There won’t be any direct spoilers for the final plot points of Final Fantasy XIV’s A Realm Reborn in here, but I’ll be gesturing at it broadly. It’s not a surprising twist or anything, but I felt I should at least disclaim that, even if I’m writing about stuff nearly a decade old at this point. After all, I just started playing the game and would have wanted to avoid spoilers, so maybe you would too. Anyway, skip paragraph three if you want to avoid spoilers (this is paragraph 1).
Continue readingVideo Gaming
I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 32
I’ve been thinking about the stories that video games tell, the ones you find within them, and the way that some games lack any kind of storytelling in favor of simulating a person’s ability to choose to do whatever they want. All of these kinds of games have their own places in the broad field that is “video games,” but I was preparing myself to write about why I prefer games with stories to tell and had to set that blog post aside because I’m too worn down by life and everything to really get my thoughts together like that. I figured I’d write a Tired and Sad post instead and realized, as I dug around for a topic, that the game I’ve maybe written the most about is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which prompted the thought that maybe I prefer emergent storytelling since that game has almost no story to tell you. Not because you have the ability to choose things (well, you’ve got the ability to choose to do them or not, which is maybe the easiest choice to give to players), but because the whole game is so focused on creating little nuggets of story that only emerge as you play and explore and find them for yourself.
Continue readingGrinding Through The Content Mines Of Final Fantasy XIV For Every Scrap Of Joy I Can Fid
In the last month (as of you reading this, anyway), I have played some 120 hours of Final Fantasy XIV. I started playing it around the start of the year by mixing it into my regular game rotation and it has slowly taken over all of my gaming time. Aside from days when I’ve gotten home from work too late to start playing a game or days when I’ve had other stuff to do (like watching episodes of TV shows in preparation for listening to my favorite media analysis podcasts, Media Club Plus and A More Civilized Age, or doing chores), I’ve spent most of my free time playing FFXIV with my friends who got into it a few months before I did or desperately trying to grind through stuff so I can at least sort of catch up to them. Or, in a few cases, grinding through the Main Scenario Quests so I can have the next group activity ready for when my friends are online. I’ve had very little time for puttering around, which is unfortunate since that is part of what I enjoyed about the game the most in the early days, but there is much to dig through in the content mines and most of the puttering activities I want to do are difficult to do when your inventory is almost always constantly full of junk that you’re holding onto because you will one day want to have it for other crafting you’re probably going to do. It’s all interconnected after all. The crafting systems, I mean. Unless you’ve got a paid account and can buy stuff on the market from other players, you need to go make all your own stuff. Which is a lot! There’s so many things you need.
Continue readingSurprisingly Relevant Politics In Final Fantasy XIV
I’ve written before about games that are so big that you can find almost anything you want to look for in them. In games like Dragon Age: Origins, it leaves you with a game that isn’t really saying anything or that buries the things it would like to say in smaller chunks of storytelling so that you, the all-important player, can make whatever choices you’d like and still wind up doing some form of the “heroic” thing in the end. In games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it never says anything but presents you with enough opportunities for you to say something about what you’re seeing that you will find a story emerging from your experience with the game. I’ve always preferred the latter, where the game relies on setting things up for you to discover or lend your voice to, because all of my experiences with things like the former have left me feeling satisfied with my video game time but unfulfilled. I’ve never really blamed games like that because how the hell are you supposed to write a story that can account for that much player choice without sacrificing a lot of the direction you’d like or rendering most player choice meaningless? How could you craft a story meant to have wide appeal that still makes a stand about what is good and what is bad in a way that will surely be alienating to some people? Well, Final Fantasy XIV does it mostly by (so far) taking a few weak but potentially alientating stands on some issues and letting everyone you skip all the cutscenes you’d like (with a few exceptions, but none of those ever seem to overlap with a story that has something to say beyond “hero good, villain bad”). Which I find incredibly surprising now that I’m digging into more and more of the story following the story that plays out over the first fifty levels of your character in the game given how it abjectly refused to do anything of the sort early on.
Continue readingTurns Out I Really Enjoy Healing In Final Fantasy XIV
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!
