1645: Animus

A long road finally came to an end today — no, nothing important, it was just a lengthy quest in Final Fantasy XIV. Specifically, it was the quest to upgrade my weapon’s “Atma” incarnation into its more powerful “Animus” form, which means it’s now just one step away from being its (currently) ultimate “Novus” incarnation.

The quest to acquire and upgrade your “relic” weapon in Final Fantasy XIV is a pain in the arse, extremely time-consuming and, at times, very frustrating, but it’s also one of the most rewarding things to do at endgame. It gives your character a continual sense of gradual progression — particularly during the Atma-Animus phase that I’ve just completed — and it gives you a series of long-term goals to aim for, which is important to keep things interesting.

I really like it, in other words, partly for the fact that it’s everything what is effectively a “construct your own lightsaber” quest should be. Star Wars MMO The Old Republic featured a “construct your own lightsaber” quest that was not particularly big or epic, and the lightsaber you ended up constructing would often be replaced by something better along the line anyway. Final Fantasy XIV’s Relic questline, meanwhile, turns this process into a long journey, with each milestone proving to be a satisfying improvement in your weapon.

The process begins with a sidequest that sees you tracking down a once-legendary smith who now spends his days at the bottom of a bottle in the depths of the Black Shroud forest. Eventually, you track down a legendary weapon appropriate for your class, but it’s in a sorry state and can’t be used. Newly inspired — though he’d never admit that — the smith challenges you to find a suitable “host weapon” and infuse it with materia to act as a base for the reconstructed relic. You then need to challenge several of the toughest bosses in the realm — at least they used to be, anyway — in order to get various materials that Gerolt the smith requires to reconstruct the relic. Eventually, you’re left with a weapon that you’ve worked hard for — but it doesn’t end there.

After infusing your weapon with additional power through a strange concoction known as Thavnairian Mist, you can then begin scouring the realm for Atma crystals. These elusive little things have a very low drop rate from FATEs, the public quests that pop up around the realm, and you need to collect twelve of them: one each from a variety of different areas. This is the part that proves most frustrating for a lot of people — there’s not really any way that you can make the search for Atma crystals any easier other than just doing a lot of these FATEs, but from a game design perspective it’s actually quite clever: it keeps even the low-level FATEs relevant for even level-cap players, meaning that low-level players who might want to use FATEs to gain experience points will usually have at least a few people to help out, since most FATEs are designed around the assumption that multiple players will show up and participate.

Once you’ve gathered twelve Atmas, you upgrade your weapon into its Atma form. Initially, this offers no improvement whatsoever over its previous Zenith form, but by purchasing and then completing the various trials in a set of books chronicling the exploits of the Zodiac Braves (the ones from Final Fantasy Tactics? Who knows?) you gradually upgrade your Atma weapon, a tiny bit at a time, until it’s considerably more powerful than it once was. When you’ve completed all the books, your Atma weapon becomes an Animus, and it’s then that the road to Novus begins — the road down which I’ll soon be starting.

Upgrading your Animus to Novus is a similarly time-consuming process, but rather than simply grinding through tasks again, you instead make use of the game’s “materia” system to infuse a magical scroll with various stats you would like to apply to your finished weapon. In total, you have to apply 75 points of stats to the weapon, but how you distribute those is up to you — with the only restriction being the hard cap on certain stats. This means that, unlike any other weapon in the game, you can customise your Novus to be the weapon you want it to be. If you want to emphasise Accuracy — essential if you plan on venturing into the challenging endgame raids The Binding Coil of Bahamut and The Second Coil of Bahamut — then you can. If you’d rather emphasise Determination, a stat that improves your damage output, you can. If you’d rather make your spells cast just that little bit faster, you can do that too. In most cases, the combination of stat caps and the requirement to apply 75 points to the weapon means that you’ll end up doing a combination of things, but it’s still possible to specialise to a considerable degree.

I haven’t really considered what I’m going to do with my Novus yet, but work starts on it when I next start playing. In the meantime, I have my shiny, glowy new Animus to enjoy; it helps me kill things even faster than I already could as a Black Mage. I’m looking forward to trying it out soon.