A game to make Final Fantasy Fans cry.
First off, Final Fantasy 11 is not your typical Final Fantasy game. There is no definite story. There is no end to the game. And if that does not scare you enough, it is online ONLY. After dishing out $50 for the game, you must then pay $13.95 a month to play the game (although it does come with a free month of play).
Everquest fans should rejoice at this. Final Fantasy fans will probably cry. You have your one character that you create, choose its class, and choose what city to live in. There can be parties formed, but the other characters in your party are controlled by other players. There are monsters you can fight, alone or with a party. And there are little subquests you can run for computer ran characters, but that's it. Literally. And isn't it the stories that made the Final Fantasy series so great?
It gets worse. The system requirements are BEEFY. First is the hard drive space. The game requires 6.5 GIG of hard drive space. Actually the game itself does not require that much, but you MUST install the expansion pack to be able to play the game, and that is 1.3 gig itself. The game took me over an hour to install. And if you think after that you are ready to play the game, you are sadly mistaken. You must download tons of updates. The minimum system requirements say a 56k modem, but on a 3 Mbps Cable modem connection, it took me 3 HOURS to download updates. Thousands of files must be downloaded. If you are unfortunate enough to have a 56k modem, you will cry trying to update the game. Here is a hint of how to spend your time. Book a trip to Las Vegas. Spend your next week packing for the game (still downloading updates). Spend a day at Hover Damn (still downloading updates). Go ahead, spend two weeks in Vegas. You got plenty of time (still downloading updates). Visit the Grand Canyon (still downloading updates). In fact, while you are there, rent a donkey and spend a month or so hiking down into the canyon itself (still downloading updates). Come back up, take a week and go to Disneyland (still downloading updates). Come back home, and if you are lucky, you may be half done, that is, if your ISP hasn't booted you yet.
If the broadband connection is not enough for you, there are other beefy system requirements. Here are the MINIMUM system requirements (if you can live with 1 frame a second).
OS: Windows 98/SE/ME/2000/ XP (XP is recommended)
CPU: Intel Pentium 3 800Mhz (Pentium 4 is recommended by Square. I recommend a 1.5 Ghz Athlon or a 2Ghz Intel. I do NOT recommend playing this game with a Celeron or a Duron)
Memory: 128 meg (Square recommends 256, but if you are running XP, I would recommend a MINIMUM of 512, a gig is good)
Graphics Card: NVidia GeForce with at least 32 meg ram or ATI Radeon 9000 or better (AGP ONLY) (Recommended is NVidia GeForce FX with 64 meg ram. I ran this on a Radeon 9000 Pro with 128 meg of ram, and it was glitchy, and graphics were ugly. The Geforce FX 5200 Ultra with 128 meg of ram handled it better, no graphical glitches, but still fairly low frame rates)
Sound Card: DirectX 8.1 compatible (I recommend a SB Live or better)
Hard drive (Minimum and square recommended is 6 gig, however it was 6.5 gig on my drive)
CD-Rom: 4x or faster (32x or faster recommended. It took over an hour to install on a 7200 RPM hard drive and a 48X CDRom drive)
Internet: 56k or other (broadband recommended)
I ran this mainly on my E-Machine that had a 2200 Athlon XP Processor, I put XP Professional on it, 512 meg ram, onboard sound card, Cox HSI Cable connection, and an ATI Radeon 9000 AGP card with 128 meg of ram, and the game ran like CRAP. Crappy performance though is not the only drawback. The game has been out now two years (in Japan), and there are still game bugs! Walking around town, my camera started spinning uncontrollably. Every time I logged back in, my camera would start doing this. I wrote to Tech Support (it took me four days of hitting automated replies before I finally got in touch with a human), and after that about another week before they were able to fix it. And I am paying for this?!?!
They also fail to tell you how to do simple commands such as open a door. I had to look up the text commands on the card, and shout to everyone to ask how to open a door. I felt so stupid. The game is first person 3D, so moving around town can take a LONG time. Believe it or not, there is a map of the town. Its big. I tried to get out of the town, but by the time I finally got to the gates, I was told it was unsafe to leave without being better equipped. So you will run around town running errands for people to earn money to buy equipment from shops or auction houses, although I have yet to be able to figure out how to even get INTO the auction house. After 25 days of trying to figure the game out, I canceled my subscription so that I would not get charged for this piece of garbage. Too bad I cannot get my $50 back that I wasted for it.
And if the $50 price tag for the PC was not bad enough, they have now released it for the PS2, and it is $100 because you must connect its 40 gig hard drive to your playstation to be able to play it. Playstation fans, a word of warning, if it sucked on the PC, it will not be much better on the PS2.
Square, I cannot beg you enough, please do NOT release anymore multiplayer RPGs, and if you do, PLEASE put a story in and a way to finish the game.
I give this game a sorry 2 our of 5.