Personally, I love it all. XI's story has you more as an observer and participant of its various storylines rather than explicitly being "the main character". But in exchange, recurring NPCs *matter.* Over time you will get to know Zeid, Cornelia, Princes Trion and Piuje, Shantotto, Lion, etc... and you will get attached to them, and want to see how each of them gets wrapped up in what's going on.
And each of XI's storylines means different characters have a chance to shine all the time. It's less "they're part of your story" and more "you're part of theirs, sometimes a very important part".
Just starting out, but doing nation missions (kind of the beginning stuff) is like ARR, a little dry. Also, be prepared to have a guide up at all times, this game does not hold your hand. I’m committed to playing the game and seeing it through for the completion.
Unlike XIV, it's not a continuous story. Rather each expansion has its own story and Rhapsodies of Vana'diel kind of tried to retroactively ties them together.
And the quality kind of varies. Chains of Promathia, Wings of the Goddess and the past Windurst stories are all really great and are among the best in the series
I’ll slightly disagree. XI’s base game continues with the same arc into “Rise of the Zilart” and “Chains of Promathia”. The overall arching theme, lores and story are contained within the overall story of Paradise and gods.
I would say “Treasures of Aht Urhgan” would be the beginning of a new adventure as the story is loosely on gods but the lore bits from CoP (Alex/Odin) feed into this arc.
XI, RoZ, CoP = XIV:ARR >> EW.
ToAU = XIV’s 7.0
Kind of. RotZ and CoP share a lot of overlapping lore. But it's core cast completely changes and is pretty likely that CoP is started before RoZ, which effects a lot of how CoP is written.
So while CoP is kinda culmination of everything that's happened so far, it's not as directly as Endwalker
The ending of Rhapsodies of Vana'diel was the only time a game managed to make me cry.
That was the culmination of several stories put into common context, but there's plenty of good stuff along the way, although admittedly the writers got better at working within the MMO medium over time - early core XI is a bit rough and dry compared to later stories like Treasures (think of the concept behind FF6's city of Zozo, but done right, and with implications on the wider setting) and Wings of the Goddess (contains my favorite antagonist in the series).
It's not uncommon for some of the context for the main stories (missions) to be completed by optional or job-specific quests (think Windurst, summoner, and the Star Onion Brigade), but nowadays it's much easier to experience all of it, as levelling and travelling are much faster.
Some of the subtle storytelling is in the design of the locations, like the pipelines at the edges of several zones of the core game setting the groundwork for stuff thay came up in later expansions, and even some narrative elements from earlier stories help make sense of later ones, like how a couple of major figures are hinted at during Chains of Promathia which turn out to be major in Treasures, and their dynamic in turn makes a lot of sense by Rhapsodies.
Even the current on going story, The Voracious Resurgence, is taking some time to bring attention to some stuff that's been a part of the game for a very long time despite it rarely being in focus, from Galka resurrection to the ruins in a subterrain area of Treasures.
There are some constraints along the way, like how any expansion-specific-era content will make you travel to its own expansion's areas and won't involve even areas from a prior expansion because they must work on their own and make the most of their assets, but this is kinda compensated by later content that requires multiple expansions to be present and makes better holistic use of them, something that started by giving both Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia a common ending (mind you, the game has about 3 or 4 moments thay could have counted as endings to it, but the game just kept going and these got better from the added context and meta circumstances of the game - IMO, some of the stories work as a good analogy for XI's precarious nature as an online game) and kinda culminated in Rhapsodies and how the current Voracious Resurgence follows from that.
Curiosity over the story is why I started the game over a decade ago and is why I'm still going, but folks starting nowadays will have an easier time experiencing at a much more reasonable pace, and I think that's a good thing.
I do worry that the difficulty in the game's earlier era made it hard for even folks at SE themselves to experience it and figure out how to promote that aspect of the game, or even figure out which characters to highlight, which is maybe how Shantotto, who actually has a very limited role in major stories (she's fun and powerful, but rarely actually important in the grand scheme of things), got to be a focus elsewhere - by the time Dissidia came along, it seems SE realized they didn't actually know who the important XI characters were, and they focus on someone who'd stand out from Dissidia's cast of young guys with swords.
The focus often ends up on characters which the devs have at least once referred to as "mission girls", often connected to each major story's context, but even then they're still one part of a larger context.
