Listen to the Rain

A nerd symphony, of course.

A while back, I got an email that Distant Worlds was coming through town to do a concert specifically focused in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I last went to Final Fantasy music in January of 2020, right before the Plague Years, when I went to go see the chamber music version of that same concert series that had all the smaller hits that you don't need an 80 piece orchestra to perform. That got me excited for Distant Worlds again...and then, well, you know what happened. 🦠 So it wasn't until much later that I actually even had the opportunity to go again, and then I wouldn't have been interested in the material (and sashagee was still not feeling all that well). But more time passed, and sashagee's condition improved, and another version of Distant Worlds, this time focused on Final Fantasy XIV and XVI said they were coming to town. So that was the one we went to.

After the standard opening--the prologue, the victory fanfare, and so on--they did a few audience hit pieces like the Four Fiends theme from Final Fantasy IV and To Zanarkand from Final Fantasy X, and then go into the program. They started with Songs of Salt and Suffering, one of my favorite songs in all of the Stormblood expansion, and did Tomorrow and Tomorrow since they had Amanda Achen, the original singer, there to do the vocals. That meant they also did The Final Day and Flow from Endwalker, and both times sashagee specifically commented on how Achen's performance was amazing. They ended with a chocobo medley, and then went to intermission.

After the intermission and a couple more fan favorites like Dancing Mad and Aerith's Theme was the XVI portion of the show, and I don't have as much to say about that half because I still haven't played XVI so the only exposure to the music I have is the FFXIV collab, and that means I'm most familiar with Find the Flame because that's the song that plays when you ride the Torgal mount you get in FFXIV, and they did play that (apparently in the game it only plays once). They also played Ascension, which is another big bombastic choir song--when you have a full orchestra and a choir, you might as well take advantage of it--and a couple other songs that didn't really stick with me, then finally ended with the classic Sephiroth's Theme.

I've been to half-a-dozen of these by this point, so I had fun but it wasn't amazing because a lot of the songs are ones I've seen in concert before. Sephiroth's Theme is a classic encore, for example. But for sashagee, this was her first time, and she mentioned she got goosebumps during some of the songs. We'll definitely be going back, especially if I can find another performance of the A New World chamber series. The music there is less bombastic, but much more varied.

Bonus picture:



The concert finished not too long after 4 p.m., and since sashagee had forgotten to eat lunch, we went to a nearby restaurant that used to be my favorite to go to before the symphony: the Gage. The food is great and the problem I always used to have--that it would sometimes take up to forty-five minutes to get the check after we were fully finished with our food--wouldn't have mattered since it was after the concert and we didn't have anywhere else to be, so we walked in, immediately got a table over in the bar area, and checked the menu. I got the fish in the end, because even though I'm more often than not disappointed with fish I get at restaurants since they're mostly tasteless and put a sauce on it that provides all the flavor, which tastes like mush with sauce on it. Despite costing $40, this...wasn't really that different, to be honest. Halibut, cod, tilapia, all have that whitefish "we taste like nothing" thing going on that more usual fish I enjoy like salmon do not. I should have gotten the coconut curry with salmon or the pear salad, to be honest.

On the other hand, the fried pickles and curry fries were delicious, and sashagee was very happy with the burger she got, so at least we'll be going back next time we go to the symphony. And we got home at 7 p.m., like your standard tired parents, and went to bed not that long afterward.

I usually don't review the same game twice, but MMOs are different. With most games, I play them once, I do all the content, and I'm done. Even with games that receive extensive post-release updates like Wasteland II or Divinity: Original Sin that had enough post-game changes to warrant doing another review, I avoided it by not playing them at all until years after they came out, long after all the additional changes had been made. But I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV for years at this point, through every patch and with all the changes that come out, so I've seen the game as it developed. And my original Endwalker review only covered the story and none of the mechanical changes and was written over two years ago before the patch content. A lot has happened in the game since then!

As before, this review will contain spoilers for Endwalker's story.


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I'd love to say that we had great weather for the weekend, with sunny skies and warmth, but it would be a complete lie. It was cloudy and rainy for the majority of the weekend, with even the least-rainy day (Saturday) still having some rain. Sunday it thunderstormed for most of the day, and there was rain the middle of the day on Monday too. sashagee spent a chunk of the weekend lying down with a headache, but thanks to her parents taking Laila for a ton of fun adventures, we had a baby-free weekend and plenty of time to ourselves.

