Final Fantasy XI - Journal!

[Hathen]

I love exploring, Tebian. However, in recent expansions, it's been made a lot harder because of the high-level monsters, along with a tendency towards making true-sight and true-sound enemies somewhat common. This generally spells too much danger for an explorer, and I really don't want to waste oils and powders when I just want to go exploring around an area anyway.

Another rare item from assault, <mine>.


lolAF2:


A salvage report, although you all probably already know given that most of you guys saw me at Dynamis already. :P

Somewhere, a WAR is crying.


2/5 pieces, woo. Not sure if I should go for legs or feet next, though I'm leaning towards legs simply because the feet are a bitch to get (in shout groups there's always like 3-4 people lotting it), and I might start a static soon, so if that takes off, I'm better off trying to get feet in that.

[Ramza]

Today's Dynamis run was absurd. It was like ... 15 AF2 drops or something? Anyway, I got my Cleric Mitts, which puts me at 5/5 for AF2 WHM. I'm pretty stoked about it.



yeah.

[Hathen]

My black chocobo passed it's raising time, and it's head off to the stables to spend the rest of its life.


38/50 on assaults now. I haven't gotten any FLs done though, so that'll be pretty tough to finish off.


I joined a ZNM LS. Pretty lightweight one, but I'm not particularly interested in the Hachiryu set, so eh. I'm slightly interested in the Enkidu set, but I'm certainly in no hurry to get that.


Finally done with Nyzul Isle.

Unless I ever play PLD, BST, DNC, SCH, or DRG I guess. 15/20 weapons, har har, and I just broke my second one!


Salvage is being stingy, which means it's "working as intended", to quote the sadistic SE employees who clearly have never played their own damn game.



But really, none of that is important compared to what I had just finished- picture heavy post gogo. I know most of you have seen these scenes, but I just really like them so I'm going to post them anyway. =P

















Following these, of course, is what many people consider the definitive cutscene of the entire game. It's shown in full-screen (No chat log, no status bars, etc), and, surprisingly (Unless you bought the soundtrack =P) a vocal song is played throughout.








The journey began in the opening CG cutscene of them game, with the Orcish siege on Tavnazia, and here is what is easily the biggest adventure in FFXI ends as well.

I'm not really sure if anything will make me feel the way this mission series has for the game anymore. They've more or less revealed the origin of the world to us, so nothing from here on out can be as interesting or engaging as this has been. I guess I'll still do endgame stuff and do the WOTG missions as they come out, but I can't help but feel empty (a har har) at the end of all this.
Certainly, I can still do Storms of Fate and Apocalypse Nigh, but the former just seems far too stressful for me to accomplish with the resources I have available to me.

Hmmm...

[Ramza]

so you've finally experienced it firsthand eh? CoP > all.

[TurnBasedDude]

Let's see a quickie status update.

-Got Askar Body and Head. I just need hands to complete the good portion of the set.
-Got BRD AF2 Legs.
-Finished CoP days after Howard did and got my Rajas ring for my DRG.

There is not much else going on other than those highlights. I've been interested in doing Salvage and hope a static pulls through. Gogo cheaper Ares pieces. ;p

[Ramza]

Just found out Square Enix put something VERY SPECIAL on YouTube, decided to post a news story about it.

http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2009/96.html

Don't miss it.

[Hathen]

Yep, I saw that when it was announced on the POL website- I generally check the POL page really often, for info on the next update and whatnot.

So far, the next update sounds okay. Nothing yet that made me really excited yet. They did say that A Crystalline Prophecy is coming out, but I have my reserves about these three new expansions they want to release when they're supposed to be using all their staff on WOTG.

As far as the Promathia fight with Dennis goes, I didn't take any pictures, aside from this one, which is meh, but it's better than nothing I s'pose.


Atamusk, Levit, and I have been working on finishing CoP for a long time...October 12, 2008 is when we did Monarch Linn, meaning we've been doing this crap together for half a year. Feels a lot longer than that for some reason. Wonder what twisted fate had brought us to roads that run so near?