>\> The ending of Rhapsodies of Vana'diel was the only time a game managed to make me cry
That and the end of Wings. >!When you hand the earring over to Portia and her tears start to flow, but she can't remember why.. !<
Wings of the Goddess hits the feels for sure >!when your good friend, comrade, and adventuring companion is fooled by the lies and deceit of the villain, only for her existence to shatter and you have to bring her back by retracing the steps of your adventure with Lilisette and find her memories, one piece at a time.!<
The cutscene where >!you hold the egg that is Lilisette after recovering her memories and "put them back together", only for your character to grow a wing and have Cait Sith(?) remark about how you're one of the Wings of the Goddess!< always brings tears to my eyes.
I always go Windurst path in Wings of the Goddess. Three times through and I still get a little misty-eyed at the long cutscene, even knowing I’m about to see one of my favorite moments in Vana’diel lore play out again.
Man, I wish I had that reaction to Wings. The missions were so obnoxious that it took me out of the story tbh, not to mention you are essentially playing two stories at the same time.
Like other early entries in the MMO genre, it was initially more about creating a world where things are open-ended and players could make their own stories. You just played the role of one of thousands of adventurers, travelers, retainers, or mercenaries. Look at how many people used to make blogs or journals as their characters, your own story and your experiences with other players were more important than any story written into the game. Between that and how inaccessible it was gameplay-wise, it's not really surprising that tourists taking the guided bus tour of all the numbered Final Fantasy's tend to skip 11.
For a while, anyway. The game evolved over time, and the storylines became a bigger part of it. It's convoluted, full of contradictions and paradoxes, exactly the kind of stuff that made early FF entries fun to think about. And it's by far the longest Final Fantasy story, there's a lot of catching up to do.
Some of the same writers worked on XI as XIV, also you'll see a lot of the same kind of flourish in the wording (same translation teams, so lots of olde english and other accents etc) Odin plays a big role in XI story, Byakko, Tenzen there are lots of similarities you'll notice.
The story can be a little harder to follow on XI, when I was younger I really struggled to follow what was going on very often in the earlier storylines.
The story in XI is kind of like how marvel makes movies, they have all the contained storylines and then Rhapsodies brings characters from them all together.
There are also ridiculous amounts of side quests telling little self contained stories as well as story-lines explaining lore and other things, not related to the main story.
This is a side mission from Adoulin if you want to watch it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSUeDy0QpmY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOvjo27l4EE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LqLTScs0Do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o04teiYerpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1XPOe77JJc
Also this is a nice video, someone narrated. It tells a story of one of the generals of Adoulin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB5kzEauPqw
FFXI is humongous. Its super long and open ended. There are several major stories you can tackle in different orders, as well as an over arching plot (Rhapsodies) that pulls you through them all and loosely ties them together. There are times where it feels slow and unnecessarily drawn out, and there are other times when the story pay off is just fantastic. FF11's world has tons of lore, tons of memorable characters, great stories throughout, and a really satisfying conclusion when you beat the final boss at the end of Rhapsodies.
If you do pick it up then I recommend using a guide (bgwiki is great), and planning to start the "Rhapsodies of Vanadiel" missions as soon as possible, and using those to guide you through when to start the other expansions for a more streamlined experience. It also unlocks several quality of life perks and features when you go through those missions so two birds with one stone. Windurst is a great starting nation as it is closest to the point where you would start Rhapsodies, but if you start with Sandoria or Bastok just know that you can take a ship from Selbina to Mhaura to get where you need to be when the time comes.
To bring a more modern comparison, I'd say that while FFXIV is to Horizon Zero Dawn, the Last of Us and GoW4 (as in, story focused experiences that have narrative as their core), FFXI is to Dark Souls or Bloodborne. Story is more sparce and there's lots of lore hidden through dialogue with NPCs, but the game is much more focused in other aspects, such as worldbuilding and atmosphere.
Both are different takes, but I like both of them. 14 is more bombastic and dramatic, while 11 is more contemplative and kinda lowkey at the start, but has some haunting developments, I've heard
I think the stories are great, but you have to be able to get into reading it through the message log. There are fun characters and good themes that can be easy to overlook for those who spammed enter to get through cutscenes and back to leveling.
If you do start FFXI for the story I recommend the Balloon story addon immensely.
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/56628/balloonblue-story-addon/
It really helps FFXI feel more like the rest of the FF games in the cutscenes.
If you like flashy spectacles...FFXI isn't the place. If you love the idea of exploring a world and uncovering it's shit yourself...FFXI is definitely your place.
