The Beastmen are mustering their forces once again, there are whispers of the Shadow Lord's resurrection, and no matter how hard you try, you are unable to persuade any of your real-life friends into spending their money on Final Fantasy XI and helping you. As you explore more of Vana'diel, becoming stronger and earning prestige, you soon discover the full dark extent of your forthcoming trials. When you log in, you awaken in Vana'diel as a freelancing young adventurer trying to make a name and fortune for himself. YOU are the main character of Final Fantasy XI. Before we get into how that went, let's go over some of the game's details. So I downloaded the PC version of the game in late December and took the plunge. And now that the next numbered entry in the series, Final Fantasy XII, is ubiquitously regarded as an offline MMORPG, it can't really be said that XI exists in isolation from the rest of the series anymore.
Even eight years after its initial release, it's still the dominant MMORPG in Japan and the most widely-played Japanese MMORPG in the world. But more practically, it's Square's first (and thus far only) MMORPG and, if you remember, was developed in tandem with IX and X, possibly making it the last game Sakaguchi worked on during his tenure at SquareSoft. Well, it's still a numbered Final Fantasy title, and it would be crass to have a big gap (or an X-2) on that cool Flash menu between X and XII. So why cover XI if it's not really a proper Final Fantasy game? There's so little resemblance between it and the ten titles preceding it, the name Final Fantasy Online would have probably been more appropriate (not to mention farsighted). it really doesn't behave like one at all. Aside from having the ostensible markings of a Final Fantasy game - moogles, chocobos, the pantheon of summon monsters, the familiar classes, spells and items, etc. This is because XI, unlike every other volume of the Final Fantasy series proper, is an MMORPG.
For a long time, even I wasn't sure what I was going to do about the entry between X and XII. "Are you going to do X-2 or jump right to XII?" they'd ask, as if XI wasn't even an option. Sometime after the VIII writeup, I started getting emails and messages from people asking me what I was planning to do after X. As far as most fans seem to be concerned, it exists outside of Final Fantasy canon sort of like how Mystic Quest was considered in the Nineties. Both distinctions actually belong to Final Fantasy XI. If I ever said Final Fantasy II is the black sheep of the series or that IX is the most-overlooked Final Fantasy game, I was incorrect.
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