Hello hello hello everybody! Seeing as we’re about halfway through this momentous year in the website’s history, I thought I’d take a second to catch up everyone with what’s been going on and what to expect coming up.

Final Fantasy XIV Story Summary

The Endwalker story summary is still continuing. Sorry about the delays on the progress of this one. I suffered some major burn out on Final Fantasy XIV a few months back and have mostly been focusing on single player games in my own time when not streaming. Mostly because of the enormous backlog I have before this crazy summer of great titles began raining down upon us.

As previously stated, it is very likely that the Endwalker Story Summary will be the last of my Final Fantasy XIV summaries. Endwalker is the culmination of the 1.0-6.0 story arc and marks a turning point in the games general story. Even the usual patch content is a completely new plot line that has nothing to do with the main story of the expansion (though is one that’s been alluded to and built up in the side quests for some time.)

This of course depends greatly on where the game goes with the next expansion and if a continuing story summary even needs to be a thing anymore, but with the Endwalker story summary I felt that my original goal of creating an easily accessible way to understand the Hydaelyn/Zodiark storyline.

But even if Endwalker marks the end, it’s not the end-end. One thing I decided needs to be done is a complete rework of the original ARR story summary. It’s just… bare bones. It needs to be brought in line with the rest of the expansions. So there’s that to look forward to.

The Final Fantasy Retrospective Continues

We are now just over halfway through Final Fantasy VI on the Livestreams, and we’ve got nearly a month of buffer on the YouTube channel even with the change of releasing videos every weekday. I’m very happy with how much progress I’ve made with the whole project, though I definitely need to get to updating the main page more often and possibly rework how I handle the organization of all the posts.

The second phase of the Retrospective comes in the form of scripted content on the YouTube channel. These videos are a bit more work, but I really wanted to focus on some of the aspects of these games that I love (or hate). Originally, the plan was to do an all encompassing retrospective of the games histories and plots, but the more I thought about it the less enthused I became with that idea. I tried scripting it time and time again but ultimately just kept hitting a wall. So I went back to the drawing board.

Ultimately, I think what works is to focus on one interesting aspect of each game and dive deep into that. For instance, the strange situation surrounding the dragons in Final Fantasy I. They stand at the center of a number of random plot points and there isn’t really an explicitly stated reason why – but there are a number of ideas that can be drawn from the subtext of the game.

Saturday Streams Becoming a Thing

When I started streaming it was a Tuesday night thing after work, but since Tuesday’s have become a dedicated Final Fantasy stream night for the Retrospective project, I wanted another day where I could play other random things if I felt like it, or draw, or just chat or do quizzes – just other stuff beyond playing through the Final Fantasy franchise. Thus the Saturday streams were born and have since become a far more regular thing on my schedule.

It might not seem like much, but I am very happy about this inclusion. Streaming is not my job. I don’t aim for it to be my job. Same as this website. I have a job – one I enjoy very much. This is all just a fun past time and hobby for me. So taking the time to actually expand it and see that pay off has been very rewarding.

I’ve been working on additional ideas of things to do with the Saturday streams. These include resurrecting the Shakespeare Monkey Challenge in the Sims 4, doing a drawing stream where I doodle a full explanation to plot of Kingdom Hearts, completing a run of the Mass Effect Trilogy where I meticulously kill every named character I can in the games, or a showcase of RPG Maker games (because I think RPG Maker stuff deserves some love). As always, I’m open to additional suggestions as well.

PHASE.VII

So the real big news is that with the completion of Final Fantasy VI on stream, we will official pass into the “next generation” of Final Fantasy games that took a technological and graphical leap on the PlayStation (much to Young Vry’s frustration). To go along with that, I am planning on doing a massive revamp to the website, the stream – everything – that I am calling “Phase.VII”

Phase.VII is planned to be the introduction of a new vTuber model for the stream, complete with actual lore for the character, a completely new stream overlay, new features (some of which have been implemented early), and for the website a new theme and layout as well as some much needed updates to the categories and menus.

In fact, the top image of this post is a sneak preview of some of the featured changes for the Phase.VII update. Keep it tuned in here for announcements for the debut of the new model and stream layout complete with some possible giveaways during the debut stream.

15th Anniversary

Finally, we have the big one for the year. As I’ve mentioned before, September will mark the 15 year anniversary of me being a content creator on the internet. 15 years of posts, jokes, streams, guides, summaries and bad photoshops. I’m planning a BIG stream event to celebrate the day, and to revisit some old content, talk about my experiences, and just have a big celebration of doing this for this long. I might even bust out my Warcraft Trivial Pursuit set to see if we can stump me.

I’ll keep things updated here with more details as we get closer to the day, but I did want to give folks a heads up that it should be happening early September and I’ve already begun planning for it.