FFXI: Abyssea

Although the same could be said for most endgame in every mmo in the world ever, abyssea deems to be as much of a dead end as the panda.

I came late into the abyssea stage, coming back from a nine month hiatus to find the world turned upside down, some problems pulled shining into the light and laid low, whilst brand new ones born, discovered, and kicked into a prison to serve the bastard fathers' jail time.

For the uninitiated, Abyssea is an mirror world of our own where a myriad of nasty beasties have raped and pillaged their way around the landscape like an armada of pedophiles at butlins. Apart from a moon bigger than Brian Blessed's shout, a sky tinted with the colour of used tampon, the world is geographically identical. Not wanting to spoil things, the crags that exist in our world don't exist there, and the monsters inhabiting took a bit too much of the awesome drug.

Let's pretend I'm a real game reviewer here; at first thought, abyssea screams of recycled zones, what with the dev teams stress on horizontal expansion rather than vertical expansion. Look at the monsters, now held together in loose packs of inevitable linking are identical to the ones we've seen already. I'm grateful to see the Empty monsters that destroyed me once apon a time in 30 cap cop fights, and how I get to break them with every swing of my great axe. Then again the music of the zones is extremely well orchestrated, even though it does get tiresome eventually, and fails to approach the amount of irrational hatred that the campaign theme still invokes.

Th mechanics of combat of abyssea is changed from our old memories of combat, including stat upgrades, atmas and enough exp to fill the grand canyon with numbers.

The first two are passive bonuses to your character, making four digit numbers something more common within these new zones, and some are just downright broken. SE have fallen into their regimented mentality on this system. A player finds the right combination of atma for a ,job and situation, they're not in the habit of diverging from said path. An equivalent might be driving from one side of a country to the other, determined to take the short, boring route instead of the longer experimental road past the lions, tigers, and bear bodied nudists as they sunbathe glistening on the beach, nipples hard at the slightest stirring of the wind. That's just the men, and I have an erection.

The experience earned in abyssea is ridiculous. Everyone and their mum has at least two jobs to max, with full merits and a side order of merit fries to spare. Having taken a meagre two jobs to 90, and fully merited all of my existing 75's, i'm now left asking myself a monumental question: what the fuck do I do with all of this experience? World of Warcraft blesses the endgame scene with enhanced gold rewards in exchange for the grunt work that took them to 85, allowing them to fund the ever-growing demand for tanks, and Warriors in particular, to spend copious amounts of gold repairing their titanic and hugely impractical armour. As of now, i'm desperately thinking of Jobs to take to 75, because I can't stand the thought of having experience points hit the ground. It's a bit of a problem i think that SE have missed, safe to say, though, the recent earthquakes'll give the dev team a kick up the arse.

Now, I'm going to settle a verbal score here: I once said that despite the level increase, in order to level up, we had to buy these three new expansions, to which my social rose up against me and said that I was wrong and ignorant.

To those who don't know how addictive business is run,

I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!