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