I’ve been slowly progressing the Main Scenario Questline once again in Final Fantasy 14. A little bit at a time. A few quests here or there, a dungeon, a trial, a little bit of support work, and so on. Slowly but surely, I’ve been getting closer and closer to the final parts of Endwalker–little threads that need wrapping up as whatever is next gets slowly referenced and eventually (I’m assuming) revealed. It’s been nice to move at a moderate pace, to make steady progress as I continue splitting my attention between a few different activities or goals, and it has given me plenty of time to chew on what’s been happening. I’m going to avoid details because I’m getting pretty deep into spoiler territory for the events that have been unfolding for the past four major updates to the Endwalkers expansion, but I’ve been having a lot of conversations with one of my Final Fantasy 14 friends about the story that have also given me plenty to think about. For instance, while I instantly agreed and had thought about it much the same way, I didn’t think of the conclusion of Endwalker as “fighting depression itself” until she put it that way. This particular vein of thought prompted me to take a step back from my “what does it mean to be a hero” line of thinking and consider other elements of the story that I hadn’t focused on up to that point. All of which feels a bit silly to admit considering that one of my favorite jokes about the Final Fantasy franchise is that the conclusion to most of the games can be boiled down to some form of “attack and dethrone god.” Which is kind of what happened in Endwalker, if you get just a tiny bit more metaphorical with it.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14
A Weekend Of Chores In And Out Of Final Fantasy 14
I spent most of my weekend doing chores. Almost the entire thing, actually, when I think about it. I woke up feeling refreshed on Saturday, got out of bed–ready to dive into my weekend’s list of Things To Do in preparation for my friends coming to visit (last weekend, as this gets posted)–and then got slammed almost immediately by the difference between feeling rested and recovering from burnout. So, rather than push myself to do the chores I’d set aside for that day, I took my time through the morning to relax, play some video games, and let my body be awake but still for a while. All while doing chores in Final Fantasy 14. I’ve started a personal money-making project, something simple but hopefully still lucrative, and had a bunch of orders and gatherables to deliver for my player guild to keep me busy while I spent my idle time doing research for said project. Once that was done, I moved back and forth between doing bits and pieces of my chores and attending to the various tasks I’d set up in Final Fantasy 14, slowly whiling away my Saturday while I collected a ton of stuff, crafted a bunch of stuff, sorted out my retainers in a more beneficial manner, and attended to some of the more laborious of my weekend chores. I did mostly the same thing on Sunday, but with the addition of spending about four hours playing Stardew Valley with one of my D&D group members since I wasn’t up for running a session, so really it was just chores all the way up and down my weekend.
Continue readingHow To Not Have An Opinion About Something On The Internet
Just don’t talk about it!
Now that this… I don’t know, fakeout? is over, I’m here to actually talk about Final Fantasy 14 and my suddenly rampant and runaway focus. I wrote out most of a blog post talking about not having an opinion about something and fell into the ancient trap that is talking about not having an opinion is still having an opinion, so I decided to delete all that but wanted to keep the title and the new opening “paragraph” because, really, this is advice that a lot of people out there need (myself included, clearly!). Thankfully, I managed to avoid contradicting my own advice since pretty much the only thing I think about these days is trying to get into some kind of actual loop in Final Fantasy 14 now that I’ve got the energy to do other stuff and have changed how I’m playing the game. My whole “take a relaxed approach and just do whatever” thing doesn’t really work anymore since my once-forgotten default (relaxed puttering) for that kind of approach is slowly morphing back into “just keep doing stuff without end” and keeping me up way too late at night. I need to create and enforce some structure on myself so I can still do fun things but maybe do them without also staying up past two in the morning–which I need to stop doing so I can actually take advantage of how much more potential energy I’ve got these days rather than my recent usual status of having a willing mind and soul but an incapable-due-to-complete-exhaustion body. Structure and a list of goals has helped with similar problems in the past–though they were coming at this from the other direction, of being so tired that I could barely push myself to do anything–so I’m hoping they’ll help again with my video game time so I can maybe return to getting a decent six hours of sleep most nights.
Continue readingI Just Can’t Make Myself Care About KotOR 2
The first roleplaying game (RPG) I ever played was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The second one I played was the sequel. To say that they have had an impact on me would be underselling the truth. Recently, I’ve been trying to replay KotOR 2 alongside A More Civilized Age and haven’t been able to really stick with it, despite enjoying my recent playthrough of the original KotOR, and I was at a bit of a loss as to why this was the case. Why have I been struggling with KotOR 2 when I’ve got such fond memories of both games and, in my memory, clearly preferred KotOR 2 over the original game. Despite there being plenty of opportunities for me to play KotOR 2 without even interrupting my Final Fantasy 14 time, why have I been unable to even force myself to play the game? I went through all that trouble to mod it for the first time ever and while I’ve been keeping up with A More Civilized Age’s coverage of the game by following Austin Walker’s Let’s Play of it, I keep internally rebelling against how much stuff he’s got rattling around in his inventory that he will probably never use to the degree that I keep thinking about playing it myself just to scratch the “hyper efficient playthrough” itch that’s been growing. In theory, I should be spending all of the time I’m not paying attention to Final Fantasy 14 playing KotOR 2 and yet I’ve gone back to playing Wildermyth instead. Only last night, as I was staring at my computer screen without doing anything while Final Fantasy 14 sat untouched on my monitor following some encouraging personal news, did the answer occur to me.
