As I’m writing this post a week ago (compared to when it gets posted, anyway. Who knows when you’re actually reading this), I’m officially two weeks into my time with Final Fantasy XIV and everything I suspected would be true in my last post about it (almost two weeks ago) has stayed true. I’ve continued to enjoy my time with the game, even if I have spent my time pushing myself through the Main Scenario Quests rather than via my preferred “slow puttering” method, but I was eager to unlock more parts of the game and my friends were often making time for me, so I didn’t want to waste the time they could have spent on other things by being lackadaisical about the meat of the game. Now that I’ve finished the first portion of the game, everything up through level fifty (as far as the MSQ and my chosen Job, White Mage, are concerned, anyway), I’m ready to get back to a little bit of puttering, trying out some other classes, and starting to spread myself out a bit more widely as I get deeper into things. I’m still on the free trial, since I’m none too keen to start paying subscription fees for the game, so there’s still a bunch of stuff I can’t access or can only access via a series of convoluted events (like taking my friends on dungeon delves requires a friend to invite me to a group and then promote me to the group’s leader since I can’t make groups with a free account). I’m already looking forward to when I’ve played enough of the game to justify spending money on it so I can join up with the free company my friends are a part of and maybe even start making friends with some of them. There’s still so much of the game out there for me to find and play!

I will say, a couple days after finishing this early portion of the game, I’m not feeling terribly impacted by the story thus far. Maybe it’s because I’ve played some of the older final fantasy games where you also played a more generic Hero of Light or Warrior of Light type character and had to do stuff with crystals, weird gods, people trying to take over the world, and so on, but I just don’t feel terribly bought in to the story as a whole. I’m absolutely emotionally invested in it, venting my spleen to my friends every time a character or villain annoys me, responding to all the absolutely unearned shit-talking that the first villain, Gaius, does right as I’m about to absolutely kick his ass, but I’m just also not terribly engaged by the story. As often happens in situations like this, where the narrative is perhaps a bit simplistic in order to hold wider appeal or stay at least somewhat morally disengaged from the way the players act, I’m much more invested in the characters than the story. Though, to be honest, even that isn’t a super strong pull for me yet. All the characters are at least moderately interesting or annoying in a way that I enjoy (sometimes it’s fun to dislike a character! Like Solas DragonAge!), but I feel much more like an audience member heckling the screen than an invested participant. It’s a difficult gap to bridge, getting me to feel that invested, but I’m more aware of whether or not a game gets me there now that I’ve played Dragon Age: The Veilguard and am still ready to leap back into the depths of that significant time investment at a moment’s notice. It’s not a comparison I like to make, especially since they’re such different types of games, but it’s difficult to talk about how bought-in I am to a game or how I feel about a story without thinking about a story that grabbed me so deeply and thoroughly that I’m still feeling its pull two months after I finished it.

That said, it’s not like I’m not having fun. Being a healer has been a fairly rewarding experience and not just because I get a decent amount of Commendations whenever I help a group of random players. It is enjoyable to learn the mechanics of fights, to have to solve the “how do I keep us all alive?” puzzle at every turn and to then try to take it a step further by timing my counters to group-wide or individual but severe damage such that the healing hits immediately after the damage does. It also feels good to be able to just narrow my focus on this one thing and enjoy a video game that doesn’t require me to participate via only violence. Sure, I still cast the occasional damage spell or whatever, but most of my game time is spent healing (such that the final fight of the first chunk of the MSQ was a huge pain in the ass that took forever since I couldn’t hurt the bad guy very effectively but he also couldn’t hurt me in any kind of terribly threatening way). I really enjoy that, being able to participate in a game as a healer rather than someone intent on damage and not really needing to change my experience of the game to accommodate that (by which I mean I still largely play the game the same way as other roles, unlike in a game like Overwatch where I have to either enact a decent amount of violence or change the way I play the game to avoid it entirely). It just feels nice to do in a way that is very personally enriching.

Even setting that aside, it’s really pleasant to heal. Learning to balance my own abilities against the flow of an encounter, learning how to watch the boss fights for tells, learning how to best respond to those tells, learning how to counteract the various abilities of each boss, and learning the quirks of each Tank and DPS I’m responsible for keeping alive means I’m never bored. It’s a nice little challenge and it only gets more challenging as I unlock more abilities. Each ability gets more complex as I level up and every single one of them seems to have a specific purpose in combat, some of which I only learn LONG after I’ve unlocked the ability. Not only do I need to learn the specifics of each ability (what all it does, the range I can cast it at, what the given distances mean relative to the character models on screen, how much mana it consumes, and how often I should be using it), but I also have to learn the button and hotbar mapping for each ability. The nice thing about slowly building a character up is that I don’t have to think about most of my abilities, I just know what motion to perform to get the desired effect. The downside of which is that it will take more work to relearn everything if I ever change around where my abilities are. I did that once, a bit earlier in the game, and it threw me off for a few hours of play. Since I’m only level fifty, I still have plenty of abilities to learn and will likely need to re-learn my button-mapping at least once or twice more as I continue to play. And then all over again when I finally swap to a different job. I’m only just starting out but, that said, I’m really not sure any other job I do will be as enjoyable for me as healing is. I just really like keeping my allies alive and fighting the empty parts of their health bars rather than whatever enemies we might be facing.