<0zym4ndias> i am 0zym4ndias
<0zym4ndias> king of kings
<0zym4ndias> look upon my gear, ye mighty, and despair

(0zym4ndias last seen online 5475 days ago)

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Both Final Fantasy XI Online and Final Fantasy XIV Online have an early quest involving the player character being assigned the role of a diplomat by your home city-state, and traveling to the other two city-states to see what's going on there. In XIV, this is an easy task that you can accomplish in under half an hour, as cutscene-based airship rides bridge the vast gaps in seconds. Despite the calamity it suffered 5 years before A Realm Reborn begins, the city-states of Eorzea recovered with a zeal befitting their colonial natures, rebuilding their fortunes atop the well-worn foundations of civilizations past - Allag, Ampador, and Vana'diel.

Vana'diel, XI's setting, has no such luck. Its world is comprised almost entirely of large desolate wastelands, still feeling utterly devastated by the war that occurred 20 years prior in its backstory. And there aren't any convenient airships waiting to take you across that vast distance to the other city-states. You can't even get a mount until you reach Jueno, the farthest and most dangerous of the initial city-states to reach. If you want to complete your mission, you're just gonna have to walk.

And walk.

And walk.

And walk.

Vana'diel is a hostile land, but only partially because of the monsters. Yes, those critters can and will ruin you if you venture far outside the cities alone, so you'll need some helping hands to survive out there, but more hostile than that are the obscenely vast distances that, even if you know exactly where you're going (there are almost no directions to anywhere) can lead to multi-hour treks just to get from one town to another. But your most dangerous foe, especially in 2021, is the user interface.

The thing is, in some ways, I kind of love it. The bleeps and bloops and lo-fi menus are so evocative of a particular time and place online, a vibe only surpassed by the immaculate PlayOnline launcher, a pre-Web 2.0 vision of online community that is sometimes what I genuinely wish the entire internet looked and sounded like.

But it's also a nightmare. Maps are uniformly terrible, with barely anything marked on it and no indication of how to reach far-off places. If you ask the person who tells you to serve as an emissary to the other nations how to actually get to them, he will tell you to fuck off and go work it out yourself. This is what the game is like to play after nearly two decades of patches to make it slightly more convenient and accessible. And it's still as frictional as a porcupine.

The thing is though, there is a method to this madness. Or, at least, there was.

Wild though it may be to think about now, looking at this game where you can't even jump, but XI was a forward-thinking game for the time. It was the last FF game series original director Hironobu Sakaguchi worked on in any meaningful capacity, and while the man has been known to puff up his own myth a bit, there does seem to be an agreement that many of the most unique elements of the game's design come from Sakaguchi and game director Koichi Ishii's desire to make players feel individually small and powerless, but powerful and meaningful when together, to organically forge from the players the kinds of bonds and parties of the offline Final Fantasies. The game even had multinational servers, unlike the region-based systems of modern MMOs, where players could play together no matter where in the world they came from, enabled by a to-this-day genuinely innovative auto-translation system that allows players to type key phrase that will be automatically translated into another player's client language, bridging the gap between languages just like Final Fantasy XIV's cutscenes bridge the gaps between it's locations. Much of the game's design was designed to force players into meaningful interaction and cooperation, because without others, you could not survive Vana'diel.

Don't know where to go? Ask someone for directions, or better yet, pay for a higher-level player to escort you to where you need to go! How do you unlock the Dragoon job? Ask a Dragoon! Need to get to the bottom of a mine filled with monsters that you have no hope of defeating alone? Find like-minded allies who also need a boar ass from the bottom of said mine, and venture forth!

Vana'diel is a hostile world because the design of the game is hostile, acting as a dark shadow looming around you and the other players, pushing you together to fight against it. The Shadow Lord may be the ostensible villain of the plot but the antagonist is the game itself, pushing back at you to push you together.

It's an engine for frustration more than anything else. By many accounts, this hostility engendered genuine camaraderie back in the day but it also alienated as many as it enthralled, and in the contemporary iteration of the game, it has been drained of its purpose. Painstakingly detailed guides on multiple wikis telling you exactly where to go and when and exactly how to optimally navigate the obtuse web of systems that had players thinking that hugging walls could aggro every enemy in an instance in 2002 remove the need to actually interact with players meaningfully in the game world, which is just as well because almost everyone you encounter is a level 99 demigod that shall not deign to engage a lowly mortal like you lest they interrupt the busy AFKing schedule they've been committed to for the past 19 years. The thing that makes the game playable in 2021, the Trust system, is also the thing that obliterates much of the design of the game, as in an instant you can summon a party of highly competent NPCs who will effectively allow you to solo all but the most difficult of encounters. In a game where almost every facet of its design is built around getting you to interact with others, Trusts and Wiki guides allow you to sidestep vast swathes of the game design, leaving only a strangely lonely and austere game experience whilst also keeping its places and people accessible to a modern audience who never experienced the game's prime.

