I played Final Fantasy XI for a month. From the graphics and music, the game is beautiful. You have your own house that you can buy furniture and stuff like that. You can only have 1 character, but that 1 char can be anything you want if you put the time into it. So for example, you start off as a mage and later on you get bored of being a mage, you can switch and become a warrior. There is no pvp, and the majority of the player base is Japanese. However, the people I met were all very nice and they wanted to help me.
The interface takes a long time to get used to, it is not your traditional rpg interface.
The thing I hated about the game was you HAD to party up in order to get experience. I know it's like that for other mmo's, but this was hardcore stuff. There was no way you could get ahead unless you depended on other people.
This caused a problem for me and for many others, it took friggin forever to do anything in that game. It would literally take you hours to start a party, take you hours to travel, hours to grind. The game really sucks the time away.
That was my biggest gripe with the game. It took forever to do ANYTHING.