Endgame Viable

It’s time for a brief Final Fantasy update.

In reverse order:

I’ve completed the story in FFXV. The last handful of hours was a death march of annoying boss fights, one after another, for what seemed like days. It completely undercut any enjoyment that could have been wrung from seeing the story’s conclusion.

The fights were even more annoying because, when you play on Easy difficulty, you can’t die. You get resurrected by a cute little curbunkle every time you would have died, so strategically, it’s better to let yourself get killed than to drink healing potions. (I assume this is a feature of Easy difficulty, and doesn’t happen on Normal difficulty, but I don’t really know.) That means you can keep limping through fights forever, but it’s a really slow and drawn-out process of chipping away at the bosses (because it doesn’t resurrect your friends).

It reminded me a lot of Guild Wars 2 Living World boss fights: Long and painful, but with zero challenge, because you can’t lose. Just a lot of irritating time wasting, delaying you from experiencing the things you really want to experience in the game.

But it’s done, and I saved the world and got to the credits, and the story still doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I maintain the game was mistranslated, or re-translated five times through Google translate, or something like that.

I haven’t logged into FFXIV for a long time. The Shadowbringers story just isn’t that interesting where I’m at. I have no clue why everyone raves about it. I’m quite sure Stormblood was better at the 30% point of the expansion. I have to assume there will be some good cut scenes later on, and that’s what everyone is remembering as the great story.

I’m sort of bemused by everyone sprinting full speed through the expansions to get to Endwalker right now. I remember doing that before Heavensward. I was so burned out I didn’t play much of the expansion I was racing to get to. Good luck to everyone else!

The story in Final Fantasy XIII is far superior to the one in XV and Shadowbringers (so far), in terms of character development and plot structure. It started strong and it’s stayed … well, not terrible, at least.

It’s a child’s story, to be sure, a Saturday Morning Cartoon, a Disney movie, if you will, full of caricatures and stereotypes and tropes and soap opera melodrama. Everyone has a secret backstory. But at least it all makes sense, something that Final Fantasy XV couldn’t quite manage. The characters have important decisions to make, and the stakes are fairly high.

Unfortunately the combat system is just awful. Playing on Easy difficulty, every fight is an automatic win just by pressing “Auto-battle” repeatedly, except the occasional boss fight where the difficulty curve, annoyingly, spikes up to impossible, and you suddenly have to scramble to figure out alternatives to “Auto-battle.”

If you’re going to pick a game to watch somebody else play, FFXIII is a pretty good choice.

A quick summary of the current status of the Quest for The One Blog.

I haven’t written out the current state of the blog recently, so here it is. This is a bit of a followup to yesterday’s list of things yet to do, inspired by some Twitter and Discord talk.

My current writing process is this: I write posts in a text editor on my Windows PC, in Markdown format. (I use Visual Studio Code.) I put them in a folder called “drafts,” within a directory structure of other stuff. The directory is part of a git repository for version control for the site.

It’s glorious. Writing responsiveness is instantaneous. None of that waiting for WordPress’s slow editor and my slow web host which takes up to a full second to load. I can focus completely on the writing and not have to worry about constantly yelling angrily at the writing tools.

When I’m done with a post, I “publish” the post, which for me means adding a little bit of metadata (the date, and a slug, mainly) to the top of the Markdown file, and then copying the file into the right directory. I wrote a script to streamline the process. Otherwise, I’d have to manually put the Markdown file into the right place, name it, and date it, which is a pain. Hugo doesn’t do any of that for you.

Next I preview the work I did by running a command “hugo server.” This spins up a local web server that displays a preview of the site, as it will be built out on the web. I open it in a web browser by going to “http://localhost:1313.” I usually do a few quick edits to the Markdown and make sure the images are right, and all the changes are displayed in real-time in my browser.

Then I use git commands to commit the post I’ve just written to the repository, and push the changes up to a remote repository. That’s the end of my involvement. The rest is automatic.

For pictures, I put them in another directory on my Windows PC which I’ve cleverly named “imagebucket.” I run a script that synchronizes everything in that directory with a remote Amazon AWS S3 bucket, which I can reference by URL. I picked AWS because I could write a script to do it all automatically. It could be anywhere, as long as it can be automated so I don’t have to manually upload pictures from my PC to the web. (I have variables in my blog so I can change the location of the images at will.)

