Oh yeah, I still have a blog huh. Lets just assume I was so wrong about Digimon Adventure: in that last post that I had to take 4 years off to recover.

Earlier this year, after many years of procrastinating, I finally made the jump and gave Final Fantasy XI a try. It’s one of those games I always definitely intended to play and have been very definitely going to get to at some point for at least a decade because time is fake. With the announcement of the crossover raid series in XIV this expansion the pre-expansion lull seemed like the obvious time to do it. With that in mind (and after another couple of months of not actually getting around to it) I picked up the game at the end of May with the intent to see how far I could get in a month and maybe continue on later. In total I played actively for about 4 months (with a gap in the middle because an XIV expansion happened or something) and completed all the main expansion storylines up to the game’s original “final update” Rhapsodies of Vana’diel. I lost momentum with the game in the last few weeks and have let my sub drop for now but I wanted to at least collect my thoughts on a game I put a lot into and got a lot out of for a while. This post is largely just a rambling, self-indulgent series of loose thoughts on my time with the game. Which fits because “rambling and self-indulgent” are some of the ways I would describe Final Fantasy XI. I’ll go roughly in the order I experienced things in but I wasn’t taking notes or anything so it’s going to be a bit scattershot.

I should also probably acknowledge a couple of things which coloured how I experienced the game. Firstly, modern day FFXI is blatantly a compromised vision. The game at its peak does not exist anymore and it’s not really possible to get that “authentic Final Fantasy XI Experience™” everyone you know who played the game in 2008 will hark back to nostalgically. The simple necessity of there being less players and generally shifting attitudes to how much an MMO can get away with disrespecting your time mean a lot of the edges have been sanded off over the years. Travel is relatively easy with cheap and fairly easy to access fast travel options for most places (with some notable exceptions). Levelling is far far quicker than all the old guides you’ll inevitably stumble across with their horror stories about crabs make it sound like. You can play through most of the story content solo (with some notable exceptions) thanks to the slightly janky but still pretty solid Trust system.

On that note, secondly, I intentionally played the game wrong by actively avoiding interacting with other players outside of the auction house. While the game definitely has been made more solo friendly it is still an MMO and there were situations where I could in theory have been teaming up with other players that I’d largely just dodge or grind around. Partly this was just logistical, I basically never saw anyone recruiting for anything that wasn’t Ambuscade or Dynamis Divergence and even that was some relatively spare shout chat when I was in town. I assume everyone uses Discord or the like to coordinate outside the game nowdays but I did not investigate further since solo play was the intent anyway. The other reason was that I didn’t want to be wasting people’s time. Since most of the stuff I could have used a party for was years out of date it’d inevitably lead to me being carried by people and I didn’t want to ask people to go out of their way when I always intended to bounce sooner or later because I just do not have time to be playing multiple MMOs long term.

Thirdly: I barely scratched the surface of this game. Even in a third of a year of playing I only got through the major storylines and still left a whole lot of stuff untouched. I only played MNK/WAR any meaningful amount, never touched a lot of the obsolete side content, didn’t do any of the non expansion side scenarios beyond the first couple of quests in a Crystalline Prophecy, never entered Abyssea beyond the intro quest and didn’t touch Dynamis or any of the current endgame stuff beyond Domain Invasion and some dabbling in Ambuscade. There’s so much built up Stuff in FFXI that I just couldn’t get to a lot of it before I fell off. Maybe someday I’ll go back and see more of it though. This means there are bits I just did not see and I’ll probably have made some assumptions about things which actually did happen in bits of the game I didn’t get to With all that lengthy preamble out the way lets get to my actual experiences with the game.

Early days.

I started out in Windurst because I was playing a Tarutaru and also to hang out with Shantotto (I did not get to hang out with Shantotto for a long while). I then spent the whole first session not actually leaving town and just running around getting lost and talking to people. In hindsight Windurst might actually be the worst of the main cities to start in just because of how spread out everything is and the Waters map split making it a bit overwhelming to navigate when you’re still figuring out the controls.

Once I got done being lost (in this specific location) and went out to fight things for a bit I got to experience the Trust system for the first time. The way Trusts are introduced to you is sort of incredible. You do a little quest to unlock a starter trust for your home nation For Windurst it’s Kupipi the receptionist for Heavens tower, she’s a solid healer who can contribute a little damage with her mace but doesn’t really massively change how you approach combat when she’s your only party member. Then you start unlocking more Ciphers through RoE quests and the very first of those is incredible. Valaineral R Davilles. The tutorial Trusts are largely a collection of characters from later in the game, I did not meat Valaineral in person for a couple of hundred hours after this point but his Trust immediately became my constant companion for more or less the entire game. Valaineral is maybe the best tank Trust in the game and holds up right through to the end game, and he’s the 2^nd one they give you. His most immediate contribution however is the way he completely warps the early game combat around himself. Where Kupipi just hangs around, keeps you alive and contributes a little damage, Valaineral opens every combat by yelling LET THE BLADE OF THE CONQUEROR ONCE MORE BRING GLORY TO THE KINGDOM! and aoe oneshotting every enemy in the immediate vicinity. The damage scaling drops off a bit as you level but it’s an extremely funny start to the game’s combat system as Val single handedly annihilates most early game encounters.

