20 Years Ago Final Fantasy XI Messed Me Up Completely

20 years ago, I didn’t have a “real” computer. Not a gaming one, at any rate. I had a beautiful tangerine iBook G3 because all I needed was a browser and sturdy clients for telnet, Usenet, IRC, and, of course, AIM. For everything else? I had a PlayStation 2 and a GameCube. To be honest, I wanted for nothing in this world. And then Square-Enix went and announced fucking Final Fantasy XI, completely fucking my life up. 

I had been fine without a real gaming computer for the longest time. I was in my first years of college, 9/11 happened, the aftermath of 9/11 happened, and everyone had decided that our eyebrows should be as anorexic as our spaghetti straps and our celebrities. The millennium found all new crises to build on top of its anxieties, and I was much more content to be a dutiful student and computer lab employee by day, and a derelict, secret-life transsexual by night, who drank heavily at clubs and went home with strangers, when she wasn’t aggressively throwing herself into MUDs and The Internet (which was honestly still cool then). America and our nightmare idiot puppet of a president had decided on pursuing a multi-decade forever war, and I was, for the most part, trying as best I could to live my life like an episode of Serial Experiments Lain with ‘80s OVA-levels of fan service. 

Which makes sense that my dad would get entirely too excited when I called him up in the middle of September and said, “Dad. I need a computer. A real one.” After spending most of my childhood chastising me for playing videogames and being deeply invested in computers, Age of Empires, Medal of Honor, and Il-2 Sturmovik meant we had shifted places entirely. He had gone all in on gaming. He visited websites like Guru3D and knew the names and model numbers of video cards and processors, and I had stopped caring when my Diamond Viper V550 card had ceased being top of the line. My father had his finger on the pulse of the up-and-coming PCI Express; he was there as AMD was about to soundly unseat Intel in the gaming market. And he said, “I understand,” and showed up at my apartment door the next Sunday with a Phillips-head screwdriver and a borrowed hand-truck of boxes from CompUSA.

My partner at the time was so pissed. She couldn’t stand computer shit, and gamer shit was even worse. She only tolerated my big ass TV and PS2 so she could watch Coen Brothers and Tarantino DVDs. But by mid-October I was set up with just slightly better gaming specs than my father (who had naturally taken this opportunity to upgrade his own computer). And it all came down to October 28th.

October 28, 2003 was fairly normal as most Tuesdays go. The world was in the midst of the Halloween Solar Storms, but whatever problems they manifested, the coronal mass ejection that day didn’t impact my life anyway. I went to class (Psychology of Personality and Shakespeare’s Early Works) and left work slightly earlier than usual (which I absolutely didn’t indicate on my timesheet) so that I could make it on the last bus to GameStop before they closed. While for the most part October 28, 2003 was as normal a day as any other, on this particular late October Tuesday, Final Fantasy XI dropped in North America, and I had a preorder with my name on it. I even picked up the official strategy guide too. This wasn’t just a new Final Fantasy (a cause for celebration unto itself); this was Final Fantasy: The Massively Multiplayer Online RPG. Few things could be so Dia-core.

My history of gaming is intertwined with online, multiplayer gaming. There were the weird, sometimes-collaborative, serialized Interactive Fiction experiences on Prodigy, CompuServ’s roguelike MMO-precursor Island of Kesmai, Neverwinter on America On-line, and Sierra Online’s ImagiNation Network’s frenetic multiplayer-Beholder clone, Shadows of Yserbius. All of them fascinated me and not-infrequently drove my parent’s phone bill into the triple digits. I had spent my pre-teen years monopolizing the modem, and when Ultima Online finally arrived on scene I was first in line to take a shot on that fuckhead Lord British. I hate Ultima, but my god the cacophony of rules and systems slamming against one another as half the player base manipulated them to murder countless Piggies, steal their pre-blessed house keys and lay claim to conch and player-owned domicile. And then there were those Avatar-wannabes who said “Hail!” and cared about Virtues. I was 14 and I extremely did not. I macro’d the stealth ability to my escape key, taped it down so it would level up while I was gone, and came home from school ready to be a fucking monster in a player-crafted red and black robe.

Don’t worry, I grew out of it.