I joined in on a Beadeaux {S} campaign run shouted by a JP, in a desperate attempt to try to be some of the few people to do Cracking Shells on our server, or any other server for that matter (There's very little info on it). Of course if you've logged in this week any, you'd know we did not succeed. Either way though, it was a lot of fun!


This guy was a lot easier than I'd thought he'd be- I went crazy and bought like, 80k worth of meds and food, but only ended up using maybe 8k of it, hah. That's probably an overestimate too. FLs arn't going to be easy to do- I can't find anybody to do them with, though hopefully I can convince Levit's assault static to let me mooch a couple runs. =P
44/50


Nobody wants this thing, so I got it for 1 point. Go me. :P Haven't even bothered getting the helm yet actually, been lazy and it's not really that amazing of a piece. It does look spiffy though.


Joined a sea LS for now, dunno if that'll last- this was boring me out of my skull, and hearing the drop rates just makes me want to run like hell considering that it's a pretty established LS, so there's probably going to be a decent amount of people before me on what I want.

Salvage agogo.

Doing my regular old runs with lack of drops and crappy junk drops for my low level jobs, as well as seeing some pretty crazy stuff on freelot (Saw Deimos's Cuirass on freelot, now THAT's something somewhere someone is crying about). I joined a random Bhaflau run and did not expect to run into this guy for the first time:

What's even more incredible than that, is that I don't ever have to care about finding him anymore.

So I suspended my journey for Hikazu Hara-Ate to order to get the 25 piece and finish the thing off. Of course skadi drops for like...god knows how many runs (WTF is with LAC and Skadi)- hell, I even see a HIKAZU KABUTO drop before I see this thing:

Hey, the other guy got that Hikazu Kabuto, I think I deserved the other thing. :P

[Hathen]

Forgot to take pictures of Dracula, but oh well. Finally finished all 51 assaults!


Salvage was nice enough to drop this thing:


lolAF2:


Some random low-tier ZNMs I did yielded some items for me. Honestly, only one of them is of any real use.


Got the Slayer just in time, I'd say, because my BLU just hit 75.


Yarr.

[Hathen]

With A Crystalline Prophecy out, I suppose I'll go ahead and copy and paste some of the stuff I've said on other places to get some discussion going. If you haven't bought ACP, I wouldn't recommend you do so- I think it's a complete waste and ripoff of $10.

I'll be fair- the first cutscene sent chills down my spine and I was ready for a good story.

And then the first mission was already stupid as hell.

Seriously, do they think these "go kill normal enemies for rare/ex items" missions are fun? It only serves to pad out the mission and irritate the players. Seeing as how this is supposed to be a fucking story-centered expansion, you're not supposed to have filler. Ugh.

There's a difference between solo content (FoV) and just bottleneck content so that limited people can get it done at once (this rare/ex item bullcrap). And it's not just one mission, either. You have to then kill the gobs in the areas surrounding Jeuno (Never seen one drop off a Tiger like wiki claims, dunno about that one).

Putting stupid shit like this and then calling it a "month-long" expansion is fucking pathetic.

They also said that their mini-expansions would be able to be completed within about a week if a group sat down and said, "Let's do this." Then it took them like, 8 hours to finish.

Let's not even compare it to mission systems. Just the assault system alone has 20 times more content than this piece of crap. 50 different types of fights (Not including Nyzul Isle since that might as well be a completely different system, but they just made it an assault to make people choose between Salvage and Nyzul)- maybe not all of them were well designed (Hi2u Supplies Recovery, Ring Searching one, Fishing Orobon), but they showed that they were thinking, and trying to give us new ways to tackle objectives. Several new armor sets, some accessory pieces, and a little story that was silly, but was okay (At least it made sense instead of being convoluted to try to feign like it's somehow a "deep" or "thoughtful" story). By the way, in case you're about to argue that assault was spread across several patches, keep in mind that every time assault was updated, we got 5 new fights.

