We had such a wonderful time with this year’s Heavensturn. The story was so gosh darn cute & emotional with it telling tales of the “Ryu” or Dragon for us Eorzean’s that eventually leads into a Far Eastern tale that intertwines with the Four Lords story from Stormblood. I love absolutely every moment of it.
The aftermath with a certain NPC relating to the Four Lords.
What was also neat is the aftermath and the return of getting one’s fortune taken again! This was from the 2023 Heavensturn event with its own story and was so delightfully fun!
Some of us ended up fairing better than others.
While I and my poor assistant didn’t fair so well, Aikirees flourished and Lizicus did. One can always request a re-draw, but we tend to stick with what we get for the year. Regardless, it’s a nice fun little thing that I am glad they brought back. It sets one back 100 Gil per draw, so very low-cost to keep drawing if one wants to.
The Cousins in their Heavensturn attire.
May everyone out there have an absolutely wonderful Heavensturn and 2024 ahead! Let’s make it a stellar and ‘zee awesome’sies’ of a year!!
Normally for New Year’s Eve, I spend the evening with my folks and we celebrate ringing in the New Year with them. However this year, they were not feeling well, so I spent the evening with my beloved FC. While we went to catch up on Dragoon quests, Juli arrived and mentioned she wanted to go Ocean Fishing.
Ocean Fishing is an event that happens only ever 2 hours, and it’s a fun time on a boat catching a bunch of fish while gaining an absurd amount of experience in the process. We decided to join her for the last boat ride of the year. It was an absolutely wonderful and relaxing time.
Shortly thereafter, we hit midnight and celebrated the new year, while having friends come to visit and chat with us until the whee hours of the AM celebrating not only our New Year’s but for friends in Central, and Mountain times as well.
It really and truly was a wonderful night that I won’t forget. ♥
Episode VI! – While Aikirees continues to lead our adventuring exploration, I continue to read and take notes as we continue deeper into the First’s deep forest.
Episode V! – Aikirees is very much taking advantage of her rather new unique look. As for what place she has in mind is still anyone’s guess as I simply just try to process the look of it all.
Let’s see… ah-ha! So we last left off defeating Belome and being swept away to the Midas River. Aside from it being absolutely gorgeous with all of the brilliant colors in the caverns, the river course itself to me was much easier to understand and control than the Super Nintendo version of this same course. I really enjoyed its incarnation as opposed to the original. I’m still not particularly good at it, but it’s very enjoyable. It starts off falling down a waterfall sprinkled with coins and frog coins with cave entrances (like the featured image above) and the occasional spring to bounce one back to the main waterfall. The second part is to roll on a barrel down a flat river with coins that one can jump up to reach while also avoiding some angry cheep-cheeps along the way.
Once the course is completed it ends with a toad offering a conversion for a certain amount of coins collected on the course itself. If the bar is met, then one keeps them, otherwise the coins are withheld until the course is re-ran to hit that bar. Once that’s all squared away, it’s onwards to Tadpole Pond! Upon entering for the first time, one is greeted by the tadpoles and the Frog Sage himself who tells Mallow is not a *shocked* ‘not a tadpole!
Mallow, really.
From here, it’s a fun-quick run through Rose Way, where we meet back up with Bowser and his army wanting to take back his castle. Mario & Mallow hide from sight to hear what has been happening with the Koopa King.
Zee Planning
Upon entering Rose Town, things are… a bit off. It’s gloomy, the music is the same when the Mushroom Kingdom was under siege and arrows are raining from the sky, so it’s very obvious as something is incredibly not right in this town.
~Ominous~
After exploring the town, and heading into the Inn, a whole adorable and wonderful scene happens. It starts off with a young toad named Gaz playing with figures of Mario, Bowser, and Peach reenacting the trio’s many adventures through the years. It’s all so cute and then when Mario comes in, Gaz asks for him to play for a spell and introduces another doll named Geno. While Mario plays as his ‘nemesis’ Bowser, Gaz uses Geno’s arm attack and knocks Mario out cold.
