whoda thought an incredibly tedious event fate grind would be the thing to get me back in da game!! just a week ago the thought of playing this at all would have me groanin. i'm consciously trying to get better at being capable of caring about more than one thing at a time, because for a good couple months it was solely this, then i took a break to start building my website and it became that instead, and i didn't even want to touch FFXIV. of course now isn't the best time to put this into practice because as of right now i have two days until servers go down to launch the expansion, so this will probably become the One Thing for a while

i spent the past weekend doing the main story and i won't lie it's been kinda boring. i saw a lot of people say it wasn't very good and i feared that meant like, destructively bad. no it's just uninteresting. this is unrelated but hey do you guys remember FFIV. haha gotcha it is related because that's pretty much what these patches have been! instead of relegating the nauseating amount of fanservice to side content they decided to make it part of the main story as well

dude's face looks terrible, and he gets far too many close-ups. all Au Ra faces look bad without exception but him especially. sorry if you play an Au Ra and this is how you find out your character looks stupid

at least they started giving Vrtra a more tolerable guy form, presumably because he becomes a support NPC for dungeons and they didn't wanna make new combat animations for a child body. or just have a small child in combat now that i think about it

so we've been hanging out in the void but we're still calling the creatures here "voidsent". they are not voidSent they are just In the void. Finalfantasyfoursent would be a more apt name

something i thought was cool (at first): after completing a dungeon during the story they now become an Area. whoa! then i remember all dungeons are just linear paths and i'm frequently asked to run back and forth between ends of them and it becomes tedious. but it's something new they're doing and that alone gets me weirdly excited for whatever Dawntrail has in store. of course "something new" very often turns out to be something lame (sniper segments, stealth missions) but still. change!

only played up to the end of 6.4 currently but jury's still out on whether i care about Zero. immediately i was tired of her when she started saying things like "friend...what does this word mean" uhhghhgh. and her hat tipping animation she does every minute, i have started laughing out loud whenever it happens. the Thirteenth equivalent to the Head Nod of the Source

i'd heard the legends. the tales, of the Estinien Workout Scene. i'm going to be honest i got my hopes up too much. i recalled a few years ago the FFXIV social media posted art of Estinien working out and it was a wacky day of silly people acting goofy. but i think it's the game's graphics man, maybe i will have to revisit it after the graphical update. doesn't help that his facial model makes it look like he's doing a peewee herman smile half the time

got up to the final boss of 6.5 and--

detour!! my item level isn't high enough for the trial, and the only way for me to get up to speed in time is by doing the Myths of the Realm raids first. took my catboyfriend G'raha on a date to the "phantom realm" which is a thing apparently, to which a portal has suddenly opened up. much like when i first heard about "the Hydaelyn fight" and thought what the hell are you talking about, when i first heard about "the [one of the Twelve] fight" i too thought, what in the seven hells are you talking about

and another healthy reminder that going into raids blind is not worth it in the slightest. for real on top of everything else this time they took a telegraph marker that historically 100% of the time has meant "stand as far away from this as possible", and said actually now you're supposed to stand on top of it haha gotcha!! had me seriously reconsidering things with regards to this game being my One Thing. just know i cut this paragraph down a considerable amount because i realized, you know it's been 34 pages, people know. zephieheads they know my plight with this game

not sure how i feel about this questline so far. been sorta rapidly erasing all mystery in this world over the past expansion which really has me wondering how Dawntrail will stack up. it is interesting though, moreso than the main story has been recently. i will be expecting a refund for the first Encyclopedia Eorzea volume as much of the information is now outdated/disproven

when i see g'raha

got up to the final raid and wouldn't you know it. Following requirements not met: Avg. Item Level: 625. then i remembered it's tomestone reset day!! i went on a couple hunts, and finishing off the last reset hunt of the expansion in Ultima Thule with that music playing well it hit a little. it's been an honor whacking big monsters with you all. but eventually i got impatient and just bought a new weapon it was like 200k whatever

i enjoyed these raids, at least the last two when i looked up what to do beforehand. didn't really like the ending though! the whole time they're building up "you must own us in battle and then we will tell you a biiig big secret" and it turns out the secret is that they all have decided to die. in the span of a short questline we find out the pantheon is real and then we fight them and they're not anymore. i get why did they did it but i can't help but feel they got done dirty, so suddenly after all these years

too much of the ending was focused on Deryk. i was already a little tired of the "chronically lonely guy learns how to be friendship" stuff with Zero but it was a lot sillier here. twelve-thousand-year-old god dude has a couple conversations with me, fights me, then decides not to die with all the other gods because he came to learn how cool and chill mortals and our world is, then we go on a long dramatic walkentalk together. didn't even like the guy. i liked his little monkey

anyway back to finishing FF4, where the final boss had an attack called Nostalgia. honestly i feel like this storyline should've been fleshed out into its own expansion? they added a bunch of new instanced areas anyway. i guess Endwalker kind of set crazy standards for what constitutes an expansion though, since we went to greece, then india, then russia, then the moon, then heaven. god what a ride it's been. Cylva and Unukalhai got totally swept under the rug here and it had me wanting to yell at my screen but i suppose that's what they get for being sidequest characters, even though Gaia gets to show up

yeah yeah Wuk Lamat shows up she's very hot and all what do you mean "YOUR" next great adventure. i'm going to grab this dude by the ear and take him along with me no matter what, i SAW him eating big fat tacos big fat tacos in the dawntrailer do not toy with me. also i like that at the end of 6.55 there's a monatge of different characters making plans to head to Tural and for Estinien it's just him suddenly deciding "hm i think i will travel west" independent of everyone else. just a few cutscenes earlier he was talking about how "you can't force an adventure you just gotta let it happen"

i'm caught up.....for the first time since 2015 i am finally caught up on this stupid game, just in time. can they delay the expansion a few more days i'd like to savor this a little more. this is where i admit that everything before this point actually happened last night, the servers are currently down. i was too busy reveling in it to talk about it

i cut my morning workout short to log on before maintenance and just hang out a while. looked for the Scions around Sharlayan. organized a group hug with G'raha. see u in two days buddy