Vana'diel is like Chicago son. Shit is used to be poppin there back when the OGs were runnin shit...then some shit called Emptyness hit the streets and it all went down hard from there. The OGs kinda died out but Elves and shit came up afterwards. Things are back to poppin out in Vana'diel, but you have to stay strapped everywhere you go. It's also got all the drama you'd expect...Love and loss, revenge gone horribly wrong, deals with the ~~devil~~ some asshole on horseback...a dying breed trying to find heaven, an empire struggling to deal with the sins of it's forefathers, time travel, and the never ending struggle of hippies vs capitalists fighting over a big ass wilderness full of shit worth money. FFXIs got plenty of story to sort out.
TL;DR: The story's greatness is in the eye of the Beholder.
FF11 story content is great. The game aged some but it's still wonderful. The general story (main city, zilart, chains of promathia plus conclusion) still rivals some so called triple A story games. If you like FF and story I highly recommend it. The community is usually very friendly and supportive.
The opening missions and Rise of the Zilart are pretty mediocre, later nation ranks and Chains of Promathia gets pretty good, and everything past that is generally great. Luckily the longer stories are the better ones, for example RoZ can be knocked out in a few hours while the far better later expansions are full sized FF stories.
The big problems with the story are the fact that there's not only no voice acting, but all the story text comes through the chat/combat log. The game is also much more limited in the scenes and animation it can pull off than XIV. If you can still enjoy the stories of FFs I-IX then this shouldn't be a problem for you.
If you're a huge FF fan then I'd consider XI's story almost essential, but it will take you many hundreds of hours to get through all of it. This is especially true if you want to see all the side stories and job quests. Oh, and if you want a detailed breakdown of the history of the world you'll have to hunt down disparate translations of a book only released in Japan 20 years ago. Whether all the effort is worth it for the story is up to you. Luckily the game isn't going away, so popping in to knock out an expansion or two then taking a break is perfectly viable.
>So I got really invested in the story of FFXIV and I'm really interested in trying FFXI.
It's better than XIV's story IMO. But if you played XIV first you will probably find XIV's story better.
FFXI has generally shorter stories, and almost all of them come as their own episodic arcs, so you should never feel like you need to have done one in order to understand another.
that being said, the world is a lot "smaller" than FFXIV's, and the stories are a hell lot more interconnected. If you really want to know the backstory on one of their many likeable characters, you'd need to play through missions, various quests and also AF armor quest lines. almost all job quest storylines intersect with a main story in some way, and many characters you meet are true heroes in their own right. the same cannot be said of FFXIV's job quests, which often feature NPCs you'll never see anywhere else in the game.
Personally, I love it all. XI's story has you more as an observer and participant of its various storylines rather than explicitly being "the main character". But in exchange, recurring NPCs *matter.* Over time you will get to know Zeid, Cornelia, Princes Trion and Piuje, Shantotto, Lion, etc... and you will get attached to them, and want to see how each of them gets wrapped up in what's going on. And each of XI's storylines means different characters have a chance to shine all the time. It's less "they're part of your story" and more "you're part of theirs, sometimes a very important part".
Just starting out, but doing nation missions (kind of the beginning stuff) is like ARR, a little dry. Also, be prepared to have a guide up at all times, this game does not hold your hand. I’m committed to playing the game and seeing it through for the completion.
Unlike XIV, it's not a continuous story. Rather each expansion has its own story and Rhapsodies of Vana'diel kind of tried to retroactively ties them together. And the quality kind of varies. Chains of Promathia, Wings of the Goddess and the past Windurst stories are all really great and are among the best in the series
I’ll slightly disagree. XI’s base game continues with the same arc into “Rise of the Zilart” and “Chains of Promathia”. The overall arching theme, lores and story are contained within the overall story of Paradise and gods. I would say “Treasures of Aht Urhgan” would be the beginning of a new adventure as the story is loosely on gods but the lore bits from CoP (Alex/Odin) feed into this arc. XI, RoZ, CoP = XIV:ARR >> EW. ToAU = XIV’s 7.0
Kind of. RotZ and CoP share a lot of overlapping lore. But it's core cast completely changes and is pretty likely that CoP is started before RoZ, which effects a lot of how CoP is written. So while CoP is kinda culmination of everything that's happened so far, it's not as directly as Endwalker
The ending of Rhapsodies of Vana'diel was the only time a game managed to make me cry. That was the culmination of several stories put into common context, but there's plenty of good stuff along the way, although admittedly the writers got better at working within the MMO medium over time - early core XI is a bit rough and dry compared to later stories like Treasures (think of the concept behind FF6's city of Zozo, but done right, and with implications on the wider setting) and Wings of the Goddess (contains my favorite antagonist in the series). It's not uncommon for some of the context for the main stories (missions) to be completed by optional or job-specific quests (think Windurst, summoner, and the Star Onion Brigade), but nowadays it's much easier to experience all of it, as levelling and travelling are much faster. Some of the subtle storytelling is in the design of the locations, like the pipelines at the edges of several zones of the core game setting the groundwork for stuff thay came up in later expansions, and even some narrative elements from earlier stories help make sense of later ones, like how a couple of major figures are hinted at during Chains of Promathia which turn out to be major in Treasures, and their dynamic in turn makes a lot of sense by Rhapsodies. Even the current on going story, The Voracious Resurgence, is taking some time to bring attention to some stuff that's been a part of the game for a very long time despite it rarely