1431: Relics and Rebirth

I must say, I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it, but I’m really having fun with Final Fantasy XIV’s endgame content. Part of this is due to the fact the new content update that dropped earlier in the week added a significant amount of stuff to do for people who had hit the level cap, but I’m also enjoying working my way through the stuff that was already there. A lot of it encourages you to try stuff that you might have ignored throughout the rest of the game.

Take the A Relic Reborn quest, for example, which culminates in you getting your class’ powerful Relic weapon, which can subsequently be upgraded to a Relic +1, for those who just like to be slightly better than the best.

A Relic Reborn tasks you with a number of different things to do, the first of which is acquiring a specific weapon and melding specific materia to it. (For those less familiar with Final Fantasy, materia are things you can plug into items of equipment to improve their abilities; in Final Fantasy VII they determined what specific spells and other actions your characters could perform, while in XIV they tend to confer bonuses to various stats.)

I had gone through pretty much the whole game without melding any materia to anything. This was partly because I wasn’t able to do it myself — in order to meld materia to a piece of equipment you need to have one of the crafting classes up to a high level, and my efforts as a Weaver were stalled by my running out of lightning crystals — and partly because I’d been replacing my equipment reasonably often as I levelled up, and consequently didn’t see the value in upgrading an item only to discard it a few levels later.

I was hoping a member of my Free Company might be able to meld the necessary materia to the weapon in question, but no-one had the right skills, so I had to brave random strangers. As someone with social anxiety, the prospect of approaching a random stranger and asking for a favour is, as you might expect, rather nerve-wracking — particularly when you’re not quite sure of the etiquette for doing so in this particular community. Should I offer them some (in-game) money? Is it rude to ask them if they want paying? How do I find them in the first place?

As it happened, finding them was a simple matter of wandering into the Ul’Dah marketplace and yelling really loud. Virtually, of course; it’s a matter of typing “/shout [message]” rather than literally having to bellow your message into the ether. Just as well, too; if I was using voice chat, there’d be no doubt in anyone’s mind that my short-but-pretty female redhead character was being played by a big hairy bloke. Not that I think anyone would care; playing off-gender is pretty common if our Free Company is anything to go by. And occasionally, playing a female character can allow you to flutter your virtual eyelashes and get people who might not otherwise help you out to play with you. (Well, it worked in World of Warcraft; the land of Eorzea appears to be a somewhat more egalitarian and less sexually frustrated society, perhaps due to the fact that the player base is slightly older than that of World of Warcraft.)

Anyway, it took me a matter of seconds to be bombarded with people who wanted to help me. Eventually I picked someone whose name I’d seen in public chat before, and whom I remembered didn’t seem to be a jerk. I met up with him at the Goldsmiths’ Guild, used the game’s convenient “request materia meld” interface to indicate what I needed and offer him suitable compensation — my Free Company brethren had suggested 5,000 gil per meld was a good starting point — and within a matter of moments it was done. We bowed courteously to one another and went about our business.

That wasn’t so hard, was it? No, of course it wasn’t; as anyone with social anxiety will know, the reality of a particular social situation that gives you cause for unease is rarely as bad as what you build it up to be in your mind. And this is just as true in the online space as it is when you’re meeting people in reality — even with online games and virtual worlds’ capacity to let you represent yourself in any way you wish.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that the quest to construct my Relic weapon is now well underway, and a big punch-up with Chimera is in my near future. But that is a story for another day.