At this point I worked my way through the early Windurst missions, which are largely fluff and feel a bit like padding until you join the shared main storyline later on. I skipped the two optional ones on the grounds that the first one is obnoxious (you have an hour real time to go kill some stuff and return but if you return less than 50 or more than 60 minutes later you fail and have to start again even if you did in fact kill the mobs in that time) and the second requires multiple players to open a gate. Skipping this one would bite me in the ass roughly 300 hours later. I also made a point of doing any sidequests that were practical to do in passing. I largely didn’t go out of my way to farm drops for stuff but if I happened to get the items for something I’d always go back and hand them in for the little story crumbs even if most sidequests are largely irrelevant to progression at this point in the game’s life.

Once I reached the point where I was ready to head out from Windurst to the other nations it was also time to start grappling with Rhapsodies of Vana’diel. Rhapsodies is awkward. It serves a dual role of both being a capstone to the game’s entire storyline but also having to implement a lot of the features that were added at that time to make the game actually accessible to new players going forward. As such the story feels like you should be tackling it after you’ve completed the other expansion storylines but ignoring it till then means massively handicapping yourself since it gives access to a lot of major QOL features. In the end I settled for progressing it in tandem with other stuff and putting it to the side once I’d unlocked all the Trust summon cap upgrades near the start of Aht Urhgan.

I did the Jeuno run at this point, you can just warp there using Unity NPCs but early on I wanted to at least walk between locations to get a sense of the lay of the land and how the zones connect since there’s a surprising lack of good maps online so I had to kind of just piece it together by checking what zones connect to what individually. FFXI is very much a game about looking at maps to figure out how to actually get to places even with the improved fast travel. The run itself wasn’t nearly as perilous as I’d been led to believe, maybe it was the route I ended up taking (via the Sauromugue Champaign, I believe it’s the Rolanberry fields route that’s infamous) and only nearly died once because I randomly decided to pick a fight with Blighting Brand, a Notorious Monster that I was not in fact high enough level to tussle with and ended up having to make a frantic dash for the Port Jeuno gate while it finished disassembling my Trusts. So in some ways I got a bit of the perilous journey experience after all.

Jeuno

Reaching Jeuno for the first time is Overwhelming. Due to its centrality to so many of the game’s storylines and different pieces of content you’re immediately assaulted by a torrent of Stuff. As soon as I entered I flagged the intro cutscene for the Abyssea storyline, getting a brief glimpse of one of Vana’diel’s myriad Parallel Hell Dimensions (I counted at least six in my time with the game) as the game decided I was ready to engage with Abyssea (you are very much not ready to engage with Abyssea at this point as it is endgame content for the level 75 era). I also somehow talked my way into getting sent into a Moblin Maze where I promptly died to a crab because you can’t summon Trusts in there and to this day there is a Tabula languishing in my mog house storage because I might come back and try again when I’m higher level and I can probably just chuck it but maybe it’ll be useful at some point? The game is swimming with stuff that you can probably chuck but maybe it’ll be useful at some point because the wiki says it’s used for one specific quest that you don’t have access to yet but will eventually and then you get to it and realize that it’s a niche endgame activity that hasn’t been relevant since 2011 but you do it anyway because why not and receive a pair of boots that give +2 int and 3 water resistance. That tangent is what it’s like visiting Jeuno for the first time as the game does not in any way indicate whether talking to an NPC will start some quest or piece of content or just provide a couple of lines of flavour text. Naturally I talked to everyone because hell yeah lets get into the weeds.

Shortly after zoning into upper Jeuno I talked to one guy just hanging out by some crates and was thrown into a several minute long cutscene where a bunch of major figures from the four city states had an intense discussion about Brenner. Several of these characters I had not met yet (Shantotto was there though, yay!) and the whole thing was deeply ingrained with intercity politics that I had not really had a chance to get into before that point so it was a little disorienting suddenly being thrown into all that with no warning. Brenner is a PVP mode that has not been updated since approximately 2006. At the point where the NPC’s assistant started talking to me about “LS Liga” I exited the conversation and never spoke to either of them ever again.

Also in upper Jeuno I encountered The Quest. The Quest is an extremely minor sidequest of no real consequence that gives a very niche necklace as a reward (it gives +2 CHA), it was also one of my personal white whales while I played the game. The quest starts when you talk to an old lady in her house and she tell you she’d like to offer a prayer for her dead husband but has run out of special candles so could you be a dear and nip across the road to the temple and get one for her. Upon doing so you’re given a clear example of how arbitrary and unhinged FFXI’s sidequest design often is as they tell you that they’ve run out of candles but they’ll make one for you if you fetch them some Lanolin. Lanolin is an untradeable drop from Battering Rams in La Theine Plateu (also from some Nms added in Promathia but those a) are rare and b) did not exist when this quest was added) La Theine Plateu is halfway around the world from this questgiver, which is less of a big deal with survival guides but is like an hour’s journey on foot. There are only two spawns of the ram and they have a huge wander radius making them extremely annoying to track down. It’s not a guaranteed drop. I accepted that I would probably never get this old lady her candle and moved on, although I did kill any Battering Rams I happened to encounter on the very rare occasions our paths crossed.

