So last week I decided to start playing Final Fantasy XIV again. I deleted some characters I made last year in the midst of the COVID lockdown game bonanza I fell into during that summer, and then basically rerolled the same character: a Duskwight Elezen Arcanist who is very tall. I’m currently sitting at Lvl. 30 on that Arcanist job role and I suspect that I only just now have fully left the tutorial. That’s probably not even true but I’m going to tell myself that just to feel better.
Final Fantasy XIV is getting its final major expansion this year with Endwalker, and I don’t think I’m going to be anywhere near able to play it when it comes out. That’s because I refuse to use any in-game item that moves me forward artificially. I want to grind the game out, for some stupid reason, despite not realistically having the adequate time to do so.
Maybe I think that I should be having the same experience that every other player had, even though the in-game item that lets you move forward artificially is a perfectly valid item to use for anyone who doesn’t want to fuck with roughly 400 hours of video game just to get to the part of the video game everyone else is sitting at.
All of this is basically to say, I will be fucking around in the Shroud south of New Gridania for 57 years while y’all are experiencing wizards on the moon, and this is the life I’ve chosen for myself. I’ll still play all the way through Endwalker, too; it just might be in 2023 before I get there.
As far as any developed takes go, I don’t really have any. The game has been refined to a knife’s edge at this point, I’m not juggling too much with a bunch of random systems, and it feels good to play. I haven’t gotten far enough into the story to make any judgments on narrative quality, but I’m enjoying the dialogue so far. I’m having a perfectly pleasant time in the first stage of an MMO that will most definitely have many, many more twists and turns quality-wise.
Anyway, video games.