(I do all of this inside Visual Studio Code, incidentally. It has a Terminal window for typing commands, and it has built-in git support.)

My site is still a work-in-progress, what you might call a Minimum Viable Product, at this point. The RSS feed and link redirection were the main things that had to work out of the gate. (Nobody in the history of the world has ever updated a link once they’ve bookmarked or stored it somewhere.)

My local git repository connects to two different remote repositories: I have one on Azure DevOps, and one on AWS CodeCommit. Those are Microsoft- and Amazon-branded git hosting solutions, very similar to GitHub. They’re free (up to a point).

At the moment, my site is built from the Azure git repo, because that’s the one I started with, and it’s the one I got working first. I had intended to host the site on Azure’s Static Website service (which is free, up to a point), but ran into a major problem because it doesn’t support root domains. (That means I would have had to call my site www.endgameviable.com instead of endgameviable.com, which is a non-starter because it would break every old link out there.)

Here’s how the process works: Each time I commit changes to the Azure git repository, a build pipeline triggers, which runs Hugo. Hugo takes all the Markdown files I’ve made and turns them into HTML files. Then they’re placed into an Azure storage bucket. You can actually see my full web site there, the place I had original intended it to live, and it loads lightning-fast, but it has a very cryptic computer-generated URL.

But in order to get my site to continue to live at endgameviable.com, I then have to copy the entire static site over to my old Linux web host. The build pipeline I mentioned above does that using a secure FTP command. It’s slow and painful, and I would never recommend anyone do it in a million years. But I don’t have much choice at the moment.

So in summary:

It’s that last step that I need to eliminate, because it’s wasteful, and my old Linux host is the only part that isn’t free right now. But there are many things I need to resolve before I can do that, most of which I mentioned in my “todo” post.

I mentioned before that I want to move to AWS. Azure just happens to be where I started, and where everything is currently wired up. But eventually I want to consolidate all of that onto Amazon AWS, because AWS seems like a more mature service than Azure at this point. At least in the area of serving static content. (It’s also helpful for my day job to have more exposure to and experience with AWS infrastructure services.)

So, at the same time all of the above is happening with Azure, I also have my AWS CodeCommit repository setup to build a second static website, which goes into a AWS S3 bucket. There’s a different cryptic link where you can see a complete mirror of my site hosted there on Amazon.

So in total I have three copies of my web site out there on the Internet right now: One on endgameviable.com (my old Linux host), one on Microsoft Azure, and one on Amazon AWS. They’re all built from the same source, the “single source of truth,” in the parlance of industry consultants, which is on my PC.

If I setup everything correctly, in theory, I can move anywhere by just flipping some switches. I just need a git repository, a build pipeline that supports Hugo, and a static file bucket that I can connect a domain name to. (It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the basics.)

The main technical challenge that I still need to solve for a static site is redirecting old permalinks. (I also want to archive two or three other blogs into this one, so I also need to redirect those links to the new site location.)

It’s a long-term project, especially since I typically only dedicate about an hour a month to working on it.

Mainly so that I can remember this, here’s a list of the outstanding problems with the blog that need to be resolved someday.

Roughly in the order I think they need to be fixed.

If you browse old posts, you might notice I still haven’t filled in all the images yet. That’s because it’s a pain.

I had intended to keep all my images in directories alongside my text content, but it quickly became apparent it wasn’t a good idea, because putting 4GB of images in a git repository that needs to be pushed back and forth across the web isn’t a great idea.

First I tried putting images on a free image hosting place called imgbb.com, which works fine, but it’s a pain to upload images manually one at a time to any web site, my general life philosophy being that every extra mouse click is time wasted. (I think it’s free. I don’t remember paying anything for it, but the About page doesn’t seem to have a free plan.)

I’ve now worked out a way to use an AWS S3 bucket to hold my images. I create and maintain the images in a directory on my local PC and run a script to synchronize them to a remote AWS bucket “in the cloud,” then reference that bucket in my blog posts. The first post wired up to use this method is this one. Now my images can go from screenshot to blog reference without ever touching an image editor or manual upload. (I still have to copy them from one directory to another on the PC, and run a script to resize and brighten them, but that’s tolerable for now.)

