FINAL FANTASY® XI: Ultimate Collection Seekers Edition

the kind of ♥♥♥♥ that lingers in the back of your mind in perpetuity, because nothing in life has ever felt like home quite the way this game did

PlayOnline is the worst thing I have ever had to use to login to the game. This service took hours of my life just to figure out how to log into the game because instead of using my Square Enix ID, you have to make a service account using a key on the website, then you get an e-mail that has a bunch of gibberish keyslams you use as your actual login and password BUT you cannot use just that, no you need to slap those in, then enter your actual Square Enix ID details, but not in the same place, first you put your username in the first page, then get asked for password in the second. Oh and you have to type it in using a clunky inbox and if you end up getting it wrong 3 times, because it's really easy to get it wrong, your account gets locked and you have to wait a couple hours. I do not care how good or bad the game is, this account system is so hideously horrible I would not recommend anyone who is a normal person bother with it.

Have to look up a guide to create account. Have to download the other half of the game after finally getting login to work because Steam doesn't download the whole thing for some reason. Controls are ass and won't let me rebind to arrow keys for movement. Left handed. Try using controller, game refuses to acknowledge controller when wireless so I plug it in. I have to bind everything myself which is annoying when everything is "Button 1-36". I can't bind menu buttons to the D-pad. I think it wants to bind it to the analog but that's extremely stupid. I tried giving this game a shot because I was lead to believe the many expansion packs helped smoothed things out but holy hell I'm just getting pissed setting up the game and I know I haven't even dealt with the menu hell, the obtuse gameplay, or figuring out macros. It is amazing this only came out 2 years before WoW. Maybe down the road I might try to figure it out but right now it feels like a waste of $10 for how rough the intro is then you have the $13 monthly fee. Edit: For the D-Pad, you have to enable "Hat switches". I just want to fight the game itself and not the monsters inside at this point.

If you're willing to roll up your sleeves and grab a wrench to work on some of the technical issues of the game using tools like dgVooDoo, Special K, and Windower/Ashita, there is an incredible game waiting here for you. Pick the Phoenix server (at the time of this review) and open up the new player guide on bg-wiki. PS, you can use a steam controller on Windows IF you use dgvoodoo as d3d8.dll, Special K as dinput8.dll, check load steam client dll early, and load steam overlay early. A bonus side effect is that this also tracks playtime, enjoy!

PLEASE look up a guide on how to install the game. Also register your account and subscribe (steam gives a 30 day free trial with the game) before you actually install the PlayOnline launcher. If you install the launcher and set up your account on there first then it bricks the launcher and you can't install the game. If you get that then reinstall the launcher

Final Fantasy XIV (in its current state; we don't talk about 1.0) is definitely the better [i]MMO[/i], but XI remains the better [i]Final Fantasy[/i] in some intangible and hard-to-define way. I only played it very little before this year, so I don't have any particular nostalgia for the game itself, but I have a lot of nostalgia for the PS2 era of Final Fantasy it came from, and it sits very comfortably in amongst that.

A unique MMORG (and one of the first). Combat is actually slowed down which allows a more complex and coordinated combat system.

Playonline is the true raidboss