zephie's game journals
i am level 50 in ninjing now. holding off on going into the 3.0 job quests for now, my time to meet with these characters again shall come soon enough (if some ninja in Ishgard don't take their place). i think i still preferred the Rogue questline, although Ninja's did have some bigger implications for the overall lore which was interesting. for i think the first time i made a glamour plate because the gear reward looks goofy and i didn't want to look like that in the final ARR cutscenes
i don't think i ever replayed the final dungeon and fights for ARR. i just remember they very geniusly had half an hour of cutscenes, in a dungeon, that i play with other people, who are able to skip the cutscenes. they've apparently since made the cutscenes unskippable which i wish i'd known because i'd like to have done it with other players in that case. the dungeon and bosses were also reworked and split up it turns out, to make the whole thing less unbelievable that they would do this in a multiplayer game. it's funny looking at the FFXIV wiki that now calls the Ultima Weapon fight "Endwalker content" since it's now its own trial. i was confused at first because i kept getting first-time completion bonuses, like damn i know i don't remember it much because i never replayed it due to the cutscenes but you're telling me i got all the way to Shadowbringers and forgot to kill that thing? ooops
rebirthed the realm and it wasn't as painful as i was expecting. the 2.0 story isn't bad, it's just largely expository and uneventful. reiterating that i can't really speak on how sloggy a slog it is for new players since i had teleports and flying unlocked. and while they got rid of a lot of the nothingquests, they only really did so for the ones that had absolutely nothing important going on, leaving behind a lot of nothingquests that were if only 20% plot-relevant
i didn't need the long stretch of quests about collecting wine just because it had important dialogue scarcely sprinkled in. and god the "corrupted crystal" quests - i need crystals, so i do some quests for someone to obtain them, but ohhh i didn't mention they had to be wind-aspected not some other element, so back to square one doing quests for someone else and then the same thing happens Whoops wrong element again! it's very clear how much they needed to get a new MMO out and had no idea how long the storyline would end up going for
my character's literal plot armor is a lot thicker than i remember it. a lot of people like the story over other MMOs' because of how important your actual youself is to the plot, but i wish it wasn't so much due to being the most chosenest of chosen ones, where god will start whispering in my ear during unequivocally certain death and suddenly nothing phases me. i'm sure it goes into how stuff works more in-depth later on or in lorebooks to make it not seem like every threat is actually not a threat because i can just go godmode. also i forgot how much not voice acting there used to be. and how much Alphinaud sucks in the beginning
very funny to refer to the people who played your bad discontinued video game as "survivors"
saved da world....now i spend the resta my day fishin... absurd amount of fish to catch in this game. and looking through the later-level abilities things start to get crazy. i'm excited to learn fishing tech... this game uses made-up units of measurement so i'll catch something and it'll say "70 ilms!" and i'll still be like Whoaa
i feel intimidated getting into crafting and gathering skills because it's so involved. it's not just "click this to make this if you have the materials to make this" there are actual rotations and it's wild. also because of how much gear there is and how fast i out-level it, then i feel the need to clean up my inventory due to all the babygear, but then i'll switch to another crafter/gatherer class and i won't have any of that babygear i now need again. out of not wanting to clog up my inventory with gear to accomodate for every other level when switching between classes i'll usually just power through with the way-too-babygear until i'm relatively caught up to other classes, since they level up pretty quickly anyway
yesterday i woke up itchin' to be back on da lake. i found a 200-page book online on all things fishing in this game and it reminded me just how much of this game i've yet to experience, and it got me really excited. unfortunately that excitement didn't translate well to the patience needed for fishing and i quickly got bored and moved on. although one thing that does make fishing more exciting is how wildly the experience gains vary between catches
also what was disappointing was finding out the class quests didn't really have a story like the combat jobs, and they apparently stopped doing them after Stormblood. maybe for the better - i'm often pulled out by how immediately NPCs are ready to tell me i'm an unbelievable master of the trade i picked up a couple hours ago. every class questline is like this and i don't need those kinds of expectations tensing my nerves out on the docks. the fish can sense that
the "Forestbreaker" title i have is from an unreasonable mind-numbing mining grind i did years ago, specifically because i liked the title (it's for mining like seven thousand times in the Black Shroud). my desire to "experience this game in order", against my own best efforts, is extending to completionism as well. i thought if i'm gonna attempt to fish 'em all, i should finish off minin' em all first since i'm so much further along with that. i plugged in a controller, lied on my bed and ran to different rocks for an hour while watching TV, until i couldn't bare how pointless it all felt - i wouldn't have even felt that bad if i was only watching TV. i just don't think i can shake the feeling of, i've done enough of this in games, throughout my life. i should be able to show Square the full year of playtime i've amassed in RuneScape and they'll give me those titles and achievements anyway
i needed some genuinely interesting experiences to pull me out of that little existential pit i fell into briefly, and luckily that's when i discovered this exists? i knew i could find treasure maps - i did not know that at the end of one it can open up a portal that sends me to a treasure dungeon. it was exciting enough despite me dying immediately due to not heeding its recommendation of an 8-player party. i just wanted to poke my head through see what was going on
