There's very few things that have happened in my life that I can say have affected my life as much as this game has. The people I meet, the places I went, the advetures I had, all were some of the most memorible times in my life. How can a simple video game do so much? Well let me tell you the story.

   

   

I started Final Fantasy XI the day it released, October 28, 2003. I remember talking to a friend of mine about what I should name my character. He jokingly suggested the name Sailorkatie after having seen a picture of my friend Katie cosplaying as Sailormoon. Since I couldn't think of anything better, I ended up using the name. Having just played as a hybrid healer/buffer in PSO I figured I'd start off as a White Mage. I wanted to eventually become a Beastmaster and had heard that White Mage made a good subjob so I went with it. I remember buying the strategy guide for the game when it came out and spending whatever free time I had at work reading it trying to learn as much as possible. The first few days I managed to run across a few other American players that I made friends with. They were very friendly and pretty silly and all wanted to progress as much as possible. We worked together to all figure out how the game worked and tried to do as many of the missions and quests as we could. Learning this game was probably one of the most interresting things I've done across my many years. There was always so much going on and so many different things to do.

I remember at first selling all my items to NPCs and our group all trying to afford the armor that the NPCs sold. After awhile I recall one of our guys figuring out there was an Auction house and all of us being really confused how that worked out. I also remember 3 of us going down into an underground cave area to farm low level equipment pieces to sell on the Auction house since everyone was needing them. The best part about that statement is I can still do this day, 6 years and billions of adventures later, find the exact same spot in the game where we would farm equipment. Anyways time passed on, our friends list grew and eventually I ended up moving and having to quit the game. Sadness ensued and after spending 2 days or so trying to get everyone to do as many missions as possible with me, I parted ways with everyone. I eventually got back onto the internet and back into FFXI 3 months later. Most of my previous friends had quit the game and the few that were still there were so high level they wern't really able to do anything with me anymore. Since I was pretty much stuck by myself at that point, I decided to try dual boxing the game.

   

I decided to stick with the Sailorscout part of the first name I had and added rabbit after having had a discussion with someone about a scene from the movie Lilo and Stich. And thus the legend of rabbit began. I've used various forms of the name rabbit over probably 100 different games, and even to this day the name I more commonly use, Rabite, began with this character.

In any case, I spent a lot of time with these 2 characters. I remember being in a group one day with some people where at the end I mentioned the fact that I was dual boxing and someone replied with "Wth, I thought you guys were just 2 crazy lesbians or something". I tend to type on whichever keyboard my hands would be on and the thought never actually occured to me that people didn't realize I was in fact the same person, so this made me laugh a fair amount. So a few months passed and I got a bit bored of the game having still been by myself. During this time I managed to get katie to 21 White Mage and 21 Warrior. I got rabbit to 21 Red Mage and 21 White Mage. Towards the end of this adventure, I began to play just rabbit a bit more and managed to get Thief and Black Mage leveled a little bit. I had some fun in the Maze of Shakhrami blowing up worms by myself, but after awhile I stopped playing the game again.

During my leave is when I had started dual boxing in RO and doing a lot of stuff with Adam. After about 4 months of that had passed, I decided to go back to FFXI. In FFXI, originally, if you left for more than 3 months, they would delete your characters. Having been gone for 4 months I was a little concerned that this fate might have come to both of my characters. Which it had to katie, but not to rabbit for whatever reason. Perhaps it was fate, perhaps I was just really lucky, or perhaps I had showed up at just the right time. Either way I really wanted to enjoy FFXI so I decided to stick with what I had enjoyed last I played the game.

I continued to level BLM while doing whatever other things I could do between levels. Around level 35 or so I joined a group of players that didn't suck at all and ended up being one of the most enjoyable parties I had had the entire game. One of them jokingly said "See you guys tomorrow?" and that's when the real adventure for me began.