The free AWS plan allows some 5 GB of storage space for free, or something like that. Most everywhere on the Interwebs allows 5 GB for free. And CloudFront, the part of AWS that actually serves the images, allows 50 GB of bandwidth for free. I assume that’s per month, but it doesn’t actually specify that. I guess I’ll find out. (UPDATE: CloudFront, it turns out, is only free for the first 12 months in the AWS Free Tier, so I’ll have to ditch that. I’m told Cloudflare is a free alternative, though I have little experience with it.)

Anyway now I need to go back and re-wire all my older posts to reference AWS instead of imgbb. Then I need to go back through all those years of archived posts and update the image references. I need to strip out the create-5-images-for-every-one that WordPress did to me all those years, and shrink them back down to one-image-per-image for 2013 through 2018. And convert them all to reasonably-sized JPEGs. (Some of them are PNGs… I mistakenly assumed WordPress would convert everything you upload to JPEG, but it didn’t. WordPress is terrible at everything.)

Once that’s done, only text files will be stored in my blog’s git repository, and updating the site will become significantly faster. (UPDATE: I have, in fact, removed all the images from the git repo. Still need to fix images for 2013-2018 though.)

There’s no .htaccess on static web sites, a very significant problem that I utterly failed to anticipate. That means there’s no way to redirect old links to new locations. I have links out there dating back to 2003. The only way to do it in a static site is to duplicate the old paths, which is a pain, and not what I want to do anyway. I want to redirect search engines from the old links to the new links, so they update their databases.

That means I need an Apache dynamic web server somewhere that can redirect links–just a server that is entirely empty of content except a single .htaccess file. With the long-term goal of moving entirely to AWS, I expect I should be able to spin up an Apache server to do that one specific task (and perhaps, also, run an XML-RPC server). It’s overkill for that one specific task, but it’s the easiest way to do it.

(One alternative idea I had was to write a very simple Golang HTTP server that did nothing but redirect links, which I think is a better technical solution, but it’s more work.)

Because of the aforementioned link redirecting, I still have to hold onto my ancient relic of a Linux shared hosting plan. I can’t yet fully disconnect from the ancient past of blogging and enter the modern world of infrastructure-on-demand.

But once I figure out the link redirecting, I’ll be able to move completely into AWS. Hopefully for free, or maybe a couple bucks a month (not counting domain names).

NOTE: Technically, it doesn’t have to go to AWS, it could go just about anywhere that supports serving static files and/or custom domain names and/or very small compute resources. AWS just happens to be the thing I’m most interested in exploring at the moment.

There’s no pingback implementation on the blog anymore, which means I have no idea if anyone in the WordPress world references my blog.

Pingbacks are implemented with an XML-RPC call from one blog to another, which requires more than a static blog can deliver. And without comments, there’s no way to display pingbacks on posts anyway.

But it would be relatively straightforward to create an XML-RPC server implementation separate from the blog to receive pingbacks. Then I could at least be notified by email or something. (But will pingback clients balk if the pingback link is on a different domain from the blog?)

The question then becomes, where to host the XML-RPC server? It’s another thing that could live on its own compute instance in AWS, or possibly on the same instance as Apache server.

Implementing a way to send pingbacks could be done with a little command-line program that runs on my PC when I add a new post, or possibly built into the site-building process. Maybe there’s something out there that does this already.

There’s no blogroll. I want to add one. I don’t know how. I just know I want the source to be an OPML link from InoReader, so I never have to manually adjust the blogroll and it’s 100% automatic for the rest of my life. And I don’t particularly want a static snapshot of a blogroll to live on each individual post’s page. It’s another somewhat sticky problem for a static site.

There’s no comment form. A fairly glaring omission to readers.

The implementation of interactive comments on a static site, however, is not a simple thing. It has to be 100% Javascript. I’m reasonably confident nobody likes third-party comment tools like Disqus, and I don’t particularly want to use them either.

I have ideas. It’s complicated. Is it worth the effort? As a web development exercise, sure. As a blog site owner, maybe. I have thoughts and opinions about blog comments that don’t necessarily align with the blogging establishment. Anyway I just don’t have any time to do it right now.

There’s no automated posting of new content to Twitter or other social media. It’s not that big of a deal, because surely everyone who cares has put my blog into their RSS feed reader of choice, but it would be nice to figure out a way to send out social media notifications.