Early Chains of Promathia

At this point I was kind of adrift without a ton of clear direction as the Rhapsodies storyline had ground to a halt at the point where they asked me to come back when I’d killed the Shadow Lord, which I knew from outside context I’d be doing at some point but the Windurst missions were only still vaguely hinting at the return of the Shadow Lord. Being very not at that point yet I decided to instead start the game’s second expansion, Chains of Promathia, since the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart doesn’t become available till after you beat the Shadow Lord. This expansion has a bit of a reputation for being one of the best expansions/arguably where the story peaked since it’s the one where you attack and dethrone god at the end. I sort of agree (it’s not my favourite expansion but it’s really dang good and it does kind of mess up the weight of later stuff a little). Promathia starts out kind of weird from a narrative standpoint because it’s largely you the player acting on information that your character in universe does not actually have. You start out in Delkfutt’s tower with a cutscene of a lot of momentous events happening involving people you do not know yet (oh hey, it’s Wolfgang, from the Brenner cutscene!) which lead to a mysterious youth ending up in the upper Jeuno infirmary, where you have to go to get involved in events. It’s not a huge deal or anything it’s just weird that there is zero in story hook for your character to be going there in the first place.

Weird start aside Promathia is great. It has a way more fleshed out cast than any of the stuff before it (looking at you Zeid) Prishe is definitely my favourite of the game’s heroines. At one point she leaves you for dead so she can go pick a fist fight with an airship. I like Nag’molada a lot as an antagonist constantly torn between different sides who sometimes works with you because he’s still figuring a lot of it out as he goes and not certain he’s quite ready to commit to his path until the end. I’m also aware though that I did not experience this as intended. One of the big early roadblocks in the expansion is the Promyvion (Hell Dimension #2) segments, which on release were capped at level 30 and way harder. That level cap has been removed in the intervening years so I was able to breeze through a fairly large section of what would presumably could have been quite tough and potentially frustrating content. In its current form though Promathia largely manages to be way better paced than the stuff that came before (and after) it which makes it a much nicer experience overall.

Odds and ends feat the Shadow Lord

While I worked through Promathia I was also chipping away at various bits of other content on the side, slowly working my way through the Windurst missions as I leveled as well as the MNK artifact gear questline and various level uncaps. The MNK quests are actually pretty neat as while they’re largely just fetch quests they add a decent amount of texture to the Shadow Lord by expanding on who Raogrimm was in life and his relationship with Cornelia as well as his importance to the Galka. Maybe I just lucked out by picking a job with particularly relevant quest storylines or maybe they all touch on similar stuff but it was cool either way, especially since I didn’t get much context on him elsewhere having not started in Bastok. These quests also required me to clear my way to the top of Castle Oztroja, my favourite dungeon in the game. As the major beastmen stronghold closest to Windurst I inevitably spent a lot of time in Castle Oztroja, which is fine because that place rocks. FFXI’s dungeons are largely pretty dang cool and are designed in ways that are just incompatible with modern MMOs. Rather than instances with specific end goals they’re largely just big open world areas with a whole lot of stuff going on and you’re expected to come back multiple times for specific purposes, delving a little deeper each time. Oztroja really sells this with its multiple layers of puzzle based gates as you work your way up through the floors. The first time I went there I hadn’t bought the map yet and accidentally fell down into the basement where I had to fight my way out through enemies I could just barely take and it was a great time.

While I don’t love it as much as Oztroja the Windurst missions also had me climb Delkfutt’s tower, another really cool dungeon which as the name implies has you working your way up a big ol tower full of giants and ancient golems. At the top you get a key that opens a door to the basement and in a thoroughly uncharacteristic move the game gives you access to a secret staircase down the middle rather than making you fight the entire way back down, so that was nice. While we’re on the topic of dungeons I should probably bring up my silliest but most stringently held complaint about the game’s soundtrack. The battle theme for most of the base game dungeons is a decent enough track except that it is also a pirate battle theme and thus always sounds slightly out of place. This is not a song that should be playing while I punch out the 2000^th bat, buckles should be being swashed right now. Also you can actually get attacked by pirates while taking ferries and it plays a completely different song unique to that even.

