After putting it off for about two months, I finally got my first job to Level 100 (the current level cap) in Final Fantasy 14. I also got three more to level 100 in rapid succession (one each day since then) [for a total of seven by the time I’m editing this the day before it gets posted], as I’ve shifted gears back to focusing on progressing the Main Scenario Quests of Dawntrail and needed to get one of each of the job types to level 100 for the Role Quests. With all that done, I can now focus entirely on the MSQ and getting as far as I can in whatever play time I’ve got most days. Everything else, for at least the next four evenings after I write this, will sit on hold [it did not, in fact, sit on hold, and I wound up doing a lot of side work] as I try my hand at getting through the main portion of Dawntrail in time for the new Deep Dungeon coming out the day before this gets posted (the day after this gets posted is the day there’s a group of people in my Free Company getting together to do said dungeon [but I will not be joining them because I’m taking a break]). I’m not going to skimp on sleep or avoid doing my weekly chores and whatnot around my apartment (nor am I going to cancel my D&D session for this reason, but it IS looking like I’ll be cancelling it for other reasons), but I did clear as much of my weekend as I could because I’m getting the good ol’ double-vax Flu-And-COVID combo on Friday. I am giving myself the space to crash super hard if I need it, but I have typically dealt with the double-shot combo without too much trouble in the past, so I’m hoping to see how much Dawntrail I can get through.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14
Trying (And Failing) To Spend More Time On My Switch 2
Two and a half months in to Donkey Kong Bananza (it turns out that games take forever to play through if you mostly ignore them and play Final Fantasy 14 instead), I’m almost to the end of the game. I’ve gotten almost all of the Bananas, most of the fossils, and almost all of the unlockable cosmetics/stat boost items. The only things I’m missing are from the area I’m currently exploring so it’s only a matter of time before I get those as well and then fight the final boss. There was a bit of a twist at the end that changed a bit of where I thought the game was going and how it was going to end, but I’m here for it. I’m ready to dive into whatever is coming my way, regardless of whether or not I expected it from the start (though there were hints if you knew enough about the Donkey Kong franchise). Plus, once I finish that, I’ll have the freshly released DLC to play, too. And the Kirby and the Forgotten Land expansion to play, too. Plus Final Fantasy Tactics (which comes out the day before this is scheduled to post) and then probably some other games after that. I’m going to really need to start splitting my time more if I’m going to play all these games! That, or focus down my Final Fantasy 14 stuff, wrap that up, and then take a break from it [which is where I’ve landed as of editing this the day before it posts]. Both are probably good ideas for my well-being, but the latter is growing more and more appealing as time goes on. Not because I’m not enjoying myself or anything, but because I’ve spent nine months sitting in my “office” (a walk-in closet) and it would be nice to spend some time in a more open sapce.
Continue readingI Finally Picked An In-Game Title For Myself In Final Fantasy 14
I’ve been making progress in the final (currently available) expansion of Final Fantasy 14 (Dawntrail) over my weekends lately, but I don’t really have a lot to say about it yet. There’s very little that has carried over from the previous chapters of the game, so I don’t have a building sense of what’s going on to discuss, and I’m only just starting level 94 quests (out of level 100), so I’ve yet to get to the midway point, much less what I expect to eventually be the inflection point or whatever twist might be coming. Things are just fine. They’re proceeding apace. I’ve reassessed my opinion of one of the main characters and am beginning to suspect so many people online seem to hate her because she’s a woman who is seen struggling with the mantle of potential leadership (I’m flashing back to how nonsensically people reacted to Keyleth of Critical Role’s first campaign) but I’m trepidatious given how many people react to that with something like “just wait” or “the story isn’t over yet.” Other than that, though, the only other noteworthy thing is that I’ve learned my favorite song from the expansion (so far) is called “Taco Delight” and I’m not sure how I feel about that beyond “mildly amused.” That’s fine, though. Most of my time and attention has gone to my various other activities: leveling crafting classes, working on leveling up my non-main combat jobs, doing side-quests with the job I’d set aside for that purpose, and doing high-end difficult content. The two raid series I’m still in, The Epic of Alexander (an “Ultimate”) and the Alexander Savage series (we’re now on A11S, the penultimate raid in the series), are what take up most of my extra time and attention since both require doing a bit of homework and preparation in the Savage series’ case and a LOT of homework in the Ultimate’s case.
Continue readingTEA Time In Final Fantasy 14
After finally clearing the Alexander 8: Savage (aka A8S) raid, the core of our Difficult Content group decided that we’re gonna go into Ultimates now. Specifically The Epic of Alexander (TEA) as chosen by a poll. We’ve proven our abilities on A8S and now we’re ready for the big time. We recruited two other experienced players to replace the two of our A8S group that weren’t interested in doing Savages, and spent a hectic weekend preparing for our first session as what I thought was a planning session for sometime in the more distant future shoved everything else aside in order to start on the one day everyone had available. Which means, as of writing this, our group is down to one weekly “Content Rewind” session since the Monday one was displaced by Ultimate practice and we’ve had our first session. Things went pretty well, as far as Ultimates go. We’re making slow progress as we adjust to the new level of demands placed on most of us, each time getting a little bit further or messing up on something new, but it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Probably because I’d doing DPS for this group rather than the healing I was doing in the other group, but it’s like any other raid at the end of the day: you study the mechanics, work on getting your part down, and slowly move forward as the group comes together. I do miss the added complexity of healing on top of all that–having a challenge to throw myself into that’s constantly fluctuating and will likely never become rote–but there were people in our group who don’t have the versatility of skillset that I do, so I knew from pretty early on that I wasn’t going to get the chance to heal.
Continue readingFinally Digging Into Side Content In Final Fantasy 14
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.
Continue readingFour Months Of Effort And Zero Regrets
Finally, after approximately four months of at least weekly (often twice-weekly until fairly recently) attempts, my group of Final Fantasy 14 Savage Raiders has cleared the raid we’ve been struggling with. The Burden of the Son (Savage), also known as “A8S” is now behind us and we can all claim a very specific and probably pretty useless expertise given how this expertise is tied to a nine-year-old fight. That said, Brute Justice (the name of the final boss of A8S) is infamous for being a difficult fight in the “Savage” tier of raids, often referenced as the prototype of what would eventually become the “Ultimate” tier of raids and clearing it without the Echo (which gives you a boost to damage and HP for every failure until clearing the raid is a given) is a fairly rare accomplishment often claimed only by most serious of raiders. Well, there’s also the “Minimum Item-level No Echo” (or MINE) variant that is truly the most difficult version of the Savage raid, but the thing that makes this raid special is that actually winning the fight isn’t that hard. What’s difficult is getting the mechanics perfect because anything less than that can either immediately result in a party wipe or start a slow spiral towards a party wipe as additional resources are needed, focus is drawn away from the mechanics, and things aren’t killed as quickly as we’d like (forcing the group to face more mechanics). Any kind of clear for a Savage raid is brag-worthy, but we’ve got a special claim beyond even clearing it with No Echo: we did it while it was (and still is, as far as I know) bugged.
Continue readingApt And Timely Metaphors In Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker
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 readingA 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.
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