A separate service that watches my RSS feed would probably suffice. Just some command-line programs I could schedule on my own PC would be good enough. Hard to find command-line tools to interact with web services, though, particularly Twitter. Twitter is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud about letting people use their API.

There’s no search feature. Another casualty of a static site. This is a pretty low priority fix, because you can search the site, you just have to type it into Google to do it: “searchkeyword site:endgameviable.com”.

The main thing I’ve done by leaving WordPress, apparently, is take a blog that used to be all wrapped up in one convenient but monolothic application, and break it up into a spiderweb of disparate services that all have to work together. Yay microservices!

We interrupt this blog post creation for an unscheduled visit from some deer.

I live on a one-acre lot, but behind my house, there’s a 90-something-acre undeveloped lot of forest, so I see a lot of wildlife wandering around my back yard. Deer being one of the larger varieties of said wildlife. Also possum, foxes, feral cats, dogs, birds, wild turkeys, squirrels, snakes, spiders, dragonflies, toads, turtles, salamanders, etc. etc.

This morning as I was getting up, I noticed a return visitor: A doe and her two fawns. They first appeared back in June.

So I grabbed a few pictures this morning.

I have hundreds if not thousands of photos of deer in my back yard from the last four or five years. Thankfully the telephoto lens on my now-nearly-10-year-old DSLR camera still works even after my cat knocked it off a shelf earlier this year, though it now makes louder whirring noises when autofocusing than it used to.

I didn’t do any color correction on these photos, as you can plainly tell from the washed-out look that comes from taking a picture through a window. The deer always know when I’m standing there at the window taking pictures, incidentally. Mama doe always stares at me intently while I’m taking pictures.

That’s it.

P.S. I’ve realized that I haven’t done a single thing to mark or promote or point out that these are Blaugust posts in anyway, which is mostly a lack of attention to detail, but I don’t particularly want any prizes anyway, so I’m okay with forfeiting my place on the winner’s stand.

I have roughly 15 minutes to think of, write, edit, illustrate, and publish a blog post this morning.

Screenshots! From Final Fantasy XIII! Which I played last night. Because I got incredibly annoyed with the bosses at the end of Final Fantasy XV, and then FFXV crashed and I lost a bunch of progress, so I think I just won’t be finishing it. Hopefully nothing exciting happens in the final cut scenes.

Final Fantasy XIII is basically a Saturday Morning Cartoon in a video game. I don’t know this, but I imagine somewhere on the Internet you can probably buy Lightning and company action figures.

This is Hope and Vanille, two of the ensemble cast. Vanille has an accent I can't quite pin down. I think it might be Australian? Or New Zealand? Or is it just made up? I don't know, but it consumes about 90% of my focus when she's talking.

Everyone was trying to find Serah. They found her, but then she turned into a crystal, which is probably bad, but it also might be good. There was a lot of discussion about it among the characters.

Lightning and Friends fought the Fal'cie that turned Serah into a crystal and killed it. Ironically, or maybe just coincidentally, the Fal'cie was also a crystal. It might also be a creature inside a gigantic metal body. Or maybe it's an alien. Or some kind of diety? I honestly don't know at this point. Is that crystal the heart? Or a kidney or lung perhaps? This is a very clear picture of what they keep calling a "Fal'cie" so your guess is as good as mine. I'm sure I could just read a wiki and learn these things but it's way more fun to speculate based on the non-existent clues the story provides.

After killing the Fal'cie, there were a lot of cut scenes and flashbacks. This is Snow and Serah in a flashback. Incidentally, they're voiced by Troy Baker and Laura Bailey, who will one day go on to act in a Very Different Scene in The Last Of Us, Part II. Karmic justice, perhaps, since Snow "wished" for Serah to say yes to his marriage proposal, a clear violation of consent and free will. But I think we're supposed to imagine Snow as a romantic hero instead.

After killing the Fal'cie and having a lot of flashbacks, everything exploded and everyone fell out of the sky and landed in Lake Bresha, which was frozen and crystallized. They were also turned into l'Cie, which is bad, apparently, but it gives them magical powers so I don't know why they're complaining. It takes a lot of effort to study and understand the rules of this world, by the way. They just throw it all at you in a wall of information. Fortunately there's a lot of recap text which keeps reiterating the important terminology.

