welcome to eorzea!
Created: 10 July 2019
Original world: Famfrit, Primal
Current world: Siren, Aether
I first played Final Fantasy XIV in 2014. I got to level 10 and quit. This, for reference, is maybe an hour and a half of gameplay.
I wasn't really bothered by this. I know myself, and I am exactly the kind of person who would get sucked into a MMO and make it their entire personality. I had other hobbies and other things I wanted to work on. I was busy with life. You know how it goes.
Over the years, I still heard about FFXIV — I had a good friend who'd tried to get me into it initally, and she'd been at it since the relaunch as A Realm Reborn. Every now and then I'd hear updates about it, and while some piqued my interest for sure (are you really telling me they're doing a whole Ivalice collaboration?!) it wasn't enough to get me to start playing.
Eventually, three things coincided in 2019 for me to pick up the game once more:
- A new playable race, Viera, was being added.
- They had recently added Blue Mage, one of my all-time favorite Final Fantasy jobs.
- At the time I was hooked on Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, a mobile gacha game that included some of FFXIV's characters as part of its cast and story, which intrigued me enough to want to learn more.
Of these, #1 was the most important. I can't overstate this — I don't really know if I would have gotten hooked if I hadn't been able to make a Viera. My very first Final Fantasy game was Tactics Advance. I have wanted to make my own Viera since 2003. That kind of childhood nostalgia can't be ignored.
So I bought the game — I don't think I was eligible for the free trial, and even if I had been I'd already decided to commit at least a month or two — and entered the character creator to make my Viera. I fiddled with the settings until I made a character I liked, until...
Voila! There she was. But what was I going to call her? I tried out the built-in name randomizer, and after a while I got the name "Veis." I liked it, but it wasn't quite right, so I decided to go with Reis instead. The name generator had suggested "Muscadet" as a surname; Muscadet is the name of the Viera town in Tactics Advance. Plus, Reis is itself the name of a character from Tactics, another favorite game. If I was going to play the Final Fantasy MMO, I might as well go with an easy reference to older games.
And away I went. Reis started as an arcanist in Limsa Lominsa, with the idea that I was going to play as summoner later on; I'd asked my friend about the different jobs, and landed on this.
I don't have a lot of clear memories of that first day playing, but I can tell you a few things about my play style: I picked up every single sidequest and did it as I came across it. Every single one. This included crafting jobs. This post illustrates how much I took to crafting right away. Keep in mind, this was in patch 5.0, in July 2019; crafting was significantly overhauled several months later in 5.1. I still loved it from the very start.
I liked the game immediately. I honestly think a significant part of it was having a character I connected with (my first attempt had been a forgettable Elezen) but the other part of it was that I was willing to commit. FFXIV has a lot of hand holding in the early levels, but even so it's a complex MMO with a decade's worth of janky systems that take time to learn. I was willing to put in the time to meet the game halfway.
And I even liked the story! This was important. I play games for story primarily, and I had repeatedly heard that FFXIV's story was among the best in the series. I knew so little about the game that from the very beginning, I completely bought in to the story. I was entranced from the first Echo scene of the three city-state leaders during the Calamity. Something as simple as an interesting narrative device was enough to reel me in. Of course ARR doesn't really compare to the later expansions, but I'm being very honest when I say I enjoyed it from the start.
That's not to say it doesn't have low points — again, an illustrative post about my ordeal with the Titan questline — but even so, I kept at it. To the point that I kind of did nothing but play FFXIV for the first few months. Oops?
I didn't just play the story, though; every time I finished an expansion I took my time doing all of the side content I could. Again, the biggest shout out to my friend Jamie, who carried me through the Bahamut raids so I could see the story, and who hopped on voice with me to lead me through one alliance raid after another. Having a friend there to guide me was instrumental in helping me get into the game. I did every optional dungeon, all the story sidequests I could find, and so on. (The only thing I skipped as I played through MSQ was Eureka; I think I briefly went in but I definitely didn't spend significant time there until later.) I even went into the old Diadem a couple times before it was taken down in 5.1 to be revamped.
While Reis is no longer my main character, she is still very dear to me, and I still log into her all the time. I probably always will.