
It's still slow, there are still a lot of things kept from the player for no discernable reason and some of the dungeon design would make the CIA's torture teams blush in embarrassment, but I definitely took enjoyment in the general experience.
The world of Vana'diel is bleak, shrouded in a lot of mysteries and secrets, some of which the main plot does address. Exploring, seeing the sights, discovering more and more of the towns and regions of the world felt like my exploration was being rewarded in kind. It felt good to walk for hours and to finally discover a bustling town of miners embroiled in thinly veiled racial tensions.
And while the plot itself is, quite frankly, a tad basic for what you'd expect from an FF game in the 2000s, there were some genuinely great scenes and set pieces, and the main villain was really poignant? It definitely did struck a chord with me at the very least.
All of this is a rough and general summary of my experience with FFXI's base campaign, and I don't doubt some of my feelings about it will change with the later content. I think XI's a game with a flawed, but fairly decent foundation with an unfortunately alienating new player experience. However, if you do have the patience to surmount those harsh early hours of the game, and a few other stumbles along the way, this game might be worth a shot.
It's clear this experience extends much further and I do intend to discover where it might lead.
But I still do want to put a small recounting of my feelings about this game up until this point so that I may contrast the quality of it later down the road.
It took me a few months to really get into this game, and I don't blame anyone for immediately shafting it in the opening hours. The controls are clunky, the mechanics are poorly explained, the exploration can be gruelingly slow and a lot of QoL features made specifically to cater to novices are very badly tutorialized, which sucks.
A lot of the early game will be spent navigating from wiki page to reddit questions about the most basic bullshit to your more veteran friend's dms, if you're lucky enough to have such a friend (thanks Alise).
However, and this is where I can't really justify myself, once you're past the stage of second guessing every mouse click, and once you begin understanding the patterns under which the game operates, it's...good?
It's still slow, there are still a lot of things kept from the player for no discernable reason and some of the dungeon design would make the CIA's torture teams blush in embarrassment, but I definitely took enjoyment in the general experience.
The world of Vana'diel is bleak, shrouded in a lot of mysteries and secrets, some of which the main plot does address. Exploring, seeing the sights, discovering more and more of the towns and regions of the world felt like my exploration was being rewarded in kind. It felt good to walk for hours and to finally discover a bustling town of miners embroiled in thinly veiled racial tensions.
And while the plot itself is, quite frankly, a tad basic for what you'd expect from an FF game in the 2000s, there were some genuinely great scenes and set pieces, and the main villain was really poignant? It definitely did struck a chord with me at the very least.
All of this is a rough and general summary of my experience with FFXI's base campaign, and I don't doubt some of my feelings about it will change with the later content. I think XI's a game with a flawed, but fairly decent foundation with an unfortunately alienating new player experience. However, if you do have the patience to surmount those harsh early hours of the game, and a few other stumbles along the way, this game might be worth a shot.