Gaz initially playing with his figures, and Mario partaking only to be knocked out by the Geno Doll.
After Mario is sent to bed, a new cut scene for the Switch version plays out. The Super Nintendo didn’t have this scene and I got really emotional. The entity we come to know as Geno comes through the window, looks at the figures, and picks the Geno doll as its chosen body to go and help fix Star Road.
This is such a great and emotional scene.
Mario wakes up, and comes down to hear Gaz talking about Geno heading into the Forest Maze to their mother. The Forest Maze area has one banger of a song and has lived rent free in my mind since the Super Nintendo days. There’s some hidden spots in here and the maze itself: there’s two routes here one is explained by the feller in his house on top of the staircase, and the other is following Geno.
Using Mallow’s Thought Peek on the Kong in the forest, I cracked up.
Mario and Mallow catch up with Geno, we’re introduced to Bowyer, a talking bow-like entity that is associated with the Smithy’s Gang, and also who has been shooting arrows at Rose Town. Mario tries to go ‘fists’ flying into deal with Bowyer, but Mallow stops him. They hide for a moment while one of the arrows brings to him the 2nd star piece, and then Geno gets involved very quickly thereafter. Geno pleads with Bowyer to stop and hand over the star, but of course does not for in which then Mallow allows Mario to get involved (while also running off without Mallow… oops.)
Mallow stopping Mario initially, and then Mario ‘ditching’ him thereafter to confront Bowyer.
The fight itself is a lot of fun, and Bowyer uses ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ and ‘A’ disabling buttons to try and slow the party down. Ultimately leading to Bowyer getting irritated enough to disable all three buttons at once. Geno speaks up and states the trio make a good team, and leads into introducing the player into using a Trio Attack, which is kind of like a Limit Break if one is familiar with any of the later Final Fantasy games.
Let’s hoober’n goooooo~!!
With the wheel at 100%, it’s time to use the ever first Trio Attack in the game to end the fight, and claim the 2nd star!
Pew pew~!
Two down, Five to go!
With Bowyer defeated, the 2nd star piece is ours! Just a quick stop back in Rose Town afterwards, then it’s back on the road heading to the Pipe Vault, then ultimately to Moleville!
It took some time, and some setbacks, but we all finally managed to reach Level 60 on Dragoon over the weekend! This has been a fun melee class to tackle being the first one we’ve done ever. Only 30 levels to go now!!
Episode IV! – While I’m still trying to ponder out what trade skill would be useful with these rather pointy gloves, Aiki seems to once again be enjoying the puzzling scenario we are in again for this week’s Fashion Report.
At the end of the night, the two cousins take a break around the HQ’s fire pit and swap stories of their adventures for the evening. Quite the wonderful way to end a night ♥
A smidgen late since the holidays have begun, but this took a little bit of work to get up and running this year. This is the first year I put together a permanent track for my small holiday tree, prior to this I would just use Bachmann’s E-Z Track. However, over the years those poor connectors gave out and the electricity didn’t flow throw it properly any longer.
Last year I took a break from even decorating the tree since I wasn’t able to get the train up and running, but took that sadness and converted it to determination to make darn certain I was able to do both this year. Overall I’m pretty happy with how the track came out and allows for the tree to sit in the middle with all of the wires feeding underneath it fairy well. The next thing now is to get the steam locomotive repaired and try to expand the track to allow for both to be running at the same time for next year.
Some of the highlight ornaments on the small tree.
Every year, along with mentioned about expanding the track itself, I want to add one or two decorative village pieces around the board too, making it look like a small town with this massive tree they festively decorate every year kind of vibe to it.
The N-Scale model train passing by in the foreground
I hope everyone is having and has a wonderful holiday season and here’s to a great New Years’ ahead!
