zephie's game journals
*stretching* ahhh time for my second day in Vana'diel, what adventures shall await me today
oh, void! unable to walk no matter what i do or where i teleport. have to exit the game and PlayOnline to return to the mortal coil. couldn't find anything online about this but cool to know that it can just happen
obligatory first death memorial. i was doing what i assumed was a very low-level baby quest that told me to "check the walls" in this area. turns out there were multiple identical walls near each other, one that progresses the quest and one or more that thrust me into a high-level deathcave where i am hit for three times my total health. luckily i'm playing this game in 2023 and not 2002 which means i only lost about ten minutes of progress and not, as i've heard, a full year of progress and the game hasn't even been out a year
me going back to open a different hidden wall, seeing "Executioner" (sorry exexecutioner) and getting scared again, not realizing it's another player
i was level 16 at this point, and i just respawned here after dying in Tahrongi Canyon
look i complain about fast travel sometimes. but this is an MMO where the maps are needlessly big with nothing to do in them but fight monsters. this is the first time i'm actually making extensive use of an autorun button, because of the apparent long initial slog of unlocking the different fast travel systems. i only died here because after a long trek to a new fast travel point i didn't have the money to afford it. i didn't know know where i or the closest town was, and the enemies were just getting progressively higher-leveled
i am running into many graphical problems i wouldn't be so unenthused about dealing with if restarting the game to test different settings didn't take so long. dudes go in and out of existence rapidly right as i'm about to try to talk to them, almost like it's on purpose... i haven't had any player interactions yet so i hope NPCs aren't trying to avoid me as well
just in case i will consult this floating "chat manual" that actually just gives general social advice
just moved in and i already have a rat problem
what...is my new job exactly
they got tired coming up with stupid speech quirks for these guys so they just went flanders with it
alright i got stuck in the void again and the game has been too slow-paced for me to care to deal with it right now. i know it's an MMO and all and thus by law is required to limit how interesting its quests are, but one it just had me do, i think the second "main"(?) (i have no idea how the quest/mission progression in this game works) mission? i had to go to a dungeon where everything looks the same and is way too spread out, run around in literal circles putting six orbs into different orb holes, activate a switch, run around again and take the orbs out of the orb holes, watching an orb cutscene every time i handle an orb, and also some of the orb holes are behind hidden orb walls, but not every hidden orb wall
maybe i was supposed to do it at a much lower level so the enemies would have made it marginally more interesting? because i'm level 16 and when i examine them it says they're too low-level and i wouldn't even get experience from killing them. i have to assume this is the case and that a lot of the suspiciously large XP rewards i'm getting for things are just catch-up mechanics. when i read about how much faster leveling is now than 20 years ago i think, good, i am not made of time like i was as a child, now i would just like to play a video game please. but i'm starting to suspect a lot of the enjoyment of the game might be spoiled by things being easier, because now that i think about it most of what i've heard about the Fun Parts of the game had to do with the difficulty of it. but i just did a couple quests that were very easy and boring that's all i'm basing this off of, hell i don't even know if i had to do those quests. i still don't know what i'm doing. i will wait until i have somewhat of an idea of what this game is before declaring "game too easy". or until my subscription runs out whichever comes first