From the moment PlayOnline (Square-Enix’s combination game launcher/social platform) booted up, I knew this was different. This was the future we were promised in countless anime OVAs and PS1 games about how cool the Internet was. This was The Wired but with a much friendlier face. It had an undeniable soundtrack, and soft bubblicious Y2K curves with early Mac OSX scanline affectations. And then it crashed a half dozen times over the next four hours as I tried to patch, login, and create a character in Final Fantasy XI. The future was not without its test. But I had a large pizza, a fridge full of Smirnoff Ice, and the US Manga Corps Remastered Lodoss War collection on DVD. This was the aughts and I was going to either log into the game that I had told myself I had been waiting for all my life, or I would have an excruciating and incurable case of heartburn.

Both would be true. But it was worth it.

Just shy of midnight the installer finished, the game was patched, and I could finally play Final Fantasy XI. I logged into the world of Vana’diel for the first time. I was entirely too full of pepperoni and sausage pizza from Channello’s and absolutely gone off that Smirnoff Ice, but my soul was ready for this. I made a Hume (human, but intellectual property) Red Mage. I chose a place called San d’Oria as my starting zone (uppity, decadent elf nationalists) and after a patented Squaresoft breathtaking intro movie, I was thrust into what would become my new digital home for the next two years.

The sound effects were too loud, the overly triumphant San d’Ooria bagpipes were ear splitting, like cheap midi soundfonts. The user interface was the “Graphic Design is my Passion” version of the actual PlayOnline portal. There was a clunky jaggedness to the way the main window popped up along the bottom and constantly resized itself. Configuration settings menus were broken up across multiple pages with barely descriptive section names. Documentation? Hah. The Windows version couldn’t even Alt-Tab without shutting down the game entirely. We literally had to wait until a third-party application (Windower) was created to tab out, which in a game that required this much sifting through of maps and charts, was a necessity. 

I won’t sugar coat it. Final Fantasy XI was kind of a rickety piece of shit. Like our Angelfire pages, and phpBB sites, and the way we ran our IRC channels, Final Fantasy XI was people absolutely on the bleeding edge of their bullshit, creating something that barely held together at the best of times, but deep in its calamity was the spark of a profoundly beautiful pre-Web 2.0 world. This wasn’t just an MMO for the PC, you see. Square Enix was building the first full-fledged MMO for the Playstation 2. North America just got the PC/Windows version first. Square-Enix was making an online portal and a comprehensive virtual game world that worked simultaneously cross-platform on a videogame console AND desktop PCs. We were going to login, reach out, and game with one another through the new household portal to the web—the motherfucking PlayStation 2.

I don’t think anything else at the time was remotely so daring, and certainly little after it came close.

In my first hours in Final Fantasy XI, I got lost in a city trying to find a child’s abusive knight-father who abandoned him to go shopping for sick new gear. I watched as he scolded the child, then took his fishing rod and gave it to me. When his father’s back was turned, I gave it back to the child, trading the item to him the way I would another player through a clunky interface. I talked to every NPC I ran across. I bought spells from a shop tucked away off a stairwell where the proprietress asked me to hand out leaflets to other NPCs encouraging them to come shop at Regine’s Magicmart. I learned to navigate the city by sight and intuition. There was no minimap back then. No exclamation points or question marks above heads. Quests had to be discovered and completed with the full spirit of adventure. God help you if you forgot where Pavipon is when you finally got him his rabbit pelts. There’s a way to scan for NPCs, but it isn’t easy or quick. 

But before all that… I ran out into the wilds like a full-on newbie menace. I wanted to see the full breadth and scope of this digital world. I had my introductory gear, a weapon and some spells. I would brave the wilderness and run far afield. This was my plan. I made it exactly one zone. Through the gates of San d’Oria, I sprinted through deciduous forest as Nobuo Uematsu’s melodies bleated through my truly mediocre Altec Lansing PC speakers. Past odd new critters, and Funguars, and bats, around ruins and creeks, and around Orcs whose character models still stand up today as some of the most incredible creatures I’ve seen in games (and shame on XVI for how they treated them). I ran until I entered a rocky valley where fog limited the draw distance because this was 2003 and I had a good-but-not-great graphics card because my father couldn’t abide me having a gaming rig as good as his.

