playonline is a launcher mostly used for final fantasy 11 nowadays, it's an old propriatary square service that was, at one time, used for a TON of games like dirge of cerberus, other MMO's like front mission online and even aspects and services in games like ff10! the service itself is mostly defunct now but the launcher itself is still very much alive and active and it has some of the best vibes you will ever find, from cool wallpapers, amazing UI design and original music good enough to be put on cd there is just so much col stuff here worth looking at. the image above is a perfect example, the cool wallpaper, the expressive UI and just, welcoming vibes really give the impression of a futuristic space that you actually want to spend time in, it has charm and heart and it kind of captures what that era of square was like in a single image more or less, the cool future.

first we got what you actually see when you get on the login screen, you got a lovely looking rounded UI that screams futuristic, like you can kind of tell this *was* what square imagined the future of tech design was going to be, and they should have been right! well, in a way they kind of were as it is a little reminiciant of the fruitiger aero style common in the late 00s on things like windows vista and even the ps3, psp and vita UI's, though sadly this style has fallen by the wayside and that sucks. you're also greeted by one of the services best songs, dolphin! this is the song that should be playing right now if you have the sound on and it's just, so cozy and beautiful and sweet, i listen to it all the time. it really helps add to the vibes of connectivity and futurism the rest of the service gives off and it's just cozy. once you actually log into the service you're greeted with the screen i shared above at the beginning of this article and from here you can pick one of the many other services playonline offers even beyond FF11, first off you got your own profile! i'm using the bouncer pfp as it's one of my favourite games and ekidna just has a super cool design, but here there's tons of options for customisation, from the tons of pfp options (which ill show more of later) to your hobbies, sex, location and even your job and likes, it's really there to help you express yourself in a limited, but still cool way. there's even more customisation in other areas too, you can change your wallpaper and your OST for the service from a massive amount of options (though the former is not as easy as it seems and i'll explain why later) you have a TON of variety, from then current square games like FFX-2 including wallpapers for yuna, paine and NOOJ, 11 and unlimited saga, some multimedia things like FF7 advent children and a random person called natsumi (i have no idea of the context for those wallpapers) and even some older games like the romancing saga games. the OST options are even more cool though, with dozens of tracks from noriko matsueda, almost all of which are bangers and really make the launcher feel homely, i can imagine spending hours here listening to the music and using the social features.... speaking of which.

playonline had tons of cool social features since it was mostly an MMO cliant. there was a fairly standard messaging feature that had some cool square flair to it, reminding me a little of final fantasy 10 with all the blue spheres as well as a chatroom that i am just, so in love with. you can change text, you have cute little avatars like the chocobo i have (to go along with the chocobo cursor) and it's just so nice to look at, even that basic customisation puts it above many modern chatrooms like discord for me and if i could i would honestly use this over discord in a heartbeat. these are easily accessable too from the cute little emoticon looking icons at the top right of the screen which also look amazing, a lot like something i'd expect from the coolest flip phones you can get. there is of course also the actual screen for getting into the game which, unlike the futuristic stylings of the rest of the menu looks more old and fantasy, like the game itself, i'm not as into this as i think it's a little more plain but it's still got leagues more charm than the entrance screen to final fantasy 14 at the very least, especially with the little window imatating a menu from the older games :) . if you don't feel like playing the game itself it's not like you're stuck for things to do either, in the last screenshot you can see the mysterious *extra zone* and all it's options and some of these are really cool!

the extras section is mostly a lot of random things you can do relating to the program or other square things. you have a cute little greeting card section for example where you can download and make your own greetings cards to send to other players using things from the game like some of the tetramaster screens, though sadly i could not get these to download they are very cute and i wish i could make some! it gives the vibe of a service that was more free of the kinds of toxicity you would see in many modern spaces, though weather this was really the case i do not know, you also have a wallpapers section where you can browse and download a ton of the before-mentioned wallpapers, but you can't really. this service is actually a lot worse maintained than it may seem on the surface, things like the cards and the wallpapers just do not download no matter how much you try and because it uses a propriatary type you can't use your own either, i had to find an archive of the exact files the game used and import them manually into the folder to even be able to change wallpapers at all, a quick google and you'll find them fairly easily on deviantart, but it's a lot more work than it ideally should be. however the wallpapers are all amazing and really add to the square time capsule vibe the rest of the service has going on. beyond this you also have the vana'diel tribune, a cute little community focused newsletter section that sadly has not been updated in quite some time, with the current article dating from all the way back in 2008, it's a cute little capsule of that time in the game and well worth a read for the stories and profiles it provides! lastly you have a little information section that is really just more tutorials and also one of my favourite parts of this whole thing, the square enix mobile section. this is a section of the program focused on, of all things, mobile wallpapers and service providers, i'm not totally sure why this is here but the wallpapers are cool, the square branded phones are so cool i need to own one and it looks so Y2K, it's a flawless section even though it does try and shill you on mobile carriers with outdated 20 year old info.

and that's playonline, or whats left of it at least, many of the games associated with it like dirge and front mission have long since shut down, but while FF11 remains active and updated i imagine it will to, one day i'll get super into 11 i know it and i'll be happy to use playonline to chill and chat and it'll be cool. download and check out the service if you get the time, i don't think you even need to be an 11 subscriber to login and use it and you can experiance a cool throwback with an amazing ost for your troubles. i'll leave this one out with a small selection of the avatars you can use on playonline, there's over 200 pages of these and are well worth logging in just to see. playonline really is what i personally wish the net was, cool, heartfelt, futuristic and techy, rather than boring, sterile, uncustomisable and made to maximise engagement like so much of the modern net, it's somewhere you make time explicitly to go, rather than somewhere you begrudgingly go since thats where people are. it's a window into a time long since passed that i wish we could go back to, and that i am trying to recapture with my own page.