I meant to do this shout out last week once it was initially posted, but derped out with everything else happening (sorry!!) Over the course of 2023 on Mastodon, we started up a community that is wholly within the social media platform for all of us who adventure around Eorzea and beyond. It’s a fairly loose and very low pressure community with no mandatory obligations of any sort; we just gather from time to time for social events and getting together to do group content as well.
Bearmine, the wonderful artist and good friend behind the work above, suggested creating a Cross-World Linkshell (CWLS) to make it easier to keep in touch while in-game. The group of us agreed and made some remarks that adding our friends to the CWLS would be akin to collecting everyone in a Pokedex from Pokemon. Nearly moments later, I chimed in with the comment ‘Frendedex!’ which became the name of the CWLS and our little (at the time) community.
A little bit later on, I decided to create a logo for our community for folks to use in various things: whether it was for posts, flyers, blogs, etc., and I got feedback from everyone in regards to the design. After a few revisions based on said feedback, the logo was completed soon thereafter. Bearmine asked for a vector copy to do something with it, and what came of it is that absolutely beautiful scenic rendition!
I highly encourage y’all to check out their work, and the link directly to the Tome of Frendedex with higher resolutions renditions is right here!
I mentioned in our Endwalker milestone accomplishment post that we were leveling Dragoon. As are the Dragons and my assistant very early one decided to become one with her interest in everything Allagan related. After many Frontlines (mostly the daily challenge roulette) later, she was able to acquire the entire Late Allagan Maiming Bodysuit. She could also have done and/or gotten the head-mask piece, but glasses. The lance is out of The Binding Coils of Bahamut: Turn 5’s weapon coffer that she acquired to complete the look.
What makes the bodysuit so neat is all the little details: from the Kevlar look, the mechanical armor & joints of the limbs, and the metallic reflective ability of the suit itself! If one looks closely, one can see the photo studio from EOCA HQ being reflected off of it. The amount of care and detail that went into this is just so awesome. If y’all PvP and acquire Wolf Marks on the regular, I very much highly recommend looking into this set for any/all class. Personally I think the melee DPS class ones look the best, but they all have their unique look and charm too.
It’s been a long couple of weeks, with no end in sight until Christmas & New Years weekend as the nearest ETA unfortunately. Upon beginning my adventures through Eorzea today, while leaving EOCA HQ, I spot the moogle box had become illuminated stating there was new mail to take a look at. Upon opening it, it was a heartfelt letter from my dearest pink cat.
Thank you, Hun for such a wonderful letter and delicious espresso. I cherish and keep every letter I get from folks & frens through the mail system. It’s something I need to do more often and send myself; it’s always nice to see the mailbox at HQ light up with a letter, even if it’s just saying ‘hi!’ and nothing more. ♥
Episode III! – Every now and then, when our outfits for any given Fashion Report align identically or near perfectly, it’s typically Aikirees who will get the chance to snicker or fully run with the more silly ones. However, for this one, I was the one who got to get some amusement out of our predicament.
Due to our homeworld having a major incident this evening, my assistant and her cousin managed to escape to my twin sister’s homeworld for a spell until the incident had subsided. After accomplishing their tasks, they visited her Free Company’s home before returning back to HQ for a good night’s rest.
The Cousins relaxing in front of a fireplace in Tess’ FC House.
While not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing to be in a perpetual state of busyness, both in and out of RL work, it does tend to make the ears a bit on the heavier side sometimes. Ah well, the holidays will be here soon and they’ll be some nice downtime then. In the meantime, just need to rest when I can, and hopefully soon. Hope everyone out there is doing well! ♥
This is more of an interlude between the ending of ‘Star Bunny,’ and ‘Star Bunny II’ since I had no idea where to squish this in before I started to document my interstellar travels across the galaxy in Star Trek Online. During this time from level 1 to 10 as a whee rank of Lieutenant, I flew around the galaxy jumping from sector to sector taking on intro missions, some story missions, side-missions, and just plain trying to figure things out.
