Tales from Eorzea #0 – A new beginning!

So, a while ago, I used to do a series of posts on Monster Hunter World called “The MonHun Log” where I was basically talking about my progress in the game… up until the end of the main story (kinda). But then I burnt out from Monster Hunter World and ended up not wanting to play much for a while and then we ended the series (for now?). But I had fun with the series of posts and all of that while it lasted. It was nice to write about a series and continue it on while also receiving some advice from people in the comment and for many reasons, I decided to start playing Final Fantasy XIV: Online… as part of the free trial! I’m not sure if I’ll go for the subscription model yet… I mean maybe if I like it enough, I will? But I’ll have to see about that as time goes on. 

Either way, today I didn’t actually get to play much of it as every MMO begins with the character creation and guess what? I created a character that I’m quite proud of! I first started with a male cat person but it looked janky… or rather, it was alright at first but then I noticed that the eyelids were weird, so I ended up not using it because the eyes bothered me. Then I proceeded to create a super edgy looking male not-dragon person… THE EPITOME OF EDGINESS. But in the end, a friend told me that you can create characters for the “Retainers” you get as the game goes. Hence, I decided to create a female character after all and create a male harem around another iteration of Lizz Winterfield.

So, I created a cat person for Lizz’ first version and she’s cute… I guess… but I’m not super happy with this character, mostly because the height and everything just didn’t work for me. I believe there’re bulkier furry characters in the game and I’d imagine that those could work well for the male retainers. I wonder what the sub-race looks like for the female characters/retainers but I’m too lazy to google it, so I’ll just get surprised later on, I guess… Hence, no Miqo’te for now. Maybe I’ll create another one of those eventually if I decide to play past the free trial. In the end, I settled for a female Au Ra character from the Xaela clan. Au Ra look like dragon people but they actually aren’t dragon people according to the lore. It’s a whole thing but essentially, they have a reptile tail and scales and horns, so let’s just call them Au Ra or “not-dragon-people”. After four hours of creating a character from that race and customising their hair, eyes and horns mostly… It was done. The issue I ran into was that the first pair of horns I’ve chosen looked great initially but then I found a bunch of hairstyles that looked interesting but I couldn’t decide between one of them. In the end, I wasn’t super happy about the other horns I had in the first place and I decided to instead go for a different set… and then I found the perfect hair… and make- I mean face paint! And then I also had to choose a different hair colour and whatever. In the end, I’m super happy with how Lizz turned out.

Side Note: For anyone that doesn’t know, the male character models in Guild Wars 2 sucked, when I first played it, so I created a female character but you needed a name and a family name for your character, so I’ve chosen the most human-sounding last name I could think of “Winterfield” as well as the prettiest name I knew at the time, “Lizz”… And yeah, that’s how I kinda came up with it and I like the name and use it whenever a name is taken or when I use a female character model or whatever.

As for the game itself, I got to play a little bit and honestly, I didn’t understand much of the story but that’s partly because I haven’t gotten into the story yet. We visit Ul’dah by carriage to start our adventure. We get stopped on the way because the trader that took us with him smuggled weed… and then lizard people showed up and attacked the patrol and we got to move on to Ul’dah, our starting town. Our first quest took us to the Adventurer’s Guild. There we met up with Momodi who works at the Adventurer’s Guild counter and who gave us our second quest: Attune ourselves to the aetheryte found inside the city, visit the Thaumaturges’ Guild, and listen to Seseroga’s explanation of the markets.

Oh, that reminds me. Lizz is a Level 2 Thaumaturge at this point with basic gear. Her birthday is the 19th Sun of the 4th Umbral Moon (19 is my favourite prime number, 4 = “shi” = death, and Umbral Moon… sounds hella cool) and her guardian is Menphina, the Goddess of Love… because love rocks. Figured that’d be of importance. Uh, Thaumaturges are kinda cool because they use different spells and get charged up with elemental energy, I guess? We have a Blizzard Spell and a Fire Spell. When you’re charged up with the Astral Fire, your spells cost more mana but deal more damage. When you’re charged up with Umbral Ice, you have more mana regeneration. Effectively, you have a spell rotation of sorts I guess and I currently only have two spells but it seems quite interesting and it’s been a while since I played a non-conjurer type character or rather an actual mage… I’m looking forward to getting the sleep spells (supposedly underwhelming) and the lightning spells (how do those fit into the Elemental Gauge?)! It’s gonna be interesting! ALSO, some people may know that my first ever pixel-art project has been “a black mage but re-pixeled to be a necromancer” and then I developed my emotes from that idea forward and stuff… So, it made sense to pursue the Thaumaturge class in FF XIV Online to become a black mage later on (and dye my robes purple, lol). Thanks for the suggestion, Naithin. I would’ve taken the conjurer or healer otherwise. I mean, I can add those classes later on but… y’know… for the starter class… mage. Hell yeah!

Back to questing: We’ve come to attune to the aetheryte in the city and some very short person called Nenebaru tried to rip us off… as a joke? Humour is weird in Eorzea. Either way, we can now use the “Return” spell, allowing us to teleport to any place we’ve been attuned to. Hence, we gotta find more of these spires in the world and teleport around, I guess! Also, there are smaller shards for intra-city travelling that can be found in important places. Gotta snatch those as well! One of those can be found at the Thaumaturge’s Guild. There we talk to the Guild Receptionist Yayake who gives us a quest to learn the Way of the Thaumaturge. Quickly, I ended up ignoring the second quest we had and the other side quests I picked up along the way to seek an audience with the Coco-Brothers. They all have a certain amount of authority in the Thaumaturge’s Guild and their names start with Coco… also they’re small people, too, and I should call them “Lalafell” more often… Next time! One of them gave us a quest to slay three star marmots, three huge hornets and three snapping shrews… But that will probably have to wait until my next play session as this post is getting quite long already and as it’s already 3 AM right now. Oh, and I met someone with a cute outfit today and they have a cool name and I figured “hey, why not make a new friend?”, so we chatted for a bit and now we’re friends. (^w^) In an MMO, I mean. Maybe they’ll be my mentor and stuff? Maybe they’ll teach me the ropes or something. This is gonna be cool! :D

Either way, I don’t know how often I’ll create these posts but I had a lot of fun so far with Final Fantasy XIV Online, and I haven’t even touched the combat yet. I wanted to log off 44 minutes ago already but I did go for “one more quest” like six more times! And I got distracted a whole bunch, so… the classic MMO experience, I guess? Hope you enjoyed this post! Feel free to talk about your characters and how long creating them took!

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!