We Are Vana'diel Too

I keep coming across the "We Are Vana'diel" videos and it's pretty lame that most of them aren't in English or even subtitled. Very very lame. I get what they are kind of doing though. They're going over memories and such.

I've always found that looking back on memories of this game to be one of my favorite chat topics. Sometimes it is in Linkshell chat. Sometimes it is over yell channel. Who doesn't love reflecting on goblin trains to Selbina zone line or Garlaige Citadel's entrance being swarmed with skeletons and bats where parties had to wait for them to all return to their original spawns? Trash talking while between HNM windows. Count me in. Great memories.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to post some more memories here.

I'll start. I was just remembering how tough the "A Shantotto Ascension" final battle was. Domina and Belle Shantotto were no joke. Then all of a sudden after the fight, they turn into Japanese Kaiju. How crazy was that? Oh, and I love the theme song of that battle.

I remember starting out for the first time as a Hume White Mage and having no clue what I was doing. Whacking things with my Onion Rod, using a Scroll of Cure thinking it was going to heal me, then using Benediction and thinking "Whoa, a 2 minute cooldown seems long" and then immediately realizing that it wasn't minutes.

But it wasn't long before a group of people took me under their wing and showed me some of the ropes. We joined together as a party and made our way up to Valkurm level. It still took a long time, but it was definitely faster than trying to hit bees with my sad little rod.

I have way more memories of people being kind and helpful than anything else, and I always tried to pay it forward. It helps that I've never really been into endgame stuff, so there wasn't much in the way of competing. Just people picking one another up. I think that's why I loved White Mage back in the day too. People were always so grateful for the wandering White Mage who could Teleport-Dem and Raise someone in the Dunes.

The first time I coordinated my own Divine Might (the original fight for the earrings, not the HTBF remake) group with 18 people, we won. It was an epic 45 minutes before the fight of me typing out roles (wasn't using vent at the time), battle strategies, splitting parties, and communicating with everyone how the battle would go. I think the original fight had a 30 minute timer, and we ended up killing it with like 2 minutes left. Did it with a shout group way back on Cerberus. Wiped twice (but we killed AAGK > HM first and left AATT in the circle, so a recovery was still possible with only 3 left). I was so stressed out this fight, that when we won, I did a couple laps around my apartment in celebratory fashion (I must have been like 19 or something). I joked with a friend of mine that I should put "Event Coordinator" on my resume, for all of the prep work that went into getting 17 complete strangers together to complete the task. To this day, that original 18-man fight was the most epic battle I have been a part of, and the //setbgm music still gives me chills of that fight sequence.

One day, I am going to sit my kids down and tell them about OG Divine Might. That may have been my greatest video game experience ever.

DM holds a special place for me also.

I don't recall what server it was on (I've been Fairy > Shiva > Bahamut > Asura), but I did DM for the first time on one of those first 3 servers. I had finally gotten an established group to pull me into their DM run. They wrecked it, it blew me away, but they ended up giving me a pearl to the LS.

It was this bizarre LS where everyone was a sackholder, we did all the current endgame content in a very casual way. What blew me away is how we just wrecked everything. We'd leeroy jenkins all the endgame content at the time and somehow pull it off, with almost no planning and no one getting locked into jobs. I ran with them for a while until I ended up quitting for a few years, the whole experience was very bizarre because we were doing content in a really informal, casual way that a lot of other formal dyna/endgame shells were doing much more strictly. I remember it because we were all getting what we needed/wanted, without having to commit to a full time dyna/toau/etc shell basically being a second job.

A few years after, I had logged in and the lsmes was something along the lines of: "We had a great run." and that was it. No one else was on, it was a large shell and I don't know what happened, but I was the only one in it. I don't recall the name of the shell, sadly, but it all started for me with that DM run and prior to my current groups, was probably one of my most distinct experiences in 11 since I started ~2003.

Memorable event was fighting Sarameya around 2009. We fought it for 2 hours with more than an alliance, repping in BLU/THF to SATA cannonball, and throwing zombie DRK at it. I remember it raging after 2 hours and feeling so defeated. It was a 4 hour process including gathering people. The good old days.

I remember running out of the Windurst gates and dying to a rarab

I think the very first (or maybe second) ever monster I fought was a Vulture in Gustaberg. It did not end well.

I remember garlaige citadel being unplayable for like 6 hrs because someone kept Training mobs to the zone.

Oh and the alliance skillup parties in The Boyahda Tree. Fun times

zoning into kuftal and guivre was sitting at the zone waiting to nom your face.

PL'd a dunes party as a 40ish rdm. went to convert and the pugil the party was fighting used screwdriver on me and i died. that was my first convert death.

taking 10 tries to beat maat.

being lvl 8/9 blm as my first job and kept lvling/delvling. quit the game for a year til my friend convinced me to come back.

1/12 on the kirin teleporter.

seeing a jp drg in af run by me and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. at least until i saw the rdm af hat. then it was love.

My friend said, check out this game. He zoned out of Sandoria and before his page even loaded he died to an orc and HP.

I chose Windy cause thats where the clear uber race of tarutarus were and created a mithra thief to run the underground. Also the music was/is so much better, especially in e/w sarutabuta.

I was hooked from the start. Made "mad" gils cooking insect balls then later farming konstat rams as thief/rng. Tough competition against the other guy Rng/thf who figured that it was a good farm also.