Fairly quickly, I got the general understanding of space combat, which is a lot of fun! Ground combat, however, is a smidgen wonky. It’s not bad per se, but it’s just not well worked into the MMORPG aspect as much as it could be. There’s two modes to ground as well: Standard, and Shooter; shooter makes it more in line with a FPS whereas standard is more in-line with MMO’s – just click/target an enemy and pew pew. Standard was giving me trouble early on, so once I learned about shooter mode, I swapped over to that for ground portion of missions only. While running around doing more casual things, I leave it in standard mode; the nice thing is it’s just a quick toggle at the push of a keystroke.
The original U.S.S. Astera
I mentioned in Episode 1 that one can sometimes be able to do mission series out of order, and the missions just scale to your level (or that’s how I believe it works). Somehow while doing all of the early side-missions, at around level 5 or so, I gained access to the Terran Gambit story line missions. I started up the first one, and after a few minutes into it somewhat realized that I probably wasn’t supposed to see this yet as it was showing and mentioning characters I have not yet encountered.
One thing I forgot to mention in the prior Episode is that the missions are mostly voiced and a lot of the original cast from the various Star Treks reprise their roles as their characters from the shows, and it’s absolutely wonderful! The tutorial mission for Starfleet has Admiral Janeway explaining what you’re doing, and the Starfleet general things is narrated by Leonard Nimoy just as two examples. Back to the Terran Gambit, I got through the first mission fairly well and somewhat felt quick (mission lengths vary from 20-30 minutes to sometimes near a hour or more), and decided to just keep going with them since it was fun and I liked where the story was going after the first couple of missions.
The second one tore me up big time. I was still trying to learn ground combat and also blew up my ship a few times in the process. It was a little frustrating to say the least, but I persevered and made it through it, but it took well over a hour to complete! I believe right around that time, along with another couple of side-missions, I was able to obtain level 10 and rank of Lieutenant Commander! The Rank-Up quests immediately come up on the screen and you’re able to accept/warp immediately back to Star Base to claim the new ship for said rank (up to a certain rank). I warped myself back to Earth, and collected my first ship upgrade: The Constitution II (or Refit, depending on your reference point). Initially, once first acquired, it looks like it flew right out of the Star Trek movies, but is capable of a lot of customization choices.
I spent a good hour or so fiddling with the customization options for it, and landed on something that looked like a Mini-Sovereign Class, but with a Galaxy Class styled bridge. Thus the U.S.S. Astera II was christened; I used the same registry number and added an ‘A’ to the end of it, but the names can’t be identical if keeping the previous ship, so I just added a ‘II’ to the end of it and all subsequent ships thereafter.
The newly christened U.S.S. Astera II in space near Earth Space Dock.
With all of the affairs taken care of, and back out in space, it was time to see what she could do! Since I was already fairly deep into the Terran Gambit story line at this point, I decided to continue on that, and then figure out how to get back on the right track for the story to be done in proper order.
I hadn’t pre-planned any posts for this week as of yet, and I really do want to get back to my adventure through Super Mario RPG where I last left off as well as more Star Bunny. Over the past weekend, I was playing catch up and dealing with multiple RL objectives all while trying to get a model locomotive back up and running. An interesting incident happened to Aikirees on Friday evening. It was a very long day at work, got home, finally settled in for the evening, and we started off on our adventures to tackle our usual daily objectives in Eorzea.
As previously mentioned we’re leveling Dragoon and, as of this post, is sitting at level 55. We primarily are utilizing Alliance Raids (AR), Trials, and Frontlines(FL) roulettes to level said class. While not the fastest way possible, it is a nice slow burn of a pace and allows for acquiring Poetics: a kind of currency to buy goodies and gear. That and these are just plain fun as a nice relaxing (typically) contrast from Expert Roulette, which has somewhat evolved into a ‘go go go!’ kind of attitude. I could write up something about that, but this isn’t about ‘speed running’ dungeons.
