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call me a storyline introduced in patch 4.1 of the critically-acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV because it's time for my Return to Ivalice. took a break for a month because i was incredibly unemployed and stoned most of the time and whenever i tried to play i would struggle with being on the first part of the game that required brainpower. i remember exactly what's going on with the plot though don't worry, word on the street is the Imperial Senate was dissolved due to their powerlessness to resist House Solidor's brutal purge and thus Vayne Solidor reigned supreme over the Empire

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immediately following Chop Quest i infiltrated Draklor Laboratory, a real fun "puzzle" dungeon with switches that toggle which set of doors stays open while my minimap is obfuscated. i would not have been able to deal. i like that it was described in-game as something only workers who were "intimately familiar" with the lab's security systems would be able to navigate, Dr. Cid man your staff might also be getting high on the clock. anyway i may be appoaching the point towards the end of a Final Fantasy game where it gets annoying as the minimap fuzzying happened again elsewhere shortly after

i now have every gambit available to me for no reason other than it was a list of things to collect, and i'm real close to unlocking every license for each character. i'm at a point where i can kinda sorta afford whatever i see in a shop that has me making grabby hands, but i've also been selling things willy-nilly without regard for whether they'll be needed later for an ultimate weapon or something. don't know how hard this game goes with that kind of thing, don't care (a lie)

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giruvegan activism sidequest at the fishing town

this is the first entry i'm writing after zephie.net went live. hello all new readers this is my game twelfth fantasy that i made, here i'll be showing you around and what to do to win the crystal and beat the game. you'll have to give me a couple hours first to run around in circles figuring that out for myself as i fear i may in fact be deep into the aforementioned annoying part of the game

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i pressed the action button to interact with objects that ostensibly do something until eventually that didn't work anymore so i looked up what to do next. had to summon a guy which fine, i didn't consider that because i've never felt the need to do it so far, but i might be overleveled. summons are more cool guys for me to collect than things to make use of. it's just funny scrolling down this walkthrough past the part where it goes into great detail on how to defeat the boss before this point. i pressed L1 and my guys tore it down while the benny hill theme played

should've kept that walkthrough open. i'm going to again give the game the benefit of the doubt and guess that i was given some kind of hint that i needed to rub my face against this specific wall in this massive maze dungeon to get a magicpath to appear. i will not be extending that courtesy to the section that followed, which was like one of those terrible Pokémon gyms with the teleporter rooms but also every room looks exactly the same and there's no map. and to add onto the hard times i'm having i've pretty much lost the plot by this point

truly they don't. did the story just continue happening in the month i wasn't playing who are these angry ghosts

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awesome string of hidden traps right before the save point. whoever at square decided to do this to the player what's up buddy do you need to talk

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i ascended this entire tower and didn't understand it at all. luckily my strategy of just interacting with random things until something happens continued to serve me well, for the most part. i swear i touched an altar that played a way too long cutscene of it glowing just to then tell me "sike now you can't use weapons", then i said wait no and touched it again to reverse it, and that for some reason triggered opening up the path forward i'd been trying to figure out for ten minutes

i actually got game over a few times in this dungeon. mostly because i'd be banished to a monster die room for failing another trial-and-error teleporter section, for which i used a guide yet still had to trial-and-error at the end because of how good this game gets towards the end. then the boss would get my party down with Disease (an ailment i'd heard of; very nasty) so i added in a gambit to cure it. just periodically setting a gambit that accounts for a new status ailment whenever i notice it cropping up often has carried me through the main story

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very occasionally i'll feel the need to use a limit break, as a last resort. still not sure i understand how they work, only because being made to sit through several minutes of consecutive attack animations and it not always resulting in an instant KO has me thinking i'm doing something wrong, because why would they do it like that. why is Knights of the Round in FF7 always brought up for how long it takes when Quickenings exist

that absolutely wasn't what i expected the camera zoom out to reveal

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Cid the XIIth is dead, he did some stuff with a bad stone feat. an angry ghost and now Bahamut is apparently a thing i can fight go, to fight people not named Bahamut. it's the end of the game! the point of no return! i am not going to Bahamut just yet, instead i'm gonna break out a guide to all the available sidequests and hunts and try to knock out as much as i can while every NPC in the world has scared dialogue. i'm also going to look up a story summary before i leave, not that "bad stone stuff feat. an angry ghost" isn't a sufficient understanding of what's going on

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party check-in. take a good look Bahamut people on Bahamut because when i come for you those numbers are gonna be somewhat higher. should've probably taken a look at the equipment screen instead actually that's gonna be the bigger glow-up. so far i've only done a couple sidequests and maybe three hunts so scrolling down this big list of side activities has me excited/scared. excited to have to actually engage with the combat system, scared that maybe there's a reason i'm almost at the end of this "60-hour game" after only around 30 hours