And so Final Fantasy 14 has just hit it’s 8 year anniversary which also means it’s 8 years since I began playing this game and honestly, that’s almost as old as this blog is. When I first played FFXIV, this blog was only 4 years old so even though I don’t write much about the game here, this game is a huge part of my life. As usual time to go through memory lane of the past year!

FFXIV was a huge influence on me playing other Final Fantasy games. So in the past year alone I managed to finish a ton of FF games as you saw on my reviews here. A lot of references are made to other FF games in 14, so it was a lot of fun seeing them as well as hearing all the original music that FFXIV remixed in their raids and dungeons. Covid hit the world hard last year and the music composer Soken brought the news to everyone that he had been battling cancer. It was definitely a rough year for everyone and FFXIV was no exception. A lot of the seasonal events were very weak. Despite that there was a lot of great things that I want to remember.

One big thing was patch 5.3. Patch 5.3 started right before the 7th anniversary event so I still count it and not only did it bring us a hit song,  and and the conclusion to an amazing story but it was the song Soken made while being hospitalized with his cancer.

Another great thing that we got was of course the continuation of the Nier raids which brought us Puppet’s Bunker and Tower at Paradigm’s Breach which concluded the entire raid. I think out of all the raid series so far, this was my favorite because unlike all the previous ones, it actually came out AFTER I had played the game it was based on. Crystal Tower and Ivalice unfortunately I did not play until years after the content had already come out. Also being a huge fan of Nier games it was great seeing references to both Replicant and Automata (with a spice of Drakengard at the end there.)

We had the strangest eternal bond anniversary this year because my husband got covid (despite never leaving the house!! 😂) I was ok though, but we basically spent the time recovering him, and our eternal bonding ceremony ended up looking like this. 😂😂 Ironically it was about 1 month right before we were set to get our vaccines, but at least now we’re vaxxed and been healthy ever since 👍.

As usual we spent the past year visiting studios on our alts, but the studio boom seems to have simmered down on Japanese servers and there hasn’t been much of anything new these days.

Another great thing was finally finishing the Ishgard housing area the Firmament. Gonna be a bloody war for housing in Endwalker but I don’t really plan to move our house from the Goblet since we’ve been there so long it just kinda feels like our home now.

Another thing was the addition of all the new blue mage skills that basically made Wondrous Tails a 1 shot joke now. It was also fun getting to spam a lot of SHB relic dungeons as BLU since it was super fast.

Speaking of relics, this expansion was the first expac where I completed every single relic! That’s right I finished ALL OF THEM. Even the jobs I never play after getting to max level. 😂😂😂 In fact here’s a gallery of all of them!!! 😂

The reason is because this time it was so easy, had multiple options both inside and outside of Bozja (except the Delubrum step which was hell without premade parties.) But now hey, I have every job ready for Endwalker (except some poo gear on some of them but ehhh with the poetics I’ll be getting from roulettes that won’t matter.)

One other big accomplishment that I had not done up until now was getting every mount and the completion mount for the expac. Normally I try to avoid ex primals until the following expac to do them unsync for faster completion. Since there’s going to be a crunching of numbers in Endwalker, I figured it will be a while before things are “easy” in unsync again. So with that in mind I decided to brave the PF pool, get beaten by RNGesus in Titania, but I managed to collect all of the dragons for Shadowbringers to get the hideous robo airplan dragon. 😂

And one final thing I did today was join the Community Stream run by community GMs of FFXIV. The reason I joined is because they were on my data center and on my server!

They even caught my husband on stream during the screenshot bit and called him a male viera 😂😂😂😂 My bunbun even got a cameo on their official tweet (with the scree umbrella xD)

On the topic of streaming, I’ve created a vtuber model based on my FFXIV character and I’m now using her to stream a lot of my games on my Twitch channel. Feel free to drop by and say hi if you see me active or follow/subscribe for notifications (*’ω’*)ｂ

So overall there was definitely some bad stuff in real life and covid still sucks, but FFXIV was definitely something that helped me keep my mind off those things. After all, why be in reality when you can be in a Final Fantasy….🔮

See you all in Endwalker! 👋