Review of Final Fantasy XI: The Vana'diel Collection 2008

I've started my third year playing this game after a six month break and am now enjoying it more than ever. This is a game that requires a lot of time for everything. Time to go from place to place, time to level up your jobs (I don't say character because you play any job you want to and switch from job to job without making a new character). It also takes a lot of time to make money and there are many ways to make money in the game it just requires ALOT of patience.

Getting started in this game can be very difficult and frustrating at times but if you talk to people most of them will help you out and guide you to where you need to get to. The game starts you out with you choosing the race you want to play as throught the game. The races you get to choose from are Hume's (male or female), Elvaan's (male or female), Mithra's (female only), Galka's (male only) and the Tarutaru's (male and female). Although there aren't a lot of different races there are many different combinations you can make for each character so running into a similiar character isn't so frequent. This is also where you will pick your main job and there are six jobs to choose from when you first start. After that you choose which country your character lives/comes from and there are three to choose from. The three countries are Bastok, Windurst and Sandoria. Bastok is made up of the Hume's and Galka's, Windy has the Mithra's and Tarutaru's and Sandy is home of the elvaans but you can choose whichever one you want.

Races: Depending on what job you want to do might help you choose the race you want to play as each race is proficient in certain jobs. The Galka's are made for jobs such as Paladin and Warrior classes (tanks jobs in pt's), Elvaan's are geared towards Monk and Dark Knight (Damage Dealer's in pts or DD's if you will), Mithra's are for the Thief and Ranger jobs (support or pullers for ur party), Hume's are the basic all around character and are proficient in any job but don't specialize in a paraticular one and Tarutaru's are the magic wielding jobs such as the White Mage and Black Mage jobs (healer's and debuffs in the party). However, you can pick whatever race you want and whatever job you want just remember that Galka's are not gonna be as good as Tarutaru's in magic and Tarutaru's aren't gonna be as good as Galka's for tanking.

Jobs: The player is given six jobs to choose from called your basic jobs. They are warrior, thief, monk, white mage, black mage and red mage. I'm not gonna go into details because that could take to long. There are 14 other jobs available once the player reaches 30. The player has to do quests to unlock the other jobs and can find out how to by asking someone or just looking it up online. The other jobs are ranger, dark knight, paladin, blue mage, samurai, ninja, corsair, bard, beastmaster, puppetmaster, summoner, scholar, dancer and dragoon. Also for jobs you get to have a subjob which means you have a main job and a job to support it. For instance, say the player is a paladin, the player then gets to choose a job to support that. The player will want to choose a subjob that will support the main job, so that player will most likely choose warrior for the defense bonuses and job abilities that warrior has. Also the subjob is half the level of the main job so if the paladin is lvl 30 the warrior will be lvl 15 with all the abilites the warrior gets at 15. Also by adding warrior as a subjob extra hit points are added onto you're character because of the job warrior. Each subjob presents its own pros and cons, so the player needs to know what subjob best supports the main job.

The storyline progresses at the players leisure and since there are tons of quests and missions that the player will be doing its easy to forget what you've done unless you're progressing really fast which is highly unlikely. Doing missions earns your rank in your home country and quests earn you fame in different countries which definately benefit the player. One example is the "Lure of the Wildcat" quest in each town (Sandy, Basty, Windy and Jeuno) when completed gives the player to get teleported to Aht Urghan Whitegate from whatever town they teleported from which will save a lot of time and only costs 300 gil per teleport.

The game is definitely geared for the hardcore people who can spend a lot of time in the game. This is definitely a game where you reap what you sew. If the player just wants to casually play the game and just party and level and talk to friends they can. The thing is that by playing casually the player will most likely not get the really best gear in the game and around level 50 will either start another job or just slowly stop playing the game. The game requires a lot of time, gil and patience for the good armor and weapons in the game if the player is willing to sacrifice it.

This particular edition of final fantasy xi combines the original release plus all the expansions up to the latest wings of the goddess. Each expansion has added new jobs, areas to explore and more missions and quests. I'm not sure what all was added with the first three expansions to the game (rise of zilart, chains of promethia, treasures of aht urghan) as I did not start playing this game till well after the release of TOAU. I do know, however, the Wings of the Goddess expansion released two new jobs: Dancer and Scholar. It also let the player travel to the past (20 years to be exact) through things called Cavernous Maws. WOTG expansion is aimed at the higher level players and I suggest not traveling to the past unless you are 60+ or have someone that can guide you.

I found this final fantasy XI a really good buy when it first came out and now that its twenty dollars its well worth the buy. I've heard people complain about the monthly charge of the game on top of the xbl charge. *For your information:you can play this game on the xbl silver account.* Thing is that most people don't just play this game, they play others as well on xbl and the monthly fee is from the maker's of the game. Alot of mmorpg's have a monthly charge and this one is no different. The updates and installing can take a really long time, maybe to long but you really shouldn't let that deter you from at least trying this game out.

There is so much more to this game and is hard to put in a review, I really don't think its possible to review even half of what this game has to offer someone who really is interested in playing. The only areas that I can think of where this game suffers is the exceptionally hard to make money or gil for weapons and gear and the long installing process and the sometimes very long updates.

All I can really tell you is try the game out and decide for yourself whether or not its a game you want to put a lot of time into. Just remember if you get stuck there are people you can ask to help you out and most of them will be more than happy to. Don't be quick to judge the game from just the beginning, it takes awhile to really get into the heart of the game itself so get out there try it and keep at it.



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