After doing that and also a Magicite collection mission which takes you round all the beastmen strongholds, (including Oztroja again, yay!) you finally get to square off with the Shadow Lord. Which is weirdly weightless in the story. After a bit of buildup largely involving Lion just sort of showing up out of nowhere at the end of a couple of dungeons, and also sometimes Zeid, whoever he is, the Shadow Lord is back! The Star Sibyl holds a meeting about it off screen and they decide they’ll probably form a committee about it some point but it’s probably fine. It’d be cool if some random adventurer were to go kill him in the meantime though. So you go kill him in the meantime. The trip through Castle Zvahl itself is suitably final dungeon-y even if I had gotten a little overleveled so there wasn’t much to the fight itself. As an ending to the game’s first storyline it largely works even if Lion isn’t much of a character up to that point, having done those MNK quests to flesh Raogrimm out a bit beforehand definitely helped his final moments land a bit better though (MORE ON THAT LATER!) then you go back to Windurst and the Star Sibyl is like “Oh cool thanks have some gil I guess” and that’s that (I only did a couple of the further Windurst missions way later because I got caught up in other storylines instead and they didn’t feel particularly urgent).

Having now dealt with the Shadow Lord I unlocked Dynamis (Hell Dimension #3) which I proceeded to never actually enter because it was old endgame stuff and I was hype for more Promathia instead. Before that I was also able to progress Rhapsodies a little more (briefly dipping into Escha, Hell Dimension #4) before being abruptly road blocked by the extremely level 80 with 70% damage resistance Siren fight they jump you with all of a sudden in a largely not that combat heavy questline. So that went back on the shelf till I wasn’t level 65. And then I didn’t start Rise of the Zilart for a month because an FFXIV expansion happened.

Rise of the Zilart

Rise of the Zilart has one of the most bafflingly unhinged openings I have ever seen to a sequel storyline. If anything the fact that I had a month’s break between beating the Shadowlord and starting it added to the effect. You rock up into Norg (it’s nice that they named an entire town after beloved FFVIII character NORG) and Lion shows up like “oh hey remember all that stuff that went down after we beat the Shadow Lord?” before throwing you into a cutscene where it turns out that the ending to that fight went down Completely Differently. As it turns out rather than you just leaving having felled the Shadow Lord and let Raogrimm find peace what actually happened is the Archduke of Jeuno and his brother showed up, gave a long villain monologue before summoning the Ark Angels to kill everyone present only for Raogrimm to sacrifice himself to allow you to escape. The only explanation given for “actually none of that stuff you did happened like you remember” is “oh you must have been so traumatized you forgot”. Incredible.

From there you get sent into the jungle to find a lost temple full of Tonberries who are distinctly less friend shaped in this game than some of their other incarnations (they’re so gangly I don’t like it). Unfortunately this dungeon sucks. The temple itself is fine but once you reach the secondary dungeon inside, the Den of Rancor it becomes super tedious. The basic setup is you have to first farm a semi rare drop lantern from a specific kind of Tonbery, there are a few of them but they’re all fairly spaced out so you can’t really run between them without having a couple of other fights en route. Once you get the lantern you have to light it at a flame on the top floor before taking it down to an unlit brazier on the floor below to open a door. Except there are 4 of these braziers, the walk back up to the floor above takes a couple of minutes while invisible. It just feels like the game is actively wasting your time and I did not enjoy it at all. On the plus side there’s a waypoint behind it so I never have to do that again and I fed the lantern to the gobbiebox at some point. At this point you fight some more Tonberries and discover that they’re actually the remnants of the Kuluu, the other ancient race knocking around Vana’diel. Their elder Grav’iton gives you a shard and then tells you to go find 7 more. No she won’t tell you where they are go scour the entire world for them.

I feel like the intent of this quest setup was fairly obvious, players were meant to collaborate and find the locations of the 7 headstones around the world, nowadays there are obviously guides out there so you can just look it up. Unfortunately the quest is still kinda tedious and one particular headstone is placed in an extremely annoying to reach spot if you’re doing it at a roughly appropriate level (I was 72ish). To get to the fire headstone you need to climb up Ifrit’s Cauldron, a pretty neat dungeon with an annoying gimmick, there are impassible fire spouts that only drop every 7 minutes real time. You can also trade an ice cluster to the spouts to drop them instantly but that requires you to drop invisibility and risk aggroing one of the Bombs that like to hang out near the spouts and might just kill you with self destruct if you’re unlucky. You have to get past 3 of these. Between the second and third there is also a chokepoint where the Ash Dragon likes to hang out. The Ash Dragon is a level 85 (the level cap was 75 when this quest was added) NM which is extremely not soloable with Trusts and has True Sight at night so you cannot invisible past it. The only way to bypass it is to time your ascent so that you arrive during the day or hope that someone else has randomly killed it for you. The whole thing just feels like it’s wasting your time.

The next quest after this is fairly straightforward but you have to acquire a Lodestone if you’re not a Galka and that requires farming a rare drop from some low level enemies and I was mad at the game for the previous quest so I was increasingly annoyed at Zilart at this point. Fortunately after this the expansion gets pretty good actually and I think the back half is solid even if the frustration of the early stuff nearly put me off. I still think it’s probably the weakest expansion overall but I did have fun with it in the end. Lion’s sacrifice didn’t really do much for me given she’s barely a character to begin with and also very alive in the Rhapsodies content I’d already had to do so it was clear she’d get better at some point.

