I have close to 17,000 hours on this game now, and I can say that this and the other reviews you have done are a complete Masterpiece. Good job.

So glad someone finally made a review for this expansion! Long overdue. Excellent work. 👏🏻

Oh man, hearing the sanctuary of zi’tah music hits hard. So many amazing memories, so long ago.

I am so glad that 1. someone is doing this and 2. that YOU are continuing this! I remember your first video mentioning that you were trying to fill in a gap left by other reviewers who skip this title. You are doing an OUTSTANDING job and these fit right in with some of the best I was someone who had played every Final Fantasy* (*except the MMOs) And I was really tired of having that caveat. Wanting to replay all the games I started streaming Final Fantasy in Jan 2020 and very early on I decided that when I got to 11, I would not skip it. I only committed to streaming about 100 hours. So in 2022 I started playing 11 for the first time. After 100hrs of streaming it we moved on but I wanted to see Rhapsodies to the end. So I played the game until I finished every expansion and Rhapsodies. It seems like you were able to really get a grasp on the battle system. I never did. I don't think I ever pulled off a single skillchain despite my best efforts lol. Being over leveled got me through most of the game, and shouting for help in a linkshell got me through the rest of the way. But I still really enjoyed my time with FF11. The story, the characters, the music, the world. And just talking to other players, and hearing their stories about "the good old days". I doubt I'll ever return to 11. So I'm so glad you're documenting the game like this. I'll be back to watch these videos again and again. Whenever I need to revisit my feelings on the game. Thank you.

wowwwwwww

You literally brought me back to the past and I love the lore review to refresh my memory. I can close my eyes and see myself in front of a ps2 again as a kid Thank you

good lord that was a trip down memory lane. i can't see the inside of boyahda without thinking about skill up parties and crabs, or walking through zi'tah without SOMEONE mentioning the music. solo'ing as smn vs shiva in that arena, running aaaalll the way down to have enough time to re-summon. or hearing of dynamis without feeling contempt. all that currency for the one guy at the head of my LS... and by the time i quit, he had 3. and that was YEARS of work! thanks for this, i was glad to watch it all the way through. also, are greatswords normal for drk now? in the 75 era they were only ever used in really specific situations - i think for light skillchaining/magic bursting or something, but it's been so long now...

Well, as an avid FFXI enjoyer myself, this was quite the pleasant surprise. The pessimist in me was not expecting an understanding reviewer, but you hit the nail on the head on every gangplank!

Loved the review!

Best XI content on YT

I've been having a huge amount of nostalgia for FFXI recently, I played it on and off for years. This is a great review that talks about that the game currently is and mentions what it was and it's nice to see. Still desperately hoping for an offline version at some point to have more people experience the story. One slight criticism I will say is the lack of talking about the rank 6-10 quests. Those are as much a huge part of what was added in RotZ along with the actual main story, and they have some great parts to the overall lore too. A lot of the environmental storytelling you mentioned actually has side quests and rank missions which give real explanation as to what it all is, so when you see a random grave in Davoi and you get told about it in Bard quests, or an oddly designed room in Uggalepih and it's for Dragoon. And all of the quests for the artifact armour also adds so much lore too. I think the reason that Zilart missions seem to not go as in deoth in its main story is because of this, no other expansion added story areas for this many extra nobs at once, was only 2 or 3 in the expansion, not 12 or however many it was. A huge part of why I think FFXI is the best story in Final Fantasy is because of how everything feeds into the main story. One quest which will always stick with me is 'Mandragora Mad' where an NPC wants specific items dropped from them. (This was also the quests a lot of people would do for fame in Windurst). One of the items you can trade in drops from Mandragora in Boyahda Tree which is a letter. Does seem like much, but then you do the Windurst rank missions and it makes so much sense. Game is full of moments like that. I miss this game so much lol. Thanks again for these videos

It's interesting that you mention how great it was to use SAM as a subjob for the first time. This would not have been nearly as nice when RotZ was the latest expansion. The Hasso and Seigan stances got added a while later, late in CoP IIRC. Before that NIN was pretty much the only subjob worth using because 1-handed weapons were vastly superior to 2-handed and of course for the shadows because almost everything would one or two shot anyone other than a tank (and tanks went down in four or five hits, so they used those shadows too!). Updating SAM to be a stronger sub for 2-handers along with changing the damage formulas equalized things quite a lot. Another fun fact about RotZ is that for most American players it released with the game , meaning nobody ever actually got to enjoy an expansionless game. Possibly for the best since there was so little content before all that, but for an old-schooler like me it's about impossible to separate RotZ from the base game.

