The story of my time playing Final Fantasy 14 is that there is more to do than anyone could reasonably accomplish without years of effort. As a result, every time I play, I am making choices about what gets my time and attention and what will languish, untouched, for months or even years. My previous attempts to dabble in a bit of everything spread me too thin and left me worn out, so these days I am trying to stay focused on a smaller number of things. There’s all my usual weekly stuff, of course: Island Sanctuary maintenance, side quests, acquiring limited currencies, leveling my alt, stockpiling things for future projects, maintaining my sales listings, and so on: the background work of playing a video game that is required to do the more focused parts of the game at other times. All of this can take up as much time as I give it because, while there is an end to it all, it is so far away right now that I have no idea when I’d reach it even if this stuff was all I focused on. So I try to keep it to a reasonable level, based on how I’m feeling in any given week or on any given day, and pick some other stuff to focus on when I’ve got the time and energy. Right now, a lot of that is going towards the RP wrestling season that’s currently under way, but if I had to name my focuses, I would say the Occult Crescent and leveling an alternate character.

Alt leveling has been very rewarding. First, I’m doing it simultaneously with a friend. We’re doing it hand-in-hand so we’ve got someone to help us stay focused and moving forward at a healthy clip, though we’re admittedly doing it for very different reasons. My friend is doing it to focus on and practice the fundamentals for some different fighting jobs, so she can shore up what she perceives as her weaknesses in high-end content. I’m doing it to set up a warehouse for project item storage/a backup FC in case my current one implodes or whithers away/a chance to play with some mechanics I didn’t get to experience on my main character/a chance to earn some additional in-game income. But, regardless of our reasons, we’re both in the same place, moving forward together as we match our pace to the other and drive our way through the game toward the eventual end, laser-focused, and optimizing as only experienced players can. Which, honestly, is mostly just fun to be doing as an activity with another person. We’ve got a good rapport and both enjoy having someone to parallel play/body double with, so it’s a very socially enriching experience.

It’s also enriching in other ways. Turns out I really missed the feeling of progress from leveling and moving through the story. I kinda knew I missed getting experience points, once all my main jobs hit max level, but I didn’t expect just how motivating the feeling of progress would be. I have plenty of progress to make and levels to gain on my main character still, but it’s a much more difficult grind most of the time since I have to pick between getting the high-tier rewards for doing my daily roulettes with my max level character or getting experience points for my lower-level jobs. There are other ways to get the high-tier rewards, but they’re not as quick as the daily roulette method and while I could split them up to do some at max level and some at lower levels, the roulettes that give the best rewards also give the most XP, so one or the other is getting starved. And while I could swap it around every night, trade off which one gets which, I don’t play this game every night and, even when I do play it, I don’t always have time for all that. So far, I’ve mostly leaned towards the limited currencies, but I’m probably going to switch it up soon. I want to get back to leveling again since I actually have goals and benchmarks for that process and earning the limited currencies kind of feels pointless since it’s not like I’m doing any of the acitivities that require them. “Maybe someday,” but that little phrase there is quickly running out of space and, eventually, there’ll be a new expansion and that gear will be easy to get and I still won’t have done that difficult content.

Which is why I’m starting to turn my “current content” focus towards the Occult Crescent. I’ve finished most of the main scenario for it–mostly solo since my plans fell through but I’m not about to let that stop me from doing what I set out to do. Now I’ve got to finish leveling, grind for the rare-drop resources to get the artifact weapon stuff running, do more grinding for that, start the second tier, do a bunch more grinding, and so on. Very attainable, especially if I make a point of spending some time each week on it. It’s not that bad, to be honest. It’s not as fun by yourself, but there’s enough people around that I wound up in a party pretty quickly and was able to just cruise around, doing events, finding journal entries, and trying to figure out how everything worked well enough that I could manage it on my own should the need arise. It’s not terribly difficult, thankfully, just time-consuming. It’s not something I’ll be getting done particularly quickly unless I focus almost exclusively on it and that does not sound particularly fun to do by myself. If I had a solid group, maybe, but for now I’m going to just keep poking away at it, learning what I can, and try to get myself in a good position to do the final stage of weapon upgrades whenever that happens. Assuming it happens. I’m pretty sure it’ll happen, since that’s kind of what relic weapons are for: being the best weapon you can have at the end of the expansion’s patch content. Still, this is my first time actually doing any of this stuff, so I feel more than a little uncertain. We’ll see how it goes. At least I’ll only need to do all that once rather than repeat it for each weapon I want, which is how all the previous relic weapons work. Talk about exhausting…