Saturday, we went to cillic and heather.eisele's Memorial Day barbecue and in the evening, to afschifler's birthday party at lisekatevans's place, and on Monday we went to maptekar and her boyfriend's place out in the suburbs for a last-minute barbecue. A lot of travel involved--train and bus to the fist barbecue, bus and train (actual rail) to the suburbs, and some walking--but worth it.

There's not a lot to actually write about here, though, because most of what happened was "we talked with people and had a lovely time." One of the people who came to the Saturday barbecue was married to a Japanese man, so she brought a soba noodle salad that was delicious (disadvantage of most barbecue--I can't eat it since if it's not pork, it was probably cooked together on the same grill as pork), as well as a farro salad and a bunch of fresh fruit, plus some delicious seven layer bars inside. At the birthday party, while joseph.harnden was telling sashagee how much better I looked now that I was wearing more colors and how she was such a good influence on my fashion, hazel.flowersmccabe was talking to me:

Hazel: "You're wearing...colors."
Me: "Well, I'm a dad now, I changed up my style."
Hazel: "You can be a goth dad."

at the barbecue on Monday, we met someone that maptekar had met through Bumble BFF (which I didn't realize was a thing). She was very reserved, but she's also Romanian, so I figured it was just her being from Eastern Europe. maptekar's boyfriend made some chicken with a honey and vinegar glaze and I had it with a bunch of salad. We would have stayed longer, but since it was a holiday weekend they were running holiday trains, so we had to get back to the city on the 7:32 p.m. train. Next time we'll be able to stay longer.

We were asked at one point if Memorial Day barbecues were a tradition in my family and I said no. But maybe I should reconsider.

My interest with Final Fantasy IV doesn't date back to playing it during my childhood. Like I've written before, my parents didn't like that the Super Nintendo wasn't backwards compatible and so refused to buy me one, leading me to become a PC gamer. Instead, like Power Blade and Shatterhand before it, I really got into FFIV by reading about it in Nintendo Power #30, where it got a cover.

The cover really has nothing to do with the game--I'm not sure who that swordsman is, and I guess the bird he's riding must be an American artist's interpretation of a black chocobo--but the article captivated me. I had already spent weeks playing through and beating Final Fantasy the previous year after borrowing it from a friend, and Super Mario Bros. 2 and especially Super Mario Bros. 3 had primed me to be hyped for sequels. With no chance of playing through through Final Fantasy II myself, I read and re-read about the Four Fiends, the Redwings, Astos the Dark Elf (who I remembered from Final Fantasy!), Rydia the Caller, the 70s fantasy novel art of the characters--I read that article over and over, since if I couldn't play the game at least I could experience it vicariously. I didn't get the chance to actually play it until much later, when I moved to Japan in 2008 and played two games on the planeride over. The first was the World Ends with You, which served me well when I left our hotel and walked from Harajuku to Shibuya, but the second was the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV, with the voice acting and New Game+ and Augments. I had always heard that it was so different as to be essentially a new game, though, so once the pixel remasters came out, and with FFXIV: Endwalker taking so much inspiration from FFIV, now was the perfect time to play the original.


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I'm excited for Endwalker, but I don't have the overwhelming, burning hype that some people seem to

Well, that turned out to be accurate.

Normally I'd be waiting years to do this review, after all the patches and systems and everything was put into place, and I'm still going to write that post eventually once we wrap up patch 6.5. But Endwalker's story is structured differently than previous expansions--in something like Heavensward, the main x.0 patch resolves many of the story beats but leaves some open, and it's not until x.3 that they all finally come to their conclusion. Patch 3.3 was the final defeat of Nidhogg and the real end of the Dragonsong War, for example, and then 3.4 and 3.5 built up the Garlean Empire and the war in the east that eventually led to Stormblood. Endwalker is different, with patch 6.0 being much bigger than a usual x.0 patch and resolving all the story threads--the 10 year Hydaelyn and Zodiarc arc, as the marketing puts it--in one single journey. Patch 6.1 is called "New Adventures" and represents a clean break into a new saga, to the point where they've said that maybe some day in the future it could represent a new entry point for players who are intimidated by the hundreds of hours of story that FFXIV makes you play through to get to the end. That also means that I can write a review of the story now without having to see how the patches resolve things.

The general consensus is that Endwalker is a masterpiece, but I can't agree with that.

(Obviously, massive Endwalker spoilers below)


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This is the divisive one.