Back to Promathia

With that out of the way I got back to Promathia, the final stretch of which is largely great. Al’Taieu

is a really cool final zone and the final showdown with Promathia and the reveals around it are great. I cried a lot during the Distant Worlds scene, it’s just incredibly cathartic to hear Ulmia sing after everything you’ve been through with these characters. I then got ambushed by a party of like 10 Fomors immediately after exiting that cutscene which slightly undercut the mood. I still think it’s weird that that’s the closest you ever get to Tavnazia proper given how prominent it is in the opening cinematic. The cinematic ends with Aldo clearly about to head an expedition into the ruins and we never go there, it’s such an obvious thing that they just never did for some reason (FFXI is all about obvious things that they never did for some reason though). I did clear up to Apocalypse Nigh in the epilogue quests but it kicked my ass so I decided to come back later and Lion got to stay dead for a while longer. I also wore that Rajas ring for basically the next 2 months because I could never find anything better than its store TP even after hitting 99, Horizontal Progression!

Treasures of Aht Urhgan

Now that I was firmly in the post level 75 era and therefore in theory strong enough to take anything in the next couple of expansions I continued to go through them in order. Aht Urhgan feels like the one I missed out on the most of by just doing the main story though. For a start said main story feels super padded. Of the 48 missions in the storyline, a full 12 have the sole objective “Talk to Naja Salaheem” or “enter Naja Salaheem’s office” which is functionally the same, a further 4 are that again but you have to wait an hour of real time after the last mission before she’ll talk to you. At one point you get 2 of those “talk to Naja and wait an hour” quests back to back. There are 3 other wait an hour quests not directly involving Naja as well so that’s 7 real world hours you are required to just go do something else for and it sucks. Other parts of the story also feel like you’re just retreading the same steps over and over again, like repeatedly having to treck out to the ghost ship or go back to that one grave for a coin multiple times (mwua ha ha). So the whole experience feels very sparse. The story itself was fine but it forecast its only real twist incredibly hard with Aphmau and then acted like it was a huge deal.

The real sense I got from this expansion was that a whole lot of its texture was in the side content which I ended up never doing. Half the zones you either don’t visit at all or go to exactly once in passing and the beastmen barely figure into the main storyline despite being one of the major parts of the expansion as a whole. I actually straight up never went into Al Zahbi because I called it a night after speaking to everyone in the Whitegate and just assumed the story would take me there at some point. Gessho was fun though, also a big fan of entirely new character Karababa. Not sure what they were going for with that Trion plotline that just abruptly stopped either, he did bring it up again when I remembered to recruit his Trust later down the line but not in any meaningful capacity.

My main takeaway from this expansion was that people need to stop making pacts with Odin because like 60% of all problems in this setting are a result of someone making a pact with Odin.

Around this point I finally beat up Siren and got the last Trust slot so I could go beat up the Zilart brothers again and get a cool earring so that was neat.

Wings of the Goddess

Wings of the Goddess is awkward. There’s a lot in there that I really like but also it almost made me stop playing the game entirely and I just wanted it Done by the end. I think the general setup is pretty neat, getting to experience this big formative event in the game’s history as it happened and see what various figures from the game’s present were up to at the time is neat. Maybe reusing all those zones is a bit lazy but it was fun to experience them again in a slightly different context, seeing Windurst absolutely wrecked after spending so long there in the present does work (until it becomes really inconvenient for mechanical reasons).

One of the big things the expansion does which is both kinda cool and also ruins the pacing is require you to clear at least one questline for one of the three nations, at various points in the story you’ll arbitrarily (it’s almost never justified beyond a vague suggestion you should go kill some time) be required to go progress one of those questlines before you can continue, and those questlines will in turn require main mission progression. It’s cool in theory but it feels like the two storylines are constantly taking the momentum out of each other even if they work individually.

I started out with the Bastok questline because a) I wanted to flesh out a not Windurst city state a bit and b) you start out closer to the guy who gives the Bastok questline than any of the others and was having a lovely time finally learning more about the Galka and who the heck Zeid is only to abruptly hit an impassible roadblock when I reached a quest that is not actually possible to do as a solo MNK. You have to escort an NPC through a mine fighting off waves of enemies who aggro and rush her instantly on spawn, she does not stop moving between waves, has fairly low HP and they spawn in too fast for you to effectively aggro them, for whatever reason Trusts also do not seem to engage properly on the fight so even THE BLADE OF THE CONQUEROR was no help. Also if you fail you can’t even try again without waiting a real world hour. Also every quest prior to that has a forced hour wait between them for no good reason so I’d already sunk several days into this storyline by the time I hit the block.

