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One of the most boring games ever! Wow, this game is so bad it's pathetic, I don't know why it's so popular. Well, this was the first MMPORPG I've tried. One of my best friends is totally addicted to this games, he's put in something like 3000 or 4000 hours of play time in the last 8 months! 3000-4000 hours! He's got a bunch of high level characters, but probably hasn't done much more than half of the possibilities. He basically works, then comes home and plays this game, which is his life. It's hard to get him to anything but work and play this game. I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series, and watched my friend play it sometimes. I had my doubts after watching him play it, but I gave it a try so I could spend a little time with my friend in the virtual world. It seems to be like heroin for him, he often calls in sick to work, and doesn't spend hardly any time with his friends and family. I'm getting worried about him. I liked the other Final Fantasy games due to their interesting stories, lovely graphics, and variety of monsters. The fights got a little repetitive, but the story and variety of spells and attacks kept the games interesting. I'm also a huge fan of RTS games like warcraft 3, turn based strategy, and the Grand Theft Auto series. Well, anyway here's the pros and cons. Pros: Pretty decent graphics and music, a lot of variety of terrain(which takes 20 minutes of walking to see a new area). Lots of different options and things to do (99 % of them are boring and extremely time consuming though as I'll go into) Cons: You can't sell the game once you register it (it says so on the box at least) most games, if you don't like them, you can at least sell them on ebay, not this one, what a rip-off! They'd get plenty of profit from their monthly fee, even if they let us sell used copies. $30 down the drain! Takes 5 hours to install, and 5 gigs of space on your hard drive! Extremely time consuming, it takes forever to walk anywhere new, like 20 minutes just to go to an area with tougher monsters than where you are. You spend most of the game just walking. Some jobs can teleport instantly from place to place at higher levels, put you're talking hundreds of hours to get to that level! While theres a lot of things to do, most of them are very boring, like fishing, you sit there with a pole (which you have to equip instead of your weapon, often requiring a 20 minute walk back to your "house" as you have a very limited number of items you can carry, switch to fishin gear, and free up room for what you catch), plus you have to wander all over the world to find different items and earn money to get the fishing gear you need, and the only reward is sitting there for hours with a pole, and being able to sell your fish for small amounts of money. Similar deals with making items and cooking. Very boring, very easy, just requires lots of patience. Quests and missions are lame, and have very small rewards. No experience earned for completing them, how lame! Almost no variety on monster graphics, they use the same graphics and give the monster a different name and toughness. I encountered maybe 9 different looking monsters in an area that took 30 minutes just to walk across!!! Monsters are easy to beat, almost no strategy involved, takes a few minutes to figure out the best fighting strategy but very time consuming to fight! Most jobs aren't very playable solo, it's slower to gain levels solo, and it takes forever to find people for a "party". Potions are extremely expensive, impossible to afford at lower levels. So you have to constantly rest! In most RPG's potions are cheap, so you don't have to constantly rest or go to a store! It takes forever to level up, like about 2 hours if you're lucky, and that's for the first 12 levels, it gets much slower the higher you get, and that's not including the time getting money for better equipment, which is essential for not dying against tougher monsters that you need to fight to level quickly. Monsters almost never drop money like in almost every RPG, so you have to constantly run 20 minutes to the nearest auction house to sell items, and you can only auction 7 items at a time, which often take days to sell. You're basically forced to buy game money with real money(which is against the rules), or beg higher level characters for money, or to do crafts or fish, mine, cook ect. . . which are all extremely boring and time consuming! If you die you lose a bunch of experience, and are sent all the way to your home point, which is usually far off. Unless someone nearby has a raise spell, in which case you're still crippled and useless for 5 minutes or so. This review is getting too long, I could rant forever about this awful game, but obviously some people like it, so it's opinion I guess. You need lots of free time for this game, it's not a game you can play an hour a day and accomplish anything. I think I pointed out how loooong everything takes enough. Be careful of addiction, this game is probably ruining a lot of peoples jobs and marriages, friendships, ect. Maybe it's because it takes so long to do anything. I'm a fairly heavy gamer, but I also have a girlfriend, a job, college and a life, and if you want to get anywhere in this game, you can't have a life.