I didn't own a PS1, so I didn't play the PS1-era Final Fantasy games until later--Final Fantasy IX in 2002, Final Fantasy VIII in 2006, and Final Fantasy VII never--but my friends in high school did and so I was peripherally involved in the wars over its quality. uriany hated the game, especially the draw mechanic, and made sure to mention it every time it was brought up. fiendishfanfares loved the story and the characters, and did her best to defend it. I had never played the game so I had no opinion, but the Great Final Fantasy VIII Wars are one of the memories I have of high school.

I first played the game years later and I liked it well enough, but there were still some problems that prevented me from really enjoying it. The way the story kept taking sudden right turns, and the way that magic worked, and the strange difficulty scaling, but I appreciated the Retro Future Art Noveau setting and the focus on character interactions. Years passed, I studied Japanese, and when the Axe of the Blood God podcast and the Square Roots podcast both picked FFVIII as their next game I knew that I needed to play along. Would I enjoy FFVIII as much as fiendishfanfares had if I played it in the original language?

It took me months to finish because there is a lot of text in this game, but I finally see what the fans love about it, even if I can't agree that it's wholely loveable.


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I realized that I wrote a post about how The Spoony Bards got a house in Shirogane, but I never wrote a post about how I got a personal house as well! It was the middle of January, forty-five days after they resumed the housing demolition timers in December--if you haven't played FFXIV, houses need to be entered by the owner at least once every month-and-a-half or they're automatically put up for sale again--and all the people who stopped playing during the pandemic lost their houses. sashagee and I spent some time going around from house to house, checking houses that didn't have anyone standing next to them, and after maybe an hour of wandering I found a house that offered me the buy prompt instead of telling me that the land wasn't ready, so I bought it. When I told sashagee that there was another free house in the Goblet, the desert-themed area where I had bought my house, she walked up to the housing plaque, clicked on it, and we both owned a house!

sashagee almost immediately started to decorate her house with a plan in mind, setting Pa-paya as the theme and filling it with flower and moogle items, but my house and yard both sat empty for months. I kind of wanted to do a overgrown high-tech ruins theme--a bit like this housing commission I found on YouTube--but I didn't have a good plan, so I just stuck some random odds and ends I found that fit the theme and otherwise had an empty house, leading aaron.hosek to praise my single rusty bench in the middle of a darkened metallic basement. That was how my house sat for months, just a storage space that I'd occasionally go into and water the plants, with a yard that had two glowing plants in it and nothing else.

But, last week inspiration struck. When I had to make a character, sashagee wanted me to make a Viera bunnygirl but instead I made a Duskwight Elezen because why wouldn't I make a goth elf? The backstory of the Duskwights is that they stuck around in the underground city of Gelmorra after the nature spirits of the Black Shroud let everyone move above-ground, so I decided to make a Gelmorra-themed house. I spent three days buying items, carefully placing them, getting everything just right, and in the end I'm pretty proud of what I came up with!

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I think I have my permanent decorating scheme until I swap to a larger housing plot!

I really want to move to the Lavender Beds, the forest-and-lakes housing district in the Black Shroud, but until my perfect housing location opens up, I'm happy with what I've built here.

When I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV, Stormblood was the final frontier. Oh sure, Shadowbringers had been out for over a year by that time, but I started playing because sashagee got me into it and she had last played in 2018, when Patch 4.3 was current. As I watched her play while she tried to convince me to join her, I saw the quest text "Use the Duty Finder to confront Tsukuyomi in Castrum Fluminis" or "The airship has arrived above the remains of Dalmasca's capital city. Set off into the Estersands and locate the missing Jenomis" on the side of her screen as she roamed around the broad plains of Yanxia while Drowning in the Horizon played. And when I started playing A Realm Reborn, she waited for me to catch up for six months, so I'd be doing low-level quests in the starting zones and she'd be galavanting around the far east, talking to mysterious beings and performing tasks whose purpose I simply couldn't fathom.

Consider it all fathomed.

Stormblood took me longer than any other expansion to date--three months instead of two--because I had to wait on sashagee to get through the story too! Previously I could just forge ahead at my own pace whenever I wanted, but now that we were playing the game together, I couldn't outpace her too quickly or she'd get annoyed at me. So I spent some time doing other things and we played together when she was feeling well, and in the end we both charged through the fire and smoke of the Ghimlyt Dark together and moved on into Shadowbringers. It's the ending she always hoped for when she got me into the game, even though I took me months and months to get there.


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Haven't posted in a bit because there's not that much to report.

