After all these years I have finally completed all the (main) stories Final Fantasy XI has to offer. Ergo, it's time for another FFXI ramble! Whoo!

Seekers of Adoulin left a bad first impression but the central characters were likable enough that it grew on me by the end so I'd say it was a net positive by the end. It's still probably my least favorite, if only because so much time is spent with the completely insufferable Adoulinian high council members. Far more interesting, I think, is the quest-line for obtaining the Barkarole earring ( http://ffxiclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Barkarole_Earring ) because the premise, while fairly cliche, is much more fun than the expansion's main plot; then again I'm just kinda un-fond of Ulbuka/Adoulin as a setting so I dunno. That said, I do kinda dig a lot of the new battles it added; Skirmish is pretty fun, for example... the first few times, until you've done it dozens of times in hopes that you both randomly get the stone for worthwhile equipment augments and the randomly chosen augment for your equipment piece is the one that's actually helpful to your job. :/
In retrospect, now that I've had some time to play around in Final Fantasy XIV, I think that what stands out about Adoulin the most is just how much of it, design-wise, was influenced by XIV (well, A Realm Reborn specifically). For example, Reives are an awful lot like FATEs, if a little more restricted and mandatory, and the Geomagnetron Waypoints are basically the Aethernet (as are the Survival Guides and Homepoint warps added to pre-Adoulin areas after the fact, for that matter). I kinda wonder how much, if any, overlap there is between the two games' dev teams now.

Far more important than Adoulin, however, is Rhapsodies of Vana'diel. Final Fantasy XI is an MMORPG that can be beaten, with ending credits and everything. (With an ending credits theme that's pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVZgBk7_jTM ) It's actually pretty clever: all the previous storylines became more and more self-contained as new expansions came out and Rhapsodies ties them all together by having a plot point from one of the early ones be the reason for the world being threatened with destruction time and time again and requires you make progress in other storylines as you progress in it (this also leads to some mild amusement from how the required progress in previous storylines is significantly less than the plot assumes you've done; Rhapsodies cutscenes just love to assume you're BFFs with characters you're really only mild acquaintances with at that point). It's not entirely flawless, of course; I'm not especially fond of how the final boss - that is, the final boss of Final Fantasy XI as a whole - is directly lifted from another Final Fantasy game... but since said boss is more of an abstract concept than a character in both games it's not really so bad, especially considering the closest thing FFXI has ever had to a Big Bad was Promathia, who was already used up in the second expansion ever.
A pleasant surprise is that they didn't take the opportunity to advertise FFXIV when they easily could have. I mean, FFXI is absolutely obsessed with its alternate universes, they could have easily used that as an excuse to somehow work in something to the effect of "Hey look, here's an alternate universe that's really awesome! It's called Hydaelyn and there's this place called Eorzea there that you should totally go to! It'll be great!" and they didn't, surprising for Square in this day and age.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do in FFXI from moving forward, TBH. As we know, FFXI is an MMORPG and at the end of the day the point of an MMORPG is getting your hand on equipment that makes your numbers bigger, even slightly, and I'm not really sure how much time I want to spend on that now that the more interesting stuff's past. Now that I think of it, I think the biggest problem with the whole MMORPG-with-a-story setup is that I can't just start a new game to experience the story again like in a single player FF game, you also need to go through the whole MMORPG leveling-and-equipment rigamarole too. I dunno, man, I just dunno.