Square Enix released Final Fantasy XI in Japan way back in May 2002. The game is finally starting to break even, with over 200,000 subscribers currently taking up residence in Vana D'iel. The journey of the game to North America, however, has not been a smooth one. The closed beta test is about to get underway, and if the build at E3 is anything to go by, getting selected isn't necessarily a good thing.

Nestled on the side of Sony's massive "booth," and featured prominently at Square Enix, Final Fantasy XI stands as one of a host of games with online support at the show. The experience of being online, at least at E3, is a pretty lonely one. A sign at the kiosk suggested that it was connected to a Japanese server, which I sincerely hope was not the case, since in my session I came across one other player, and he was standing right next to me on the show floor.

As you run around the large world. it strikes you that real-time, accurate traversal of large spaces is not necessarily the best way to do things. I have little patience for games that don't really accomplish much in reasonable amounts of time (this probably disqualifies me as part of the target audience), and I found the whole experience to be very tiring. When I did run into my booth-mate, I had the option of chatting with him on the keyboard, or using an on-screen keyboard. We helped each other to take down a monster, but it was hardly what I would call scintillating entertainment. The fact that battles seem so slow certainly didn't help matter. The screen is very busy once you do start to do things, with menu after menu opening up, not to mention the large region at the bottom of the screen that scrolls off a ton of information about what's happening in the virtual world.

I did run across a fair amount of monsters, but the problem is that there were only a couple different types. I probably killed about 10-20 creatures in during my play time, and those were of just two types: bats and ogres. The world itself looks pretty decent, but I was playing a night stage, so it probably wasn't the best level to judge graphical achievement by. I did see someone else playing in what looked like a desert region, but instead of my bleak, dark vistas, he was faced with samey, rock landscapes.

Final Fantasy XI is being brought to North America by Sony later this year, which means that Square Enix is probably going to be getting decent network support for the game as well. This is good, since the last thing this game needs is another drawback. As it stands, it hardly seems worth shelling out the money for the game, hard drive and network adaptor, let alone the monthly fee. Let's hope that Square Enix doesn't suffer too much financially if the game bombs in North America.