So I switched to Windurst and I’m kind of glad I did because the Windurst storyline was my favourite part of the expansion hands down. You get to hang out with the game’s only male Mithra Lehko Habhoka and a bunch of other cool Mithra, as well as learning about one of the major events that gets talked about constantly when you start in Windurst. It does feel a bit like a missed oportunity because a lot of Lehko’s arc ties into the Mithra homeland and the Sin Hunters which feels like it’s building on the stuff with Mhag in Promathia towards some eventual visit to Gha Naboh that never actually happened and for all that he talks about changing things he never gets to appear again outside of this storyline set in the past (I did read ahead a little on Voracious Resurgance and it seems like he might reappear in that, which would be neat).

Notably the Windurst missions also lack the random forced hour waits so that was nice, although it was somewhat offset by the Campaign System. Basically various Wings zones are constantly being fought over by the alliance and the confederation and depending on how things are going the fighting might get pushed back to either the cities themselves or the beastmen strongholds. Which is a very cool system in theory when there are a lot of players in these zones and extremely impractical when it’s 3 expansions back and obsolete content. Because all non Campaign related NPCs despawn while a battle is in progress this basically meant there was a 50% chance every time I had to go there that I’d have to spend 10 minutes running around on my own (not even able to summon Trusts because it’s still considered a town) punching Yagudo to make the NPC I needed to talk to respawn. Which got kinda tedious after the first 8 times it happened.

This was also the point where my hubris in not getting the Portal Charm all those months ago came back to bite me as I discovered many hours into the questline that it’s one of the very small number of instances where you actually do have to go past the Three Mage Gate. Fortunately there’s an alternative method! Unfortunately that alternative method is a 6 quest long chain for the Rhinostery to acquire a certificate allowing you access to the canal which contains the back entrance to the area behind the gate. So that was an entire day of sidequesting but we got there in the end. Incidentally the quest that gives you a certificate is another example of the game’s sidequest designers not giving any thought to the numbers involved. I thought I’d exterminate the Starmites they asked me to while I was down there even if it wasn’t my main goal because I’m there anyway right? They’re a bit off the path to the exit I need but what the hey. Turns out there are 5 Starmites in the entire game, they have a 5 minute respawn time. I killed all 5 and got 0 of the untradeable uncommon drop shells the Rhinostery want as proof of your kills. I decided 3000 gil was not worth sitting in a sewer for an extra 5-50 minutes, maybe the respawned mites ate the Star Tree in the end.

There’s also a weird bit of padding at the end where you fight your way to the top of past Castle Oztroja (yay!) to defeat the Yagudo leader and then Fenrir shows up to fight you but it kicks you out of the dungeon in the cutscene so you have to fight your way back up again to do a second boss fight when you were right there. So that was weird. On the whole though I really liked these Windurst quests so I can forgive a little bit of repetition here at least.

As for the main missions for the expansion: please stop making me walk to the Jeuno gate holy shit. Where most of the game has had significant QOL overhauls and it’s generally easy enough to teleport to any given place you need to be or at least relatively close to it, Wings of the Goddesses zones are almost universally horrible to navigate. There’s generally only one fast travel point in a given zone and it’s almost always on the complete opposite side of where you need to be. As a result my progress through the expansion became glacial because I could not be bothered running across the Sauromugue Champaign Yet Again so they could send me on a mission to get soy sauce from a goblin halfway across the world so that I could then run across the Sauromugue Champaign again to hand it in and instead opted to go punch Ambuscade for a bit instead or whatever. There is a secondary teleportation system involved in the Campaign system which has a few locations that are slightly better but for whatever reason I just could not get it to work and talking to the NPCs that should have given me the teleport option just resulted in them giving me unrelated tutorial dialogue which I was unable to find a solution for online so I just had to run. The expansion loves to have you do something in the past then go back to the present to interact with whatever that changed then take it back to someone/somewhere in the past, which is fine in theory except for the continuing issue of it being a huge pain to go anywhere in the past.

Structural issues aside I liked the storyline well enough, again they broadcast the Lilisette twist way too hard (Mayakov having the comedy gay man lisp was definitely not necessary) and it does a lot of retreading the same ground over and over again (From what I understand these quests released over like 3 years so there’s some degree of making sure people remembered what happened last time I guess but doing it back to back it becomes a bit of a slog). The reveal that Hell Dimension #5 was actually the original timeline was neat though, Cait Sith was fun except for that red light green light minigame. The player being the final Spitewarden also felt like it never really went anywhere since you immediately defeat them on your next encounter.

My main takeaway from this expansion was that people need to stop making pacts with Odin (sometimes in response to other people making pacts with Odin) because like 90% of all problems in this setting are a result of someone making a pact with Odin.

Overall it’s just really hard for me to seperate Wings of the Goddess from how frustrating it was to actually play through even if there was stuff in I that I did like.

