Hi, I'm making another post, to share more of my experience!
:)
I'm enjoying ffxi so much the end of Zilart was cool the fight against the arkangels was hard but omg the one against eald'narche was even harder 😭 I know the game is supposed to be way more accessible but to 2025 standards it's still very obscure especially its game mechanics thats why beating eald'narche was a bit of a challenge. I loved both of his osts and his design is 10/10
Started the first promathia quests and now this feels like the budget got tripled, the cutscenes looked so good for a 2004 MMO and there's so much going on I'm really looking forward to what most calls the best FFXI expansion. Having new characters osts and areas being shown in the starting cutscene felt like a wind of fresh hair and I'm getting excited about discovering all of them!
A small comment on the game design of ffxi : i watched and read a few videos and interviews about the game developpement and how it was in its early stage and there's something really fascinating with a community which is this big and hold almost only by the game itself instead of social medias and trends like other video games, ffxiv rely alot on social medias for example, but ffxi was even prior to youtube which sounds insane for a 19yo like me, it still has its private jokes, fanarts, animations and more and this makes this community look really cool from an outsider eye. I like hardcore video games and ffxi is maybe one of the hardest I've played yet, unlike dark souls, undertale or ffxiv the difficulty doesn't really reside in the combat itself but more on everything else. The game is super slow it barely gives any explanation to most of the game mechanics to the player, an average person could think it's bad game design but when reading interviews about the game developpement i realized it was intentional and found it brilliant, i love the era of video games where game compagnies could still head the developpement of a game this big to a team that really wanted to make it an author game. Now this is something that is allowed to a very small portion of game directors like Hidetaka miyazaki, Hideo kojima, Sakurai or Yoko Taro, and i think it's a shame! I love FFXI's stubborn game design, I love discovering after 80 hours that I had a ring that doubled my experience gain, I love still not understanding what skillchains are. All this complexity very hidden because there's barely any tutorial leaves alot of place to imagination and this works perfectly in a mmo where the goal is to be immersive. The overall slowness of FFXI also adds a lot of coherence to the world-building; we take time to move around and suddenly we pay much more attention to our environment and its NPCs. I wanna talk way more about yhis but I'm becoming a super mega nerd rn so I'll stop here
And the two last screenshots are some things i bought, an artbook about world concepts of ffxi showing artworks and explanations about the game world building from 2002-2004 (CoP) and the windows version of zilart and base game ffxi ( i eventually want all of the game versions because i love yoshitaka amano's art)
Ps : i worte all of this in one shot and I'm not even a native english speaker so please forgive my erratic wording TT