Continue readingMidwinter Video Game Malaise
I’m in another weird spot with video games. A brand new one, this time around, which is kind of refreshing, but it’s still weird. I’ve never really been one to cling to a video game if I wind up not playing it all the way through. The two previous exceptions to this are huge, sprawling games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, both of which take multiple hundreds of hours to play all the way through and are a “sometimes” game for me. Now, though, as I shift most of my gaming time towards Final Fantasy XIV and occasionally dabble in a second playthrough of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a second attempt at a second playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom, and a second playthrough of Chained Echoes in preparation for the upcoming DLC, I find myself looking at games I didn’t finish and wishing I had the time to play games that aren’t either super engaging or just unengaging enough to listen to a podcast throughout. I mean, I WANT to play those games, even if I seem to struggle to make myself do it sometimes. It makes sense that I might have a difficult time pushing myself to play more Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth given how much I don’t enjoy the open-world segments and how many of them there are, but I actually do enjoy playing Armored Core VI but I just can’t seem to make myself sit down and play it with any kind of frequency. Nor can I seem to make myself play Dragon’s Dogma despite being incredible excited by everything I’ve heard about the game and having a podcatcher chock full of podcasts to listen to while I run around it’s wide-open world. Instead, I play a new game with my friends and replay other games when I’m not playing that.
Continue readingFinally, I’ve Joined The Fantasy…
In what should probably not be a surprise to anyone who knows me and my video game habits but is probably nevertheless a surprise to everyone I know, I’ve gotten really into Final Fantasy XIV. To be abundantly clear, given the way some people get super obsessed with this game, I’m playing it a normal amount. I’m slightly less into it than I’m into Baldur’s Gate 3 every time I start playing that again and much less than I was into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which means it will probably become a sustainable habit. Which is probably what is surprising to the people who know me since I’m not really into Massively Multiplayer Online games. The only two I’ve ever played with any regularity are Overwatch and Destiny 2 and have bounced off literally every single other MMO I’ve ever tried. Hell, I eventually stopped playing Overwatch and Destiny 2 as well. Those were extenuating circumstances, though. I stopped playing Overwatch after a couple years because they changed the game to support play at their league level and that made all the things I enjoyed doing absolutely unpleasant to do unless I had a solid team behind me (and that almost never happened). I played Destiny 2 for years and only stopped because the people I played with were no longer available to me due to my connection to them revealing himself to be undependable in a way I couldn’t overlook or let go. Neither of those reasons has anything to do with a commitment or my attention span, but every single other MMO I’ve tried–like Guild Wars 2, WoW, Runescape (back in the day), League of Legends, and so many more–fell by the wayside in less than a month. Even Palia, as much as I enjoy it, rarely lasts a month before I forget it exists for six to twelve months. But Not FFXIV, though. At least not so far, anyway.
Continue readingUnreliable Detection And Definition Of Unreliable Narrators
This post contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you wish to remain unspoiled, you should probably bail out now since you’ll probably be able to guess some amount of them by the time you get to the point below where the spoilers are (there’s text in all caps to let you know). That said, I kind of hop on that particular point somewhat tangentially, so it’s entirely possible that you can read this whole post minus the paragraph with the spoilers and still not figure anything out. Knowing the game and what these spoilers are, though, I wouldn’t risk it.
Continue readingPutting The Past Behind Us: Feeling Unmoored In The Endless Present Of Tears Of The Kingdom
“When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world.” I was a child the first time I heard those words. A bipedal meerkat spoke them as the camera zoomed in on him and he alternated between gesturing at an imaginary world behind the camera and pointing an instructive finger at the young, depressed lion that was just off screen. As far as scenes go in The Lion King, it’s important for the plot but maybe not the most visually interesting. The sort of thing that would normally slip past a child of five or six, which is how old I was when I first saw it, but one of my younger siblings became obsessed with the movie and we watched over a hundred times before a new movie caught their attention. If you watch something that much, enough that you can still recite the whole movie, front to back, about two and a half decades later, you wind up taking it all in even as a child. Maybe especially as a child. It was an interesting thought to me, back then, as it was the answer that meerkat, Timon, offered in response to the suggestion that there is, in fact, something you can do when bad things beyond your control happen to you. It was a big thought for a child, but it was something I thought about constantly and so it stuck.
Continue readingPassing Time With TCG Card Shop Simulator
A week ago today (the day you’re reading this and six days after I’m writing this), I stopped resisting my desire to buy any kind of new game to help me get over Dragon Age: The Veilguard and bought a game I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks now. I’d thought to buy it last month, but I was busy with Dragon Age: Inquisition and couldn’t afford any distractions. I was already distracted enough, thanks to being neck-deep in Dragon Age stuff and Veilguard just around the corner, so I let it pass and figured that, by the time I thought of it again, I’d probably be over my incredibly surface-level interest. I mean, I’m not one for simulator games and TCG Card Shop Simulator is just another entry in a long line of incredibly similar-looking games, so why would this one hold my interest in a way that literally none of the others ever have? Other than, you know, being introduced to it by watching two members of Friends at the Table have a great time playing it and it being focused around not only something I have personal experience with (trading card games, which is what TCG stands for) but something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about (game shops). So, last Tuesday, while in a fit of malaise and depression, I bought the game and immediately lost three hours of my life.
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