The thing that was previously green is now blue. I now know this is, I think, a "Vestige," which contains a "Pulse Fal'cie." I think.

I’m going to play Final Fantasy XIII next. That’s a 13. Those roman numerals are confusing.

I’m in Chapter 14 of Final Fantasy XV, which is the last chapter before the Epilogue, preparing for what I have to assume will be an epicly annoying final boss fight. (The boss fight leading up to this one was pretty annoying.)

As a reminder, I’ve learned nothing about combat in FFXV except press the left mouse button a lot, and warp around a lot fighting with the camera. And sometimes press other keys if the game tells me to, which summon a god or something. And drink a hi-potion each time you’re hit, because every enemy hit is a killing blow so you lose all of your hit points and stagger around useless for a while. Also it doesn’t matter if you die because a cute little carbunkle always resurrects you, which I presume is a feature of Easy difficulty.

Anyway this isn’t about Final Fantasy XV, it’s about Final Fantasy XIII, because I decided I’m going to play the franchise in reverse order until they stop being fun. I’m finishing up 15, and I’ve already been playing 14 off and on for years. Those are the only two Final Fantasy games I’ve played up to now.

(Well, technically I played about an hour of the Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster the other day.)

So I got Final Fantasy XIII (that’s a 13) on Steam. It was a minor inconvenience to get it running, because I had to install .NET 3.5, which means you have to go into Windows Features and check a box instead of installing it like the game wanted to. After that it runs fine on Windows 10.

According to Wikipedia, this game began life on consoles in 2009, then made it to Windows in 2014. It’s the first of a trilogy of Final Fantasy XIII games, a rare thing in the Final Fantasy universe, apparently.

I’ll say this about FFXIII so far: It started out way better in the first hour than FFXV did. (These roman numerals are going to get annoying.) The story starts out with a bang, and we get likable characters and an ensemble cast to follow immediately, and a bizarre but colorful space opera setting that appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with Final Fantasy.

I don't know what this is so I've titled it "green thing."

The gameplay, however, is … let’s see, how can I say this without being too negative. It’s not ideal. It’s not the part I’m interested in. It’s what I might call the obstacle that must be overcome to reach the end of the game, the suffering that must be endured, if you will.

It’s a weird hybrid of real-time combat and turn-based strategy combat, which will probably annoy fans of both types of combat. Hopefully I can continue to click on the “Auto Battle” button on Easy difficulty for the entirety of the game. Would that there was a cheat or something to just skip past it all.

And holy crap, somehow the morning is almost over already, so that’s all I can say about it.

I have what I have to assume is an abnormal reaction to music posts.

In my observations of human activity on this planet, I’ve noticed that there are people out there who enjoy sharing their favorite music with the rest of the world. Bel does mixtapes, Syp does mixtapes, and Bhagpuss regularly reports on YouTube music. Roger also sometimes talks about movie soundtracks but I can’t find an example at this particular moment.

I’m sorry to say I tend to avoid those posts. Music is such a deeply personal experience for me that, in my mind, reading these posts feels a bit like reading about peoples' favorite sex positions. A bit on the uncomfortable side, in other words. Or possibly even worse, others' thoughts on music might come across as flippant or casual or nonchalant, suggesting that perhaps they aren’t taking the subject of music nearly as serious as I do.

I’ve occasionally pondered writing about songs or albums, and I’m sure I’ve tried it a few times in the past. I usually feel like I’m having a continuous panic attack for weeks after posting them, so I don’t do it very much. And I’m certainly not going to go look them up now and renew that feeling again.

I had an experience as a younger lad that continues to inform my perception of music choice: Long, long ago, my mother was very excited to receive a CD of popular music from the 40s. I, being a dumb kid at the time, made fun of “old people music,” as dumb kids do. My mother burst into tears and I felt awful about it. I still feel awful about it to this day, and she’s been dead now for more years than I knew her. Of course she’d be excited about music from her teenaged years, who wouldn’t be? (CDs were new then, too, so it was extra cool.)

That experience taught me never to judge anyone’s choice of music, because judging someone’s personal choice of music can come across the same as judging them personally. It also taught me never to reveal the music that resonates with me, because that leaves me open to people placing value judgments on me personally. Or so my brain tells me. Some people have thick skin but I definitely don’t, especially in this area. Something I probably inherited from my mother.

