You will learn to fear The Grind. You know what The Grind is don't you? You don't? Ah, ignorance really is bliss. The Grind is the art of relentlessly pounding on weak creatures for hours and hours – and hours – on end, desperately trying to beat other noobs to the punch, feasting on experience points like bulimic Pac- Man. This is the routine all MMORPG players observe until the magical words “Level Up!” appear and do a sparkly dance on your screen. “Hurray!” the Level Up letters cheerfully sing in unison, jumping up and down in choreographed delight. “Hurray!”

Final Fantasy XI’s main problem stems from the fact that it gets The Grind completely, utterly and hopelessly wrong. It’s not fun to play. This is why you fear The Grind, which is ten times longer, harder and more frustrating than any other MMORPG to date. Compared to the slick accessibility and over-eager hand holding that other console games strive for, the cold shoulder that Final Fantasy XI gives you is borderline insulting. You’re dumped in a town, told to sod off and get going. Where? Who? What? Hello?

There’s a whole world full of oversized dragons, eccentric creatures and breathtaking landscapes out there to discover, but you’re not allowed to discover it. Not until you’ve fought 15,000 rabbits, died a hundred deaths and levelled up sufficiently to take your first nervous, tentative steps outside of the comfort zone that Final Fantasy XI keeps you trapped in for the first thirty, forty, even fifty hours. For those coming into this experience cold, this won’t feel like a game so much as it does a daily chore, as you’re forced into performing the same menial tasks over and over again. For a world that promises so much freedom, the invisible walls thrown up by Vana’diel’s rules are claustrophobic and suffocating. It’s probably a metaphor for something. We don’t know what. We’re just tired of fighting rabbits.

A popular myth is that you escape The Grind once your level hits double digits. Not so. No matter where you are in Vana’diel, you’re always caught up in its deathly slow, glacial pace. You can practically feel the Grim Reaper checking your pulse while impatiently tapping his foot. “Not dead yet? Hurry up and die.” Fact is, unless you team up with reliable team-mates (rare) who properly understand their roles (rarer still), you will end up dying. A lot. It’s a by-product of Final Fantasy XI’s design, which dangles the carrot of an experience-points feast for defeating tougher creatures in front of your nose, offering a potential shortcut away from The Grind. Yet when you square up to the tougher creatures, the result is nearly always an untimely death. Should you be punished for trying to escape the most tedious ritual ever seen in games? It doesn’t matter. Just hurry up and die.

It’s worth pointing out that buddying up with the same team-mates over the course of a full game is almost impossible for various reasons. Your principal goal is gathering enough experience points to level up, gain new gear, see new areas, fight new creatures. So far, so usual, so MMORPG. Yet whenever you team up with someone a few levels above or below you, the experience points rewarded drop sharply, making The Grind even longer and even tougher, which in turn makes teaming up with those players pointless. Add the impracticalities of getting everyone to play together at the same time and it soon emerges that you’ll never get your friends on the required levels, unless one of you stops and lets the others play catch-up. This makes bringing in friends from the outside impractical. Instead, you have to make friends from within, constantly recycling them so you have enough friends to play with who match your level. Imagine going to the pub and switching people around so you’re only talking to those who’ve drunk the same amount of pints as you – before you know it, your real friends are at the other end of the bar, fed up at being ignored, and you’re stuck talking to Emily with the moustache from accounts who keeps laughing even when you’re not trying to crack a joke. Switch Emily for PiMpHuStLa69 with the one-star Xbox Live rep and you see the problem. Finding a party is hard enough. Finding a party that isn’t full of grammatically challenged idiots should at the very least reward you with 100 GamerPoints (there are no achievements in Final Fantasy XI either). You can always catch up with your friends for a casual chat around town, but the strongest bonds are formed in the heat of the battle – something that Final Fantasy XI conveniently ignores.

The problem peters out the more you play, simply because levelling up at the higher levels takes approximately five millennia instead of five hours, but then this game is aimed at veterans anyway. For example, as Final Fantasy XI also encompasses the Treasures Of Aht Urghan expansion, there are lots of Exciting New Classes™ for said veterans to play around with. By veterans, we mean genuine, battle-hardened Final Fantasy warriors. You have to be Level 30 or higher to even think about witnessing the new classes, so these new classes make no difference whatsoever to the noobs spending their time with the great unwashed, squabbling over rabbits. So again, another problem is that veterans will get rewarded for their invested time but newcomers will get nothing but second-hand stories passed down through Vana’diel about how cool the Corsairs are.

Still, for those with three spare ice ages on their hands to plough through what’s on offer, here’s what you can look forward to. Corsairs, the ones in the fancy dress pirate outfits, play a support role similar to the existing Bard class and are proving immensely popular thus far. Blue Mages learn spells and have the potential to be powerful at higher levels, but actually learning spells is a confusing, awkward process that no one seems to understand yet. Meanwhile, Puppetmaster, the most vaunted class of all, has turned out to be rubbish. “Puppetmasters will probably be good when you hit end game!” shout the deluded fanboys, referring to the limbo when you hit the maximum Level 75 and you’re just playing for… well, no one’s really sure what they’re playing for. Still, given the huge commitment required to get there – generously estimated at six months of non-stop playing – it’s unlikely most players will have the patience or resources to see whether Puppetmasters flourish at the end of the game. Two out of three then. Not bad, but not particularly great either.

Sure, there are positives to keep the negatives in check. There’s an unrivalled sense of teamwork in place when you do eventually cobble your own merry men together and there’s no shortage of players willing to help out with kind words or advice. The glue holding this community together is unlike any other on Xbox Live, probably forged from the shared experience of having to slug it out through The Grind. One clever design element was the inclusion of Linkshells, essentially in-game chatrooms that cut down on the footwork and cut out the idiots who run rampant in the Vana’diel, helping you fast-track your way onto a decent team. Actually gaining access to a Linkshell brings its own set of problems – they tend to be handed out by current members, meaning they have to be earned by social status within the game itself – but still, it’s quite a handy passport to get away from the uglier side of the game.

Eventually, with enough persistence and invested time, you can coax a decent game out of Final Fantasy XI’s Spiky Shell Of Hatred +3. There are enough legendary monsters, seemingly impossible quests and rare items to keep any player slashing and hacking their way through the hordes of lowlevel enemies. It’s aged somewhat, it’s tattered around the edges and it’s somewhat weather-beaten, but Final Fantasy XI has managed to endure after all these years because underneath its prickly, hateful surface beats the heart of a competent MMORPG.

Is competent enough? In a word: no. In seven words: It’s not even close to being enough. Final Fantasy XI has proved to be one of the most divisive games on Xbox 360 thus far, as those with saintly patience lap it up and enjoying the unique experience on offer. The majority simply cry in frustration, with the pointed inaccessibility every bit as appealing as a smiling orc in a thong. There are several fun ways you can spend your valuable time on your Xbox 360. Going through The Grind certainly isn’t one of them.

Ryan King