Anyway, Aikirees is up for AR and gets Labyrinth of the Ancients, which is the first Raid in the Crystal Tower Series that everyone encounters and, along with the two after it, are now required to continue the main story. ‘Raid’ in Final Fantasy XIV is not necessarily mean the content is more difficult, it just means you’re running through a massive dungeon with mobs and bosses with 23 other folks divided up into three even teams. Aside from that, they’re pretty similar to a regular dungeon with four players, and slightly less mob groups. This raid, in particular, is considered very easy aside from one mechanic at the very end a lot of players try to speed through (and it usually doesn’t work).
We have been running Labyrinth of the Ancients on and off since late Stormblood, so I have seen how over that period of time tactics on certain bosses/areas has evolved and/or other Data Centers running it just a smidgen differently. All of this is perfectly fine and is the nature of any MMO that has been running for any given good length of time. The reason for stating that is this incident just seemed… peculiar enough to stick in my mind all weekend. Usually things like this I write off and move on, but there has been an uptick in these kinds of things happening: whether it’s directed at me, or another player.
The run is going pretty smoothly and then the Alliance hits an area where each of the three teams has to go down a different path and deal with a mini-boss at the end called an Atomos. The catch is there’s a pad of a different color representing a shield for another teams Atomos of said color that four players have to stand on to drop said shield while the other four players go smack the Atomos until it’s defeated.
The pathway where the three teams split up.
Aikirees gets to go smack said Atomos (or, poke it rather) instead of pad standing. The Atomos spits out adds every few moments and the party has to deal with it, and Aikirees decides to pull it to the pad folks so they’d have something to do while the others smack said Atomos. The tank didn’t like that and told her not to pull said mobs to the back pad. That’s perfectly fine, and there’s nothing incorrect with stating this. There’s also nothing inherently incorrect with pulling said mob to the back so those waiting there can have some fun too, and the adds are pretty weak to begin with. Regardless it wasn’t anything to fuss over and the section was cleared without a hitch. While heading into the next part, the tank blatantly explain how that section is supposed to be done. To me, especially in this raid in particular, felt kind of uncalled for: it went perfectly fine, and it is a tactic the party can use to make it a bit more entertaining (sometimes quicker, depending on who stays back) for folks on the pad.
After that, it was back to quietness with a few call-outs for adds and where the teams needed to move to, like the ‘A,’ ‘B’,’ and ‘C’ in the above image. At the end of the raid, there’s a bigger boss-like mob that everyone goes and wallops on. Said boss has a nasty 1-Shot Area of Effect (AoE) that can and will K.O. the entire raid if not countered by the teams running back to a safety pad to put a big shield up. Looks kind of neat when first seeing it.
Same tank says the above to the entire raid team. This really isn’t necessary to say, and similar comments have been made elsewhere while running content. This is the first raid a lot of newcomers are going to see, so while it’s technically possible to burn down the raid boss if said HP is at 10% or less, it could have been said a lot more polite or not at all. Shielding for the final AoE only adds an additional few minutes of time to the run and it’s a guarantee non-wipe if done. Newer players more than likely are going to head back anyway because it’s just new content to them. In this case, the damage output was way lower so it was irrelevant to even bring up to begin with.
Normally things like this never really get to me, but hearing it more and more it’s just…. I don’t know. Every character one comes across has a face on the other side of the screen, and maybe they were just having a rough day and didn’t want to deal with this sort of thing (counter-point to this is just not run the content to begin with). Just choose kindness is all I’m trying to get at; everyone is going through their own thing & personal battles, and we’re all playing this game to have fun, relax, and maybe make a friend or two along the way.
Episode II! – Half Vanu, part Miqo/Viera, and an interesting style choice of boot. I have no idea of what to make of our predicament, but my dear younger Sister is having the time of her life from this weeks’ outfit.
