June 14, 2009

Bastok Rank Missions

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.

 

9 comments:

Andrew said...

YES! I too, am a sucker for completion, and not knowing the detailed story of this was just bothering me. Thanks a million.

Yeargdribble said...

Timing couldn't have been more perfect. After watching all of ToAU I decided to watch up through CoP more or less in order to make sure everything was refreshed.

After watching Windy and Sandy I was sad to see Bastok amiss, but just as I finished Sandy I look up and BAM here's Bastok. Thanks so much for your work on this project.

Anonymous said...

Thank you man for uploading these videos

Can't wait for more updates from you with WOTG

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU SO MUCH for posting these vids. You have saved me the time of playing 11, and i always wanted to watch these. Maybe I'll join for 14 :)

Till then, keep it up!!

Forbin said...

You know you love Bastok the most! :P

Sourside21 said...

Thank you so much for uploading these! You should definitely update the WotG cut scenes when you get the chance, :D

LH said...

Hey! I too wanted to express my thanks to you for posting these videos. I roleplay at a Final Fantasy themed MU* and was researching Zeid when I came across your videos. I stopped playing FF11 years ago but always adored the storylines (and never finished one of them). I was pleasantly surprised to your videos--now I can catch up on the story. Thank you so much! This looks like it was a LOT of work, and I really appreciate your hard work!

Anonymous said...

Hello. First I wanna thank you Lawtechguy for getting all these cutscenes together but I am having no luck viewing any of them. Dunno if anyone can help me out but for what it's worth I'm using Windows Vista, tried Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox. Thanks, hope I can view these soon.

lawtechguy said...

You need to download and install a bit-torrent program. It's easiest just to get Vuze from http://www.vuze.com/

Once you have that up and running, just browse to my vids (search lawtechguy) and download them. Vuze has a built-in video player, but as long as you have a video codec that supports MKV files (you can get this from DIVX.com now), you can play in Windows Media Player.

While I'm here - just FYI for everyone, I have plans to do some recording in the near future. I'm almost done with leveling RNG (it's at 69 now) so I'll switch gears soon. I've had a second set of all the WoTG stuff planned for a while. I'll also put up the moogle expansion story and maybe those quests on the ToAU generals. I still need the last fight of Crystalline Prophecy and only halfway through Shantoto Accension, but they should make it up eventually as well. Wish I could find a static on Shiva that could meet on weekends.....