FFXI Gil Guide: Final Fantasy XI Gil Strategy Guides, Hints, Tips

I'll be honest, I've not played any of the recent Final Fantasy games. The last one I played used 8-bit graphics many many years ago and I don't even remember which one that was. Sure, I've watched other people play the recent sequels here and there but they never really caught my interest very much. Maybe it's because I never actually sat down and played any of them.

Recently I got the opportunity to play the beta version of the North American release of Square Enix's first foray into the MMORPG market, Final Fantasy XI. If the single player versions are anything like FFXI, I can now see why so many people have such a fanatical devotion to the Final Fantasy series.

For the most part, FFXI is a standard swords and sorcery MMORPG with a twist of technology added in. Perhaps a better description would be an earth like world in the late renaissance period that has been influenced by magic since it's creation. FFXI is set in the land of Vana'diel which began as a world of magic and only recently in it's history had technology such as ballistics introduced to it.

Players do have a choice of races from the diminutive Taru Taru to the gigantic gender neutral Galka. Character customization beyond a few sets of hairstyles and hair colors is fairly limited though.

Character professions start out with a few basic professions with more possibilities opening up as a character advances in the game. Players can switch their character between professions with little to no repercussions. No lost experience or skills and there is no limit to how many times you can switch professions. This enables one character to theoretically become master of all professions eventually. It's very frustrating in other games to have to work on a certain skill/profession negating work that you've put into other professions due to unused skill atrophy. Even more frustrating is being locked out of certain skills simply because you did not chose that skill when the character was created. Happily, FFXI suffers neither of these problems.

Interaction between player characters is centered around questing, trading and monster bashing. Anybody looking for hardcore player versus player interaction will not find it in FFXI. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and it fits the intended audience and the game series quite well. The atmosphere of the game is geared more towards working together to accomplish things rather than trying to beat another player at something.

That said, there is ample opportunity for competition between players. When a character is created, they chose one of three cities to start out in. These cities are competing against each other for control over different land regions. The more land that a city controls, by fighting monsters in the regions, the more non-player vendors are available in their towns with more varieties of items to sell which makes them a more successful city.

There are quite a few crafting skills available and cover most items that a player would want to make. Much like the professions, there is no limit to what crafting skills a character can learn, provided they have enough resources or money to learn them. Each character has the ability to become both an adventurer and a crafter if they so desire.

The graphics quality is on par with any recent 3d MMORPGs and any user with a fairly current computer should have no problem dealing with the higher level textures and resolutions that the game has available. Special attention has been paid to player and monster models as very few of them have any noticeable polys or graphical glitches. Unfortunately this comes with the price that most monster models are reused many times with different names attached to the monster.

Sound composition is done rather well. It's certainly not one of those games where you turn the music off immediately and switch to playing mp3's or whatever although I haven't found myself looking forward to the music ever.

Game stability is excellent for a game that is in beta but this is easily explained by the fact that the game has been released in Japan for about a year now. Any stability issues have already been ironed out and it shows. In the month and a half that I have played it, the game has crashed maybe three times. However, users who play on the PC platform should be forewarned: you will grow to hate your windows key and may eventually take it off of your keyboard. The game can not be run in windowed mode and hence will close out if you try to alt-tab or use the windows key. In the middle of a heated battle, this can have dire consequences if you miss a macro key. It would be nice if the devs would have the client intercept any windows key requests before it was sent to the OS but taking they key off of the keyboard is just as easy.

There are other methods for controlling the game though, most notable is using a game controller. This brings up an interesting aspect of the game, a PS2 version will be released sometime in early 2004. PS2 and PC players will be able to play on the same servers together which will expand player base even further.

Included with FFXI is a sub game called TetraMaster. It's a card game of sorts which I am told was a sub game in a previous Final Fantasy. I've not really played it much but it does have a fair number of followers already. Having a sub game like this leaves the door open for Square-Enix to provide other sub games from the FF series as options in the future.

Pricing for FFXI will be on par with other MMORPGs at $12.95 per month for one character and $1 per month for each extra character up to 16. TetraMaster will also cost an additional $1 per month.

Overall, Square-Enix seems to have a winner on their hands. Look for Final Fantasy XI to be released in North America for PCs in late October.