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.
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.