I will start this impression by saying that I have always been extremely dubious of Final Fantasy XI, so feel free to disregard everything I say out of hand if you love MMORPGs or have some vested interest in PlayOnline and online console gaming.

This title is being pressed amazingly hard this year at E3. Sony's floor space has 19 playable stations and Square Enix has another 10. The lines are virtually non-existent and with extremely good reason. Battle, which is the only aspect of the game that is playable, is extremely slow and boring. Selecting actions and executing them can sometimes take upwards of 20 seconds and going from area to area - even on what I should think would be a T1 connection to the PlayOnline network - takes nearly a minute. The FMV is marvelously pretty but the in-game graphics are, by today's standards, nearly as bad as Final Fantasy VII's. They are blobby and blurry and a large portion of the models and locations look like retextured versions of one another. The job system appears to be the bright and shining hope of the game considering that characters can have virtually innumerable skills and spells. The obvious online elements of the game, such as inter-player communication and the massive number of other characters, have been vastly improved upon over previous versions of the game that I have seen.

If the lack of interest in the game at E3 is any example of what the game looks forward to in a North American release, Square Enix might spend their first combined fiscal year in the red.