April 2026 Version Update

It's a toss up between XII and XIII really. They are very similar to me. I think I enjoyed XIII more, but don't remember much of XII. All the PS2 era games I played on an emulator, never really got the "authentic" experience.

I mean, if you want to say the "MMO styled offline RPG game" the mind clearly goes to FFXII.

If you mention FFXIII though I fail to see it? I guess with the Grand Pulse thing and the questing/hunting maybe? Bit of a stretch to say that's MMO-styled though

Noooo idea, this is just info I've logged from my LS mule, which is always online to facilitate a discord relay, it announces Besieged updates in LS too and it logs to file when it captures one of those events. If people genuinely cared enough about this (this data is just from a silly project I did to help those in my LS who haven't done TVR yet), I could expand it to collect data on mirrors at least but there's no way of knowing if a NM is dead without going and looking tmk.


It's doable, but until I had considerably more data and could say for absolute sure what was going on, it'd be a disservice to people to provide something that could be incorrect.


It does include the opening CS and the period after it says they are attacking, but the zone is loading the actual battle, it does not include the closing cutscene, as they are considered retreated as soon as they warp.

I was referring to the entire first part of the game which was an extended "tutorial" before you even get to the open world "real" game, which only took about 30 hours to complete if you rushed through it.

It felt a lot like grinding my way to level cap so I could do end game, while having my hand held the entire time.

Just a PSA that the games I've found that most scratch the "single player FFXI" itch are:

Xenoblade Chronicles 1. Whole series is MMO-like, but especially the first one is SUPER FFXI-coded. To the point of having mobs that look like FFXI mobs, the first "NM" in the game being basically a FFXI crawler in a CN-like area, your main character has positional attacks that feel very FFXI THF-like, other zones that feel incredibly FFXI-inspired (Eyrth Sea is practically lifted from FFXI, there's an area that looks like the Riverne BCNM entrance was used as an art reference, etc.). Edit: Oh yeah, and the targeting system feels very PS2 FFXI, right at home for me but I've had other people with no FFXI background tell me they thought was kind of awkward (which, hey, fair?).

White Knight Chronicle. Level5, a lot of people didn't really care about it so kind of an under the radar game. But also feels a ton like FFXI offline.

And then FFXII is maybe my 3rd place?

This only works partially. Arguably, the Quadav are the most understandable of the three main beastman tribes, because they literally just want to protect their nests and Bastok keeps *** with them.

Yagudo are insane, but potentially fixable if you can get them to chill out a bit. The "peace" with Windurst is... workable at least. Plus you've got the sane ones that work with the Far East who are chill enough.

The Orcs are *** ***. Like, completely. They're *** psychopaths. They burned down the *** world tree for the lulz. Exterminating them all is not enough.

As for the other races, Goblins are mostly just dorks, Gigas want to go home but are stuck here, Demons are just Odin *** around(Odin is the cause of every problem in FFXI), Antican are just lolbugs, we know the deal with Tonberries, Meeble are just dumb moles, most of the races in Aht are either created by Aht or Aht *** with them for so long that they're fighting back, and Velkk are just unga bunga croq people. It gets less interesting the further you go out from the main 3.

I was gonna edit my previous post but just kept thinking of Xenoblade's FFXI inspirations. More zones coming to mind, like a total riff on Uleguerand Range. One of the characters has a somewhat unique feeling playstyle that I then clocked as "oh, that's FFXI SMN, now I get it".

And the big thing is just that the scale and size and feel of the zones matches FFXI, and often hits real highs on the same level you remember from first exploring some truly new FFXI locations. And the world design itself is very much the same as FFXI's connected zone based approach. With similar mood and quality of music, and changing times of day feeling like FFXI.

Mechanically too, the hotkeys are kinda laid out like FFXI's macro bar system (with its own twists like building cooldowns into the visual display) and felt instantly familiar to me. The camera and zoom kind of feels the same and like "home" to me as well, as an always-controller FFXI player. Heck, there's even an autorun that feels alllllmost just like FFXI's (and by default is even mapped to where I've always had FFXI autorun mapped to my controller). At its fundamental level, combat just FEELS the same as auto-attacking at a similar pace and using macro-ed abilities/spells/WS in XI on a controller.

As you can probably tell, I really appreciate it and I liked the game a lot from the explicit perspective of wanting to play a high quality console single-player FFXI-like experience. I liked it way back on Wii, and I played it again just a couple years back on the Switch Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition and loved it just as much (if not maybe appreciating it more). Holds up great as a single player FFXI-like.

EDIT: And to be clear, it's no soulless ripoff, but I can easily see the real love for FFXI that some of the staff for the game obviously had. The inspiration shines through in a good way.

the last remenant feels like a single player toau expansion. very xi feel to the game.

Only caveat: if the story being sci-fi anime BS bugs you too much to enjoy the obvious mechanical inspirations, maybe that's a matter of taste that might impact your enjoyment. I happen to like sci-fi anime BS (the Gundam or Eva variety or whatever), as I think a lot of us here do, and from that perspective it's really well done and I found it effective at feeling like I was going through a scripted FFXI-ish campaign.

Every time people complain about not being able to attend besieged I remember that not everyone has a mule in their linkshells that automatically sends a message predicting when one will start whenever preparing begins, and how long until attack after advancing.

Funny you mention this. I asked someone who made a separate tracker bot to Dale's about tracking Besieged and they act like it was too much of a pain in the *** to do it...

Besieged happening is just like an NM's spawn timer.

Opens X amount of time since last besieged, and can happen at any time between X-Y in that window.

It is guaranteed to happen in that window, and guaranteed to not happen for at least X amount of time since last defeat.

Tracking it is no different than tracking a 24hr or any Xhr NM spawn timer.

I've considered and got feature requests to add it to vana-time but from my understanding, like Dodik says: it's only a window and difficult (at least i haven't seen any reliable data) to pinpoint when a besieged might happen.

So I don't feel it would provide much value. I made a updated windower addon some months ago but it just tossed together a afternoon and do same as the TVR keyitem: just announce on change (advancing, attacking and retreat).

It's possible similar to Where Is DI or Where Is NM (and possible other examples) where you can pass data from the game via an API/webhook but it relies on crowdsource the data and big enough adoption cross servers to be reliable.

I'm not tech smart, I just write lengthy job guides. '-')

Why can't a mule read the log and post the message to the bot to be disseminated? lol

It can, but you'd need an active character doing it on every server which is a lot when the site is a free service. It's better to crowdsource it but that requires enough people to be willing to load the addon and bad actors to resist poisoning the data.

I think you could probably get the window reasonably tight if you did that, though. A few weeks of data collection from all servers should be overkill for distinguishing minimum and maximum travel time in normal conditions.