   

   

   

We grouped together pretty much every night from that point on till we all reached level 75. Along the way we did the Chains of Promathia missions together as we reached appropriate levels. It started out with just 4 of us doing the missions and picking up random straglers along the way, but around the Ouryu fight we came across another couple of excelent players and went on to become some of the first people with Al'Taieu access in the world. I can recall amost all of the troubles we faced along the way and nearly every adventurous journey we went on. And I could probably fill a book with the stories I could tell about this group of people. But I'm not going too, because that would get incredibly boring. I will however talk about a few of them.

I think the first major problem we ran across was doing the Riverne Site A mission. We actually went through the entirety of the promy missions in 1 night, and later that weekend did the Phomiuna Aqueducts mission with a full alliance of random people I came across. In fact, we weren't even really going to try to do the CoP missions together if not for the fact that I found that random group yelling for members for Phomiuna Aqueducts. I remember everyone being online and I was thinking, "I really want to continue these missions and I'm willing to even do this without them if I have too." So I asked my 3 companions to join in and after a long and terrible afternoon of trying to get 18 people through the Aqueducts without aggroing everything in the world, we completed the mission. Imediatly afterwords someone asked if anyone wanted to try the Riverne mission and the 4 of us joined in on it. After spending another bazillion hours getting 12 people through Riverne and aggroing everything in the world, we finally made it to the mission field. Now at this point we were all tired and that may have had a lot to do with us failing, however Riverne Site A was supposed to be the "official first really hard mission." So we all went back to the drawing bored, looked up some things and the next night we tried it again. I remember this also being the first and I think only time I got to play RDM for a CoP mission. Apparently the easy mode version was to kite the Epsilons around with Gravity so I went as RDM/NIN, and one of our other members went as NIN/WAR, and the 2 of us kited the guys around for awhile and eventually won the mission.

I belive the next thing worth mentioning is our Ouryu fight. We tried this fight so many times before Ace asked someone from his Linkshell to try helping us our. Invincible happened to also be stuck on this mission and so we brought him along. We had heard it really helped to have a Summoner along since apparently Garuda could do some pretty serious damage to him. Invincible also happened to be a Summoner so it worked out really well. After a horribly grueling battle, somehow, someway, Invincible managed to finish off Ouryu right as Ouryu finished all the rest of us off. I remember him being like "and everyone said being an elvan summoner was a bad idea" and then all of us laughing because it's possible the only reason he lived was because of his extra MND and extra HP. So from that point forward he ended up becoming a part of our group and every friday, unless we hadn't reached the level cap for the mission yet, we did another mission. Eventually we completed them all and gained Al'Taieu access and then waited 3 months for them to actually add it to the game.

Sadly as our CoP missions came to an end and all of us eventually reached level 75, we had little reason to hang out as much. Most of us still talked to eachother for awhile and we would randomly help eachother out with things but for the most part we all went our seperate ways. I eventually joined a Linkshell called Summit and began a horrible grind towards victory over everything in the game.

Summit was my first experiance with end game in an MMORPG and boy was it not something I was at all prepaired for. Summit at the time happened to be one of the top end game Linkshells in the entire world. We had to be online litterally 12-15 hours a day, 5 days a week, or we would get kicked from the shell. Luckily for me my job happened to only be 2 days a week so the other 5 I wasn't really doing anything.

   

I wish I had more images from the time I spent in Summit. I got to participate in some world first kills (like Absolute Virtue) that at the time I didn't have a working computer and had to play the game on PS2. There's also the fact that for the longest time I couldn't get fraps to work and a few other random things. I remember doing a lot of really random things in that Linkshell that I'm sure I'll never get another chance to experience in any other MMO. Working with a lot of those guys was also something I've come to appreciate over the years as I've moved from game to game. Summit never really had any Elitest people in it. It was a bunch of nerds just hanging out having fun while doing something not many other people in the world could handle doing. I remember even during more serious events or attempts that the atmosphere was still very relaxed and we were good enough that even when things were looking bad, we were able to keep our heads straight and recover. Our leaders didn't sit there and yell at anyone, instead they gave sound advice and we were able to learn and grow. I've always hated in other games having leaders that would yell at players so that not only did that person not learn anything, but then they felt really uncomfortable doing anything.

