Based on recent announcements regarding the new expansion announced at VanaFest posted elsewhere in these forums, I have come to the conclusion that the problems with crashes of the PS2 client on a number of NPC Conversations and Cutscenes will never be fixed.

They are not going to create an expansion install disc for the North American PS2 version. I suspect it is for economic reasons. There are too few players in North America that still depend on the NA PS2 version for access to FFXI for it to be worth creating and distributing that expansion installation disc.

I also tend to believe that it is for the same economic reasons that they do not want to put time into fixing these crash problems for the North American PS2 version.

I suspect the problems are caused because of issues that Square-Enix and both Square and Enix before that have had for many years in porting things to North America. The amount of text data needed to convey something in English is much longer than the amount of text data needed to convey it in Japanese. There have been many games in the past where something has had to be cut out of the game as it was done in Japan to make room for the added length of English text.

My suspicion in the case of FFXI is that the longer English text has in some cases exceeded some memory boundary in the PS2, which causes the game to crash when that English text is loaded. And no one at SE caught the error when it was made. And now they probably don't want to put time or money into finding the problem and fixing it.

The Japanese version is likely not having this issue, or they would be fixing it.

They are not blocking use of the NA PS2 version at all.... they just aren't going to do much effort to support anything specific to the NA PS2 version any more to fix it. You can still log in, but if it crashes, too bad.