21:35 this image brought back nightmares, thanks

I just finished cop and Zilart on the Horizon server and you absolutely nailed this review. Loved it, thank you!

love from the horizonxi server. love that you made this. i rewatch this just for calming content

haha i see my sky NM chart XD

Me and a buddy of mine decided to restart a few months ago, and we decided to do exactly what you suggested in this video. We chose a different job for each expansion capped them at 75 and played through the expansions that way. Highly recommend doing this!

Great vid. HorizonXi and Eden are both 75 locked and great to play on, if interested in this time/expansion era

The truth is. I don't remember much of the storyline when I was playing the game in the 2005 or 06. But i remember all the linkshell I was in, all the friends i had made, and all up and down while doing quest, exp levelling, or camping for drops. Glad tat i had played the game. And glad tat ff14 didn't lose tat 'human' interaction, which i still playing today. It's truly a MMO, and rpg at the side.

awesome content, subbed!

Epic job!!! Subbed and looking forward to more on FF11. Thank u for your hard work and dedication to this content and keeping FFXI alive.

love your content! sub + liked

Great review! What do you think the balance is between cutscene and action play? Do you think FF devs don't have to worry about shorter attention span since most of their following is probably playing for the story?

One interesting fact about RoZ is that you don't need to beat the story to access the end game area. Many people did not finish the RoZ story and they stopped doing the story missions once they got access to Sky. Another reason is you don't need to finish RoZ to start CoP. So for people who didn't care about the story, there's no incentive for them to beat the story until they added the extra questline as an epilogue for both RoZ and CoP

Great review, thank you. Made me go revisit Hall of the Gods just to appreciate the visual storytelling again. Only correction i would make, is that v25 Odyssey NMs are more challenging than even the most recently released Master Trial. It is a very minor thing, but it is the only thing i noticed.

1) Awesome vid! You really brought back some memories for me! I played all the way to the end...(Seekers + ROV) 2) Why dont you like Mithra's lol /popcorn

I love the FFXI retrospective series you made! Can I ask permission for making Chinese subtitles for those videos? I want to share those videos and post them on bilibili.

Ok. Your hall of the gods speech Absolutely Killed it. Coming from a Vet from 2002 PS2 release and beta player. Because the games UI, how they want you to view everything... It asks you to explore and ask questions about the world. No stone left unturned and this is 100% of FFXI which is what absolutely sold me.

I mained Ninja and Bard and loved both job roles!

One bit you left out, regarding the Sky God NMs: there are tougher versions of them that show up in Escha as part of the Rhapsodies storyline, but you can only get the items to spawn them by beating their 'normal' counterparts, and then breaking them down with Synergy.

I played this game a long time ago because of the interesting job system it had, skipped a lot of the story but then I landed on a retrospective video talking about said story and now I consider ffxi the MMO with the most amazing story ever told (in my consideration)

“It took me 15 hours to complete rise of the zilart” Bro back in the day it took 15 hours just to get everyone in your group ready to take on a few hours of content. 😂. We used to form “story groups” that would join up and complete the expansions in 2-3 hour chunks. Even a 15 hour expansion lasted most of the month, due to scheduling and other real life events. I remember joining many story groups for the sky and sea storylines to help LS members catch up. Good times.

Not enough good can be said about XI's music. Easily up there in the series for me. The zone music is where the game never ceased to amaze me. I felt the same excitement in wanted to hear the next track. Exploring was made even better because of it. The viewpoint I share the most with you on RoZ is the pacing for sure. I felt it was far too much gameplay for the amount of story you got. Because like you said it isn't that the character's are bad, they're not. But, compared to pretty much every expansion after this or even the Shadowlord's depressing tale in base game, they aren't given enough time. Maybe I am harsh in saying this but I felt very little for Lion. She gives you that talk in Sky like you're the best of friends and then sacrifices herself but I had little attachment to her because we barely spent time with her. Which does kind of lead back to that respecting your time point you brought up again. I was originally shocked to hear you say the game does so. But the more I thought about it after last video's comment the more I have come to terms with that particular frustration with the game. As I said, it's an MMO with 20 years of content. To have gotten 3 players through every expansion, each with a job and subjob, relic armor done/job questline done, blue magic/maps/mounts/trusts acquired, with only 2 fights requiring outside assistance in just under 400 hours is probably pretty reasonable. Hearing you say 120 hours through CoP seems like great time. Especially since you did more optional content than we did. I really think it had a lot more to do with the type/amount of things it asked me to do. The game has so much QoL to allow me to breeze through the game as fast as I did but the missions still have the often annoyingly tedious objectives you'd have done upon releases. For an example from RoZ, I vividly recall the 5th (of only 18 missions in the expansion) where you had to collect 8 elemental crystals. You already had the shadow one but the game is serious. Go through great lengths to get the other 7. So much work for a tiny bit of story progression. That's really where my bigger gripe lies. Maybe not so much my actual playtime but rather the amount of work required of me to just see the next cutscene. A quest like that might have been a really cool experience back in the day, only playing XI every day with friends, trying to solve it and do the fights together. Today with a guide, it was an list of far too much be asked of me for what the game will ultimately give back as a reward. Hearing you talk about the summon fights and the excitement of NMs and fighting at the same level does make me wish I delved into more of that. I just didn't want to force friends to play more content than they wanted to with me haha. I think our first roadblock was Ark EV. We played COR, PUP, and BLU so we had a heavy DPS focus. I wish one of us played a tank or healer job because relying on the Trusts for a more specific strategy for survival wasn't working at this roadblock. I remember coordinating skill burst between the 3 of us but rarely did I look into ensuring we did so with our trusts so, at least from your account, I think we could've played better. But ultimately we caved to over leveling and once we did so there wasn't any going back. Which bummed me out. I count 4 or 5 fights we ever hit a roadblock on. Ark EV, WotG defense of Windurst from Yagudo mission, a WotG boss fight against Aquila where we couldn't let Lillisette die, an early Rhapsodies mission against Siren that was easier when we came back for it, and the final boss of Rhapsodies where we called for help a 2nd time. I tried hard to keep fights as they were intended but I think maybe I could've done better so I will be interested to here how you feel about fights in the next few videos. I think you brought out a lot of what makes this expansion unique even if ultimately it is the shortest and least interesting to me. I hope I don't come off as overly negative in some parts of my discussion. My thoughts on this game are very all over the place and I've been wrestling with them since I finished. You've got a great voice over that keeps a good positive energy in these videos even when you discuss criticisms you had.

