Final Fantasy XI: Wings of the Goddess Review

The latest expansion for Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy MMO takes players into the past during the Crystal War era, which took place before the original storyline of the game. Using the idea of an epic war, they added several new features to the MMO including the Campaign Battle system which allows players to fight on the front lines.

Most of the new game content focuses on the new Campaign Battles and 2 new job classes, Dancer and Scholar. The new classes are useful additions to the game, mostly used to support other players with their abilities.

The Campaign Battle system provides a method for gaining experience points without having to join experience parties. For the most part it’s fun and provides a good alternative for gaining experience points, but is poorly designed for the game’s capabilities. It tries to place too many players and NPCs in one area, often resulting in drastic slow down and being disconnected from the game even on high end game machines and broadband internet connections.

Several new monsters and new equipment for players were also added to the game, but have fallen into some of the same problems the game has with other rare monsters. Many rare monsters have predicable methods of spawning in the game, usually on a timer such has 21-24 hours after it was last killed. Because of this, and the extreme value of the items these monsters drop, many of these monsters become monopolized by players using hacks to claim the monster when it appears. Square-Enix routinely deletes hundreds of characters for various hacks, but has not been able to ultimately stop monster monopolization, and as a result, many players face little if any chance of being able to fight these monsters themselves.

Square-Enix has come out with several updates since the expansion’s release, but they have mostly focused on content not exclusive to this expansion. Aside from a few new monsters to hunt, not much has been added to the game for veteran players, aside from 2 new job classes to experiment with. Players who focus mostly on leveling and are tired of the experience party grind will enjoy the campaign battles and ops, but so far this expansion has not proven to be a necessity for players. Square-Enix routinely releases large updates that add new content to all aspects of the game, and more is definitely on the way for this expansion, but until some more Wings of the Goddess exclusive content arrives, veteran players are still going to be focused on content in the older expansions.

7.0/10

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