Well, I’ve played it now. I’m some kind of big Hulk-like fucker with white hair. And I’m a Red Mage, which means “jack of all trades”, as far as I can tell. Anyway, I started off in some town called Bastok, where the game immediately played a terrible trick on me. There was a cut scene of some woman not being allowed out of the town because it was too dangerous and she didn’t have a bodyguard. So I assumed, as one would, that she’d ask me to accompany her for a while and our mini adventure together would be a neat tutorial in the ways of the game. Instead she just ran off, saying she would like to show me round but that that she was too busy. Oh.

So I wandered around town and gave an adventure coupon to a nice lady who gave me some money. Wandered into the residential district and found I had a house, staffed by a friendly Moogle. Kupo. Baffling, but friendly. Kupo.

Anyway, I wandered off and talked some random NPCs until one of them gave me some supplies to deliver to an outpost in another region. Seemed a bit much for a level one quest… or mission… but I decided to do it. (Missions and quests are different in FFXI, somehow, and though the supplies appeared in my inventory, the mission to deliver them didn’t appear in my mission list. Or in my quest list. Very confusing.)

I ran out of town and killed a couple of hornets with a combination of my Dia spell and my Onion Dagger. Go me!

After that I ignored monsters and just ran to find this outpost. After about fifteen minutes I passed one, but I was still in the starting region, so I didn’t think that was it. I needed to go to the next region to the north. Found myself in a nice area with windmills, but no outpost. So I went further north to some dunes and discovered I didn’t have a map of that area. But I decided to run around anyway.

By this point my suspicions had been confirmed. This wasn’t a mission for level one characters. This is probably something high level players do inbetween riding chocobos and sipping champagne and laughing at the antics of newbies from their heavenly cloud palaces. Or something. All the monsters were, to quote the game, “incredibly tough”. Luckily, they didn’t seem to care I was there… until a goblin assassin decided he didn’t like my lovely white hair and killed me in one hit as I ran past him. So I respawned… back in Bastok, where I’d been forty-five minutes earlier.

I think I might just go and kill hornets for a bit while my pride recovers. Those supplies can sit in my inventory and rot for all I care.