My recovery continues--I went to see the surgeon who did my appendectomy last Friday and the visit lasted approximately two minutes, which is a good sign. He talked to me a bit and took a look at my wounds, which are healing pretty well, and told me that I should probably avoid heavy lifting for another couple weeks just to be absolutely sure. The med who spoke to me briefly before the surgeon said they'd be able to take my glue off, but that didn't happen. Not that it bothers me that much--one of the three wounds has already lost all of its glue, and its peeling off the main injury near my belly button too. I have one more doctor's appointment today, which includes another look at my injuries and a general physical too, and then I guess I'll be done until I'm fully healed! Hopefully it's soon, since it's sashagee needs a lot of help and it's been very hard for her to try to do everything. A couple days ago we went to the grocery store and I carried most of the groceries! It's been weeks! I helped her get off the couch a couple days ago! That's a victory.

That guy who was commenting on my seven-year-old post seems to have gone away. Thanks to tcpip for citing the specific section of the German criminal code banning the display of Nazi symbols.

I've started playing Final Fantasy VIII along with two podcasts I listen to, Axe of the Blood God and Square Roots. I tried to do a bunch of graphical mods for it, akin to the Moguri Mod for FFIX, but it turns out that none of those mods work if the game is set to Japanese text, so I'm playing with highly-detailed player models and original-scale backgrounds. It's pretty jarring, to be honest, but I can handle it. The part that I can't handle is how sluggish everything feels. Did controlling Squall always feel like you were steering a garbage scow? The game doesn't even have tank controls and I feel like I can only rarely get the party where I want them. Ugh.

I'm still pretty close to the beginning, since now that I know the game is level-scaled I'm planning to use Card to break the game, but I've already noticed that Squall isn't as emo as the English translation made him feel. The bit where Quistis says she's joking around with him during the Fire Cavern test:

Quistis: "You know, the boys often choke on this test when I come with them. I guess my charm makes them nervous."
Squall: (...Whatever.)

in Japanese is:

キスティス: 私とここに来ると、いつもの実力を出せない生徒、多いのよね。私の魅力ってやつかしら。
スコール: なんて教師だ
Quisitis: "There are a lot of students who can't hack it when they come here with me. Maybe it's because of my charms."
Squall: (...what kind of teacher is this?) or more figuratively, (...this is teaching?)

Right from the start he's not as dismissive. I think I'll like him better this time around even if it takes me more time to get into the game due to engaging with Triple Triad earlier. I forgot that NPCs take your cards if you lose! Ugh.

I'm still playing Suikoden on and off, but I admit that I can't really get into it. Even when I was playing it in 2019, that was true. Maybe I just need to play more...but I'm over halfway through the game, so where's the hook? Suikoden II is the one that everyone loves, though, so I'm trying to power through so I can get to that one day.

Alright, back to work. I had to get up much earlier today since my doctor's appointment is at 4:15 and it wasn't worth taking a whole day off for that, but that means I'm kind of sleepwalking through my day. It's a good thing I don't actually have anything important to do today!

In addition to the actual making and eating of the dinners, I liked the farmer's market because it made sure that I'd always write something on a Wednesday.

The Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Jp: ゼルダ無双 厄災の黙示 zeruda musō yakusai no mokushiroku, "Zelda Unrivaled: The Calamity Apocalypse") demo surprise-dropped a couple days ago and so I've been spending some time playing that. The first thing I have to say that while Nintendo spent some time pushing this as a canonical exploration of the pre-apocalyptic past of Hyrule, but it's actually a gaiden game. The first thirty second of the opening movie show guardians destroying the castle town, Zelda summoning the power to seal the darkness, and a tiny egg-shaped guardian activating in her study before creating a swirling blue portal and jumping back in time to before Ganon's rebirth, to when Hyrule was dealing with rising monster populations and excavating the lost Sheikah technology because the prophesied time of Ganon's rebirth was at hand. That kind of makes me think that in this game, you'll defeat Ganon and prevent the Calamity at all, thanks to the heroic efforts of time-travelling egg. I'm pretty sure it'll go into the non-canon section of my Legend of Zelda reviews masterpost, though of course I've only played the demo so maybe it'll still end in tragedy.

So far it's a lot more Legend of Zelda than Hyrule Warriors was.

It's also good Japanese practice. I'd say I understand about 80% of what I read, rising to 95% when I pause the game and look things up. That's really good compared to where I started back with the first Legend of Zelda.

