Here£¬I want to talk about Final Fantasy XI. Interestingly, Final Fantasy XI is actually a port of a PlayStation 2 game, which was first released in Japan early last year.

 

 The North American PS2 version of the game is slated to be released in 2004 alongside the PS2 hard drive, making this the first time that a Final Fantasy game has debuted on the PC prior to on a video game platform on this continent. When Final Fantasy XI first launched, it experienced many of the growing pains that many online RPGs experience in the days following their release--server instability, game balance issues, exploits, and so on.

 

The good news is, these issues have basically all been taken care of, so what you're getting out of Final Fantasy XI is an online RPG that's fully ripened. The game is stable and lag-free on a broadband connection (don't even think about playing over a dial-up connection). The character classes (called "jobs" here) are balanced, and each is respectable in its own right. There's a considerable amount of content for players of all levels, including content from a full-on expansion pack, which was released as a separate retail product in Japan.

 

The game play, though not drastically different from that of other online RPGs at a glance, has some unique and interesting features. Furthermore, if you're expecting that an online RPG originally designed for consoles and clearly derived from EverQuest would seem simplistic--or ugly--by the genre's current standards, you'd be mistaken. It's true that Final Fantasy XI is simpler in some ways than most other MMORPGs, but the simplified aspects--your character doesn't need to eat and cannot grow fatigued from running too much, for example--are mostly to the game's credit. Not all such omissions are praiseworthy, however.