There are too many video games again. Well. I guess there’s one that is too much video game and then a few other that are a perfectly normal amount of video game, but all that comes out in the wash and I still don’t have enough time to play all the video games I want to. I’ve got a lot of gaming hours in my week as the 1200+ (I haven’t check in a while, so it’s probably notably higher) I’ve spent on Final Fantasy 14 so far this year have proven, but I’ve got so much more of that game to play and so many other games to also play. I still never went back to Slay the Princess, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, or Wanderstop, I’ve got a growing pile of updated games to play on the Switch 2, and I’ve got even more brand new games to play that are already out or coming out soon (and then even more games coming out after that). Between my new TV and my now-a-year-old gaming PC, I’ve got the ability to play so many exciting and visually stunning games that I’ve been putting off for years due to the technical limitations of my home gaming systems, and yet all I play is Final Fantasy 14 and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
Continue readingFF14
Still At The Same (Raiding) Party Three Months Later In Final Fantasy 14
One of the activities I was most excited to do with the Free Company (what Final Fantasy 14 calls player guilds) was something called “Content Rewind.” This isn’t an official activity in Final Fantasy 14, but the name given to an FC activity by the founder that the rest of us have adopted. The idea is to go back to early raids and run through them in a way that resembles what it would have been like to play through them when they originally came out. Rather than the “MINE” method (Minimum Item level, No Echo) that is the hardest possible way to do the raids, doing them “synched, no echo” is a way to include a decent amount of difficulty without making them as difficult as possible. For MINE, you’re using gear that has been scaled down to the lowest item level (which represents the gear’s power, essentially) that the raid will allow. You’re also doing it with no echo, which is the game’s feature that makes repeating a fight easier after you’ve failed it by raising your hit points and damage by a certain percent. Synched, No Echo, on the other hand, limits your items to the highest level that would be allowed and while you’d be missing the boost from the echo as well, it doesn’t hurt as much since your gear is stronger. It’s supposedly even easier than if you’d gone into the fight with appropriately leveled gear that was available back then due to the slow creep of power that has occurred over the years. I have no experience with this since I’ve only been playing the game for six months, but enough people have said it independently that I believe it. What all of this means, ultimately, is that we get a group of eight players together and work our way through a tough boss fight, one strange battle mechanic at a time, until we eventually emerge victorious.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14’s Shadowbringers Expansion Brings The Storytelling To A Whole New Level
It took exactly five months, from January 1st until June 1st, but I finally cleared all of Shadowbringers. This is notable since that particular expansion seems to be widely regarded as Final Fantasy 14 at it’s best and is the first bit of game content you can’t access with a free account, almost like they know they’re sitting on gold and want you to have to pay for it. Which is fair, in my opinion. I couldn’t possibly blame them for it, but then I bought the full game the instant I hit the 3.0 expansion so I could fully invest in all the parts of the game I’d been denied up to that point, so I’m clearly not someone who is going to suggest it might be unfair for game developers to get paid for the great work they’ve done. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the storytelling being done by Final Fantasy 14 and how it reaches what might be it’s pinnacle in Shadowbringers and the related patch content. After all, this expansion represents a moment years in the making, tying things together that have been dangling since the early parts of A Realm Reborn. There is clearly more to come, more that is being built towards and more surprises to catch me off-guard, but that stuff all feels like the final book in a series, meant to wrap up the throughline story while Shadowbringers is the penultimate novel that brings it all together and points it at the finish line so the last book can wrap it all up. It’s an impressive bit of work and while I’ve positively crammed my days with FF14 in order to get to this point in five months, it makes it that much easier to notice everything that has been brought together.
Continue readingFaltering Redemption Stories In Final Fantasy 14’s Stormblood
I finally finished all of the patch content for the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. Well, the Main Scenario Quest parts of it, anyway. There’s still plenty of quests, the raids, and who knows what else still available for me to do, but I’ve done most of the content quests (the ones that have their quest marker filled in with a plus sign on a blue background) and all of the story stuff, so I’m pretty much done with it other than slowly working through the other stuff as I have time, inclination, and enough friends online. I finished it just a couple days before my friends returned from Japan, actually, and had to slow down since I’d promised to wait to start the next expansion until they were back in the US and could get my reactions to it live. So, I’ve spent a few days noodling on the expansion as a whole and even spoke with some of my friends about it, to see what they thought. The general reaction to it seems to be pretty muted, since most people don’t seem to hate it or love it. I mean, the most common reaction was “you did the entire expansion in two weeks???”” but the second-most-common reaction was “it was fine.” More people hated it than loved it, but it really seems to have not made much of a lasting impression on people and while some of this is likely the result of how tired I am this week, I’ll admit that it is already slipping from my mind as well. It wasn’t bad and I enjoyed my time running through the plot, but it made it through the entire expansion without really making a statement about rebellion politics, reform, justice, or the particular cruelty of empire.
Continue readingI Became The Unofficial Videographer For A Final Fantasy 14 Wrestling Federation
Well, recording the Final Fantasy 14 wrestling match (primarily for my friend who is out of town but also for one of the performers who asked for access to the videos when I spoke with him about getting permission to record) went so well that I’ve become the unofficial videographer of the group now. The wrestler shared it with the rest of the group and they all loved it so much that I offered to keep recording the events for them, sharing the videos via a throwaway gmail account I have. I was clear that I wasn’tmaking a commitment to record every single event since I’m sure there will eventually be some I can’t attend and I’m not going to let this game get in the way of my non-digital life, but I plan to attend each event as long as it’s my choice and I’ve got the ability to record them relatively easily so I might as well. It was a relatively easy process, after all. I spent some time earlier today (I’m writing this on the day of the wrestling match while I wait for the videos to finish converting and then upload) messing around with my settings so I could get the best possible mixture of recording quality and file size. I chopped the entire event into smaller pieces, too, so that people wouldn’t be stuck watching a four-hour video and could instead focus on individual matches or how the pre and post match banter or events looked. I even titled and numbered them so that it would be legible to anyone what was going on. It wasn’t a lot of work, mind you. It took about thirty minutes to configure my setup–which I used for streaming back in the day–by messing with settings, recording stuff for a minute or two, checking the output, and then tweaking more stuff, but now I’ve got that set up and all I’ve got to do from now on is manage the recording software, process the final videos, and then upload them to my gdrive for my throwaway email account. Easy-peasy.
Continue readingGiving In To Capitalism In Final Fantasy 14
A couple weekends back, thanks to a day with little else going on, I managed to make a million gil (the currency in Final Fantasy XIV) in a single day’s collection. It was quite a prosperous undertaking and still left me with decent chunks of the day to do other stuff. A lot of collecting is done on a timer, with the various collection nodes (minerals for rocks and ore and trees or bushes for wood and vegetation) for high-level materials showing up at specific times every day. So, for the day, I set some alarms that our guild’s leader wrote out for us and teleported around the map to hit up every single possible node. There was one more that I lack the ability to visit, since it is locked behind progressing the Main Scenario, but I still made out like a bandit thanks to my guild leader setting me up with a solid set of gear. A lot of the higher-tier gathering is based on your gear rather than your levels or abilities, so going from a scattered set of decent gear meant for level fifty to a stellar set of gear meant for level sixty was a HUGE boon and going from a mishmash of what I had laying around to actually good level fifty gear for my other gathering class was a game changer. That change alone made me so much money, and my guild leader did it all for free (on top of buying all the stuff to use for his own projects or pass on to the buyer who has hired the guild to collect these resources).
Continue reading