Jul 28 2008
My epic (fail) journey begins
After spending the longest time I’ve ever spent on installing a video game, I finally got around to playing Final Fantasy XI for the first time. As a “puny Earthling”, I’m biased toward creating/recruiting human characters in my video games, so I made two different “Humes” - one a White Mage named Kaeli (Siren server), and another a Warrior named Reuben (Hades server). I wanted to start out with a Thief named Tristam, but that name and all variations on it were taken on the server where I wanted to use him. In case it wasn’t apparent, I named them both after characters from the oft-ridiculed SNES RPG Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, because I though it would be the least likely game from where people would steal names.
I spent my first half-hour of the game wandering around blindly because I didn’t bother to read the instruction manual before playing. FFXI’s mouse movement system is weird - first, you have to click and hold your mouse somewhere on the screen. The closer to the middle of the screen you are, the better, because your character tends to swing around wildly when you put the cursor anywhere else (but unlike holding down on the mouse wheel button, there’s no indicator of where your center is). A little while later, when searching for the menu button, I found out that the number pad works just as well.
Why I decided to make one of my beginner characters a White Mage instead of a Black Mage, I’ll never know. Healing types are notoriously hard to solo, which is something I should have learned the hard way from playing Guild Wars with my starting class as a Monk and dying several times over. If I can make Kaeli powerful enough, I’ll swap out her White Mage-ness to make her a Beastmaster so that she can use axes, with White Mage as her sub-job.
If that doesn’t work out, I’ll probably play as Reuben, and team up with one of my buddies who’s been playing the game for a few years now, and knows the area better than me.
