FF Online is pretty tedious and boring. Why not just go for Guild Wars? Its free

Trust me, well if you didn't know FF XII was out, it is. And go buy that game, you won't regret it. Might be confusing in the beginning but its pretty easy to understand the battle system really, and the liscence board.
If you want to do everything in the game you'll have around 200-300 hours of logged game play.
And if you decide to buy the game I suggest you check faq or buy a guide to know which treasure not to open. Because you will not know which one never to open before you get the zodiak spear (best weapon on FFXII)
If you want to know early, these chests don't open them. In front of Dalan place (lowtown), at the palace right after going through Garamscythe Waterway before going up the stairs (6 chests here don't open one), in the confictionary in Nalbina Dungeons (3 in this room) and Phon Coast on the beach (16 chests bunched together).
Just buy a guide easier cause some chests you need D.A.

I played for 2 years after it's release in North America. All I could get was dialup and the game worked fine. I was still able to do time sensitive things like Skillchains and Magicbursts just fine on dialup. The updates for the game where one of those leave it overnight things and come back tomorrow.

Although for dialup I had good dialup I live a few hundred feet from the phone companies service box for my area and I had ping time of 180-300 on average which is good for dialup.

U should however never start ffxi without atleast one friends because that i found was very boring, n obviously the stronger u get the more fun it is, but beggining always sux.