Day 07 & 08 - The Grind

Ah, the grind, what a familiar feeling. I mashed Thursday and Friday together into one day, because while I probably played more on both these days combined than half the time I've already been playing, not a lot actually happened. The major exception is a little cross-world flying nimbus tour I took with Tori, which I'm saving for a separate sideshow post due to the nature of the trip. I did do a bit of exploring prior to that trip though, on account of the fact that I was starting to wear the resources out of the area surrounding Pokari. I was moving to greener, or in this case browner pastures, as the next place on my training route seems to be a fall themed area, score! (Fall's my favorite season).

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if it was the big goofy bears walking upright, or the large cartoon style plants, but something about this area had me reminiscing back to the days of Banjo Kazooie, which certainly is not a bad thing, it certainly livened up the grinding. There are some other worthwhile things to mention not directly related to my journey though. The information surrounding the switchover from closed to open beta was finally released. The closed beta is to end March the 16th with a full character wipe, which they say will be the last one. The open beta will commence the following day, or at 9 PM on 16th for those who made it as far as Lv40 in the closed beta.

In addition to that reward, the first 25 to reach 65 on each server, along with 75 others chosen at random will receive a free pet that they'll keep even into retail. The "Katsune Kid" pictured above. For those who are wondering, Katsune or "Kitsune" refers to the fox spirits recognized in Japanese Shinto mythology. Some lived in harmony with humans, some caused mischief and more importantly, the number of tails on the fox indicated both its age and wisdom, with nine being the highest amount of tails possible. The above fox will not be available to catch in the wild for other players.

So as I mentioned before my adventures took me through the cave I had chosen not to pass through last time I had seen it almost 10 levels before, and I came to the new autumn area to grind. It seems my new enemies of choice were to be Birds, Tigers and Bears... Oh my? I encountered a new named enemy immediately and then got to work making the local fauna feel the wrath of my genocide. Certainly though, the refreshing change of scenery was a sight for sore eyes, and there was a little outpost not far down the road.

Most importantly, I discovered how useful the possessor is! Now, you're probably either asking what a possessor is, already in love with it, or hate it more than anything in the whole wide world. Reason is, the possessor is basically a tool that lets you put the game on auto-pilot. You give it up to 6 abilities, tell it how often to use them, tell it what ability it should heal with and when you're how low, set potions and mana potions and tell it how long to wait before using them, as well as set pet food and pet potions and tell it when to use them as well.

You can indicate to the possessor what type of enemies to kill, how far to wander from where you left it, and if you have a certain item, you can even have it pick up items and filter out certain items you do or do not want to pick up. Basically what this means is, if you have 5 different quests to kill 50 boars, you can just make sure you have enough potions ahead of time, head to the place turn your possessor on and go make a sandwich, watch TV or in my case write a blog. Some people view it as "lazy" or "cheating." Honestly, Ether Saga for me is a very casual MMO, and the grinding is fairly tedious, I'll be honest, a vast majority of the quests are "Go kill 50 Womp Rats" or something along those lines, and you'll get vast quantities of them at once.

A lot of the people complaining about this feature I believe are young, they don't have a lot of commitments, and are used to playing free to play MMOs with obscene amounts of mindless grinding. For me, while Ether Saga is absolutely fantastic for a free MMO, a majority of the quests don't even come close to scratching the interest of those in Final Fantasy XI or even World of Warcraft for that matter. Their repetitive nature means they will cause even the most seasoned MMO player to become quickly jaded and then bored. The feature is not a replacement for a human player, it can't use combos, it doesn't react to strange situations. For interesting, complicated quests and dungeons its still very imperative that you be the one controlling the game.

It's just an absolute lovely feature that allows you to sideline some of the grinding quests and do work, read a book or watch TV while the game grinds it out for you. I certainly don't miss the tedium of manually killing hundreds of the same thing over and over. Not to mention possessors have time limits, so you'll need to do difficult quests or buy a possessor from someone else when yours runs out. For me, the possessor is one of the greatest mechanics in Ether Saga, and with all the controversy in the community, I really hope they don't sack it. For anyone who really wants to grind, remember, the possesor is an option, not a mandatory thing. I've also used the possesor in the background to deal with tedius things like repeatedly feeding my pet or using potions on myself every few seconds while trying to fight a difficult battle.

Back to my adventures though, I did manage to score some green glowy body armor out of someone's bazaar at the market square in Pokari on one of my many back and forth visits over and under the mountains. My guy got a lot of exercise, turning in and receiving quests in Pokari and then carrying them out in autumn land. I also discovered that the caves I had earlier explored with Tori were sent down from the Heavens to imprison the Monkey King.

I was teleported there to investigate, and things came full circle for my little adventure so far. I visited the Ancient Ruins before heading back to Pokari with my report. Before drawing my adventures to a close for the night I took a little bit of a trip on the transportation service to confirm something for myself, after teleporting to many cities I discovered that there was in fact a whole other world map, a region if you will. I teleported to a suspended little town and opening my map discovered it to be entirely different, a snow covered region. While the world had already been large, I knew there had to be more, and was happy to find this. But that's an end to my adventrues for now, look for the slide show of Tori and my nimbus trip soon!

Until next time, Akakiba, signing out~