It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
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Feeling Ambivalent About The Switch 2
I don’t think I’ve ever felt as truly ambivalent about something as I do about the Switch 2. These days, the word gets used to mean “no strong feelings one way or another” or something similar that implies a certain amount of neutrality. The definition of the world does involve a degree of neutrality, which is where the confluence of meanings began, but it’s pretty specifically about a net neutrality as your mix of feelings about something essetially cancel each other out. All of which is a bit of a hair to split even for me, but I have never felt quite so strongly and truly ambivalent about something before in my life so it felt like the specificity was worth the pedantry. I mean, better that than to continue endlessly spinning my wheels about the unanswerable question of whether or not I want to get a Switch 2 any time soon. It’s a bit of a moot point as of writing this (not quite) a week ahead of time, given that all of the preorders have been consumed and, even faster than the original switch, everywhere has sold out, so it’s not like I need an answer right now. My current policy of “get one if it’s easy to acquire without going out of my way” will work just fine for this situation, so there’s really no need to religitate it all over again. But then again, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t always relitigating things in my head and then writing about them on my blog, would I?
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 readingFinal Fantasy 14’s Stormblood Is Full Of Big Ideas That Went Basically Nowhere
About a week ago, give or take a couple days because time is blurring together and I genuinely can’t remember how long it has been, I finished the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. I’ll freely admit that I went into it a bit miffed and resentful because I’d just finished a bunch of storytelling about other worlds, the loss of balance that had a world being swallowed by light rather than darkness, and the sacrifices we make to see our vision for the future come to pass. The game took all that interesting, intriguing storytelling that it had been building towards for quite a while and tossed it all aside to focus on a popular rebel who used charisma and emotional manipulation to gather an army he could sacrifice in order to summon a god to unleash on not just the empire that conquered his homeland years ago but every single conquered people between him and said empire, including his own people. He was clearly cast as the villain in this moment, creating and then betraying a grassroots rebellion, but the story didn’t sit super well with me because, out of all the characters I’d met, his general politics matched closest to my own and yet the game was constantly casting him as a villain. All of which was further complicated by the fact that he was one of the few people of color in the game and had come to represent the resentful refugee who was not content to live in squalor and take whatever scraps he could beg or steal to keep himself alive, often in wars that defied logic and actual revolutionary practice just so he could be horrible and villainous in a way that advanced the plot.
Continue readingAvoiding My Reflection In Wanderstop By Not Playing It
Back when I originally conceived of my post-work-project vacation, I realized it lined up with the release date of the game “Wanderstop,” a fact that tickled me to no end since Wanderstop is about burnout and I was (and still am) incredibly burned out. I thought it would be incredibly appropo if I played the game about burnout while recovering from my own, but that was before I got into Final Fantasy 14 and developed a bit of an dependence on the escapism it provides (since it has been my sole escape for three solid months as of this post going up). Still, one of my friends was interested in it and I was in a bit of a giddy mood since the game had come out, my project had released, and I was putting my break off for an unknown amount of time, so I decided to stream it for my friend over discord. I booted it up, started playing it, got through the stage-setting stuff at the beginning, and then promptly got my ass handed to me by the game as I played it like I’d play any game and it was absolutely prepared for me to do that in ways I didn’t fully expect. It all but called me out by name as I played it for an hour and a half, to the degree that I closed the game to go to bed that night and have been kind of afraid to open it again. It’s not every day that a game holds up a mirror for you to see a perfect reflection of yourself and I’ve been so mentally and emotionally fragile lately that I didn’t think I could risk it.