Seekers of Adoulin

This one’s my favourite expansion. Coming from Seekers with its incredibly frustrating zone traversal it was super cool to reach an expansion which made that traversal such a core part of its identity. Because so much of it is built around gaining and using new methods of traveling around Ulbuka they actually clearly put a lot more thought into the zone layout and making it feel like you’re consistently opening up new waypoints so you don’t have to constantly retrace your steps and it’s a lot less painful when you do need to go somewhere multiple times (repeatedly going up to that one mountain is a lot less annoying when there’s a bivouac like 1 minutes ride away). Adoulin proper is a cool city to just hang out and do sidequests in, I like the Impreteur system even if the time gating is pretty rough (I did not max out a single coalition in my time playing but even if I’d been on top of them from day 1 I’d not have finished). My secret nemesis in this game is Clemnar, the guy who stands outside the Couriers Coalition and has done nothing wrong but his name sounds like he should be some kind of barbarian and he’s just some guy, why do you look so normal Clemnar what the hell? At time of writing I realized his name is actually Clemmar and I have been misreading it this entire time and somehow this is his fault actually.

Around halfway through I realized I was actually just playing an Ys game, you could replace the player character with Adol and maybe add a shipwreck at the start instead of teleporting in with the Geomagneton and not actually have to change the story at all otherwise. The story itself manages to feel like it expands on the world (and adds Hell Dimension #6) while working perfectly well as a self contained thing. I could really have done without the occasional “oggle Arciela” dialogue options though why the fuck were those there?

Rhapsodies of Vana’diel

Having now finally reached the end of the major expansions I got to the finale. While no longer actually the final update to the game Rhapsodies is still very much an ending, and one which sort of reflects the game as a whole. Because of how it’s kind of just a few extra zones layered on top of what’s already in the game and clearly didn’t have the resources for a full on expansion level of Stuff at times it feels like it’s just checking off boxes because it has to try and weave everything in. I don’t think Nashmeira needed to be in this questline at all really, she’s just there to say hi because we’re saying goodbye to this world. Rhapsodies feels like it reflects the game as a whole because it feels like it’s making the best of a missed opportunity. There are so many threads in this game that ultimately never went anywhere because of its nature, as an MMO with a dwindling playerbase in the face of other games with more modern designs it was always going to have to end someday and leave things unsaid. Rhapsodies is trying to put a capstone on a work that by its nature still has so much more potential and will never be able to go there. A couple of things really sum this up for me: Reisenjima and the final confrontation.

One of the big threads that comes up constantly through all the expansions is the state of the Far East, with all sorts of characters and factions having direct ties to a region the game never actually visited. Rhapsodies adds 3 new zones, two of which are Hell Dimension versions of existing areas. The third is Reisenjima. Reisenjima is the sole region in the Far East we get to visit, it’s also largely desolate, being a linear corridor with a couple of minor branches and 3 NPCs in it (also so many goddamn Panopts). It feels like they at least wanted to give us one little glimpse into a region of the world that’s so storied but they’d never get the chance go visit for real. Iroha sort of feeds into this as well, as Tenzen’s future daughter she’s reflective of a storyline for him that just never got to happen.

Rhapsodies is about a lot of things that never quite got to happen. Its future is one where we reached heights we as players never got a chance to attain and it having to fasttrack our ascension invariably brings to mind the things we left undone between now and then. If our Spitewarden incarnation was a bit of a miss Voto Oscuro is the same concept again but with more bite. Where our Spitewarden is just “well what if our loyalty to Lilisette led us to embrace darkness?” Voto Oscuro is the incarnation of everything the player will never get to do in the game, futures that will never be written because of the inevitable ending of the game, and it’s that inevitability that allows the Cloud of Darkness in to a degree, even after everything the player’s character has done they’re still not able to fight The End. We as players can’t ultimately keep the game going indefinitely but we can at least face that ending on our own terms (by punching it in the face repeatedly, naturally) and that’s what Rhapsodies really is, this game is done and will never get to do everything it could have but they can at least find a way to end gracefully.

Before the final battle there’s a cutscene which should be perhaps the peak of the entire game, every one of the expansions’ main heroines appearing to fight back the Cloud and give you a chance to strike back and save the world from the nothingness. It’s very hype but also slightly hollow, because it’s not them. Rhapsodies introduced Trust magic as a diegetic part of the world, you’re explicitly conjuring magical simulacra which share these peoples memories up to a point but it’s not them. Here at the very end they couldn’t be there with you and that’s too sad. Like a lot of Rhapsodies it feels like a compromise, you almost get that beautiful moment but it’s not quite the real deal. It’s competing against the game’s own nature and the need to add the Trust System at all (among other things it is entirely possible that Lion is currently dead when you do this quest if you haven’t done Apocalypse Nigh and Lilisette may or may not currently exist or be stuck in a hell dimension because the game’s story is non linear). The expansion is a clearly fond farewell to a world that never quite got to reach its full potential, a recognition that you can’t have it all but you can at least have something. Rhapsodies had to simultaneously bring the game’s story to an end and also introduce the mechanical overhauls and systems needed to keep the game alive as it is now, and the story reflects that. It’s a compromise.

Maybe that all sounds overly negative but I do like a lot of what it did, it was nice to see Tenzen again (or for the first time because of how you’re mechanically encouraged to engage with things but y’know), I’ll take any opportunity to hang out with Prishe for a few more quests, Lion gets to exist a bit outside the context of “random woman you meet at the bottom of dungeons a few times”. It’s a compromise but it owns that compromise. If there’s an emptiness there it’s embracing that emptiness and working with it. Modern(ish) FFXI is a game of compromises and Rhapsodies perfectly embodies that, it’s messy in a lot of ways but there’s also nothing quite like it and probably never will be.

