Empty Lifebar takes on Final Fantasy XI (July 25, 2012)

Not long ago, Square-Enix announced that their hit MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI, will be receiving yet another expansion. This got some of us here at Empty Lifebar thinking, why haven’t we played Final Fantasy XI yet? This lead to myself, Samuel Evans, Alfred Trujillo, Erik Rodriguez and AJ Lysiak deciding to pick up copies of Final Fantasy XI. This marks the first entry in a new weekly piece that will let our readers know how our adventures in Final Fantasy XI go.

I created a Mithra, which is a cat-girl, and decided upon the Monk class. Alfred decided to make a Tarutaru, an adorable miniature bear-like race, and took on the role of the group’s healer as a White Mage. Sam made a Hume (human) Warrior and AJ made a Mithra thief. Erik is actually a veteran of the game and has been playing since 2003 but he is using an Elvaan (Elf) and chose to start work on the very cool Puppetmaster class.

We started out in the city of San d’Oria and after a few tutorial type “quests” at the beginning, we finally ventured out into the wild. After a couple hours, and a few instances of Sam running off and getting killed, AJ and Sam decided that they had their fill of the game and bailed out. That left me, Alfred and Erik to fend for ourselves for the rest of the night. We stayed training in the forests until about level 10 or so and then pushed on to the La Theine Plateau. Nothing really major happened while we were there except that we leveled up to around 13.

Once we hit 13, though, the fun really started as we entered Valkurm, also known by the Final Fantasy XI community as “Death Valley.” And don’t worry, Valkurm is well deserving of its title. Erik, Alfred and I dug deep into the dunes of Valkurm, avoiding the terrifying Goblins everywhere. Sadly, after we got pretty far into the area Alfred and I got completely destroyed by some Goblins and Lizards and were sent all the way back home to San d’Oria. After the long walk back to Valkurm, Alfred and I had to face the biggest challenge so far…crossing “Death Valley” without any help from Erik. Needless to say, it was the scariest thing we have had to do in the game at this point.

Once we eventually met back up with Erik, he had found two adventurers out in the field that decided to join our party, for privacy reasons I’ll refer to them as Gig and Doc. Now that we had a party of 5, we felt a bit safer as we fought off the hordes of lizards and goblins in Valkurm. We actually held our own for a while, training our skills and leveling our characters…until a Goblin Leecher attacked us from behind. We managed to take the Leecher out after a while due to our combined efforts but sadly, Gig was killed in the fight. This mean Gig had to run all the way back to us from Selbina. Gig made it back no problem, but as soon as she reached us another Leecher attacked her from behind and killed her yet again. We couldn’t help but laugh at her bad luck, though we did feel a bad for her. This led to the entire group making cracks about her being the Golbin killer or telling her to pull the Goblin any time we saw a Leecher.

The night after our first taste of a Final Fantasy XI party we got in with something much cooler. Alliances, if you are not familiar, allow up to three parties to basically band together in one a giant party. Well, towards the end of the night we ended up getting into a giant 18 person Alliance. Needless to say, we kicked some major monster ass. We were flying through training pages like crazy (which give you mucho EXP when you complete one) and were leveling without realizing it. It was ridiculously fun, but I personally like the old-school 6 man team of adventurers better.

The last major thing we did in our first week was ventured to the other cities. First, we took a relaxing boat ride to get to the Mithra and Tarutaru homeland of Windurst. I fell in love with the place almost immediately. After we left Windurst, however, the fun really started as we trekked our way to Jeuno. For those who haven’t played Final Fantasy XI or haven’t made this journey yet, the way to Jeuno is horrifying. Almost everything on the way there wants you dead, and they won’t hesitate to gang up on unsuspecting adventurers. Thankfully, we made it to Jeuno in one piece and then called it a night.

Our first week of Final Fantasy XI turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. We got to level 26 and made a few new friends along the way. We also were able to get our Sub Jobs! Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to take on this stellar title. Also, for any of you who want to maybe play with us, we play on the Ragnarok server. Just comment on the article with your username if you happen to play on Ragnarock and we will try our best to party with you sometime!