Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Been there, done that"

Good:
-Excellent class variety, each one offers a much different gameplay experience. Advanced jobs are also great.
-Each city is unique and fun to explore and the layout of all the different areas was pretty cleverly thought out.
-Quite a few quests to undertake.
-Environments are expansive and the draw distance makes open landscapes fairly visually appealing at times.
-Building up a guild full of friends is just as easy as it should be and a lot of fun.
-Challenging combat that isn't too difficult for the first few levels, but slowly ramps up.
-Some of the music can get repetitive, but overall it's a good soundtrack.

Bad:
-Probably the most tedious installation process ever.
-You can not advance in this game by playing alone. Around level 10 the game pretty much forces you to group up with others in order to keep leveling. Normally this might be acceptable, but given that you pretty much have to have a good tank and excellent healer and most people don't fall in this category means that you'll be spamming LFG for a long, long time.
-Combat is just boring by yourself. Target the enemy. Attack. Wait a while.
-Customizing your character's appearance so you look unique is basically impossible.
-It really sucks when you die. You lose 10% of your experience. That's harsh!
-Rival kingdoms are a fantastic idea, but it wasn't implemented in an exciting way. You'll feel very insignificant in regards to this and there just isn't enough controlled PvP in this game.
-Enemy design is good, but tons of enemies are based on the same model over and over only they're colored differently. Who wants to fight level 40 orcs that you could beat at level 10 when they were colored green? I don't.
-A lot of the environments just don't have very much detail. Sure, trees are nice, but there's not much else going on.


As much as I wanted to like this game, the bottom line is that there just isn't any reason to play it, aside from the familiar FF elements, when WoW does everything better.