In my quest to play all the mainline Final Fantasy games, I’m now down to 3: FF3, FF5, and FF11.

Last night, after many trials, I’ve installed FF11 and am in the process of setting up some mods to make it a bit more palatable. I’ve read that the main story here takes about 100 hours, so my goal is to just blast through it as fast as possible (then get back to leveled up all my jobs in FF14 to 90).

But boy did they make the process of installing FF11 difficult. I would totally get it if someone tried to play this game and gave up literally on the trial checkout page because you have to first set up an address and payment method and they do not tell you this. For as much as SquareEnix has the ability to make good games, their online interfaces are some of the worst in the…world maybe at this point.

And then there was a 5 hour update download/install once I finally figured out how to make PlayOnline work. And I’m on a 1Gb/s fiber line. Just woof.

But I’ve heard the game is fun after you finally get through…all that.