Highly Addictive, mind numbing game

I've played Everquest and Anarchy Online before playing this game, so I have a frame of reference with which to compare this one to.

First of all, FFXI is has a very different look and feel than any other Windows PC based MMORPG. This is because the game was originally designed for a Playstation 2.
When you first play the game, you might be annoyed at the clumsy control system. What really helped me out was learning to forget the mouse and use my keyboard for everything! It is so much better when you learn to avoid using your mouse. This is a difficult concept for many Windows gamers to deal with because we're used to using the mouse in most PC games.

As for the gameplay...the combat system is very different from EQ or AO. It feels more like a live action battle, almost arcade-like. For one thing, unlike Anarchy online, you actually do have to be close enough to hit someone in order to do melee damage. It auto locks your char into facing the current enemy/target, so you can use the arrow keys to run in circles around your opponent. Some moves require that you face the enemies backside, which is only possible if he's directed his anger at one of your team mates.

The game has hundreds of quests...but those actually can become quite annoying when you find out you must do an insane number of quests to improve your fame. In each city/region in the game, your character has a certain amount of fame. This fame affects how NPC's treat you, as in whether they sell you things at good prices or try to rip you off. It also affects which quests you can do. The higher level quests with valuable rewards can't be started until your fame is high enough.
Unfortunately, the designers decided that instead of making fame something you can look up, like any of your other stats...you have to find an NPC in each region and talk to him. This NPC will tell you in a very cryptic way what your fame is. He'll say something like " I've heard your name before, but maybe not..." and supposedly that means you're at fame level 2. I believe there are 5 or 6 fame levels...I never got that far because after the 20th mind numbingly boring quests, I still hadn't advanced my fame beyond the same cryptic message.
What's worse, is the quest givers never tell you what fame you need to get their quest! They just don't give it to you! So often I have wasted 40 minutes traveling to a far away town, only to find out I still don't have enough fame to get any quests there.
It seems the game is full of time wasters like that. While it has boats and ships to travel, the ships are something you can only take after completing a HUGE number of quests. I anctipate it would take hundreds of hours to do enough quests for an airship pass. I didn't try it...well I did, but I just couldn't handle the time it took.

Another huge flaw in this game is the forced teaming. Basically the mobs that are worth any experience at all become very difficult to defeat on your own. It becomes mostly impossible to level by yourself. You must find a team. What's worse, the XP in a team is based on the highest level char and how he compares to the mobs you're fighting. What would often happen to us, is one of our team mates would level up, and suddenly all of us started seeing worthless xp!!!
To make it worse. as you get to higher levels, the xp amount per mob is still about the same...but the xp you need per level is HUGE! so at higher levels it starts taking an obscene amount of time to advance anymore.
On top of that, you must find team mates who are very close in level to you....often I'd spend hours waiting around begging someone to team with me. You know how stupid it is to spend money on a game where you spend time waiting around for someone to invite you to their team?
I rarely had that problem in EQ...mostly cause the XP penalty for having a higher level character on your team wasn't so insane. We're talking a difference of 3 levels is sometimes too much!

Another stupid thing about this game, is you can't change your character's hair color or armor color like you can in EQ. I really enjoyed using dyes in EQ...i could totally change my look and my hairstyle.
No in this game you can only do that by starting a new character, which also means paying an extra buck a month. on top of that, your new char will have no fame and no rank. So you'll have to do all those hundreds of hours of boring quests over again!

The targetting system is a bit messed up as well. there is no way to target the mob who is attacking you. so many times, i got aggro'd by a mob behind me and i started running away. Well the clunkly user interface makes it very hard to look behind you while running away...so i could target the guy who was chasing me!!!