zephie's game journals
ughg. Black Mage is done with for now. my cutting back on this game very fortuitously coincided with leveling the first class i've actively disliked playing. in terms of grinding i haven't been logging on to do much every day besides daily roulettes. i'm not a fan of the awkward MP management mode-switching, having to stay still all the time, and the being useless in dungeons because everything dies before my spells go off and i can't re-target in the middle of casting
the Umathurman class questline with the nugget people ended up being quite enjoyable actually, but man i did not care about the Black Mage story. load of boring fantasy prophecybabble that i'll probably read about in the lorebook at some point and find way more interesting, not realizing it was all stuff i tuned out in-game because i just wanted to be done with the job
awesome sex with a black guy joke final fantasy
ohh mann ahh i guess i'll have to hang up my staff. that's too bad
uhhh i passed 5000 achievement points. i guess that's something to write about it, although the number ultimately doesn't mean anything because individual point values are all out of whack. some super easy achievements will give 30 to 40 points and insane multiple-year-long grinds will give 10 to 20. kinda makes you wonder what the point of them is, or achievements in general. or any kind of video game grind. or playing video games at all. weeell i'm gonna get started on Paladin
so i figured out something. every week there's a fashion challenge, which ultimately amounts to looking up what specific gear i have to wear for maximum results. people figured out you had to wear these Best Man's Slacks this week so i went to buy them on the market, but they were a little expensive so i looked up if there was another way to get them. apparently i could buy them for less than half the price from an NPC......this can't possibly work can it
it did lmao. granted i only made like 400k overall the past couple days because the market competition became a hassle to keep up with, but that's no small amount for me, who is probably many months away from being able to make serious money due to my snail's-pace Chronology Quest
it's the game('s relaunch)'s tenth anniversary today! and to celebrate there's a new event that takes me down memory lane to look back on how horribly designed the raids have been over the years. so there's a bunch of items to collect in exchange for a currency that's rewarded for doing Alliance Raids. i don't think i've ever replayed one of these raids and i was immediately reminded why
i took a lot of videos of random deaths and i honestly could not decide which one looked most confusing. they're all pretty bad, and there were a lot of them
i did "The Orbonne Monastery" first off. at the start it's already overwhelming but whatever, it's cool there's a boatload of people here wailing on mobs until my screen's an incomprehensible glaucomic mess, it's some trash so it doesn't matter. then there are the bosses - ok, i think, this game's boss fights are usually unreasonably cryptic but considering how many people are involved and how unreadable the visuals are i'm sure they'll dumb it down. well it's definitely dumber but not in that sense
i just kind of tried to follow where bigger groups of people were going and hoped i wouldn't get hit with one of the thousand insta-death mechanics that aren't telegraphed whatsoever. what confuses me most is, this whole thing is clearly a spectacle. yet i am required to look everything up and spoil it all for myself beforehand, lest i blow the whole thing for 20+ people, and i'm pretty sure i was responsible* for a few people's insta-deaths at one point. even if i knew what to do like i'd be able to tell when to do it anyway. i could not imagine going into this as a healer, i will never have that kind of confidence for anything, including breathing
i tried a raid from a different series to see if they were all like that and yeah they are. at one point i turned into a rock and suddenly i was the only person alive in my party. oops?
i'm now looking at guides for some of these fights to better understand the incredibly intuitive mechanics. a couple of my favorites so far are: a guy is about to shoot you, a barrier with an opening appears around you, aim the opening towards him and not the actual barrier or else you will die, if you aim the opening towards him you will only almost die, making it seem like not the right thing to do. you know the universal "don't stand here" AoE marker that has been used for every fight in the game so far? how about a literal funny trick gotcha mechanic where instead, that's the place you do stand. at least these ones are telegraphed, in a way
another method of earning this event currency was through PvP, and i guess this is it. i guess after seven or eight years this is when i finally try out PvP in this game. i think i can safely say that was the most confused i've ever been playing a video game. the mode i tried was Rival Wings, and i did look through a guide quickly to try to get the gist of things beforehand. it's a 48-player gamemode so i figured a lot of newcomers are gonna be trying out PvP for this event, i'll be far from the only person not 100% sure of what to do. i was 100% not sure of what to do
i spent the whole game aimlessly running around trying to attack anything i could find. eventually when the match ended and it showed some base crystal nexus tower thing exploding i had no idea if i was about to see the word victory or defeat. it was a victory, and i'm retiring from Rival Wings undefeated
been playing the 72-player Frontline mode instead which is much simpler but also looks like this a lot of the time
considering also retiring from this mode un-undefeated. not that it's reasonable to take 72-player games seriously, but it's obviously definitely all my fault that the team i'm on always loses. played enough to get the important event reward anyway
