This is a review of both the current Retail game, and the level 75 era private server Horizon. I will cover Horizon first, and then the Retail game. For context, I actually bought the big fat HDD and played the game on my PS2 for a bit way back when, but didn't stick with it. I played 200 hours of Horizon when it launched a couple years ago, then played Retail for a couple months. Then I came back to Horizon a few weeks ago to play with other HQers.
FF11 Horizon
Horizon is sold as a recreation of the early FF11 experience based on the Chains of Promathia expansion, which was the first expansion to launch for FF11 in the West (in the West, the game launched with the Zilart expansion already bundled with the base game). It also has some "balancing" changes. Basically it is the FF11 equivalent of a Vanilla+ WoW private server.
To get the game to work, I had to log in and log back out several times while I tried out the different controller presets in the Horizon launcher. The game was originally designed to be played on the PS2 with a controller. I also had to do some fiddling with the in-game options/config menu to adjust the aspect ratio and set my chat windows.
The first few hours of the game are pretty uninspiring to get through, as you are dropped off in a city with no overt guidance. You actually start off in a completely different section of the city than the questgiver who starts you on the nation storyline, the main storyline of the base game. You then solo to level 10, which amounts to a few boring hours of auto-attacking mobs. It is not practical to play with other people before level 10 as the party level syncing does not go down below level 10, so if you tried to party before that people would get wildly different amounts of exp. Level syncing ensures everyone is progressing at the same rate and makes sure that even players up to 10 levels higher than the synced player are getting exp equivalent for their level). Overall the introductory experience is bad, and the people I introduced to this game needed handholding to be walked through the setup and initial starter quest experience and encouragement/promises that the game does get better once you solo to 10.
Once at level 10, the fun begins. You then go to popular leveling zones, such as Valkurm Dunes or Buburimu Peninsula, to start doing what FF11 is about: the 6 man levelling party. In FF11, it is very, very difficult to solo mobs that are at the same level as you. You can run around everywhere looking for lower level mobs to zerg if you want, but that is very intensive and quickly becomes exhausting and boring. So you need to form a 6 man party (1 tank, 1 healer, rest are damage/supports) to kill higher-level mobs for more exp. To get the most exp your party wants to be fighting mobs that are labelled Very Tough (5 levels above you) or Incredibly tough (6+ levels above you). Combat is low enough APM that you can actually type and chat with your party while fighting. I have had more conversations with people in FF11 levelling parties than I have had doing "group content" in WoW, FF14, GW2, etc, where people are ostensibly doing something together but no one is really interacting.
Doing a levelling party in Horizon is a large time commitment, as mounts are limited and one way (can only be rented and ridden from a city, and then dismounted). You have to spend a lot of time travelling across several maps, dungeons, boat rides, etc, to reach a levelling camp location. You could be looking at 30 minutes to travel to a location to then grind there for a few hours. And if you die, you lose exp and can de-level and lose access to high level abilities or armor with a level requirement. So there are more stakes involved and more commitment is required to play the game, which in turn makes people more invested. It is also a private server with about 2-4k people online, and you will see the same names who are at the same point in their journey as you. There is a community feel in the game that is not present in continental megaservers like WoW or FF14 where you queue for a dungeon, get teleported to the dungeon with four other randoms, complete it in 15 minutes, and then everybody goes their separate ways and never sees each other again.
The game also gives players the tools to find other players on the same stage of their journey as you and form a levelling party with them. You can type "/sea all 30-40" to see all players online who are currently between levels 30 and 40. You can see what location they are currently at, what their job is, if they are a party leader (yellow name) or a party member (blue name) or unpartied (white name). You can also further specify what location they are at if you want people nearby, what job they are at if you want a tank or a healer, or if they are flagged specifically to join a party. You can then whisper those people and say, "Heya! Would you like to tank for my levelling party at Valkurm Dunes?" Some would say "well that's a more involved process than just queueing for LFD or duty finder!" and yes, they would be correct, but the point of this game is that it is more socially involved.
Anyway, that is pretty much the Horizon gameplay experience. 65 levels of the levelling party experience as you go from 10 to 75. You will occasionally form a party to go do story missions or an unlock quest together in which you battle enemies too strong to be soloed, or journey through a dungeon to reach a cutscene. There is a level cap "endgame", but most people won't get there quickly due to the long grind to level cap and how your friends might not be level capped and you might be syncing down to level them up.
The only other real thing of note is the job system/multiclassing, which is a little deceptive. It is not like Guild Wars 1 where you can fully be both classes. In FF11 you can equip a subjob. You would imagine that this would give you a lot of character customization, but in reality you're only really going to get one or two, maybe three notable abilities:
- If you equip warrior as your subjob, you will get provoke (taunt ability), berserk for a damage buff, occasionally auto-attack twice, defender ability which reduces incoming damage and is useful if you are tanking or you accidentally take aggro, and Warcry (group wide attack buff).
