These past couple weeks I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI again. If you’re not aware of my history, it basically dominated much of my early adulthood 18-20s. My addiction got so bad that I not only failed a term of university and lost some online friends (from generally not engaging with them), but it also kept me away from my family when my grandfather was dying.

I’m not going to claim it’s the game’s fault. It’s entirely mine. I was going through a period where I wanted familiarity to escape to, and having some genuinely good memories of it, FFXI offered the perfect escape. I should have recognized and stopped myself from doing so before things ever spiraled out of control, but that’s something I’ve beaten myself up over more than enough at this point.

The last time I went back to FFXI, it was to replay the story on a new character. That generally went pretty well, but I ended up quitting again when I saw the amount of time investment that would be required to do the stuff I would need to do after that. It didn’t help (or maybe it did in the sense it helped me quit) that at that time everyone I know who had played the game had quit and doing anything at my stage still required people to help.

This most recent time I came back mostly from the nostalgia of seeing people mention it on Twitter. Mostly from people who had never played it discovering that it was actually a really good game. It got me thinking about wanting to revisit, and just as it happened, there was free week coming up. I thought I’d hop on for a short week and see what had changed and then stop.

That was the plan at least. The plan changed when I found out how to automate some of the game. For those unfamiliar, FFXI introduced a system that allows you to play content with NPCs that helped me do a lot of stuff by myself the last couple times I’ve played. However, the stuff I’m talking about is the unofficial stuff. The things people use to bot the game.

Botting used to be heavily frowned upon when the game was still in its prime and bots like fishing bots were screwing up the player economy. Now that the game has advanced to this stage though it’s pretty common to see people botting certain things with multiple characters. Well, I say that but you’d be surprised to learn that a lot of the tools people use aren’t easily findable.

Hell, the stuff I found was nothing more than a six year old tool that didn’t work entirely and a buggy Windower plugin (Windower is a third party program for FFXI that adds some QoL stuff) It wasn’t as nice as what it seems other people used, but it was efficient enough to help you play the game. At the very least, it was helpful for playing other characters, which allowed me to multibox.

I already had my first character, the second I made to redo story, and a friend’s character that I had taken when they quit the game. While you couldn’t do the most cutting-edge content with three, most of the stuff I left undone due to there being no feasible way suddenly became doable. Thus I got sucked back into this game with the plan of saying goodbye to it on my own terms by accomplishing the things I left undone.

Though as my title says, farewells are never flawless. While I did get much accomplished and I did have quite a bit of fun here and there, I noticed the effect it was having on both my mental and physical health. I was waking up groggy and I felt that heaviness that often accompanied my deepest depression when I played in the past. I also found myself doing less of the stuff I was doing before or paying less attention than I probably should have (like my Japanese studies)

I even went as far as to spend money on the game. Not just the subscription fees themselves (for four characters even) but I bought gil again (Against the games ToS) Not great, and probably another thing that cemented my fate of getting sucked back in.

I did accomplish some things and it did look like I could do what I wanted to eventually do. However, thinking about all the stuff I’d need to sacrifice to make it happen, over time, really wore me out. I thought “Is this really worth it?” Ultimately, right this moment, I decided no and canceled all my accounts again and logged off.

A bit sore that I’ll be feeling the effects of the money I spent for a while, and there’s a part of me that’s saying “It couldn’t hurt to play out the rest of the month you bought” However, I know that if I let those things sway me, I’ll just be right back at it again. In fact, I know this to be true because it actually happened a few days prior when I thought about quitting.

I guess the next step now is to uninstall everything. The whole “talking the talk and now walking the walk” thing.

I do have a post that I was writing about my time in FFXI. Initially I planned to post it to justify my decision to come back. Now I think I’m going to post it to explain the hold the game had on me.