Anyways time moved on, Summit at one point actually became Millenium and after our AV kill I quit the game again. I didn't completely quit the game though, I tried to play both WoW and FFXI at the same time. It was kinda a wreck and I eventually got overwhelmed. I remember after some time had passed I got back into FFXI again. I think it was around the time the Treasure's of Aht Urhgan expansion came out.

I remember at the time I had been really pissed off about how they didn't include Mime as the final class for ToAU, and I leveled Puppetmaster out of spite. However I almost instantly ended up falling in love with the class and leveled the hell out of it. For litterally 3 weeks I didn't sleep and all I did was play the game. I was the first on the server to hit 75 and also the first to realize that the class needed some really horrendous amount of work to it. After hitting 60 the entire leveling process kind of changes and everyone at the time had this "Lets fight the hardest possible thing we can kill for exp." And of course my arguement of "lets fight as many of the next to hardest stuff possible because I can actually almost do damage to that stuff and we can kill them twice as fast" didn't work well with anyone but the japanese. So I ended up quiting the game again after getting really annoyed with the overall atmosphere.

When they added the AF for the new classes I came back to the game to see if any of the changes they had made to Puppetmaster made the class any better. Sadly it didn't matter even if they had or not because the class had been branded with Worst Class Ever. I played around with it a bit but after awhile I started to get bored of everything again.

   

   

   

One day I ran into Invincible and told him of my troubles. He suggested I join his Linkshell (which suprisingly enough was filled with old Summit/Millenium members) and give end game another shot since his linkshell was a lot more casual about how they did things. I quickly became friends with everyone in it and had once again had the desire to play the game. While I didn't really care for a lot of the end game stuff since I had already done most everything a billion times, there were some new things we engaged in and the people involved were such great people that I was able to keep interrested enough.

Slowly and surely I made my way through the ToAU missions with the help of some of my newfound friends. It was a loooong and interresting journey but I had enjoyed the CoP storyline so much that I wanted to see the ToAU story. However the story ended up not being as epic and in the end I was a bit dissapointed. However after I completed that my brother got me back into WoW and I started trying to play that and FFXI at the same time again.

Of course that didn't work out at all and hanging out with my brother over a bunch of random people ended up being the case. I played WoW for a few months and eventually that got a bit old and around the time the Wings of the Goddess expansion came out I decided it was time to go back to FFXI again.

   

At first I was a little dissapointed with the way the release had been handled. There were only 3 missions and the entire world was pretty much just a rehashed bunch of graphics. However the new Campaign system was probably the greatest thing ever and I was horribly addicted. I remember like a week or 2 after the expansion came out I had already gotten over 100,000 allied notes from doing it so much and everyone I knew was like, "wth I have like 4000 allied notes." Also sometime shortly after the expansion came out I managed to aquire a much much better computer and ended up diving into the mod world a bit as well as doing anything to increase the overall look of the game for myself. After another few months of playing had gone by a lot of my friends had either quit or stopped playing as much. And the new expansion for WoW was coming out soon so I ended up quitting the game yet again.

Sadly that was the last of my journeys in the world of Vana'diel. I've joined a few times since then and ended up quitting a few days later. But around May, 2009, with the announcement of FFXIV I finally decided to quit the game forever. I had played the game for many years, accomplished many things, meet a wide variety of people, and after having clocked in over 500 days (12000+ hours) of gameplay, I can say that it was one of the greatest adventures I've ever had. I'm a bit sad to let go of my character but she'll still live on forever in my heart and mind. I also realize that I may never again get to experiance a journey anything like the one I took through Vana'diel. Very few games I can say had a world so emaculate that I could spend hours just walking around areas looking at the environment. I doubt any game I play in the future will give me the same joy I experianced in this one, but I hope to someday get to live a similar experiance once again.

I have a few more images collected involving the adventures I went on. I actually have about 400 or so pictures on my hard drive but I'm only going to put about 40 or so on here for the moment.