it took five days on customer support with Square Enix for me to get access to this game. the registration code required to make an account is only sent to you via a single email at the time of purchasing it from the SE store, and there's no way to change the email address on your account. both strange decisions that i imagine get them a lot more support tickets than necessary. i said this to them too, i'm just trying to help make your jobs easier dude, in case you hadn't yet realized how bad your account systems are

this is not even to mention PlayOnline which everybody says sucks to use but is apparently so deeply baked into FFXI's code at this point that Square is too scared to try to amputate it. fortunately all its added headaches are made up for by its vibes being unmatched. how i yearn to have experienced this on a PS2. this is the music of playing on-line

this warning used to be in FFXIV but they took it out. i guess they have a desire now

all the male characters have epic warriorhero background music and all the female characters have sexy sex music. i'm in awe

i wonder how he's doin. u know

this is the worst character creation menu ever dude i'm trying to see the different facial options but? they just carry on with their animations?? camera moves around showing them doing flips n whatnot girl can i please LOOK at you

all the randomly generated Mithra names are suspiciously close to Zephie?? it's either Eiphieh, Eephize, Fefephihe, Epipen, or Skuunkyafunanpyakafa

alright i'm pretty sure it's doing it based on my PlayOnline name

The Begins

i cannot wait to get into gameplay so i can (hopefully) separate the NPC dialogue from the endless market chat are you kidding me

there's gotta be a plugin that makes these guys talk normal

and me

i like when an enemy drops a number guessing game chest that takes a full minute+. haven't decided if this is sarcastic yet, maybe when i find out if the loot i get is good or not. is "linen" good

the transition screen to an area i'd already been to randomly played i think an opening cutscene for a new storyline? at least not as bad as FFXIV showing a cinematic of a character death* upon opening the game for the first time if you have an expansion installed

me: ok computer, search for help articles on turning off XP messages

square: nothing found for that. here's homophobia though. is this good

closed the game to troubleshoot framerate problems so i will use this time to get down first hour-ish-maybe-two thoughts. uhhh controls are from the 1600s but honestly i prefer everything being neatly packed into menus over having 50 different icons on my screen at all times. this feels like a very slow game that would be cool and chill to play with a controller, especially because those framerate problems are apparently often caused by the game looking for a controller that's enabled but not plugged in, and i did not even have it enabled so i am just going to not bother dealing with that. i need to spend time configuring the log window because it is bad, there are too many nothingmessages and they are tedious to navigate. someone could have been asking me if i wanted to be their best Final Fantasy friend (my real reason for playing this game) but i didn't see it because the game was telling me my evasion level went up by 0.2 points after every hit and that i made progress in the quests 'kill 10 enemies', 'kill 50 enemies', 'kill 100 enemies' and 'kill 200 enemies'

*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