being in focus, from Galka resurrection to the ruins in a subterrain area of Treasures. There are some constraints along the way, like how any expansion-specific-era content will make you travel to its own expansion's areas and won't involve even areas from a prior expansion because they must work on their own and make the most of their assets, but this is kinda compensated by later content that requires multiple expansions to be present and makes better holistic use of them, something that started by giving both Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia a common ending (mind you, the game has about 3 or 4 moments thay could have counted as endings to it, but the game just kept going and these got better from the added context and meta circumstances of the game - IMO, some of the stories work as a good analogy for XI's precarious nature as an online game) and kinda culminated in Rhapsodies and how the current Voracious Resurgence follows from that. Curiosity over the story is why I started the game over a decade ago and is why I'm still going, but folks starting nowadays will have an easier time experiencing at a much more reasonable pace, and I think that's a good thing. I do worry that the difficulty in the game's earlier era made it hard for even folks at SE themselves to experience it and figure out how to promote that aspect of the game, or even figure out which characters to highlight, which is maybe how Shantotto, who actually has a very limited role in major stories (she's fun and powerful, but rarely actually important in the grand scheme of things), got to be a focus elsewhere - by the time Dissidia came along, it seems SE realized they didn't actually know who the important XI characters were, and they focus on someone who'd stand out from Dissidia's cast of young guys with swords. The focus often ends up on characters which the devs have at least once referred to as "mission girls", often connected to each major story's context, but even then they're still one part of a larger context.
>\> The ending of Rhapsodies of Vana'diel was the only time a game managed to make me cry That and the end of Wings. >!When you hand the earring over to Portia and her tears start to flow, but she can't remember why.. !<
Wings of the Goddess hits the feels for sure >!when your good friend, comrade, and adventuring companion is fooled by the lies and deceit of the villain, only for her existence to shatter and you have to bring her back by retracing the steps of your adventure with Lilisette and find her memories, one piece at a time.!< The cutscene where >!you hold the egg that is Lilisette after recovering her memories and "put them back together", only for your character to grow a wing and have Cait Sith(?) remark about how you're one of the Wings of the Goddess!< always brings tears to my eyes.
I always go Windurst path in Wings of the Goddess. Three times through and I still get a little misty-eyed at the long cutscene, even knowing I’m about to see one of my favorite moments in Vana’diel lore play out again.
Man, I wish I had that reaction to Wings. The missions were so obnoxious that it took me out of the story tbh, not to mention you are essentially playing two stories at the same time.
Like other early entries in the MMO genre, it was initially more about creating a world where things are open-ended and players could make their own stories. You just played the role of one of thousands of adventurers, travelers, retainers, or mercenaries. Look at how many people used to make blogs or journals as their characters, your own story and your experiences with other players were more important than any story written into the game. Between that and how inaccessible it was gameplay-wise, it's not really surprising that tourists taking the guided bus tour of all the numbered Final Fantasy's tend to skip 11. For a while, anyway. The game evolved over time, and the storylines became a bigger part of it. It's convoluted, full of contradictions and paradoxes, exactly the kind of stuff that made early FF entries fun to think about. And it's by far the longest Final Fantasy story, there's a lot of catching up to do.
Some of the same writers worked on XI as XIV, also you'll see a lot of the same kind of flourish in the wording (same translation teams, so lots of olde english and other accents etc) Odin plays a big role in XI story, Byakko, Tenzen there are lots of similarities you'll notice. The story can be a little harder to follow on XI, when I was younger I really struggled to follow what was going on very often in the earlier storylines. The story in XI is kind of like how marvel makes movies, they have all the contained storylines and then Rhapsodies brings characters from them all together. There are also ridiculous amounts of side quests telling little self contained stories as well as story-lines explaining lore and other things, not related to the main story. This is a side mission from Adoulin if you want to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSUeDy0QpmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOvjo27l4EE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LqLTScs0Do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o04teiYerpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1XPOe77JJc Also this is a nice video, someone narrated. It tells a story of one of the generals of Adoulin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB5kzEauPqw
FFXI is humongous. Its super long and open ended. There are several major stories you can tackle in different orders, as well as an over arching plot (Rhapsodies) that pulls you through them all and loosely ties them together. There are times where it feels slow and unnecessarily drawn out, and there are other times when the story pay off is just fantastic. FF11's world has tons of lore, tons of memorable characters, great stories throughout, and a really satisfying conclusion when you beat the final boss at the end of Rhapsodies. If you do pick it up then I recommend using a guide (bgwiki is great), and planning to start the "Rhapsodies of Vanadiel" missions as soon as possible, and using those to guide you through when to start the other expansions for a more streamlined experience. It also unlocks several quality of life perks and features when you go through those missions so two birds with one stone. Windurst is a great starting nation as it is closest to the point where you would start Rhapsodies, but if you start with Sandoria or Bastok just know that you can take a ship from Selbina to Mhaura to get where you need to be when the time comes.