I ran smack into a gigantic fucking bumblebee. And it wrecked me. I didn’t even have time to consider combat. It aggroed on me, it attacked, and I died. 

The first time I died in the Threshold MUD was to a giant bumblebee too. This is just how these things go. I released my soul from my body, and respawned back in the kingdom I had so impetuously left. I asked for some directions from a player who cheered me on as I respawned. And over the next couple hours I made more friends. And when I was ready to venture out into the wilderness, I put years of Diku codebase training to work for me. I knew how MUDs worked, and Final Fantasy XI (like its 1999 predecessor EverQuest) was deep down pure MUD. Even commands were the same.

I made my tentative steps into the wilderness of Ronfaure forest, after my place-reminding death, where Nobuo Uematsu’s jaunty Renaissance Faire beats floated mellifluously about as I religiously typed out “/check <t>” and “/attack <t>” (but only when the check came back as manageable). I moved slowly as I slaughtered weird rabbit-owl-squirrels and skinny rock-burrowing worms. XP ticked off in small little chunks, and as I had learned, death came swift, and death took XP away. Die enough and you would level-down, so it was important to be sure you could win a fight before committing. Especially if you were playing with others.

Occasionally I’d return to the safety of the stone walls of San d’Oria. “Sandy,” other players called it. Familiar faces from the forest just outside the city would turn up in shops and in front of the auction house. They’d flicker and flash and materialize with a new outfit. And we’d cheer, wave, and emote. A name from the public communications channel generously offering advice and making jokes would match the one above the catgirl sprinting by with an aggroed train of giant sheep following her. You’d say hi, and she’d follow you around and occasionally cast cure on you as you fought mobs well above your challenge rating. 

I’d never really made friends in online gaming spaces before. But by the time it was light out and my phone was telling me to wake up for Introduction to Western World Art (which I was absolutely skipping today), I had made a half dozen new friends, and even joined an LGBT linkshell (somewhere between a guild and a private group chat). And the next time I logged onto PlayOnline, I even had a message waiting from a friend inviting me to join their guild’s bulletin board. I got invited to go grinding in the Dunes, a notorious hurdle that all new players had to clear.

The Valkurm Dunes were one of the first stumbling blocks that XI players had to surmount if they made it past the introductory levels. This was an MMO and at the time, MMOs were not games for solo players. Final Fantasy XI was the least solo-friendly MMO I can think of and the Dunes was where parties would huddle up for hours wailing each with their specific role, equally pulling their weight, to bring down crabs and goblins and all other manner of nasties. Now, a smoothly operating party could clear through mobs and score level after level, all while carrying on and having a hoot of a time roleplaying or just shooting the shit. Grinding, at its best, was something of a highly regimented clicker game that you could play inside of a group chat of fantasy anime weirdos. It ruled. Until someone fucked up. And then the group would fall apart. A total party wipe decimated morale and XP bars. As easily as bonds could begin to forge they were ripped apart. And then you spent hours shouting for a tank, a healer, another DPS who knew what they were doing and was appropriately geared. This is how you leveled. And as much as we bitched and moaned, and as much as it wasn’t for everyone, I loved every minute of it.

After Valkrum there was Qufim Island, then the jungles of Kazham, the Garliage Citadel, and the Kuftal Tunnel with its boulder-blocked passageway that was tied to lunar phases and whose enemies I still shudder thinking about.

Final Fantasy XI was a game where partying was a necessity. You had to make friends, you had to join groups and linkshells. Relying on random shouts for parties was a possibility, but the grind was so brutal and inefficient even dedicated players with good consistent guilds took quite a while to reach the end game. And just like Final Fantasy XIV, a player could be every class. Unlike XIV, a player would need to learn and level multiple jobs to be effective in their primary role. 

