FINAL FANTASY XI

Revisiting one of the greatest MMOs of our time.

- Steven Messner

Playing Final Fantasy XI after all these years is a lot like returning to your hometown only to find it desolate and different. All the old buildings are still there, but the faces aren’t the same. And that feeling I had – that indescribable sense of belonging – is gone too. It’s a bit alienating and tragic, to be honest, but really what else should I expect from an MMO that’s almost 20 years old and clearly nearing the end of its days? Though I was never as obsessed with Final Fantasy XI as I was other MMOs like World of Warcraft, I can still vividly remember the summer months I spent playing it. My love for Final Fantasy XI is the definition of a summer romance. All I wanted to do was spend my time adventuring across the lush fields of Vana’diel, but my parents decided that wasting my break playing videogames was a bad idea, so they regulated my playtime to a few precious hours each day. But I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

I found an old 11-inch TV-VCR combo set buried in our storage closet and hid it in my room. After everyone had gone to bed, I’d quietly grab my PlayStation 2 and bring it to my bed, plug it in, and play Final Fantasy XII until the sun came up – until the day my mom’s mischief detector finally got her attention and she busted me and refused to keep paying the monthly subscription fee.

Maybe that’s what’s missing now, I think as I walk the streets of Windhurst trying to reacquaint myself. But I know that’s not entirely true. Final Fantasy XI wasn’t great because playing it was against the rules, it was great because it was an MMO built from the ground up to encourage cooperation and friendship. A relic of an era before World of Warcraft ruined the entire genre by being too popular.