i preordered Dawntrail and all i got was this stupid monkey. and earrings that give me +30% exp from battles, which is actually why i bought it because the rarest minion in the game won't get me to switch out my little owl. i'm normally adamantly against paying for any kind of advantage in games but if i'm gonna be buying the expansion anyway then whatever. also leveling jobs is so needlessly tedious for a game where the road to max level is really just treated like a tutorial

been on the hunt grind lately. it has become the sole reason i begrudgingly have a discord account, to be notified of big guys to kill. i was worried that when Dawntrail comes out then A-ranks in Shadowbringers areas will be too easy to take down in small groups, and it'll be hard to find trains to join to get the achievement/mount for it. even now occasionally when the train moves to the next mark it'll already be dead. got three months to kill 2,000 A-ranks man. 1,000 S-ranks will take way longer but i'm not worried about missing the boat on those

i used to join hunts occasionally during SB/ShB, but i was a little hesitant to get into it this week after remembering a postmortem i'd seen from someone who'd gotten the Endwalker hunt mount, and how totally hollow it'd made them feel by the end. maybe i'm in the honeymoon phase with the whole process but i feel there are way worse grinds. i'm having a good time. tons of people show up and joke around, some funny stories come out of it. re-reading it now and the whole thing was the guy specifically rushed to get it while it was the rarest mount, so upon realizing this i now say: the two-to-three-year casually-paced hunt is on babey

there are a loooot of Endwalker hunts posted and i'd be lying if i said it didn't make me wanna hurry up with the MSQ a teeny bit. recently i made the horrible mistake of learning that Endwalker is filled with references to optional side content, and that made me wanna suck this game dry before moving on so i could catch as much as i could. but now whatever dude i can look up that stuff online after the fact, i'd only be impatient while doing all that side content anyway

i even had a dream about being held back because i wasn't caught up. think i broke into someone's house or something and cut some wires of theirs, and i wanted to fix it but the ability to fix wires was learned in Endwalker so i couldn't do it? i don't know. pretty sure the dream was entirely FFXIV-free up until that point. also dreamed last night that Zenos got so powerful he modded the game into Tony Hawk's Pro Skater but that's a story for another time

shadows got brought last night. have a bad habit of getting too wrapped up in the MSQ and leaving myself with hundreds of screenshots to sift through before i sit down to write my journal. i've also just started working on a total redesign of my website which for whatever reason makes me feel slightly as if anything i write for the current version is Garbage, and Pointless. also i'm still standing around all day waiting for hunt notifications to pop up, which they often do, so i'm hardly ever giving myself time to actually sit down and write

it's funny, i remember when the Shadowbringers trailer came out and there was a scene where Urianger calls a hooded figure "Matoya", then her hood comes off and it's actually Y'shtola!! and it was like what da!!! what's goin on here...did Matoya take over her body or did Y'shtola slurp up Matoya's soul or is it the past and Matoya used to be a cute catgirl or what.... but actually it's just that Y'shtola decided to be called Matoya in this part of the game

maybe sacrilege but i've had enough of the Rak'tika music already, especially after frequenting this area during hunt trains. Y'shtola fakedies for the tenth time at this point and after every somber cutscene immediately it's la HEE. also i just learned that those vocals and melodies are actually from a sample pack Soken found, and now all i can think about is the fact it's some random woman singing gibberish, who might not even know what FFXIV is. my life-hee is a lie-hee

Shadowbringers has some real high highs but man how good would it be if they cooled it with the Chore Arcs. tell me why we just had to spend hours fixing a trolley. oh it's because the Eulmoran army is on the other part of the map and we didn't want them to see us, so aside from the many other ways we could have snuck by this tiny area this was the only way for us to sneak by this tiny area. and then after all that they were waiting for us on the tracks anyway so cool, glad i listened to a guy cry about his dead wife and kid for no reason. suck it up dude i lost Papalymo

coulda done without Ran'jit as well. he's definitely the nothingcharacter of this expansion and is way more of an obstacle than he should be. had to fight him as Thancred for like 15 minutes here, after which there's a cutscene that absolutely makes it look like Thancred dies? i mean i didn't want him to die. he does spend half the expansion taking out his trauma on some little girl and secretly hoping she'll sacrifice herself for Minfilia's sake so. i mean whatever you know. Ran'jit fight was rad though even if it was 15 freaking minutes long and i had four abilities

didn't remember that Emet-Selch founded the empire but absolutely remembered the part where i call Y'shtola mom and she threatens to spank me

Eulmore is a city, as they say. it's actually just a single fancy hotel. but then Vauthry sprouts wings and flies off (very funny) to "rebuild" his new paradise. as a rule dungeons are always much more believably-sized than the actual open-world zones and cities, but god in like, the span of a few hours? he apparently builds a gigantic, much bigger and fancier-looking place than Eulmore. then he gets hot somehow. just a weird part of the game but building the big stoneman was cool

in the second quest of the expansion there's a dialogue option to mention G'raha by name, and at that point it's pretty obvious he's the Exarch. he got those lips you think i couldn't tell. i like that he's technically a super old man by now and he has a very authoritive tone to his voice, but when the hood comes off and he starts talking about how much he loves me and how adventure i am he sounds like a wide-eyed kid again. he's my favorite. this scene has a dozen dramatic fantasy magic things happening but then Emet-Selch just walks in and shoots him with a gun

yes!! yes!!!! Shadowbringers starts doing some pretty cool Game things towards the end which i like. lame sniping segments not counted. they hiped up a segment called 3-D MineRunner that ended up just being zooming in to click on a guy

i looked ahead to see how many quests i had left and was surprised to see Amaurot took up so little time. i think it must have seemed like a long section last time because i didn't have flying unlocked and i wanted to talk to everyone in the city, so running around took forever. there's a pretty impressive amount of zone-wide changes in NPC dialogue after certain story events that i sometimes regret learning about because of the time it takes up in going to absorb it all, but i'm glad it's there. i'd bet maybe 1% of people saw some of it. go on ask me for exclusive lore on Fort Jobb Guard #9 i possess rare knowledge (i've forgotten most of it)

i went through the trouble of leveling my trust avatars thinking i'd be able to use them in the final dungeon and still earn exp for them (i wasn't). and also because of THIS scam

i'd heard i can unlock glamours for them. turned out to just be a couple preset outfits. dreams of running dungeons with Slutty Thancred broken and torn. wish i could take NPCs into trials as well because the build-up to the final fight is slightly spoiled when i gotta wait 20 minutes for a party, at that point i'd gladly welcome a sundering

right before he dies Emet-Selch pleads that he be remembered. would have loved the option to say "no one will remember you idiot, perish" but truth be told he was one of the best characters in the entire game so he'd be remembered regardless. and i'm stupid for this, i know i am. i try to be careful, but in fact-checking a specific detail i looked at his wiki page, and i squinted i really do squint to try to avoid unnecessarily spoiling myself. but i accidentally saw things. and all i can say for sure is it'll probably be difficult to forget him during Endwalker

it's late and i'm sleepy and this page has been long but man!! i really enjoyed bringing those shadows. almost can't believe i replayed this whole damn game. though now i'm in a weird spot, because i got up to 5.2 before starting new game+ and the next chapter is unlocked after completing 5.3. so all i can do is watch videos of the story up to this point, which will suck because i'll have to look at someone else's character (NOT canon), and they probably won't obsessively talk to every NPC like i do. plus last night when i tried to do this no Invidious or Piped instances were working so i was stuck being unable to reconvene with G'raha in any way (unbearable)