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.

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.

ToAU, like much of FFXI, feels like it has a few really cool ideas for its plot but not enough to build out into a roughly 40 hour expansion storyline. Its climax is good, its premise is good, and most of the memories players will take from it will be good too, but in the moment to moment playing, it feels even more like drudgery than that which preceded it. The base game, RoZ, and to a slightly lesser extent CoP all frequently presented players with strange new dungeons at regular intervals that carried just a hint of Castle Ravenloft. This, of course, made them very stupid and mean, but also memorable, funny, and in some sense, "epic." Just as World of Warcraft was about to do, FFXI seemingly casts this aside with ToAU. The actual gameplay of the expansion mostly consists of running back and forth a great many times between three or four key locations and watching the cutscenes that ensue, with semi-frequent breaks that demand the farming of various items.

As a result, in a perhaps shocking twist, I consider ToAU a step backward for gameplay... though it is a small step forward for story. Unlike CoP, ToAU is comprehensible and has sensible structure, though it leans excruciatingly hard on comic relief from a character who's more likely to give abuse victims PTSD than to elicit any laughs.

Is it worth playing FFXI for? No. It is considerably more tame than CoP in just about all ways, and thus its relative refinement has rendered it the less interesting. It has its moments and its concepts, but I can't say its worth the effort.

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.

Chains of Promathia is what happens when your DM who is on the spectrum somewhere does some adderall and a line of cocaine and then fixation dumps his whole DnD campaign setting's worldbuilding on you in an incomprehensible word-salad hurricane. To call it "an ambitious story for an MMO in 2004" is like saying that that when Mount Vesuvius erupted it was a bad day to be in Pompeii. To be perfectly frank I believe that this glorious audacity blinds many to the deep, deep problems that haunt the writing of CoP.

While the base game and RoZ were quite notably underwritten, CoP is overwritten in the extreme. There is about 400% more text than there should be, and much of it is a garbled soup of overused jargon that would make Kingdom Hearts blush. This is a story that dearly loves its twists, and it's true that having twists AT ALL in such an era was virtually unprecedented, but CoP just doesn't know when to stop jerking the player around. Almost every major piece of information that is dramatically given to the player for most of CoP's playtime is a red herring that will soon be paved over with newer, similarly incorrect information. When the expansion is nearly over, it is revealed that none of these answers that have been painstakingly collected across these hours of gameplay are true, and that the truth is actually far less satisfying than any of them. As far as the plot is concerned, almost every cutscene can be written off as a waste of time which sends the characters on a dozen more hours of chasing their own tails because the game isn't yet ready to end.

Thank god then, that plot is not all that makes a story. With the exception of a perplexingly tacked-on elvaan dude and a triplet of tedious tarus, the character writing of Chains of Promathia blows its predecessors out of the water. It's characters and many of the scenes built with them are genuinely touching. I would, in fact, be willing to say that this is the first time in the genre's history that an MMO manages to accomplish this... but now we must ask again that dreaded question: Is it worth putting up with actually playing FFXI for?

Maybe. You actually don't have to even start RoZ in order to do most of CoP. You'd need to at least hit what was once the level cap in order to finish it, but the road to playing CoP isn't THAT steep, there's some worthy stuff to see, and with a few very notable exceptions (like climbing a certain mountain for a certain mandatory mission) the missions of CoP don't ask too absurdly much of the player. I'd say it's worth thinking about, but be wary of anyone who tells you that CoP is "one of the best stories in Final Fantasy." These people are narcs and frauds. People who tell you that CoP is one of THEIR FAVORITE Final Fantasy stories however are probably just cool weirdos and it's okay to hang out with them.