Note on all expansions: Every part of FFXI takes an enormous hit in my ratings for existing within the god awful, unconscionable interface, code base, and general design philosophies of FFXI. These things are the foundations of the whole game, and thus no expansion can fully escape these sins. Despite this I have chosen to log them all separately because they are each different beasts.

By the time I reached Wings of the Goddess I had already dumped hundreds of hours into a game that I don't like. At best I had felt that everything I had seen along the way had been "okay." I'd forced myself through my utter revulsion at the overall play experience of FFXI's base game, been mostly disappointed by the stories of RoZ and CoP, and had been concerned by the blandness of most of ToAU's missions.

It was all worth it for Wings of the Goddess.

I cannot possibly overstate how much the story of Wings of the Goddess obliterates every past expansion. It's paced better. It has more substance. It's more focused. It has better characters. It's funnier. It has much, much more dynamic cutscenes. It takes the nation story concept from RoZ and the base game and does all three of them miles better than either previous attempt. It has one of my favorite villains of the entire franchise. I'm perfectly happy to place all of its writing only slightly below that of FFXIV's best expansions.

Its missions too feel like improvements, though not without some asterisks. Rather than conjure up a bunch of new zones and then fail to fully exploit them like ToAU, WotG just clones the base game's world, sprinkles in about three new zones between them, and strives to make decent use of it. Unfortunately almost none of the original dungeons made the the journey in any meaningful way, so for the most part it's just bouncing around copies of very old areas. Thankfully most of its requests are relatively unobtrusive... not much in the way of long and tedious drop hunting.

WotG is by far the most fun I've had with FFXI, and I'm just a whisper away from recommending the world to fight through the universally terrible experience of the game's interface for several hundred hours, paying a full subscription all the while just to get here, but that's still a very tall order. Maybe it's still best just to watch the cutscenes on Youtube. In any case letting this languish in obscurity feels like some sort of crime. Let it be known that I did my part.

FFXI just keeps getting better and better. This is a contender for best story in any Final Fantasy game imo, and its a really fun, epic experience from start to finish. I am in awe of this game's worldbuilding and characters, both of which really shine here.

Would literally be perfect if the game designers were not petty. They make getting through any map an absolute chore, as in these past versions, you practically have to rout through every single square. There also are no survival guides close to Jeuno or the vertical conflux in Grauberg, two places you go to a LOT for no other reason than they want you to have to spend ten minutes walking to those locations a lot. And there are also a lot of missions that basically require me to farm an item to retry a boss (No I don't want to farm ANOTHER punch bug, why do you ask). so while this had the potential to be amazing, once again the FFXI game design philosophy lets its down a bit.

If someone were to ask me "what's FFXI to you?", the Wings of the Goddess era would be my answer, and was my peak FFXI experience. The level cap was still 75, you had level sync to smooth the leveling process a little bit (but not too much!), your jobs were fleshed out, you had Dancer(!), campaign was a blast, and there was just so much to do! Abyssea and onward watered down the game a bit for me, to the point where it's not recognizably FFXI to me.

I play on a private server these days, and am enjoying the experience now just as much as I did back then on retail.