Vana'diel Report:: 9/17/08

Recently in the news, the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) has gotten press for a ridiculously long Notorious Monster (Boss, hereafter referred to as NM) fights. Two NMs in particular used to take upwards of 18 HOURS to kill. These two baddies are known as Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden

The story about the linkshell (an in game term for a group of players who work together) BeyondTheLimitation's unsucessful 18 hour fight against Pandemonium Warden was even reported on Yahoo News with even less research than would be expected from a blog, apparently under the assumption that World of Warcraft is the only MMORPG ever to have existed and FFXI, which existed before WoW magically discovered a way to copy them from the future. To correct some of their information: One, people felt ill and like they wanted to pass out, they did NOT actually become so, FFXI does NOT have guilds, and Pandemonium Warden was NOT perfectly fit after that time. They had succeeded in taking it down to roughly 5% of it's total health.

In the most recent update, however, the strength of both of these NMs has been greatly reduced to the point of which they should be beatable within two hours. There is nothing wrong with that. There was also nothing wrong with it to begin with. At no point in the game are you actually forced to fight Pandemonium Warden or Absolute Virtue. What is wrong is that in its new, weakened form, Absolute Virtue, a monster who would make adventurers quake with terror when he spawned has gone from a battle like this:



To a battle like this:




Now, I'm all for these big baddies to be killable, but that fight took 27 SECONDS. Admittedly, it's by using an incredibly cheap tactic using the weapon Kraken Club combined with the job Dark Knight's abilities Blood Weapon and Souleater, but a monster that used to take hours to kill should not, under any circumstances, be killable in under a minute.

This cutting of the Gordian Knot has caused Square-Enix (The makes of FFXI) to adjust AV yet again. He now gains resistance to melee damage when enough of it is dealt in a short enough time-frame.

This is not as malicious of a move by Square-Enix as one might think. Their reason for this is to keep these monsters a challenge. However, many linkshells possess the mentality that can be summed up by this picture.

The challenging nature of FFXI and necessity of cooperation has always been what has set FFXI apart in the realm of MMORPGs, but Square-Enix also knows that a game must be accessible by it's player base as well. Square-Enix has revealed that AV and PW have a weakness that players just haven't found yet. Maybe some day people will find the secret to these currently unbeatable monsters.