Champion Transformation
More than 60 Champions in all, players can unlock a variety of historical and mythological icons, including Dracula, King Arthur, Joan of Arc, Lu Bu, Beowulf, and more. Once transformed, champions can use a powerful set of skills and abilities, unique to the character.

PvP, CTF, and DotA Inspired Battlefields
Players looking to spice up their MMO combat experience can engage in thrilling PvP, CTF (capture the flag), and DotA inspired battlefields. Choose your side, transform into your favorite champion, and smash through minions, monsters, towers, and players, on your way to victory.

The God Beasts (Guild Raids)
Strategy is everything. Challenge terrible monstrosities with your guild, but be warned, it will take 20-30 highly trained players, acting as one cohesive unit, to take down one of these massive beasts. Guilds able to slay a God Beast will be rewarded with extremely valuable treasure, gold, and prestige.

Vast Character Customization
Choose from over 10,000 different weapons, armor pieces, costumes, and trinkets! Characters have 24 different equipment slots to ensure each character stands out from the crowd. Each piece of gear can be upgraded through a unique and user-friendly enchantment system. With every successful enchantment, your character’s gear visibly changes, proving your might.

East Meets West
Explore a large, awe-inspiring fantasy landscape where some of the greatest figures from all corners of the world, meet on the battlefield. Legendary Champions draws from a variety of sources, including history, myth, and popular culture.

Overall: 7.9

• 7.7 Production: Square Enix’s first online Final Fantasy.

1. 8 Graphics: Character design and architect is definitely unique and the graphic style not too flamboyant, and the equipment design is great too. Nothing much to say about it really. It’s good cause it’s good.
   
2. 8 Sounds: Composed by famous composer that did other FFgames, slightly generic, but good. Fits the area and situation, and was not increasingly annoying even after months of hearing it.
   
3. 7 Story: Like any other “Final Fantasy” games this speaks for itself, the story and lore definitely have some pull to it, but there is definitely a lack of immersion, it didn’t make you feel like your influencing the world around you, it just seemed you were there. . .Along with a lot of other people. Silent Protagonist.

• 9 Game-play & Mechanics: Definitely in no way innovative, yet they did spice it up in their own way with the macro UI, and selection of skills and attack in role-playing games of the past. Movement and animation are smooth but are somewhat dull and slow, so anyone that is seeking intense action and fast progress will not find it here. But the character progression definitely give you a rewarding experience for your hard long work, emphasis on hard. (No pun intended) Overall it does cater to a niche audience, you like it or you don’t.

• 8 Community: FFXI is all about community, it’s incredibly hard to progress in the game at a decent pace without friends or mate in FFXI, since it focuses on group grinding, although there are still drama and whatnot, Final Fantasy XI had great community. Nowadays they have promoted veterans to play with newer players so you definitely don’t get excluded from the action.

1. Customer Service: In-game support for me was great, I didn’t have any problem with that, I got stuck in a glitch area, put in a ticket, GM contacted me, and within minutes I was out of there. No question asked. Outside customer service, was manageable and I only experienced it once true character recovery, I had an discontinued character for couple of months and had to have them recover it, everything was fine except for the fact I had no items except a fishing pole and two bait. Others have cited worse customer service experience.

• 7 Cost: FFXI is priced at $12.95 per month for the service fee, +$1.00 extra for any Additional Character Slot and +$1.00 if you buy a Tetra Master Account (Card game) and since you can play every job on a single character, multiple characters aren’t a necessity. Square Enix’s playonline has a 30-day free trial for FFXI so you can see if you’ll like it. But IMO I think FFXI is priced very well with all the service, maintenance, customer service,  uptime and weekly/monthly content updates.

Final Words: FFXI is one of those games that you either like it or you don’t, it’s fairly old and it caters to niche gamers, but I recommend it for trial anyways.

-Got lazy near the end- SORREH!

RIP Acclaim.

Game’s community in the end decides if the game will succeed or fail, the game just doesn’t have the player base to recover the 5 years and the near 100 million dollars wasted in development. Pleagued with hackers the game inevitably became broken, but the reason for the failure isn’t even the hackers. Ex-employees’ blame the poor upper management always disagreeing with each other. With lack of direction and leadership the game faultered to where it is today.

Upper management collided and created the explosion of failure.

There is a small group still in charge of maintaining APB till a buyer purchases the company if no one is found the game will be shut down and company liquidated. When that happens be sure to drop by their offices in the UK, for some cheap pens and legal pads! Sadly APB may be the Tabula Rasa of 2010.

To the dismay of many fans, Final Fantasy XIV will now have restrictions on how long you can play on one class. You can gain 100% on one class for 8 hours. During the following 7 hours the exp level will drop from 100% to 0%. Although this might seem like a incentive to stop playing a game you are PAYING monthly play, this is actually a move force players into playing different classes. Making it very hard to devout that one or two days off of the week to have a gaming marathon.

This will unnecessarily elongate the game’s life by reducing leveling and just giving the player something else to worry about. Even the most devout of Final Fantasy XI fans have addressed concerns. Only time will tell as Final Fantasy XIV is set to launch near the end of September.

MMOsite boldly asks “is this game just about the nudity?” To which Kabod answers, the game’s hook is the nudity, but once player delves into the combat they stay for it’s depth and our villian and hero system. Read the follow interview in the link below.

http://news.mmosite.com/content/2010-08-27/adult_only_mmo_kabod_online_interview,1.shtml