…God No.

Technorati Tags: Final Fantasy XIV,Final Fantasy XI

LiveJournal Tags: Final Fantasy XI,Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIII isn’t even out yet, and there’s already talk about Final Fantasy XIV. A thirteenth sequel is expected of course, as Square-Enix will keep pumping out these games until Mount Fuji finally buries all of Japan in lava. This game, however, is an unprecedented MMO sequel to Final Fantasy XI: Online.
If you’ve never played Final Fantasy XI: Online, try this little experiment: go out and wait for a ferry for five hours. Then get on. Sail someplace where no one speaks English, and people judge you based on your job and race. Try walking from town to town with wild animals chasing you the entire way. You should have no viable means of defending yourself from said animals, and if you’re killed, return to the town where you started.
FFXI is a terrible, terrible game. It can’t really be called a game, because it’s more like slow torture. Where other MMOs reward you for your accomplishments, FFXI punishes you for your failures.
Now they’re making a new game, instead of resolving all the glaring problems with the multi-platform original. Not much has been said about it so far, but one would think they’d learn from their past mistakes. Not so.
FFXI had five playable races. Each race had it’s own quests and attributes, so if you didn’t choose wisely starting out in the game, you were screwed for the next eighty levels or so. Racism was absolutely rampant in FFXI, albeit make-believe. It wasn’t just in the in-game dialogue, but also other players refusing to interact with certain races of certain job classifications. This made for fun times, especially since everything in the game must be done in groups of six to be successful. The races themselves were silly. There were dog-people; cat-people; obnoxious funny-talking little child-people; humans, but spelt “hume”; and elves, but spelt differently also to try and be clever. Here’s a picture:

That’s not from FFXI, that from FFXIV. They’re re-releasing them, because they’re so interesting… Seriously, WTF? You had the option of creating a whole new game, and to erase the mistakes of the old one, and you went and did this. Obviously, any fantasy game is going to have humans and elves, and cat-chicks are hot, but why bring back the other two? Why not add more, or replace what your have? The only people who ever played as the dog-people were douchebag loners, and the people playing as the kids were weird 30-year-olds with serious problems. What do either of these races have to do with Final Fantasy anyway? Throw in some moogles or marlborors. You think people wouldn’t want to play as a fifteen-foot tall carnivourous plant that spews poison out it’s mouth?