It’s been about a month since my first entry in this FFXI “Journal” I don’t remember if I ever made any promises about how often I’d update, but I’ll apologize for the lack of content even if not. It’s something that’s been in the corner of my mind, but every time I came back to it, there was always something I’d rather do.

I’ve been playing too much. No question. There’s been other stuff I’ve wanted to do, but I’ve found myself pushing it aside for FFXI. My excuse was always that I would play a lot now to get some of my jobs up to snuff and then I could take it easy for a while.

The problem was that there was a lot of stuff, and as soon as I finished one thing, I found another I wanted to work on. As should probably be expected of any ongoing game, I guess. I remember I finished Masamune, and almost immediately went to work on BRD empyrean harp and THFs Twashtar. Now I’m even working on Verethragna for MNK and on mythic for BRD. It just never seems to end.

Which means at some point, I’m going to need to put my foot down and cut back a bit. Quite a bit in fact. Even if I’m not doing much with my life right now and have the time, I feel like I should be doing a variety of things. Not just FFXI.

I’d like to institute a system where I play a certain amount of FFXI (Maybe like 2hours) and take a 30 minute to 1 hr break doing something else (Maybe longer if I’m vibing with something) That way I’m not just letting FFXI absorb all my free time and accomplish nothing else

Can’t really start it at the start of the month (due to being super close on finishing some stuff), but maybe by the time Suikoden remaster comes out I can have something in place.

Let me talk about my current plans in FFXI

Apart from finishing Verethragna and the BRD mythic, I’m hoping to start work on a Tizona for BLU. It probably wont take me very long to do, but it probably will be slower than BRDs mythic. I’m also hoping to gear up my WAR some to have a savage blade zerging option.

I do need to make a bunch of capes still. Not sure which ones to focus on. Maybe a TP cape for WAR and a WS for MNK. I also need to properly make a SAM cape and a THF WS cape.

I’d like to do more odyssey. Still need a mpaca set and I’d love to get Nyame rp’d somehow. Not sure how likely that is, although with a REM BRD under my belt, I can’t imagine that it’d be too difficult to find groups

Still would like to get aeonics, but I’m waiting for my LS. Originally I had considered hopping to another server and getting them merc’d, but I decided the money would be better spent working on stuff I can do and being patient.

Not an exciting entry, I know. I’m feeling really tired right now and it’s sapping a lot of my energy just to write this. However I needed something to do while waiting for these spawns

Hey Mae here. Finally doing this thing, I guess. Not sure what I was thinking when I proffered the suggestion of a FFXI journal. Especially when I saw some of the insane journals people were already doing (I saw someone making a physical journal with drawings and how could I compete with that?) I know it’s not a competition, but I also don’t want to disappoint expectations. Which is hard because I’m not even sure what people’s expectations are to begin with.

Where to start? I guess a good place would be to give a bit of an introduction to me.

I first started playing FFXI in fall of 2003 during my freshman year of university. I had been reluctant about an online Final Fantasy, but some online friends had convinced me to get it to potentially play with them. Ironically, they would only end up playing for a couple weeks where I would become a full-on addict. I ended up playing the game to the detriment of my academic/social life, and eventually I forced myself to quit sometime in spring 2024.

I’ll go into more about that at some point if I can find a good juncture to talk about it. What happened next is that I ended up coming back in fall of 2004 under a new character and new server. That character was a male Taru named Diumis and would later become the Mae you know today.

Diumis history is probably even rockier than my original character. He started off as a BLM, but quickly abandoned the path of nuking for healing when he saw the doors being a WHM opened. You see back in the early days of FFXI (strokes invisible white beard) to get anything off the ground (whether it be exp parties, missions, we) you were pretty much beholden to tanks and healers. While you could potentially make do with alternative tanks/healers, it wasn’t optimum, and anything that wasn’t optimum, in those early days, was heavily disfavored for making the game more of a time sink than it was

*ahem* Essentially being a tank or a healer in those days meant a fast track through the game. DDs could spend hours/days looking for EXP parties, whereas I hit 75 and the endgame rather quickly. While initially I was thrilled with this (I’d always lamented my first characters lack of being able to progress) after entering my first endgame shell, I realized what a curse it really was.

We can talk about that more as these entries go on. I was thinking maybe doing “A little bit of the past” and then “A little bit of the current” for each entry. That way I’m not struggling for things to talk about each one. Maybe someone can give me an idea of what they want to hear me talk about.

Let’s talk about the present Mae.

I never thought I’d be playing FFXI again. While I definitely have a fondness for it, it was always hard to come back in the past. Seeing all your friends gone and having little ambition to build an in-game social network, makes FFXI a really grueling game. I tried for a period about a year or two ago to play solo mulit-boxing (building up a lot of resources) and I just could not handle it.

When I saw a FFXI community was starting on Bluesky, I didn’t have very strong expectations. Mostly because it seemed like a large majority of people were coming from FFXIV, and FFXIV never jived for me (I’d always been interested in the story but the gameplay is not for me) I had doubts about how committed they could be to playing two MMOs. I figured FFXI at most would be momentary distraction.

Why did I decide to throw in with it? Part of it was that I did want to play some FFXI again, but the main reason was I’m lonely. My situation right now doesn’t let me meet new people or people that I could say had relevant things in common. I figured nothing ventured nothing gained. Nothing to lose anyway…

It’s too early to call any kind of conclusions about whether it was a good choice or not. On the one hand, I started playing FFXI way too much for several weeks, to the detriment of things like my Japanese learning and experiencing other media. On the other, I’ve met some really cool people, some of which seem to even have some affection towards me. Which has made me feel better about myself? I think anyway.

I think in maybe another month or so I’ll do a real evaluation of whether this was a good decision or not. That’s not to say I’m not making some changes though. Now that I’m done making empyrean weapons, I plan to take the game a lot more casually and focus on helping where I can. Out of the game I also intend to start working at some things that I’ve neglected. We’ll see if I can maintain a good balance as I strengthen these relationships.

I don’t know if this what anyone was expecting for an entry. I’m not sure if the subsequent ones will be the same or different. I don’t even know when I’ll post them. More frequently than the time it took me to post this first one, probably, but not daily.. No way. haha

-Mae