- If you equip ninja as your subjob, you can create shadow clones which will soak attacks aimed at you once (requires using stacks of expendable ninja tools, can be expensive to keep stocked if you are a new player), and stealth through areas. You can also dual wield, if you want.
- If you equip samurai as your subjob, you can regen 600 TP in 15 seconds, dodge an attack once every minute, and gain a damage buff for wielding two-handed weapons.
- Etc.
- Some jobs cannot be very effectively equipped as a subjob, namely the three pet classes of Summoner, Beastmaster, and Dragoon, as you either lose access to your pet or they become ineffective.
- (The Horizon private server made some changes for job and subjob abilities, listing them here would be getting a little too into the weeds)
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Retail FF11
Retail differs from FF11 in that the game is not about the levelling party experience. The player base is concentrated at the level cap endgame, so before then it is a mostly lonely experience. You can acquire exp multipliers, summon NPC party members anywhere, and generally just level very fast and don't need other players' help for most things. I played a Summoner and only needed to ask other peoples' help for getting my summons (I do not recall at what level, I think maybe level 30-50ish). I wound up levelling to the high 70s/low 80s before stopping levelling to concentrate on the main story so that I did not become over-levelled and trivialize it. Retail is also different in that there are books in every zone and dungeon that you can teleport to and from. Unlike Horizon FF11 which is a simulation of inhabiting and traversing a fantasy world, Retail FF11 is pretty much teleport simulator as you travel to go get the next quest item or talk to the next NPC.
The early FF11 is a little strangely structured, in that you start by doing nation storylines but then the nation plots are forgotten as everything converges in Jeuno with the Shadowlord plotline. Apparently, the base game suffered from the same issue as Trails in the Sky FC, where the game had to be shipped out the door before the whole story was implemented. It ends half way through at the Shadowlord fight, and the other plot stuff is not resolved until the Zilart expansion, in which the central storyline and the nation stories are separated. So you have to go back to your nation to finish their stories from rank 6 to rank 10. Then you go to Norg to continue the main story from where it left off at the Shadowlord fight (and retcons in some additional events). The base game story (both the nation missions and the Shadowlord story) aren't much to write home about, but the main story does become a little more interesting in Zilart.
I got a little bit into the Zilart storyline before I got tired of Retail and unsubbed. I have heard that the story continues to get better as FF11 goes on, but I just couldn't endure the gameplay anymore. The Retail gameplay experience is fundamentally a lot of teleporting around, going to dungeons and farming mobs for a quest item or some other tediousness, and I just was not able to endure that for the sake of getting to the next cutscene. But in light of how boring the moment to moment gameplay of the latest FF14 expansion's story was (four hours of boring visual novel in which you literally never get to fight, vs lots of teleporting and running around to get quest items), I am not sure which of the two I would pick. Hopefully neither. And before anyone says, "Well they are MMOs, of course you are going to get a bad single-player RPG experience!", I would point to GW2 and WoW, which while they have dubious writing do have enjoyable moment to moment story questing-based gameplay experiences.
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The game looks aesthetically very nice. It has an overall grounded aesthetic without looking like a brown ugly game. I like how much of the game takes place not in generic green European medieval forests, but also in vast rocky landscapes (and, again, doesn't look ugly like in other games). It reminds me of places I have been hiking to like sandstone canyons. Reminds me of the Wild West.
There are more nice locations. The Japanese-y forest of Zi'Tah. The bridge city of Jeuno. The mining city of Bastok. The scenic ruins of Tavnazia. Even a few really high fantasy locations like Al'Taieu or Promvyion, but due to the cost and time to travel in this game (unlike in WoW/GW2/FF14 where I can teleport and fly and get a good shot within a couple minutes), I only posted the screenshots I had on hand.
I do have a gripe with Horizon, which is that they replaced the faces with redrawn upscaled textures. I do not think they look good, and there is no option to revert to the original faces. I have heard that there is a fix mod floating around somewhere. Apparently it does not address the custom faces that the Horizon devs implemented though, so you would have the redrawn faces next to original faces.
The music is very good. Half of the base game's soundtrack was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, the other half by Naoshi Mizuta who would go on to do the expansion tracks. Overall I do not find Mizuki's tracks as likeable as Uematsu's stuff, but there are some good tracks here and there.
I like the anthem music of the Republic of Bastok.
I like the music that plays when you are on the boat to another continent:
I was going to post them all as videos, but then realized that would be a lot so here is a list:
- The cutscene music that plays when you fight the Shadowlord at the end of the base game:
- Dramatic cutscene music from Zilart
- Rendition of the Vana'diel March when you finish the nation storylines.
- Normal battle theme in the Rise of the Zilart expansion areas
- Fishing barge theme
- When you travel back to the past and fight in the war in Wings of the Goddess
- Wartime San d'Oria music in the past
- Traveling the jungles of Ulbulka
- Your private tropical island theme (FF11 did it first!)
- Iroha's theme