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 readingTaking A Day Off Final Fantasy 14 Against My Will
I might have a small problem. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV and while I haven’t lost control of my life, I’m still showing up for work, and I’m still attending to all my responsibilities, I am also absolutely at a loss for what to do with myself tonight (the day I’m writing this) while the game is down for its next major update (going from version 7.1 to 7.2). I mean, I’ve got stuff I could be doing and that I probably will wind up doing once I’m done here, but I am absolutely feeling adrift as I think about the fact that I can’t just keep playing FFXIV with all of my free time. Aside from a few planned breaks here or there, largely intended to take care of specific tasks or watch some Hunter x Hunter to prepare for the next episode of Media Club Plus, I haven’t taken a night off of playing Final Fantasy 14. I certainly haven’t avoided playing it any time I’ve WANTED to play it. Until tonight. Tonight, I’ve had to refocus myself multiple times as my mind has wandered off to think about what I’d like to do in the game. It’s been annoying. Minorly annoying, sure, but annoying all the same. It makes sense the game would need to be down for maintenance in order for them to update all the servers and everything (that’s a pretty monumental undertaking), but I still feel modestly frustrated by it as I’ve had to think about what to start spending my time on instead. I mean, I haven’t really started ANYTHING since I began playing Final Fantasy 14, other than Slay the Princess. Closest I’ve come aside from that was playing a bit over an hour of Wanderstop and I had to stop that because it was going to make it more difficult to keep myself working. Which, you know, is a pretty moot point right now given that I’ve taken the rest of the week (as of me writing this) off.
Continue readingFinding The Online Community I’ve Always Wanted in Final Fantasy 14
Last weekend (as of this post going live) was incredibly eventful for my little group in Final Fantasy 14. As I’ve been playing more and more over the last few months, I’ve gotten to know more and more of my Free Company (or guild, for those of you more familiar with other Massively Multiplayer Online games) as they’ve made me gear, helped me with quests, I’ve done work with/for them, and we’ve just hung out together. It’s been really nice, finding a community, learning people’s names, occasionally hanging out in voice chat, and just really digging into the social aspect of the game beyond running into random people around here (many of whom are very nice and not at all creepy: one of them gave me some free stuff the other day while I was working on a project near a market). Because of that and being a very active and friendly member of the tight-knit group, I’ve been getting involved in more and more stuff as time has gone on. I’ve always been a regular at the group’s wrestling outings, but I’ve done what I can to try to attend every single group event so that I can become a bit more emmeshed in the group before my friends, the couple who got me into the game at this particular moment in time, disappear for their delayed honeymoon. All of which amounts to me attending three roleplaying events with the group in a twenty-four hour period from Friday night to Saturday night. They were all a lot of fun, but that was a lot of socializing via text and, for part of it, voice chat, which left me drained. I don’t regret my choices, but I do wish I had a bit more of a social battery these days.
Continue readingLots Of Side Progress In Final Fantasy 14
I haven’t really posted much about Final Fantasy in the last two weeks, since my post about Capitalism finally getting me in Final Fantasy 14. I wrote about it tangentially a week ago, but that was mostly in the context of working a long day from home, but I haven’t really written about the game and its story. Mostly because I wound up letting myself get incredibly side-tracked over the past few weeks–long enough that I’m not exactly sure how long it has been. Instead of focusing on the MSQ (Main Scenario Quests), I’ve been working on a bunch of side-content and leveling up my skill-based jobs. I helped rebuild a city that was actually rebuilt years ago (the costs of running through old game content years after it was released), helped a bunch of people settle into a post-war life, visited a fantastical floating island chain that provides a specific type of resources used only in building and maintaining the aforementioned rebuilt city, and used the bonuses from that to drastically boost my own abilities. I also attended another Roleplaying Wrestling event, did a “Savage” raid, wrapped up a tiny bit of the MSQ so I could start the next expansion, and built myself an entire set of crafting gear so I could say I’d done it. As you can see, it’s not like I’ve stopped playing the game. Even when I deviated from this to play other games (more on that next week), I used the nights I’d normally take off from the game to do that. I have stopped spending as much time on capitalistic gain, though, just because I don’t really have anything to spend the money on yet and have been trying to use my evenings a bit more specifically.
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).
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