So it begins.

I never thought I would actually do it, but I decided to - a FINAL FANTASY XI blog. I'll admit, I haven't been much of a blogger in recent years, but from what's been going on within my online life of Final Fantasy XI, I think now, more than ever, would be the best time to get this thing going.

With that, I'll devote my first post to, well, me. Since this is all-new, I thought I should take the time to introduce myself to my reader(s). My name's Max and I've been playing Final Fantasy XI since the North American release (October '03), so I'm going on about five and a half years of trekking through Vana'diel. It's hard to believe that I've actually been playing the game for this long too!

I have two in-game characters. The first, and one I'm most proud of, is my original Hume character, Viceroy. I've been playing on Viceroy since day one and the name has become my online alias with the gang I play the game with. He hails from the great Kingdom of San d'Oria, is Rank 10, and is a 75 Dark Knight, Blue Mage, Dragoon, and Thief. His newest up in coming 75 job is Ranger, which now sits at level 67.

When he's not off hunting ladybugs in East Ronfaure[S] or running for his life because he caught the eye of some life-sucking UFO or Shark in Al'Taieu, he enjoys meriting/xp'ing, climbing floors in Nyzul Isle, skilling up, decimating birds with his lance, Limbus, and getting Meanie killed.

The other character, whom I've been playing the most as of late, is a San d'Orian Elvaan by the name of Kuvak. Kuvak is a character the was originally my mule, but seeing that I regret not picking an Elvaan originally and always wanted to play as one, I started to level Kuvak up to where (as of 2/24/09) he is a Rank 6, level 59 Paladin. I have to say, this is something that I thought would just be a huge grind, but it's actually been a lot of fun. I have reached a point on this character to where I can now play him full time. Also, being over Rank 5 means that getting around is a hell of a lot easier with that airship pass.

There were so many things early on in the game which I really dreaded having to do again (subjob items, Kazham keys, magicite, certain job quests, etc) - but truthfully they really are not as bad as I remember them. Because so much time had passed since I did them the first time, I came to the realization while working on them that they really are not that difficult. It was a different time in the FFXI community when I started playing the game. Many of the websites that we would use as guides were just getting started and were pretty vague in telling us what we had to do to get certain quests done. The FFXI Wiki had not yet existed, either. Our main pages for all the information came from either the FFXI Vault, Alakazham.com (a web site which makes it damn near impossible to find anything on there), or Killing Ifrit.

It's also amazing to see how much the game has evolved over the course of six years. Even though I started when the game made its North American debut, the Japanese players who have been there since day one and still continue to the play to this day, are the ones that have seen the most change out of any of us.

When FINAL FANTASY XI was released in the US, we were given the first expansion to the game, Rize of the Zilart. For all us US players (unless you were lucky enough to get in on the beta), we never had a chance to experience the game as it was before that expansion came. Recently, there was an opportunity for me to do just that when I re-installed the game through the 2008 Vana'diel collection after reformatting my PC and installing Windows Vista. I have to admit, I'm real curious to play the game in the pre-Zilart form and may give it a shot when I install the game into the new computer I'll be purchasing sometime next month.

This is something I want to continue talking about within this blog - the earlier days of FINAL FANTASY XI - leading up to today. Given that I've been in the game so long, there's a ton that I can recall and look forward to blogging about in addition to what I've been up to in-game and what not.

So for now, I'm going to wrap it up. I'm actually at work now and should be getting back to what I was doing. >:D

See you next time!

- Viceroy/Kuvak