What, why, when, how, where and who? These are the fundamental questions when looking at history, and video game history is no exception. What inspired the idea of Final Fantasy XI and who took on the challenge of conceiving and creating it? How did this giant MMORPG get its first foot off the ground and into the door of a giant, ever expansive world? Join us, as we take a brief look at how this game got started and how it became a legend.

With an emerging MMORPG market that showed the world it could certainly pack a punch (with games like Ultima Online and Everquest becoming ever popular), Hironobu Sakaguchi, the mastermind behind the Final Fantasy series, managed to convince Square to test the waters of the new genre in the year of 1999. The developer who was given the task of creating the online world, was the team behind Chrono Cross, but of course little did they know what would lie ahead of them.

Final Fantasy XI Gil is described by its producer Hiromichi Tanaka as the “most [representative] Final Fantasy of all the instalments”, strongly influenced by the early Square release Final Fantasy III, and one can easily see its influence in Final Fantasy XI. FFXI’s first MMORPG featured a huge amount of features new to the genre, whilst building and improving on most of the staples set by other MMOs.

One of the most well known features of the game is the multi lingual servers which, instead of giving each region a server, meant that players could play together from all over the world. Not only did this create a truly worldwide community (there was a multi-lingual chat system so players with different languages could communicate with each other), but also reduced costs of the development of the game by 66%. This did create some small problems though as Final Fantasy XI did not have a worldwide release which meant that once it was released in North America (one year after the Japanese release) most of the players had already completed the majority of the quests and the game was generally unbalanced. To solve this problem though, Square created new servers which didn’t feature an already evolved economy and community.