Final Fantasy XI became the thing I stayed home to do. People joked about MMOs becoming their jobs, but I think that’s unfair. We came to fight monsters and be social, and that’s exactly what grinding was. Final Fantasy XI wasn’t a job; it became the thing I installed on the computers at work so that when I was stuck there late at night just because someone needed to be physically present until 11 p.m., I could log in and play. It was really beautiful using business-class broadband. I got so used to it, I rearranged my discretionary expenditures to get cable internet at home. Vana’diel and the friends I made there were crucial. Especially because it was so much easier to come out to your linkshell of queers than it was to your bosses, coworkers, professors, family or even real-life friends. The first people I ever floated being trans to were my Final Fantasy XI guildmates, while we were deep in the middle of camping the level 70+ area, Castle Oztroja, and we had just pulled another giant angry birdman. We nearly wiped while everyone was congratulating me and being supportive. L O L.

For two years this is how I spent more of my evenings, some entire weekends, but always at least some of them. I’d go to concerts and clubs still, and get right back on for a few hours before nodding off at the Auction House. My friends in MUDs would tell me stories on AIM about how the Thieves Guild got taken over this week. It was an elaborate story of collaborative interactive fiction mediated by real systems and mechanics. A number of players set themselves to a goal and then, like in tabletop games, let probability and mathematics adjudicate what happened next. There was full regime change in the MUD. Economies altered, allegiances shifting to reflect this new paradigm. Back in Vana’diel I waited in real time as a ferry took me from Selbina to Mhaura across the Bastore Sea. Players huddled together occasionally emoting, but mostly just huddled up idling near one another, deeply engaged in roleplay storylines with one another in the whisper channel. 

A handful of my friends from the “real world” joined, crossing over from the world of their class-less, level-less William Gibson-themed cyberpunk MUD, and I played with them until they left for World of Warcraft. They preferred the mouse-driven, faster paced, and more “edgy” gameplay to XI. I started having to split my time between the friends I’d made in one world, the friends in the other, and the friends in yet more. I flitted between so many digital worlds, always returning home to Vana’diel. And while eventually World of Warcraft won out by sheer overwhelming force, it took until the Wrath of the Lich King expansion to actually captivate me in even half the way XI did.

World of Warcraft was at times a great game, but it wasn’t the experience that XI brought. There was no player housing to decorate with furniture you made yourself, and there never would be. Crafting was purely to fill out equipment gaps and items for raiding. The charm of using the player trading interface to gather from nodes in XI was replaced with point and click efficiency. It ran beautiful, looked good, and had an interface that made sense. It was going to fight to be the future, a future that was overly simplified and streamlined, players wouldn’t just not be required to cooperate, they would be on opposing sides of a forever war. The high octane MMOs had arrived. But I’ll be honest, as much as I loved it, PlayOnline was never going to be the future. Even as it tried to adapt and save the early and mid game to bring in new players with adjusted difficulty, experience rates, and NPC companions that kicked ass like having 12th grade friends in your freshman year. Final Fantasy XI was too rickety a creation to truly pivot. Its PlayStation 2 guts were too evident, the way it was strapped together and lurched and spasmed was its downfall as much as its beauty.

The internet stopped being something we logged on to. The runaway spending of the dotcom bubble had paved out the infrastructure to establish the world of the always-on, always-connected reality we exist in now. 

PlayOnline did not become the new hub of our digital lives. Facebook, Twitter, and Google were poised to make the move in the post bust space. Amazon consolidated power. Our phones became smart, and then exponentially smarter. The web was always looking for a way towards profitability. Banners gave way to the algorithm. MP3s to streaming. The complex messes of MMORPGs like Ultima Online that gave way to the complex messes like Final Fantasy XI became streamlined into World of Warcraft, which became obsolete and swallowed up by Naoki Yoshida doing WoW more aggressively than Blizzard could with Final Fantasy XIV, along with the ubiquity of mobile gaming, service gaming, free to play casinos we carry with us at all times. Everything became social, everything became commercial in ways so accelerated that even the illusion we maintained about how beautiful and pure we were in our digital existence feels like an ancient memory. When I think back on my years with Final Fantasy XI, I’m wistful and nostalgic and deeply grieving for a time when the internet still seemed like a fun and possible space of considerate connection. But also for all the time in the world that the body and mind of a 20-year-old has—one who could stay up all night fishing Lake Tepokalipuka in Sarutabaruta, pretending to be a puppeteer/ninja with a friend who might just actually identify with being a cat and a girl outside of the game as much as they did inside, sharing all the quiet moments of ourselves in a world purposefully created just for them.

Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.