And that’s today’s random thought.

And we rejoice, because we found an existing image to put into this post.

Final Fantasy XV is on my mind this morning.

Final Fantasy XV is one of those open world games where you’re supposed to spend 500 hours wandering around collecting chocobo figurines, or something like that, but I’m just running (or driving, in this case) from main quest to main quest to consume the main story and nothing else.

I gave the game two or three opportunities to amaze me with deep and meaningful side quest stories, but instead, I was given errands to go to some spot on the map, fight some monsters, and fetch some item or another to bring back for a pittance of experience points or gil. So the lesson was quickly learned that side quests are pointless in FFXV.

I’ve also been struggling with the game crashing fairly often. (More than zero times is “often” for a video game.) Previously I thought that turning off Windows Full Screen Optimizations fixed it, but it didn’t. Neither did disabling Windows Game Optimizations or disabling the Windows page file (common Internet solutions). It now appears that the game is prone to crashing unless you simply reboot before playing.

Anyway, besides all that, one thing this game is fantastic at is cinematography. I got to the Trial of the Leviathan, where you spend most of your time gaping at the amazing set piece imagery. (It’s way better than the Kraken scenes from either Clash of the Titans movie.) Screenshots, of course, look puny and pitiful compared to the actual game experience.

Apparently, according to the Steam achievement stats, only 33% of players have reached this point of the game and completed this amazing Leviathan set piece. That’s not terribly surprising, because this is a game that people will probably decide they don’t like early on. You have to sign up for a wild ride to get through this game, and have a high tolerance for slow, awkward game mechanics.

Narratively speaking, the story makes little or no sense. I have no idea why The Oracle was calling on Leviathan in the first place. Something about the world being plunged into darkness and needing help, I think? There was no evidence of that anywhere in the game up to that point. The world seemed pretty lively and fun to me, what with all the chocobos and Dukes of Hazzard caricatures and whatnot.

I don’t understand what’s so special about this ring they kept talking about. I don’t understand why the bad guy appeared out of nowhere to stab the nice lady. But it was a really, really dramatic turning point in the game’s story, this Leviathan trial. It’s the “all is lost moment."

Anyway, despite all the weirdness, FFXV still remains in my #1 go-to game playing slot, consistently beating out Final Fantasy XIV.

It’s the first day of Blaugust, and it’s a dreary one.

I have about 15 unfinished blog posts sitting in my “drafts” folder, as we start off with Blaugust this year, with topics ranging from Amazon Web Services to Final Fantasy XIV to Crowfall to Guild Wars 2 to last week’s scandal to MMORPG stories. (There’s one in there called “how to play MMOs,” which I don’t even remember writing.) I had a post setup and ready to publish today, about the things that Final Fantasy XIV still needs to do to address those last couple of things holding it back from ultimate MMORPG supremacy. I also had a big list of writing prompts I was going to use.

But it’s a drizzly, dreary morning here where I live, I’m “in a mood,” and I don’t feel like posting any of those drafts or reading any of my old posts, so I’m just going to write something new instead. Even today’s magically-changing Windows background is a gray cloudy sky.

Also, there’s the Blaugust challenge, and then there’s the Blaugust challenge. The Blaugust challenge is to post something every day, which I consider to be more of an organizational and scheduling challenge, more of a work challenge, as it reflects the work that goes into professional blogging for the big dollars. The Blaugust challenge is to write something and post it the same day, every day, which I view as more of a NaNoWriMo-style writing challenge than a blogging challenge. Be creative and entertaining and productive, right now, go! In a first draft! Without any editing!

Let’s see what else is going on around the blogosphere today. Wow, remember that word “blogosphere?” That used to be a common word, back before “social media.”

Roger has some useful thoughts about Blogrolls over on Contains Moderate Peril that I generally agree with. Blogrolls are a weird social minefield, or they used to be, at least. I don’t think blogging is the same today as it was in 2005, when blogrolls were the lifeblood of blog discovery, so it may be less of a concern among younger generations of bloggers. Someday I want to add a blogroll back to my site, but it’s a thorny technical problem and I have to do it in a way that I don’t have to maintain it manually, because I hate doing that.