Have to throw in Hakutaku Ohat alliances. Phase 1: form alliance via shout for 4 hours. Phase II get the alliance to the ??? which was damn near impossible through temple and den. Phase 3 beat the NM. I remember people d/c and lose their drops. People drop out after 15 people get their ohat and everyone too tired to go on so 16 and 17 person out of luck and they have to do it again. When my ohat dropped, and really for years after when a sky drop or something that should go to me happened, nothing was certain until it hit your inventory.

Gotta kudos to all those alliance leaders over the years who just got it done. I wish people still used the flag system, I think that would reinvigorate FFXI.

I posted this a while ago in a different thread, but it basically explains the origin of my character Jessie. I started a Mithra when I saw the trailer for Treasures of Aht Urhgan and really, really wanted to go Corsair. But when I was in Valkurm leveling Thief (to preemptively raise Marksmanship Skill in anticipation of Corsair) I saw a Blue Mage kicking butt so I completely changed direction.



EDIT: I legitimately did fall in love with Blue Mage that day. The sheer levels of customization, both with the magic sets and the broad spectrum of armor you can equip. Spamming alternating Head Butt and Bludgeon in the day was so satisfying. Everything about the job felt so powerful in the earlier levels.

A friend started the game in 2004 and started blogging about these 5 baddass warriors in the game that could kick your ***. There was even a rumor you could fight them together...

It took 2 years of playing to get to them. Definitely a journey - not the destination - experience.

I stole A LOT during the EGS days

This game introduced me to catfishing before the term was coined.

Luckily, as a vulnerable 18 year old girl, I have never been catfished, but I have witnessed a few hilarious instances of it occurring.

Heh, great story :)

MY Divine Might story doesn't even involve me getting to play Divine Might. Wife was in an intense DM run and she FORGOT TO PICK ME UP FROM WORK. I couldn't get in touch with her, so ended up walking ~3 or so miles home. Wasn't even mad when I found out why (well, I was a liiiiitle annoyed but I understood). Their group was right on the verge of a win, failed 1 or 2 times but were just right there and she was on WHM and was pretty vital to the fight. So, of course lost track of time and reality and totally spaced on picking me up. At least she won!

I had the last laugh though, when she stopped playing after Abyssea, I inherited her Tarutaru and still play it as my alt ;) I also got the great joy of being able to give her a hard time with stuff like "hey, pay attention to this login message that says NOT TO FORGET YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY because of FFXI"


I absolutely did this when our CoP static finally beat One to be Feared. Biggest reaction I've ever had to anything in a game.

BLM was my first job too, starting out in Bastok, and it took me two weeks of leveling past Lv8 to escape South Gustaberg with enough cushion on Lv9 that I didn't delevel on death. With no sub job, little reliable information available at NA release, underleveled magic skills, and Bind as the only source of crowd control, XP was slow and deaths were plentiful thanks to frequent resists and no self-sustain.

One of the times I hit Lv9, a group of friends only a few levels higher than me took me to Konschtat Highlands to watch them kill stuff. I promptly died to the AOE damage from Sprout Spin (back when it still hit outside of party) and had to eat the home point since none of them were high enough level to raise.

And let's not forget how expensive it was to level a mage job and have to buy all your spells at rapidly increasing prices from the NPCs.

At least I had fun on the job, like training all of Giddeus to AOE nuke for Yagudo necklaces (and getting some re-pops in the train), organizing Lv50+ Freeze MB parties and the /p macros that went with it, spamming Fire II in a moon party and hitting as fast as the DRK but for twice the damage, or low-manning Nidhogg and taking huge chunks of his HP off with each MB.

There was also the time I killed Leaping Lizzy with Blaze Spikes because the person who claimed it already had the boots on them and was holding her in hopes that a friend would show up. It only took a few cures to get her completely focused on hitting me and my spikes until she died.

Started as a warrior running around in ronfaure. Coming across an orc for the first time he's kicking my butt. I remember thinking oh I'm sure if i make it back to the gate the guards will surely help me. Man was I so wrong c_c

Starting this game out all alone i had no idea on how to heal on my war.
i would walk back to the mog house after finding out it heal me to enter/exist. Then out to kill a few more mobs.

Luckily somebody told me about /heal.

I used my mouse to move my character for a solid month when I first started.

When I started, I thought it was the coolest ***ever to hold the movement key as I was killing ***with a greatsword on WAR cause it made me weeb slash through them. To go back to those halcyon days...

Haha, reminds me of how I used to try to dodge an enemy's attack with the movement keys until someone told me that it did nothing. To be fair though, I'd just come from playing third-person shooter games for several years.

I also used to subconsciously move the entire controller in the direction my character was travelling when I played SNES or N64 games, especially when I wanted to jump farther.

I moved my character while getting attacked and happened to dodge, for about 3 months I thought I could physically dodge attacks by strafing.

I grouped up with someone in La Theine and every time a crystal dropped I'd ask 'what can I use this for?', until whoever they were eventually took me to the Smithing guild and patiently explained what crafting was.

Subbing level 5 THF as a RDM until 30 because I thought it was going to make me and my party rich.

Farming tree cuttings with no treasure hunter for literally weeks to afford a full stack of all ninja tools because spamming the entire elemental wheel was how I thought I needed to hold hate.

Lord the stories could go on and on lol

Oof. I started on PS2, and I didn't have (nor could find) a PS2-friendly keyboard at the time, so I spent my first 3 months selecting one letter at a time with the in-game one. To make matters worse, I didn't know you could make your own macros.

By the time I found a USB keyboard, I was up to like 20 wpm with the in-game letter selector lol