This is just a bunch of irritating low level NM fights (They're not creative either, oh wow Goblins that use their job's 2HR, just because it's a low level fight doesn't mean they can half-ass it), stupid farming, and then one stupidly difficult boss at the end, which is only irritating because it forces you to get the key item all over again if you fail (When have we ever had to go through such an irritating way to get the trig again for a mission? It's always been "talk to this NPC to get another one", not "go to 20 different places under a level cap").

tl;dr, A Crystalline Prophecy is a big steaming pile of goat shit.

I've never been let down so badly by a version update before, too. Not because they added things that were stupid ideas, but adding stuff that's just so badly executed (Mainly Augments).

But the new ANNMs, along with the WHM and SMN updates, are more than enough to make up for the letdowns I guess. The RDM updates were kinda lame, though.

Needless to say, I'm not the least bit interested in A Moogle coup d'etat or Shantotto's Ascension, because those were two I was less interested in ACP, and with ACP being such a large disappointment, I'm even going to bother.

[Hathen]

Do Limbus solo every now and then when I miss my scheduled runs- still no luck with getting the right item. I've gotten COR once and MNK twice.


The item from the egg event this year is kinda cool, it gives 10 storage spaces, which isn't too bad

I took the liberty of camping Kreuzet after the maintenence, and after several attempts to pull him properly (I had pulled him and died to aggro before, of course nobody around me helped because they were too busy stealing my claim), this is what I got.

Of course the 3 or 4 people before me got the dagger on the first time they killed him.
Then on his next pop, I got it with TH1. TH1 > TH3 apparently. This game is stupid.


Been cooling down a bit on salvage lately, I'm trying to get that damn turtle to drop the Hara-Ate, but no such luck so far.



My first real drop from my ZNMLS, up until now I've just been getting a bunch of crappy trigs. No Enkidu's has dropped yet on any of my trigs, and the Beast Slayer I got was from a random lowman I did with Twc.


Put this behind for a while but I finally got it for my BLU. Guess I have to work on Expiacion now.


A picture of the Astral Plinth inside Al Zahbi, a rare sight. The last time I saw this thing was a couple years ago, back when Besieged was actually difficult. =P


I want to talk about ACP for a second, now that I've finished it. I'm sure I've made it obvious that I don't like it one bit, but I'd like to give an idea to all of you how incredibly pathetic this "expansion" is.

I liked the first cutscene, despite some people hating on it. It was exactly as described- a large crystal has appeared above Jeuno, and inflicted a magical daze on everyone. A young boy appears before me, calling himself Aldo- sounds good so far.
And then. Then he tells me to go get the crystal shards. Anybody who has done this incredibly frustrating mission knows that it has no fucking business whatsoever being in this mission line. The fact that the expansion is about 8 hours long doesn't help when you spent 2 of those hours just trying to farm crystals.

And what happens when you collect these crystals? He tells you to go farm more of them. This is the first 4 missions out of 12- a wasted first 4 missions with nothing but filler, save the introduction. Can someone tell me what's going on? Can someone tell me what this crystal is? What does Aldo and Emelyne have to do with this? What do all those characters in the back of the promotional poster have to do with this? What does TAVNAZIA have to do with this?

Finally something happens after the farming, you engage an army of Seed Mandragoras? Why? I don't know. They claim to be spawned from the crystal, though what this has to do with the Orcish siege on Tavnazia, I don't have a goddamn fucking clue.

So you kill these Mandragoras, and you are asked to go to Fei'Yin. Then you are asked to go to the Hall of the Gods. WHY? What does this have to do with Tavnazia or these two characters? The only reason you need to walk to these places is to get a whole bunch of diarrhea out-the-mouth dialogue that neither explains anything, lets you learn anything about the characters, nor is it entertaining. In other words, it takes up several dozens minutes of your time, and nothing else.


