// PC GAMER — GAMING
Final Fantasy 11 is one of the greatest MMOs of our time
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This article was originally published in PC Gamer magazine issue #340 (UK, February 2020). Final Fantasy 11 celebrated its 24th anniversary in May and remains popular enough that a new expansion may even be on the horizon. That's exciting, so we're republishing this return to the game from 2020. Also check out our 2021 feature: Life in Vana'diel: 19 years in, Final Fantasy 11 is still an MMO unlike any other.
Playing Final Fantasy 11 after all these years is a lot like returning to your hometown only to find it desolate and different. All the old buildings are still there, but the faces aren’t the same. And that feeling I had—that indescribable sense of belonging—is gone too. It’s a bit alienating and tragic, to be honest, but really what else should I expect from an MMO that’s almost 20 years old and clearly nearing the end of its days?
Though I was never as obsessed with Final Fantasy 11 as I was other MMOs like World of Warcraft, I can still vividly remember the summer months I spent playing it. My love for Final Fantasy 11 is the definition of a summer romance. All I wanted to do was spend my time adventuring across the lush fields of Vana’diel, but my parents decided that wasting my break playing videogames was a bad idea, so they regulated my playtime to a few precious hours each day. But I wasn’t going to give up that easily.
I found an old 11-inch TV-VCR combo set buried in our storage closet and hid it in my room. After everyone had gone to bed, I’d quietly grab my PlayStation 2 and bring it to my bed, plug it in, and play Final Fantasy 12 until the sun came up—until the day my mom’s mischief detector finally got her attention and she busted me and refused to keep paying the monthly subscription fee.
Maybe that’s what’s missing now, I think as I walk the streets of Windhurst trying to reacquaint myself. But I know that’s not entirely true. Final Fantasy 11 wasn’t great because playing it was against the rules, it was great because it was an MMO built from the ground up to encourage cooperation and friendship. A relic of an era before World of Warcraft ruined the entire genre by being too popular.
Unearthing what makes Final Fantasy 11 great doesn’t just require a shovel, you need a damn excavator. Before I could even log in, I had to wrestle with the infamously complicated PlayOnline service, an esoteric artefact in itself. Back when Final Fantasy 11 launched on the PlayStation 2 online services were beyond rudimentary, especially on a console that wasn’t really designed with internet multiplayer in mind. That’s why Final Fantasy 11 came bundled with a 40GB hard drive and a network adapter.
PlayOnline was an ambitious push to normalise online console gaming. Square Enix designed it to be a kind of platform for all of their multiplayer games and it included ambitious social features for the time, like personal email accounts. It was Steam for the PlayStation 2.
Today, though, PlayOnline is an enormous burden. Even the simple act of registering an account feels like an arcane ritual. PlayOnline ID, PlayOnline member name, PlayOnline password, Square Enix ID, Square Enix password—you probably need them all at one point or another just to get access to Final Fantasy 11. Menus and prompts are so confusingly arranged that more than once I found myself in some weird dead-end corner of PlayOnline with absolutely no real clue how to get where I was going.
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