One of the quirks of essentially chugging Final Fantasy 14 is that there is a huge amount of the game that I just don’t understand, and perhaps even more that I don’t even know about. The focus on crafting, making money, story progression, and specific activities means that I’ve largely ignored significant portions of the game that showed up to fill in the gaps between major expansions. Sure, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on some of the side activities, like my Island Sanctuary and the Ishgardian reconstruction crafting activities, but I’ve mostly avoided the special activities of Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. I dipped my toes into the first two, but never really spent the time to figure out why I would want to do any of them in the first place. I’ve been told the Cosmic Exploration stuff from Endwalker is fun and a great way to get some crafting experience, but I’ve enjoyed my current method of doing projects so I’m not sure I’d enjoy a new side activity, especially now that I’m finally moving forward in Dawntrail. The other two areas, though, are their own beasts. The Eureka exploration from Stormblood is a pretty significant time sink, even when you’ve got people to help speed up the process, and the Bozjan Southern Front in Shadowbringers has some really difficult barriers to cross in order to progress and no amount of bringing in my level 70 jobs to level them up will make that go any faster. Still, now that my Free Company (the FF14 equivalent of player guilds) is putting in some focused effort to completeing these activities, I’ve begun spending my thursdays desperately trying to stay alive as we all fight endless swarms of enemies to get the XP we need to level up the “elemental” level thing specific to the Eurekan exploration zone. It’s not the most fun, but it’s a refreshingly straight-foward activity so far and having a large group of other FC members to play with is enough fun for me.

Probably the most fun part of it is the general chaos that descends once we’ve paused leveling and either dug into the quest line for the area or thrown all of that aside so we could explore the whole map (you get an acheivement for fully exploring any map and we all want that little pop-up since, judging by the fact that we’re playing through six or seven year-old content, we’re all completionists). Once we’ve split up from our rolling ball of death (one tank to grab enemies, one healer to keep the tank alive, and six DPS to wreck whatever we’re fighting), the voice chat descends into a chaotic mess of asking how to get to the area someone found, calls for resurrections because someone aggro’d too many enemies or fell from somewhere while an enemy was aggro’d on them (or they landed in aggro range for an enemy and got auto-attacked while they were at one hit point), and other people trying to figure out where someone’s body is so they can go resurrect them. It’s a lot of fun to be dashing around and occasionally getting caught up in a mass-death event with everyone because someone aggro’d a dragon that will absolutely wreck any one of us, dragged it to the rest of the group who all fled and aggro’d their own overpowered enemies such that we’ve got one or two people still alive running toward the mess in order to bring people back to life or hold off the enemies long enough for the party to get their feet under them again. So far, we’ve avoided any total party wipes, but it has been a close thing a handful of times. We managed to slowly put the party back together while the aboive event was happening, but it’s always a messy experience and those can be some of my favorite ones. Nothing like a little fun chaos, a challenge to confront, and the satisfaction of pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat.

While there’s a little plot spun through all of these areas, it’s very much a side plot that has little to no bearing on anything that happens after it. It’s incredibly easy to ignore what is going on since pretty much every quest amounts to “Things are weird here! We sensed something specifically weird over there, in that general direction, and need you to go get it. Great, now do that three more times and you can move on to the new area! Don’t forget your vision of the past that is a story in parallel that must certainly be related to what’s going on even if there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection between the two!” It certainly doesn’t help that I did most of the first area months ago and barely remember anything beyond the major framing of this activity, or that the whole activity was a way to create “relic” gear that would grow more powerful as you did stuff, giving people playing the game as this stuff came out a way to get more and more powerful gear that is just kind of underwhelming now when you can just buy what would basically be the end result for your job every ten levels after 50 (50, 60, 70, etc). I’m sure this kind of activity will be relevant to me when I finally catch up with the endgame in another month or two, but I find it difficult to push myself to grind through this stuff when I could be doing something a bit more fun like crafting or progressing the MSQ.

Still, I’m fine continuing to participate with my friends. Once we’re all leveled up and everything, it’ll all be so much easier to do the grinding for whatever junk we need from each area to keep upgrading our gear, so I’ll at least have the option to do that if I ever want it. I’m not entirely sure I will, since I’m not super fond of most of the cosmetics from that set, but there are a couple things I like so maybe I’ll wind up doing it when I run out of other things to do. I mean, that’s why most other people in the FC are doing it. They’re out of stuff to do. So why not go back and do all the things you skipped along the way? There’s no reason not to, especially if you have a fun group of people to play with. Which I have. We can be a little chaotic and messy at times, but it’s almost always a fun time and when it isn’t, that’s usually because I’m tired as hell and the hubbub of our little group is a bit too overstimulating for me. Hopefully I can get my schedule back into decent shape now that I’m on a decent antidepressant, but my first week of trying that didn’t work great so we’ll have to see. It’d be nice to be able to relax a little bit and enjoy all this stuff now that I’m slowing down on doing the main quests.