So we enter the climax of this addon, which is a battle against a crystal that has no explanation given whatsoever. What is it? A lost shard of the mothercrystal? An apparition of the emptiness? Dunno, we're too busy creating a crappy piece of armor to bother writing anything resembling a story, even a hackneyed one.


So here's the ending, and you should get ready for this.

Code:

We defeat the crystal, and he basically says, "ha-ha, you're too late", and begins doing whatever he's supposed to do to
destroy the world. And then something along the lines of "oh no, the light within mankind has stopped my onslaught". Then
we are informed that your character, Aldo, and Emelyne will have no memory of what has transpired over the course of this
expansion. Nobody learns anything and we don't learn anything about the characters or the backstory of Vana'Diel, nor does
it progress any story involving these two characters. I can't think of a more boring conclusion to a story than this, and god
forbid we go back and write any of this so that it actually makes sense.

But hey, I got a shiny piece of armor, and that's what really matters for your $10, right?
That was the whole thing, by the way. I just showed you the entire contents of the expansion.

I'm not sure if you bought this expansion, Tone, but if you did, I wholehearted await a highly negative review of this absolute turd of an addon. The fact that anyone could say that this was a good expansion blows my fucking mind.

[Fred Flintstone]

Milkman reviews ACP. No surprise what score it receives.

Code:

F

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3173796&p=1

[Hathen]

Pretty surprising for that to come from Milkman, since he's probably the one most supportive of FFXI in the community. He's been playing since launch and he's always been very supportive of the game, from that column in EGM till now.

Guess that only emphasizes how big of a piece of crap this thing is.

[Ramza]

I will have a review of ACP up on the site soon. I'm not done with it yet, but so far my opinion is pretty much aligned with that of Hathen and Milk. I'll see if the completion of the expansion makes any difference. But at this point, I think the most salient point is this: if the content were FREE, it wouldn't be a big deal. But having to pay $10 for this is ... fairly ridiculous.

Of course, I'll still be buying the other two. Maybe the others are planned to be larger? :(

Ramza

[Hathen]

Even if I didn't have to pay for this, I'm still annoyed at the absolutely pathetic conclusion Aldo and Emeline have to a story we've been waiting for 6 years.

The person who wrote the story was the same guy that did Nation and Zilart missions, and it's obvious he has not bothered to go read up on how the lore has expanded, especially from CoP, which makes this story just incredibly silly. The Seed Crystal doesn't fit with the history we've been given...

Code:

how can we possibly be born from both the Seed Crystal and the Destruction of the Mothercrystal?

It doesn't make any sense, and it only shows a sign of laziness and uncaring for what has happened in the 4-5 years he hasn't worked on the storyline. (It's really not that much- you could probably read through the entire established history of Vana'Diel in a couple hours, so it's not like it's some overwhelming backlog he has to address) I wouldn't have minded an adjustment of the story behind the creation of Vana'Diel if he created some story that was good enough to justify a change, but as it is it's something he probably wrote the night before he had to submit it.

I could probably write out a huge essay pointing out every single thing wrong with the new expansion and it'd reach the text length longer than the dialogue that we were fed in this expansion, that's how much crap is filling this thing.

[Ramza]

Whether you think Crystalline Prophecy is any good, please show some respect. "That guy" is Masato Kato, who worked on Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears. So get your act together. :)

I haven't finished Crystalline Prophecy still (so thanks for not putting that in code text, nub), but I don't see how this so-called "Seed Crystal" can't fit in with the rest of the plot. Crystals is crystals. Mebbe Seed Crystal is a piece of a Mothercrystal? Like...the fact that it's even a "seed" ... yeah, go back and check out the ending to Chrono Cross. Maybe the five shattered pieces of the Mothercrystal (making the five races) were egg-like, and had to be "fertilized" by something. SEED CRYSTAL. And now it works. They can tailor the story however they want.

I'm still excited about the conclusion, so give me some time to get there and absorb it yo. :)