Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Final Fantasy XIV caught me right at the tail end of my MMO junkie phase. I’d put a fairly significant amount of time into Final Fantasy XI before it, so I figured why not? And honestly, I have to give Final Fantasy XIV some credit: it replied to that question very, very quickly. It was as though Square had developed the thing inside a bubble. Reinforced by steel plate. On the surface of the moon. The number of incredibly bizarre, even-more-incredibly unintuitive design decisions was absolutely baffling. A brilliantly flexible class system gelled up its giant anime hair, picked up a slightly smaller blade, and attempted to save the day, but its quest was disastrously unsuccessful. Fortunately, Square decided to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch. But what’ll the realm look like once it’s finally been reborn? Well, pretty familiar, if a new trailer’s anything to go on. But maybe not for the reason you think.

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I must confess I know essentially nothing about Final Fantasy XIV, as FF has become one of those game series I’ll cross the street to avoid. I do, though, admire both the relative honesty and the steely-eyed resolve in Square acknowledging that MMO spin-off FF XIV was such a screw-up that it had to be killed off – with plans to relaunch it as ‘A Realm Reborn’ and what they claim is tantamount to a brand new game. As is Square tradition, there’s an overwraught, highly technically accomplished cinematic to commemorate the end of FF XIV’s existing world. It’s a certainly a dramatic way to announce that all your characters are getting wiped.

So what happens after the apocalypse?
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Squeenix ultraboss Yoichi Wada has spoken about the ongoing woes of troubled MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, saying “The Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged,” when asked about the game. VG247 reports that the Square man, speaking at a press conference in Japan, said that they company planned to “continue with our reform work, which basically amounts to fully redoing the game, and hope to revive the FFXIV that should have been released.”

The XIVth Final Fantasy game, which was launched in September last year, has been so beleaguered that its intended subscription model has never actually come online, with trial accounts being extended indefinitely. The PC version of the game sold 630,000, with the PS3 version, which was intended to appear in March of this year, returning for further development at a heavily reshuffled internal dev team.

That “free” 30 days you get if you buy Square Enix’s MMO Final Fantasy XIV is now 60 days, thanks to the troubles the game has experienced on launch. As well as the inevitable server issues, there’s a bunch of broken stuff in the game, including problems with a number of quests. Square Enix have announced that “All users who registered a FINAL FANTASY XIV service account and purchased a character by October 25, 2010 will be eligible” for the additional game time. Presumably the publishers expect the worst of the problems to have been resolved by the end of that period, but I’m not getting a good feeling for the fate of this one.

There’s been some strange talk surrounding MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV recently, with various corners of the internet claiming that the game was both secretly developed in China and quietly altered, for everybody, in accordance to the Chinese government’s strict laws regarding MMOGs. Which wouldn’t be a huge surprise. According to US based research firm DFC Intelligence, China has more than 100 million MMORPG players, which is just under the entire population of Japan. Except this makes no sense whatsoever since Chinese MMORPG Zhengtu Online recorded 860,265 concurrent users at its peak. Good job, DFC Intelligence.

The hubbub surrounding FFXIV, which was released yesterday, has sprung out of the language in the Japanese version of FFXIV. In summary, Japanese and Chinese both use kanji characters, though Japanese also uses hiragana and katakana character sets for, among other things, writing phonetically. For example, “チョコ” is katakana meaning “Chocobo“. Yet for reasons unexplained by the developers, FFXIV only features kanji. As such, in FFXIV Chocobos are called “馬鳥”, which translates literally as “Horsebird“. And that’s not all.
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The Final Fantasists at Square Enix send word that their beta test for improbably pretty MMO Final Fantasy XIV – which earlier in the week was declared “delayed” due to terminal bugs – is actually opening tomorrow. Let’s hope that isn’t a sign of things to come. There’s a sign up form over here for you to sign up with (tomorrow), should you wish to sign up to this open beta. Is my terrible news writing a sign of the times? Sigh(n).

There are a bunch of MMOs on the horizon that we’ve pretty much neglected in the past few months, and one of those is Final Fantasy XIV, with its bunny-ear girls, ludicrous hyperbolic fantasy and science-fiction architecture. There was a trailer at E3 (which I’ve slung below) but also a bunch of details about the game which arrives on September 30th. Interestingly, the game does away with classic level-based experience point progressing, and instead opts for a skill-based system which will, as I understand it, allow a single player to take on different roles depending on the skills they’ve gathered and the equipment they employ. The character will still become more powerful in terms of hit points and mana, however.

The closed beta started last weekend, and it seems that North American applicants can sign up here, and Euros and Japanese here, so you could potentially get a look at it if you were interested.
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The first trailer for Square Enix’s second Final Fantasy MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, has washed on the shores of the internet. It’s… Japanese? And pretty. That said, I’m not sure how close to the game this is, because the main site shows stills from the video as “screenshots”, which seems a bit unlikely. Anyway, this is very much a next-generation build for Final Fantasy XI, with Square Enix talking about allowing people to transfer old character names to the new game, as well as being able create very similar avatars based on the same race types and classes. Lots of changes to the details of combat and professions, of course, but we can assume the core experience will be rather similar. The game is scheduled for some time in 2010.

Come on, hands up if you played and loved Final Fantasy XI, I know you’re out there.
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