FFXI: Return to Vana’diel – Time Traveller
I return to Vana’diel after not having played FFXI for over a decade. Here are my adventures!
So I hop on the boat to Norg, which happens to be a pirate town of some sort. I explore around and talk to NPCs, but it’s pretty clear that this area is made for someone higher level than myself. I decide to focus on the business at hand, which is talking to the captain and meeting this person he found.
I recognize her as the girl, Iroha, from the very first cutscene I saw in game earlier. I also recognize her because FFXIV did a cross-over event and I have her cosmetic armor in that game. 🙂
Anyhow, she recognizes me, and calls me her master. Then she proceeds to tell us that she’s a time traveler from the future, a future that is very dark and bleak. Apparently, in the future, I’m her teacher and an influential person, so she’s come to me in the past hoping that I can do something to change the course of history and prevent the Emptiness from destroying the future she knows.
Iroha then gives me an orb that I can use to enter her time, and says I should be able to “experience both futures.”
She naturally doesn’t have a lot of time to explain things before she’s warped out of there, leaving us all with more questions than answers. It’s never good to hear the future is gonna go bad.
After she disappears, Gilgamesh tells me I should probably go look for his daughter, Lion. But to progress, I’ll need to rank up with my home city more. Alrighty, I can do that.
I also get the awesome Rhapsody in White item. Holy crap! This thing! It gives SO MANY nice permanent buffs:
- 30% bonus to experience and limit points gains
- 100% increase to combat and magic skill gains
- Allows an additional alter ego to be called forth at once.
- 80% reduction in gil consumed by home points
- Reduces the amount of gil and tabs consumed by Survival Guides
That’s incredible!
Anyhow, I head back home to do what Gilgamesh suggested — work on some city missions to get my rank up. Along the way, I stop to check on with the Sparks vendor to see if I had any new gear I could equip. And, there was a whole new set of armor that made my Red Mage finally look… like a Red Mage!
Now I was ready for some missions! In the past, I’d done all the way up to Rank 3 missions, so I was familiar with the “save the kid from the orcs” and the “rescue the guy from the caves” mission. Finishing those got me pretty close to Rank 3, but seeing I was level 23 at this point, my mind was straying elsewhere.
I wanted to make the run to Jeuno.