If you aren't here for the (genuinely immaculate) vibes, then you're probably here for the story, and while I can only account for the base game story, it isn't much to write home about. It's steeped in an even more intense strain of the Fantasy Racism tropes that accounts for the least palatable sections of XIV's story, to the point that it would almost be avant-garde, the way the Bastok nation storyline has you working unquestioningly for a cartoonishly evil state that openly uses slave labor, to defeat the embodiment of rage and anger felt by those exploited by them: a being called, uh, the Shadow Lord. But it doesn't really put the work in to make it interesting. By many accounts Rise of the Zilart, the first expansion, picks up immediately where the base game left off and recontextualizes events to make things much less uncomfortably racist, but due to the games frankly bizarre attitude towards difficulty scaling, Zilart is so difficult that most guides encourage you to complete almost all the expansions that came after Zilart before you tackle the thing that resolves most of the threads hanging from the story that propelled - well, gently nudged - me through the first 50 levels, and I'm a long way off from all of that. Despite the systems of Final Fantasy XI being neutered to allow players to access the story, the base story lacks almost all bite without them. I'm sure defeating The Shadow Lord was an immense mechanical accomplishment given meaning by accomplishing it with your friends in 2002. But now? It barely registers.

Still, there are moments of true beauty where the magic of this game somehow manages to shine through. Once you have your wiki open on the other screen, and a band of unwaveringly faithful NPC trusts, you can set forth on your quest. Going from Bastok to Windhurst as I did, the first leg of your journey will end in the seaside town of Selbina in the Valkurum Wastes, from which you must take a ship across the sea to the town of Mhaura. Maybe here, the game will use a cutscene like XIV? No, of course not. Buying a ticket, you are brought to a little gated area to wait for the ship (a potentially 10-15 minute wait) just like real public transport. Then you get on the boat, wait for it to set off, and then you can climb up onto the deck to enjoy a low-res version of the world and it's landmarks roll past you, while a beautiful track plays that belies this game's history as a product of the remarkable Chrono Cross team (https://youtu.be/jaKmkoy1r7o). This whole process takes a long time, and it can take over half an hour to reach Mhaura from Selbina. And there isn't really anything to do on the way but talk to your fellow passengers. And before you think I'm about to launch into a boomer rant about how we all used to talk to each other before our headphones and ipods and playstation ps and zunes, the beautiful trick of all this is in what happens halfway through the voyage.

On my trip from Selbina to Mhaura, another ship, without warning, pulled up alongside ours, and a band of undead pirates lept aboard. Barely managing to fight off one, I couldn't hope to face the entire band on my own, and retreated below decks, waiting for them to give up and move on. But instantly, in my head, I saw a story unfold. Of a whole group of players, each of whom came to the boat on their own, suddenly having to band together to beat back the pirates. This whole boat ride, all it's length and waiting, is an engine designed to organically facilitate a genuine fantasy story beat, of individual adventurers on their own banding together - maybe even becoming friends - to defeat a foe they did not expect. It was honestly kind of beautiful to imagine.

But it was just imagination. I can see how the design of this area could facilitate that story, for sure. I'm sure it happened, in the past. Maybe it forged genuine friendships that transcended the world of Vana'diel, or maybe the impromptu alliance disbanded as they disembarked, and went their separate ways, never to see each other again. But there isn't room for either now. There's just me, watched over by my silent NPC allies, enjoying the wonderful music and beautiful vibes as I imagine what may, once upon a time, have been.

Is Final Fantasy XI a good game? I don't know. I can't know. It's not here. I'll play to see the stories, sure - Rise of the Zilart, in particular, has my attention for seeming to share a lot of ideas with Shadowbringers - but the actual play experience that the systems of this game were designed to create has not been preserved. Final Fantasy XI, as it exists now, is a museum. A (lightly) guided tour through its impossibly vast, crushingly empty world, everything within a memorial to the experiences its systems were designed to facilitate, now gone and beyond our ability to revive, no matter how powerful our healing magic is. There's something kind of beautiful and wonderful about what Final Fantasy XI tried to do. But that game is gone. All that's left is its headstone, and those that left in its wake, some continuing to visit and remember, and most leaving it far, far behind them.

Reviewed on Nov 29, 2021


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