Naithan is still playing Dark Souls, entering Sen’s Fortress, my favorite part of the game, and possibly one of my favorite locations in any modern RPG.

Tipa has a post up about the original Final Fantasy, which is interesting to me because, like I’m sure a lot of people, I also just bought the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and played a little bit of Final Fantasy for the first time. I salute the effort of trying to get 31 blog posts out of it, though. It’s a teeny tiny game by today’s standards.

Anyway, there’re a bunch more posts out there, go read them! If you want. Again, as a reminder, I’m not your mom. There’s probably a convenient link that I could put here to direct you to all those posts, but I’m almost positive you can just Google “Blaugust 2021” to find it, and anyone reading this probably already knows about Blaugust anyway.

I don’t know if I’m going to do this again tomorrow. I have three full days of Puppet training coming up at work, which means three full 8-hours days sitting on a Zoom call. If you haven’t experienced this, it’s … an experience.

(Puppet is a software tool, by the way. I’m not learning how to make marionettes.)

Well, I’ve committed the cardinal sin of blogging right out of the gate: Writing a post about nothing, for which I cannot write a concise, descriptive title. But it’s over now and we move on to other things, because life is about looking forwards, not backwards.

We now bring you a brief Shadowbringers update.

My character has reached level 76. I haven’t done a single side quest, other than the ones that unlock flying, because there’s no need to. I got at least one extra level because I did the Holminster Switch dungeon four times, because I thought I needed to level my AI companions, but it turns out you don’t need to do that just to play through the main quest. (Incidentally, four dungeons runs did not level any of my companions.) You get ridiculous amounts of experience points just turning in the the main quests, and I’m still getting rested experience.

In terms of story, I just started level 74 quests. I’m still kind of waiting for The Greatest Final Fantasy Story Ever to start… I’m at the point where our heroes have just entered Riki’Tiki (not the actual zone name, but I can’t remember it, because every name in this expansion is just an unmemorable jumble of random letters).

There are good moments here and there. Good short stories. I mentioned the brief character arc of poor Tesleen last time, which I would still point to as the pinnacle of the expansion thusfar. I thought there might be more to Tesleen’s story but they just threw her onto the garbage heap of history and turned her into a dungeon boss.

Il Mheg before.

The zone story of Il Mheg, the fae kingdom, was charming, but largely a time-killing side quest in the overall story. A McGuffin hunt, as is so common in MMORPGs. A “middle book” experience, let’s say, if we were reading a fantasy trilogy. The part where the characters are just kind of killing time before the plot advances. I can’t think of any consequential character developments that occurred in that time.

There are things I’m interested in, but the game doesn’t seem to think they’re as interesting as I do. I resonate considerably more with character-driven stories than plot-based stories. So this odd relationship between Thancred and … uh … hrm, maybe I shouldn’t name too many people because I know there are readers way back in Realm Reborn or Heavensward. Thancred and that teenager.

Their relationship is interesting to me, mostly because it strikes me as strange, and also because Thancred has never really had much character development before, not that I can remember at least. But whereas I want them to drop everything to do with these silly Ascians and Calamities and dig into the emotional meat and potatoes of this borderline abusive, weirdly co-dependent relationship, to unravel the murky threads of that story, they keep marching onward with saving the world or some such nonsense.

As we roll into Rikki’Tikki’Tavvi (still not the actual zone name), I’m also a bit fascinated with how they’re setting up this Ascian Guy to be holding the moral high ground over the good guys. I’m delighted with stories that explore moral ambiguity. Nothing is more fruitful story territory than good guys doing bad, and bad guys doing good.

Il Mheg after.

I don’t know much about the Sin Eaters, except they explained that they are evil, bad, horrible, terrible things that must be destroyed on sight because they are unambiguously bad. So of course the first thing I thought was, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if there’s a way to rescue and restore the souls trapped in them and our heroes have been mercilessly exterminating them all this time? What if we could have gotten Tesleen back? What a fantastic moral dilemma that would be for our heroes.”

So far there’s been no sign of that development, though. But I’d love for our heroes to have to swallow their morally-superior pride and work with the enemy to achieve a common goal. It’s not very interesting to me to see pure good characters doing good deeds because “it’s the right thing to do.” Ugh. Gag. Choke. Stories are supposed to teach us how to navigate the moral complexities of real life, not trick us into believing real life is a fantasy.

