Well as some of you may or may not know, I recently tried installing Final Fantasy XI Online on my computer, to sate my hunger for MMORPGs since World of Warcraft had lost it's appeal to me. And...I can hardly say it was worth it.

A gruelling registration process on their unwieldy site, having to use a third party company to even DOWNLOAD the trial, meaning in total I had to register THREE accounts just to play the game, and then an anal installation process and a long, overnight patching spree left me wondering whether it was all worth it...and...it wasn't.

Logging in and creating my character was fine. But there apparent "hundreds of combinations of appearances!" were limited to 10 face models, 2 hair colors and the choice of your body size (small, medium, large) hardly hundreds...having gone through this process I proceeded to log in, chose a random server and a random (out of three) starting location, and logged in. I was met by a reasonable enough opening in-game cinematic (as with most Final Fantasy Games you're the strong, silent type apparently, who doesn't even talk to NPCs) and was chucked into the game with very little indication of where to go or what to do.

Even if I HAD known what to do, I couldn'tve done anything. The controls weren't like anything else I've played. Upon standing around for three minutes finding the usual directional buttons (A,W,S,D and Up,Down,Left and Right) didn't work, I proceeded to consult the massive tome that is the players manual...which told me that the directional buttons were the numbers on your numerical keypad. Those of you using a laptop, we don't HAVE one of these, unless you have a very technical laptop, only desktops and USB keyboards have them. "Fine," I thought to myself, "I'll just go chance the keybindings."

No I won't. Next article in the players manual Q&A:

"Can I change the keyboard bindings?"
"No."

...WHY NOT?! What is so hard about giving people the opportunity to change their keybindings? So, out comes the old USB keyboard from my ancient desktop. Plugging it in I could finally move around...just about, even "running" seems like a crawl compared to the size of the area, and after 10 minutes of running around trying to find something to fight, the combat system for the job I'd chosen (Monk) was limited to Auto-Attack, and an ability on a 5 minute cooldown, what did the ability do you ask? It sped up my auto-attack...as if it could be any less involved.

After boring myself killing 3 or 4 giant wasps and slowly dying inside, I proceeded to try and log out. The game manual had mentioned: "Press the * key and after 30 seconds you will log out." This was a little longer than I was used to with WoW, so I pressed it, my character knelt down, and I went to go get a drink and brush my teeth. About 5 minutes later I came back and he was still in that kneeling position...

"..."

This is also the ONLY way to logout, might I add. The menu's are as unhelpful as an armless guy on a rowboat. In disgust, I alt-F4'd. This didn't solve my problem...in fact, the game just opened the "macro" menu as I pressed Alt. A game immune to Alt-F4. For all their technological advancements, the Japanese had finally made a game that was like prostate cancer, a total pain in the ass. Trying Ctrl, Alt, Del yielded slightly better results, note the word "slightly"...the game had reduced my screen resolution to 800x600 and now it was all smooshed. The game complained that it had lost fullscreen mode, but continued to exist anyway. Having to go and close the process down it finally gave me my resolution back and I was free...

All in all I think the game was a flop. Comparing it to WoW it's not friendly to new people, and since it's designed for three consoles (PC, Xbox 360 and PS2) it wasn't exactly control friendly...later on I'll plug in my Xbox 360 controller and see if that makes it any better, but only to humor me. I don't think I'll be seriously considering playing this game, except to laugh at other people who, like me, spent the 18 hours of arduous pain and torment trying to get the game to work...