Final Fantasy XI Playdiary
Entry 21 - Alliance fun
Directly following the disjointed events recounted in my last entry, I had a proper adventure again. As you may or may not know, in FFXI upon reaching the original maximum level of 50, your experience counter will stop going up. To get higher than that you have to complete a quest. Since I play the Japanese version I call it "Genkai1" - I have no idea what the popular name for these quests will be for the US players. Anyway, the first genkai quest lets you extend your maximum level cap to 55. I have no pictures of the fun/pain of this quest as my screenshot folder was full from my encounters with Garuda (I love Garuda). So let's pretend I already wrote about it. The second genkai quest lets you extend your maximum level cap to 60 and one quiet day I was wandering through Jeuno when I heard a Japanese player shouting that he wanted to make a team to complete the quest. I asked if I could come along despite being a little low levelled (51) and he said that would be wonderful, so here is my account of the quest from my perspective. At least until the point that I filled my screenshot folder up again with all of the excitement.
After half an hour of crazy organisation by the two leaders of the expedition (all players involved in this are Japanese so it was really quite awe-inspiring how professionally the team worked together), the group started assembling in Upper Jeuno. And Xylia started taking a lot of pictures. Over sixty, in fact ^^;
Once we had seventeen recruits, we split into three teams so that various jobs were nicely divided and formed an alliance. This means the seventeen people function as an extended party, so we can all attack the same monsters and communicate over the same channel. I was a little surprised that we were going with so few people as I'd heard horror stories about this quest requiring more, especially since Guriko and I were low level. The leaders seemed confident enough so I assume reports of the difficulty of this quest were exaggerated. I was put in charge of teleporting my section of the alliance around and casting strengthening magic. We all gathered together and headed to Xarcabard. It looks so beautiful and unspoilt in that split second before everyone else appears on my screen :)
Upon arrival we discovered that one of our white mages had disappeared. The very purple dragoon called her in real life and discovered her computer had crashed. D'oh. We decided to proceed slowly to the first point in our quest in the hope that she'd return in time to participate - we could manage without her, but it seemed unfair to leave her out. At this point I will explain what we had to do with minimal actual spoilers. At three points in Xarcabard are targetable '???' points we have to touch. Simple enough - but each is guarded by a notorious monster that can detect people trying to sneak by and eliminate them. So we were going to take the monsters out before they got a chance to and touch the points. Interestingly the monsters respawn within thirty seconds of being killed so you have to be quick and work as a team if you don't want things to go horribly wrong.
As we waited, the sky turned purple and misty indicating darkness weather. Creepy. We started to head towards the first of the quest monsters, killing everything that dared cross our path. With seventeen of us they were all hopelessly outmatched and much fun was had slaying things. Here is a shortlived Etemmu ghost...
An Evil Eye failed to live up to its name and ended up dead just like the rest. These are actually a little nasty as they cast various status spells on the team. Fortunately with so many of us and half a dozen being white mages we were quite safe to charge in and smack it to death. I also came across Demons for the first time (exploring difficult areas such as this alone isn't something I do often) and was impressed by their dark pointy bodies. Of course they didn't last long either.
Eventually we reached the first area. Everyone was in good spirits as we'd killed some Darkness Elementals on the way and obtained some dark crystals which were jokingly squabbled over. The missing white mage chose this moment to reappear (perfect timing) so we sat and waited for her to catch up. You can see our target dead ahead - a cave guarded by a Boreal Hound. We cast all of our strengthening magic and ran straight at it, hoping to engage it close to the cave so we'd have more chance to touch the ??? point before it respawned...
At first I stood back and healed. When I saw it wasn't nearly as scary as I'd thought I ran in and joined the battle. The poor hound was dead in less than a minuute and everyone managed to enter the cave and then run back to the camping spot without a hitch. One down, two to go.
We teleported back to where we started and ran to our next target - the Boreal Tiger. Naturally everything in our way was destroyed before us. Once we got to the second cave, we misjudged our distance slightly and were spotted. The tiger ran up to us with a growl.
It had some fairly nasty group paralysis attacks but thanks to our red mages and bard we had plenty of MP even without taking time to rest before engaging it, and it was soon dispatched. At this point I was happily snapping pictures as usual when I got the dreaded message in my log that my folder was full once more. Sigh. You'll have to trust me that we won and then went on to beat the final creature - the Boreal Coeurl. It was a great feeling to have been part of the team and to have helped out. It was also nice to have cleared the second level cap quest so early. One less thing to worry about if I ever get that high in level. Everyone was excited as we parted back in Jeuno and headed our separate ways. It's this teamwork that is the real fun of the game for me. I look forward to the next alliance I join up with.
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Date entered: 29th November 2003