I've also been playing more Final Fantasy XIV. I've gotten almost all the way through the pre-patch Heavensward quests and then took a detour to start doing Beast Tribe and crafting stuff, but really what I've been doing has been getting rich. In the two weeks since my free company completed Housing (Savage), I went from having maybe 40,000 gil in the bank to having 4.5 million thanks almost entirely to selling housing items, mostly to weebs. The second expansion, Stormblood, takes place partially in a Japan-themed area called Hingashi, so it added a lot of Hingan (or "oriental") themed housing items, and once I realized my character could make them, I started making them and putting them up for sale. I've sold at least six 神棚 kamidana--called "Oriental Altar" in-game--at around 180,000 gil each, for example, and a bunch of kotatsu, "Oriental tables," tatami mats and tatami flooring sets, and so on, plus some non-Japanese-themed furniture like alpine chandeliers. I've even, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say, made money buying Hingan desks and Hingan pillars from the housing vendor and putting them on the market board at a 500% markup. I don't have enough money to do anything I want, but I have enough that I don't need to worry about most purchases anymore and if I found a small housing plot for sale, I could buy it. Though to be honest, what I really use the money for is minions and more glamour items. The true endgame.

Not much happening this weekend, though there's an outdoor Halloween I might go to. Otherwise, just games, anime, and tea. Lovely.

I thought I was done with MMOs forever, but sashagee pulled me back in.

I followed the original development of Final Fantasy XIV haphazardly, mostly reading about how it was likely to be a disaster. At the time I was playing World of Warcraft and had no intention to switch, so I watched from the outside as the development ran into a bunch of roadblocks, the zones were empty cut-and-paste jobs, the gameplay was boring at best and infuriating at worst, the art team spent as much time and effort making a flowerpot as they did a player character model, and a private stockholder sold his entire 1% holding of Square-Enix in response to how terrible the game was in possibly the most epic ragequit in gaming history. But to their credit, Square-Enix didn't give up. Back then, every game was either World of Warcraft, or wanted to kill World of Warcraft, and they always came to one of two ends--they were World of Warcraft, or they died. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Wildstar, Tabula Rasa, Rift, all years in development and all gone now. Many others went free-to-play and scaled down their ambitions drastically. Somehow, Square-Enix threaded the needle and made gold out of dross. They made the game totally free, shut it down, and then restarted it, hence, "A Realm Reborn."

I went to Distant Worlds back in 2014 when they played "Answers" and showed the cutscene, and I kept seeing articles here and there on gaming websites I followed. The first one to really get my attention was about a phantom train and Kefka raid based on Final Fantasy VI, but by that point I had been done with MMOs for years. schoolpsychnerd wasn't nearly as in to video gaming as she used to be, and what's the point of playing an MMO by yourself, even if it is as story-heavy as FFXIV was supposed to be. But the whole time, I kept hearing the it was the best Final Fantasy of this millennium, and I thought that one day, I'd get to it.

Well, I got to it.


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Not posting a review until I do the 2.1-2.4 quests, since apparently I have a hundred or so story quests to go, but I got a full twenty minutes of credits and everything. I did the final two dungeons in about an hour, most of which was cutscenes. Squeenix patched them so you couldn't skip the cutscenes, whcih meant there'd be a cutscene, 10 seconds of running, another cutscene, etc. At least I didn't end up lost in the Imperial fortresses with no idea where to go, which is what used to happen back when cutscenes were skippable. Groups that cleared it already would charge ahead and leave new players in the dust. I already had that happen a couple times in lower-level dungeons, where the boss had died and nearly everyone had left by the time I was done watching the story.

It's weird. I had sworn off MMOs when I quit playing World of Warcraft back in 2011, but sashagee convinced me to jump back in with her and aaron.hosek came back a couple weeks afterwards. There's enough quality-of-life features that there's barely any friction as I go through the game, especially now that flying is allowed in ARR zones and sashagee could just fly me around on the two-seater mount I bought her. And now that I can fly, there'll be even less friction. It's certainly true that I wouldn't be playing if it weren't a Plague Year since I'd have too much to do, but when everything is cancelled and I'm at home for the overwhelming majority of the time? I can weave this into playing my other games. And it's something we can play together!

She nearly murdered me when I turned off the sound on the villain's speech and started playing a clip of an uwu version someone had recorded, though.

Gaius Van Baelsar: "Tell me... for whom do you fight?"
...
Gaius Van Baelsar: "How vewwy gwib. And tell me...do you bewieve in Eowzea?"

Also, when the Ascians revealed that they were actually trying to resurrect [SPOILER], I literally gasped. Slightly, but still--I'm not immune to nostalgia. They got me.

It's a hotbar-and-cooldowns MMO with daily and weekly quests and I'm having fun with it in 2020. Who would have thought?