It's finally here: the video I personally never really wanted to take the time to do, but happens to be what many, many people have been asking for for quite some time. I've also always been a sucker for completeness...
Even though I started out in Bastok when I first set foot in Vana'diel five years ago, I was largely disappointed with the story and characters overall, and it ended up being the last rank 10 I achieved. To me, it always felt somewhat disjointed, like a haphazard assortment of go here, kill this NM, retrieve that item. To this day I still don't really understand the last mission in relation to the rest of the story; I kind of think maybe it could have just ended after 9-1. In short, these missions lacked cohesion to me, and I guess that's why I never felt all that compelled to record the custscenes. But I will admit, now that it's done, that while I still remain unimpressed with the overall plot, there are some moments that are touching, and some I found quite humorous.
When I recorded the San d'Oria and Windurst missions, I largely omitted the parts having to do with the Shadow Lord and put that in a separate video. However, the Shadow Lord plays a much more integral relation to Galkan history, so I decided to include MOST (though not all) of those scenes in this video. I did still omit the portions of the Magicite missions having to do with Aldo, Verena, and Fickie, and I left out the one sceen with Ajido-Marujido in Castle Oztroja (which conversely was pretty integral to the Windurst plot). On the flip side, I took the liberty to add in a few scenes from the Dark Knight job quest and a small snippet from DRK AF, since these shed a little more light on Gumbah and Zeid.
The Bastok missions cover a wide variety of subjects, but if I had to pick an underlying theme, it would be about the legend of the Talkekeeper, set against a backdrop of racial tension between Humes and Galka.
