The real strength of this series has always been its ability to deliver a moving and engaging storyline while providing gamers with state of the art visuals and RPG-style gameplay. Final Fantasy XI does an admirable job of delivering on these aspects, although perhaps not quite as strongly as RPG-fanatics would have hoped. The online-only direction forces the game to become a completely non-linear, immensely massive real-time world, in which players are now tasked with the daunting responsibility of completing missions and quests spread out over vast miles of landscape. Naturally, telling a story instantly becomes more difficult because of this, which is why few MMORPGs attempt it.