Continue readingTrying To Take My Time In Final Fantasy 14
Over the weekend, after about six or so weeks away from doing any kind of Main Scenario Quest progression in Final Fantasy 14, I’m back at it again. For the first time in my seven and a half months of playing the game, it ACTUALLY feels like I’ve been away for a while when I meet back up with the main cast of NPCs and they all remark on how well I look like I’m doing (and I look GREAT, btw, since my main glams all got updated renders in the latest patch) and how nice it is to meet up again after all this time. Generally speaking, there’s usually at least a few months between an expansion and each of its patch updates, so people playing the game as it came out got to experience the passage of time that the game softly implies–albeit usually a truncated version given the way people talk about finally seeing each other again (the game’s actual timeline is incredibly unclear, but I’d guess it’s maybe a fifth of the real-world passage of time if I had to suggest something). When you play through almost the entire main story arc of the game that exists today, you don’t really get the same breaks and breathing space that the game was (eventually) written to reference. It was interesting to see the way they went from tightly-spaced events with a degree of implied continuity that mmade it feet like there wasn’t much time between each major event to events spread out by gaps the characters suggest were significant when they reconvene. They took the nebulousness of in-game time and went from ignoring it–which implied not much time passed at all–to doing enough soft framing around the start of each expansion and certain patches that it implied a moderate passage of time. Perhaps most notably, this was a major component of Endwalker’s conclusion and, given my own feelings at the time, it felt like it would be doing myself and the game a disservice to once more dive into the plot immediately.
Continue readingI Can’t Imagine What Final Fantasy 14 Would Have Like Without My Free Company
Aside from my very first month of playing the game, I have not experienced what it is like to play Final Fantasy 14 without being a member of a Free Company (the FF14 version of player guilds). The friends who got me into the game were members of one already, so I was already predisposed to joining that particular group from the get-go, but the warm welcome I received while I was still a new player on a free-to-play account solidified my decision to join. Since then, I have not regretted my choice. Almost everyone in the FC has been a warm and welcoming person who has done what they could, sometimes at mild to moderate inconvenience, to help me out as I’ve gotten further and further into the game. From free level-appropriate gear when I was reached the tough middle of my crafting journey to tons of free collectibles (music for the in-game jukebox, minions, clothing items, mounts, and more) more or less constantly, I would not have made the progress I have without the support of this FC. Nor would I have made as much money since everything I know about crafting to make money has been learned from people in the FC and almost all of the money I’ve made in the game has been made via crafting and gathering jobs for the FC’s leader (often as part of deals he has brokered with other very wealthy players). Joining this FC immediately upon becoming a paying subscriber to the game has irrevoccably altered my experience in ways I rarely stop to think about now that I’ve adjusted to it.
Continue readingHousing Opportunities In Final Fantasy 14
After a relatively short time, I managed to win the opportunity to buy a house in Final Fantasy 14. I know people who have been trying for well over a year to get a house in one of the few player housing zones in the game, but I got incredibly lucky and won on a housing plot in what turned out to be a relatively unpopular area, based on how few bids there were. Personally, I think parts of that area are incredibly underrated, which is why I added them to my list of possible locations. Normally, getting a house of some kind wouldn’t be as big of a deal as it has been this past year, but there’s been a few events in the US that had the local housing market locked in a way that it normally isn’t. Typically, if you do not enter your home for forty-five days, your house will be automatically demolished, your things put in storage, and some amount of the house’s cost refunded to you. This is to prevent players from purchasing and sitting on the nicest housing plots long after they’ve stopped playing the game. Sure, it’s still incredibly easy to just log in every so often to keep your house occupied, but that means you have to buy a subscription every month and a half, at minimum, and Final Fantasy 14 loves that. They want your money. So, prior to the massive floods and damage to North Carolina last year, this process happened regularly and houses would go back on the market at a fairly normal rate. Once those floods happened and huge portions of the US (well, not that huge in proportion the the US itself but still huge compared to most parts of the world) were unable to access secure internet and gaming time, Square Enix decided to put the timers on hold. A decision they relented on in December of 2024 and them immediately put back in place during the L.A. wildfires. As a result, until incredibly recently, most houses only became available because people actively sold them or moved into new housing of their own.
Continue readingI Could Balance My Gaming Time If I Wanted To
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 readingStill 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 readingDedication To The Craft In Final Fantasy 14
One of the things that has taken up a large amount of my time alongside running through the plot of Final Fantasy 14 has been not just leveling the combat classes I need to complete the plot-based missions, but also leveling the crafting and gathering classes required to repair the gear for those combat classes. I mean, I can also make gear for the lower-leveled classes I’m working on getting up to snuff now, but most of the purpose for all that leveling is so I can keep my highest tier of combat gear in tip-top shape without needing to rely on other players I might not have easy access to when I need the work done and so I can stop paying an NPC vendor to repair my gear. Getting it fixed by a player character is a much better investment since you can repair gear beyond what you’d normally expect to it’s “full” state. It’s a bit silly since all this does is set a new point for what counts as “full” integrity on your gear, but it is satisfying to see all of those blue lines (to signify full integrity bars) next to all of my gear whenever I open my character window. Still, having all this extra space before you need to worry about your gear breaking is one of the main benefits of crafting to the person playing the game’s content and, for a while there, I couldn’t actually fix my top-tier gear. In order to hurry through the last two expansions, I set aside my usual schedule of 2-3 weeks on content and then 2 weeks on other stuff (mostly leveling crafting jobs), so while the leveling I’d done previously was enough to keep my gear going in the 2nd to last expansion (Endwalker), it was not enough to fix the gear I got following that expansion. And some of the gear I got toward the end of the expansion, too.
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