This is what it feels like to be a drug addict. Once again I have gone into the rabbit hole that is known as Final Fantasy XI, and I literally have no excuse. Joining me this time on my drug addled delve into this shit hole are Haud and Maestro, who promise more excitement than a school girl on prom night. We also resurrected that red pearl of awesomeness known as ChocobusMaximus while we were at it. And I can say in all confidence after my first week back, that this game is as addictive as ever. Why the hell should you get stuff done when you could just idle in Jeuno all day looking for shouts for some notorious monster that no one is ever going to shout in a million years. But if they actually do, oh boy am I going to upgrade my axe to the +1 axe of asssplitting. Whatever, my point is that this game is still actually pretty fun. Logging on as a mid-level 80 beast master I immediately started working on some of my Magian weapons which proved to be both a huge time sink, and oddly attractive. That is the general idea of this game though: general disgust on the surface of idea, but then somehow it's fun in practice. I don't even know.
I feel it
So far our adventure has just underlined the serious issues that the game suffered from prior to both the raise of the level cap, and the removal of level requirements for missions. How the fuck did anyone do the Zilart missions before the quality of life updates? Seriously I want to know, someone tell me. We spent a few hours farming some fucking torches or lanterns or something, and then when we got to the boss, which was 3 tonberries, they housed Haud within a minute of the fight starting, and quickly turned their sights on me. Got out of that one by the skin of our teeth. We're also working on the CoP missions which are a clear improvement over their Zilart counterparts, both in narrative style, and mission execution. Well, I need to make myself clear on this matter: CoP sucked balls before the level cap restrictions were removed too. But at least we didn't have to run around finding fucking lanterns for the CoP missions! YEAH FUCK YOU ZILART. I don't even know whats going on in Zilart, I'll be honest with you. There's some crazy shit going on, but I have no idea what it is. Fucking ghosts and shit.
Quality of life~
While I'm ranting about quality of life, can you believe that those motherfuckers at SE went ahead and made it so that you could reduce the size of the god damn chat box? I'm not even kidding when I say that we flipped a shit when we found this out. There was actually a moment of silence from amazement when we discovered this feature. The SE that I knew back in the day would never have allowed such a thing to pass. You would have used the huge, clumsy ass chat box made for a 600x500 resolution and been happy about it. Thank your Japanese game developing masters, you insolent mortals! But now the development team has decided to do shit like this. They also reduced the timer for 2-hour abilities down to 1-hour. Which means that I can no longer call them 2-hour abilities. What the fuck is that? How am I supposed to erase a decade of saying "2-hour ability"? Hey bro, I'm going to activate my 2....My 1 hour ability. THANKS SE.
I know that sometime during the course of writing this I had a point. Oh yes: this shit is actually really fun. And I'm greatly looking forward to the release of the expansion pack, which drops next month sometime. Also going back and doing the old content is pretty cool. Yay
