Time to laugh in the face of oblivion.
#20
Final Fantasy XI
a.k.a. the MMO one.
93 points
• 4 mentions
• Highest rank: #8 (Pudik)
Released on May 16th, 2002 (Japan)
Producer: Hiromichi Tanaka (1.0)
Director: Koichi Ishii (1.0)
Lead Composer: Naoshi Mizuta, with Kumi Tanioka and Nobuo Uematsu.
This was another of Sakaguchi’s ideas - an MMO. This was before World of Warcraft, and Sakaguchi was intrigued by the social aspect of these multiplayer games. He was also the one who pushed for it being a numbered entry instead of a spin-off, which was a pretty big thing - imagine if World of Warcraft had been titled Warcraft IV.
I haven’t found if Play Online was also Sakaguchi’s idea. FFXI was tied to Square’s weird proprietary network that gave us so many headaches and ended up going nowhere after this game. There were also other controversies, like the game requiring the HDD add-on to be playable in PS2, or it launching in Windows first. It’s also notorious for not being too player friendly, at least on those first years, as gaming companies were still figuring out how these MMOs should work.
But this is where my knowledge of the game ends - I never played it. By the time I was ready for the MMO craze the dominant game was WoW so I skipped FFXI entirely. To cover this deficiency, I asked Johnny Unusual to write a few words why he had ranked FFXI so high in his list, at #6.
Johnny Unusual said:
Ah, I meant to type IX instead of XI. Never played XI.
Oh, well.
I couldn’t find anyone willing to contribute a first-hand account on why IX is good, but it must be doing something right, as it’s a twenty year old game and it’s still online and receives new content every now and then. The community is tight knit, so if Sakaguchi's goal was to create a community that would play online as comrades in arms, he succeeded. Alas, it will remain in my list as the FF I never played.
Something old
FFXI has drawn from all other titles during its lifetime, from enemies to jobs to abilities. One aspect I’d like to highlight is that from the very beginning it was designed to be “universal” - one version for all regions, with no post-release localization, so when the designers were picking names for its bestiary they used both japanese and western names. So it drew inspiration from all FFs from all regions!
Something new
Being a MMO, the usual turn-based combat of FF had to be redesigned. FFXI introduced free movement in battles, and ditched random encounters altogether, critical aspects of its battle sytem that would be adopted by future FFs. Some aspects of its lore, like the Galka, Mithra and Tarutaru races would also be reused later by Square’s next MMO.
Something blew
In FFXI you can have two classes at once - a main class and a support class at half the level, which enables the main class to use abilities of the secondary class. A system like this hasn’t resurfaced in a main FF since (and while XIV implemented a similar system, it ditched it when it was rebooted, but more about that later) (spoilers!)
Rating:
2/7 possible polygonal models in screen