Thank you for taking the time to talk about the greatest game ever

Well, you did what nobody else on youtube did and nailed a lot of stuff. A lot of people that played ffxi back in the day would swear that the story is amazing but it is pretty lame. I think they were more immersed in other elements of the game which is the opposite of modern games which try to achieve great stories but ferry you down hallways. ffxi was all about the journey. Also, the job you leveled took you probably weeks or months to grind to levelcap. There were specific quests and gears you obtained for that job and everyone had a different experience. This was a true open world game where people truly make their own path. FFxi is also the last of the old guard...like dragon quest or dark souls. Progression in era was not about spamming quests but about gathering 6 players in a zone and killing monsters over and over. This is far superior imo to modern games that just give you cookie cutter quests of go kill x about of enemies with boring exposition. I hate this new design, I'm honestly not interested too much in story of any game and focus on the battle system. FFxi required that you knew enemy strengths and weaknesses, levels, and composed a good balanced group of jobs where hopefully people are decently geared and know how the game works to optimiize your xp/hr. When played this way, ffxi is more "respectful of your time" and fun. But to people that play without engaging fully with the mechanics of the game, it is very slow and tedious. But at least your skill and knowledge of the game make a difference...unlike modern games. You also missed the HNM system in areas like dragon's aery, cape terrigan, and behemoth's dominion. They are on timers and there would be whole linkshells of levelcap players sitting in a zone at a time trying to claim them as soon as they spawned...using hacks. That did not respect anyone's time lol.

please do a cop version

What is the first song you played here, I feel I have heard something similar in ffxiv

Awesome review regarding story, but it's hard to encapsulate the actual feel of FFXI without playing it like it was supposed to when it first released. If you feel obliged, you should strongly consider joining a private server and trying it there. It's a hell of a lot more rewarding. Getting to 75 alone takes something like 3 months, so the "trivialization" you mention is completely eliminated. Great review.

Am so annoyed I didn't 'quite' get to Sky before completing my review. The other new areas (jungle, desert etc...) were complex, sprawling, interconnected maps that were both immersion and engaging whilst also far more aggravating and incomprehensible than anything in the base game. The backtracking required to solve puzzles with no clues or explanation felt bizzare - the base game was a vast challenge with some odd moments of 'where do I find that?' but some of the requirements in this DLC would be absolutely impossible without a guide (be it a friendly mentor or a wiki). That said - as sparse as the plot it - it jumped up my drive and engagement level far more than the original game. Having clear defined villains from the start, and a mystery to solve made me determined to set off and solve this quest far more than the original game ever did (where the shadow lord was more an implied 'someone should probably do something' thing you would get to eventually). The mismatch between vast stretches of labyrinthine quests for short cutscenes is an issue though - there's so much potential here and I'm glad I experienced most of it. Will have to come back and finish the job one day, but have had to move on the FF13 for the marathon! Cheers for your videos, have been invaluable consultation on the larger picture whilst I experienced as much as I could of this world

The players made the stories in XI, not the writers and that is why FFXI is the best MMO ever made.

my only regret with this game, is that i didnt spend MORE time in it