Four kingdoms, once allied against the dark forces but now too used to peace, fall back on bickering with each other. The kingdoms are inhabited by people of different races and different culture. Their differences are causing problems as the dark forces are stirring again.

Sounds familiar? It should. It’s the story line of many games, novels, and movies. This variation is taken up by Final Fantasy XI, a purely online version of the long line of acclaimed titles. Gone are the days of ripe imagination fueling the text-only MUDD (multi-user dungeons and dragons). The new MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing games) are full of graphics, sound, and life.

In the virtual world of Vana’diel (actually this world is replicated across some 30 servers and have a total character population of 1 million) characters fight to build their experience points. They must also do good deeds to gain fame and rank within the kingdom’s citizenry. Once strong enough, the characters will travel to visit different kingdoms of the virtual world to meet other inhabitants to form raiding parties against the hapless animals of the kingdom.

Keep in mind that this is first time this reviewer has played a MMORPG, so take the comments with a grain of salt. For those of you who have never played in this online gaming experience, and want to read about what happens in these games, your first gaming experience should be very similar to mine.

Final Fantasy XI has truly beautiful graphics, once it is set up properly (more on that later). These graphics include very good shadow effects, gorgeous landscapes, and sharp looking monsters and animals. Released in the States in October 2003, the game has been around in Japan for over a year. Hence certain worlds have tremendously powerful Japanese players walking across the land. Buyers pay for the $50 game, and then pay $13 monthly fee to continue their character. Additional characters cost $1 each per month.

One positive difference between this MMORPG from others is that you can change jobs in the middle of the game. There are some 15 jobs, and each player can grow one vocation, grow tire of it, and switch to another vocation. You can go from a healing white mage, to a noble warrior, to a death-dealing dark knight and onwards with much variety. Once you reach level 18, you can then have a sub-job. For example, you can have powerful black mage (main)/white mage (sub) combination to give you devastating attacks with some healing in reserve. Or perhaps you would like a paladin/warrior, the most defensive player possible. Level 20 brings you the ability to ride a chocobo, an ostrich-like stead that allows you to travel quickly across the world. Level 30 opens up advanced jobs, and so forth and so on.

So with such a good game praised by so many other publications, what problems can exist? Plenty.

First, the game takes time to load onto your gaming system. Following that, you need to download updates from the web. Expect this process to take 2 hours (with fast broadband connection) and 6 GB of hard disk drive space. Once the game loaded, it didn’t look right. The initial graphics were set to a very low level, and you had to exit the game completely and fire up a separate game settings software to get the graphics to work. The game software will not self identify the best graphics setting. Until a patch in January, 2004, the game hangs every time upon exiting. It must have a conflict with Win 98 SE. (Why am I playing this on Win 98? High-speed dedicated gaming machines use very light O/S to give more resources to the game. There’s no need for all the complicated support of Win XP. Plus, the game advertised that it would work on Win 98.)

One oddity of the game is its menu system. Since the game is designed to communicate with console systems as well, it relies on arrow keys to open menus. It’s an odd feature from all of the Final Fantasy series.

Avoid playing the game as an individual. First off, the game is very time-consuming if you are learning everything from scratch. For instance, if you want to give a NPC (non-player character) something to finish a quest, you must “trade” with it. You can’t simply click on the NPC to initiate the action. It’s not intuitive. As a solo player, there are many hidden things that you will not know about. Buying a guide book is a must, as well as relying on forums for information.

If you are entering the game without a previous group of committed friends, you will have to group with strangers for conquests. This too can be a frustrating experience at the lower levels. Groups that are not effective will end up wasting your time, and may lead to a few deaths along the way. If at all possible, enjoy the trips online with your friends. Or make contacts in the virtual world, and make note of those that are truly helpful and friendly.

Sadly, even if you go through all the initial hiccups successfully, you will eventual feel a lack of purpose. Much like The Sims, you can keep on growing your character. At some point you must question the reason behind pouring 2-5 hours a day only to see some more numerical value in a spreadsheet in hyperspace increase. Like all Final Fantasy titles, the game takes tremendous numbers of hours to play. Unlike the other Final Fantasy games, though, there is no finish to the story. It cannot, for if there is an ending all the players would leave. Expect more expansion packs to be issued to keep the upper-level players interested.

Overall, the game graphics is astonishing. However, there are several problems with game design. I do not recommend solo plays, but rather recommend that you play with a group of established friends who all have similar tastes.