Anyway, we’ll see where it all goes.

I find it somewhat odd that there aren’t a lot of new characters in Shadowbringers so far.

In Stormblood, we had Lyse (not technically new, but kind of), and Fordola, and Gosetsu, and Hein, and Yotsuyu, and Xenos (if you can call him a character), and a bunch of incidental side characters I can’t remember. M’nago, I think, was one I liked.

So far in Shadowbringers, we have the Crystal Exarch, who is not so much a character as he is an exposition-delivery and deus ex machina robot. Lyna is very cool but she has no backstory and no relationships. (Characters are usually only as good as their relationships with other characters, in my personal opinion.) The Mysterious Teenager has a lot of interesting potential, but it’s not yet clear if that’s the focal point of the expansion or just an incidental side plot. The fae folk are comic relief. Feo Ul is very amusing, but not really a character.

Feo Ul after.

For comparison, by this time in Stormblood we had a very strong character arc in progress with Lyse, with a clear beginning, middle, and end to look forward to. In Shadowbringers so far … not so much. Just a lot of plot happening without much character involvement. (To reiterate, I greatly prefer character-driven stories, which is somewhat difficult to pull off in a video game.)

There are a couple of new bad guys in Vauthry and … um, the monk guy, whose name I can’t remember, but thusfar they seem to be factory-produced cardboard-cutout villains with no motivation other than being villainous. I guess they’re meant to be blank slates on which we can project whatever bad people and things we don’t like from the news and Twitter.

Then there’s the Ascian, who I have to assume is the real villain. He’s more interesting, or at least entertaining. But I’ve always felt the Ascians were a bit of hand-waviness in narrative terms, because they appear to exist only to sow chaos for no other reason than to sow chaos, which is quite a silly character motivation if you ask me. An external force to drive plot forward, when the internal forces can’t or won’t. Sort of like a natural disaster.

And I guess there’s poor Ardbert, whom we don’t see nearly enough. The tragic ghost who’s doomed to haunt us forever is an interesting character, and I hope he plays a much bigger role than just a transition between scenes. I honestly don’t remember what happened to him. It seems a lot more important now than it did back then. Back then–I think it was somewhere near the end of Heavensward?–it felt like a random side story that didn’t matter much. I should go back to the Neverending Story book and see what happened. I remember liking Heavensward a lot but I can’t remember a single thing about it now.

There’s other stuff with the Garleans and the Black Plague going on back in The Source which I have to assume we’ll get back to eventually. They just sort of stopped at the end of Stormblood to do this world-hopping trip. Is time even advancing back in The Source? I think so, but it’s “different.” Time moves slower in The First, I think, so we can have an expansion-sized adventure without much time elapsing in The Source.

The forest of Rikki'Lake and the new Y'shtola.

I suppose we’re meant to feel some sort of tension over whether our heroes will get back to The Source or not, but when the story plays out in a video game, it takes a lot of the wind out of those sails. The player can teleport back and forth at will, so no problem there. And it doesn’t really matter whether the Scions make it back or not, because we can always teleport to The First to see them. In any case, it’s not like any of the Scions have any real ties back to The Source. Urianger doesn’t have a family and children to get back to, for example. The only people the Scions ever interact with are other Scions, and they’re all together in The First.

And again, we know for sure the world isn’t going to end, because it’s a video game, so not much tension there. The only way to make me feel that tension is to present sympathetic and believable characters who feel that mortal peril in-world, and–so far–they aren’t. (They immediately killed off poor Tesleen.) It’s just another day at the office for our heroes saving the world–so far.

Perhaps it’s all just laying the groundwork for something amazing that’s yet to come. Although personally, I think stories are supposed to start amazing, then be amazing in the middle, and then end even more amazing than they started. In a perfect world, at least. Very hard to do in an MMORPG, of course.

P.S. I present these viewpoints not so much to criticize the story, but to write down a record of how I perceive it at this point, so that I can look back and see if/how anything changes later. This is one of those times when I’m glad I don’t have comments, because I’m sure a horde of fans (aka. cultists) would jump in here to explain how my opinions are wrong. Rest assured, fans, I would not write this much about a game I didn’t like and enjoy playing. (I certainly wouldn’t decorate it with pictures, either, which is a massive pain in the arse.)