While not intentional Rhapsodies did also provide me with an even more significant ending when I zoned into La Theine for the penultimate mission.

I was not at all geared for the Cloud of Darkness and defeated it with less than 2 minutes left on the clock after dying and reraising dozens of times. I think that’s fitting for such a scrappy end.

Closing thoughts: Stories untold

I have some kind of conclusion in here but also just a lot of messy thoughts about the game that don’t really fit anywhere else but I’d be remiss to exclude them and if you’ve reached this point you have a high enough tolerance for tangents anyway.

As I played I’d occasionally comment on things with a friend who played the game during its heyday and occasionally I’d mention some little thing that seemed baffling to me and he’d counter by declaring that actually no that was a major thing that everyone actively leant into back in the day. Much is made of XI’s horizontal progression but my argument is actually that a lot of itemisation is dogshit. It’s cool that some items had uses for years or were so (usually accidentally) powerful that they’d become core to entire jobs but also I just killed this NM plant and it dropped a katana which gives +3 water resistance and that is a filler item at best. At one point I killed a Sapling and it dropped “Stumbling Sandals”, which reduce your DEX and AGI by 10 each for no benefit. I fully expected him to explain patiently to me that no, actually Stumbling Sandals were extremely useful for some niche purpose and people used to set up dedicated Tottering Toby Linkshells to have a chance at this highly important item. He didn’t say that but I would have fully believed it if he had because it’s that kind of game.

By the time I finished Rhapsodies I’d been bouncing around between story stuff and little bits of endgame progression here and there, a lot of what’s soloable is also obsolete at this point because you can buy a set of pretty reasonable ilevel 119 gear for a trivial amount of Bayld the moment you hit 99 and I’d dabbled with Domain Invasion and Ambuscade enough to have gotten some gear out of it, I spent all my gil on a fancy ammo slot orb that took me weeks to save up for and was a fraction of the price of the +1 version that’s actually used in endgame builds. Given my general intent to play solo I was always going to hit a point where I couldn’t meaningfully progress and the game became a bit of a checklist of things I still had to do before drawing a line and moving on (I want to play some other things actually, I hadn’t finished any other games since like April when I started to drift away a couple of weeks ago). Which is ultimately why my interest began to wane, there’s still a bunch of stuff I’d like to have done, I never did get to that Shantotto expansion or figure out how to get into Dynamis. Apparently Prishe is in Abyssea too? Nobody told me that or I’d have gone for it sooner! I played a lot of FFXI for months and I still feel like I barely scratched the surface of this monolith of a game.

That they did in fact do another update after the definitely final for real update does maybe undercut the feeling of being done but Y’know what? In the context of Rhapsodies I’m fine with that. My interest may have waned for now but I’m perfectly open to returning someday if the spark flares up again. And if I don’t? That’s fine to because I know my character still does all those things. Even if I never beat Chaos or figure out crafting enough to appease Shantotto I know those things still happened because I’ve met the person who has and punched them in the face.

That’s where I fall on FFXI as a whole. I’ll never experience it all, maybe nobody truly has because it’s so immense and so much of an MMO experience is transitory. I’ll never experience FFXI at its peak because that moment is gone, what exists now is an imperfect contradictory bundle of compromises. One of the things I read while I was playing is the BGWiki’s history articles detailing a lot of the early updates and events around the game and I was struck by how much of the game’s history is the devs being actively at war with the playerbase over how the game should actually be played. The things I knew about XI from reputation were relatively sparse going in: crabs, Shantotto and Absolute Virtue. How famously people fought the Jailor of Love in shifts for literal days and didn’t succeed, how every time someone figured out a way to kill AV they patched it out. But that’s actually just the entire history of the game; players are farming skeletons too much? Unilateral Skeleton Buff. Fishing is a widely botted activity? Load Fishing! The state of the game is always a clear compromise between how it was intended to play and how people actually played it. Or things that had unintended consequences would shape the entire game for years. There’s a dev comment in those history pages about how they didn’t think people would use Utsusemi Like That and it proceeded to define huge swathes of the gameplay and encounter design for years because they didn’t push back on it hard enough. It may feel like modern FFXI is a mess of unwilling concessions to playability in light of a shrinking playerbase but I think it was always a mess of unwilling concessions to playability actually.

I didn’t have the definitive Final Fantasy XI experience because there’s no such thing, but I had a great time with it, it’s a fascinating game in all its compromises and baffling design. It certainly explains a lot about why FFXI 1.0 was Like That. It’s antiquated and hard to play in a lot of ways but there’s a charm to that if you can stomach it and there’s no definitive experience so maybe the one you’ll have will be as interesting as mine was. Either way I’m very hype for XIV to let me hang out with Prishe again in a few weeks.