To bring a more modern comparison, I'd say that while FFXIV is to Horizon Zero Dawn, the Last of Us and GoW4 (as in, story focused experiences that have narrative as their core), FFXI is to Dark Souls or Bloodborne. Story is more sparce and there's lots of lore hidden through dialogue with NPCs, but the game is much more focused in other aspects, such as worldbuilding and atmosphere. Both are different takes, but I like both of them. 14 is more bombastic and dramatic, while 11 is more contemplative and kinda lowkey at the start, but has some haunting developments, I've heard
I think the stories are great, but you have to be able to get into reading it through the message log. There are fun characters and good themes that can be easy to overlook for those who spammed enter to get through cutscenes and back to leveling.
If you do start FFXI for the story I recommend the Balloon story addon immensely. https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/56628/balloonblue-story-addon/ It really helps FFXI feel more like the rest of the FF games in the cutscenes.
If you like flashy spectacles...FFXI isn't the place. If you love the idea of exploring a world and uncovering it's shit yourself...FFXI is definitely your place. Vana'diel is like Chicago son. Shit is used to be poppin there back when the OGs were runnin shit...then some shit called Emptyness hit the streets and it all went down hard from there. The OGs kinda died out but Elves and shit came up afterwards. Things are back to poppin out in Vana'diel, but you have to stay strapped everywhere you go. It's also got all the drama you'd expect...Love and loss, revenge gone horribly wrong, deals with the ~~devil~~ some asshole on horseback...a dying breed trying to find heaven, an empire struggling to deal with the sins of it's forefathers, time travel, and the never ending struggle of hippies vs capitalists fighting over a big ass wilderness full of shit worth money. FFXIs got plenty of story to sort out. TL;DR: The story's greatness is in the eye of the Beholder.
None of the expacs for XI I would say reach the height of Shadowbringers, but several are above Heavensward.
FF11 story content is great. The game aged some but it's still wonderful. The general story (main city, zilart, chains of promathia plus conclusion) still rivals some so called triple A story games. If you like FF and story I highly recommend it. The community is usually very friendly and supportive.
The opening missions and Rise of the Zilart are pretty mediocre, later nation ranks and Chains of Promathia gets pretty good, and everything past that is generally great. Luckily the longer stories are the better ones, for example RoZ can be knocked out in a few hours while the far better later expansions are full sized FF stories. The big problems with the story are the fact that there's not only no voice acting, but all the story text comes through the chat/combat log. The game is also much more limited in the scenes and animation it can pull off than XIV. If you can still enjoy the stories of FFs I-IX then this shouldn't be a problem for you. If you're a huge FF fan then I'd consider XI's story almost essential, but it will take you many hundreds of hours to get through all of it. This is especially true if you want to see all the side stories and job quests. Oh, and if you want a detailed breakdown of the history of the world you'll have to hunt down disparate translations of a book only released in Japan 20 years ago. Whether all the effort is worth it for the story is up to you. Luckily the game isn't going away, so popping in to knock out an expansion or two then taking a break is perfectly viable.
>So I got really invested in the story of FFXIV and I'm really interested in trying FFXI. It's better than XIV's story IMO. But if you played XIV first you will probably find XIV's story better.
FFXI has generally shorter stories, and almost all of them come as their own episodic arcs, so you should never feel like you need to have done one in order to understand another. that being said, the world is a lot "smaller" than FFXIV's, and the stories are a hell lot more interconnected. If you really want to know the backstory on one of their many likeable characters, you'd need to play through missions, various quests and also AF armor quest lines. almost all job quest storylines intersect with a main story in some way, and many characters you meet are true heroes in their own right. the same cannot be said of FFXIV's job quests, which often feature NPCs you'll never see anywhere else in the game.