The Adventures Of Pirotess: Buying A House

One thing you can do in Final Fantasy XIV is buy a house. You can either buy a house with your Free Company or buy your own personal house.The requirements for buying your house are that you need a character to be level 50 in one of the adventure classes, second lieutenant in one of the Grand Companies for personal housing, and rank 6 or higher for Free Company Housing. The big thing is finding land that is for sale in the residential areas which are, The Mist, Lavender Beds, The Goblet, and Shirogane. The second thing is making sure you have enough gil to purchase the land. Prices vary depending on who is selling it and the size of it. Small, medium, and large plots are what is available and this affects what size house you can place on the land.  Once that happens you can choose the kind of house you want depending on the size of the land. I got my personal house in The Goblet pretty close to my Free Company and a few friends. I was pretty excited about my new small cottage.

Pirotess gets a housing permit.

What comes next once you buy the land for your new house? You need to buy a housing permit from the NPC vendor which is usually close by in the residential area in order to build a house on the plot. The prices for the houses are as follows: Small house - 450,000 gil Medium house - 1,000,000 and Large House - 3,000,000 gil. What comes next after you have everything you need? Customizing your house outside and inside of course. You can decide where you want to place your house on your land and then customize the colors. You can also write a custom message on the placard in front of your house.

Pirotess has a new house!

What comes next once you have your new house set up? Decorating it of course! You can craft or buy furniture and decorations for outside your house and inside. You can also craft food dishes on your Culinarian to put inside your house and yes, your characters can eat them. Each dish has a certain number of servings so people who visit your house can be treated to a snack. Many of my wonderful friends in the game gifted me furniture that they crafted for me as a house warming gift. I love each piece they gave me because it was thoughtful and they crafted some pretty amazing things. One thing that I loved was the bench and table that I had in my little garden outside my house because it looked like the summons Carbuncle. 

Pirotess enjoys outside with her new furniture. 

It's fun decorating the inside of your house because you can make it however you like it. There are a ton of choices when it comes to choosing flooring and wallpaper for each room. Creating or buying each furniture item for your house lets you get creative with how you want it to look and show off your own personal style. For my small house I had an upstairs and a downstairs so I had my choice of two rooms to decorate. For my first floor, I have a pretty nice pastoral theme I like and it's nice and simple with a few furniture pieces. 

Pirotess hangs out in her living room. 

For downstairs, I made it a little different. I chose a little more blue for the walls and had a jacuzzi on one side for a relaxing corner. A bed for Pirotess and a little table spread out with foods I had crafted on my Culinarian made a cozy little spot for resting and snacks. I love both rooms in my little house, but I'm pretty fond of the downstairs one because it turned so nice and relaxing. 

Pirotess enjoys some snacks and the jacuzzi downstairs. 

Having a house in the game is pretty nice and it's been so much fun decorating it. You can always redecorate it too for a change or even for the different holidays. You do need to log in to keep your house though, not every day, but enough to keep it. If there has not been 30-35 days of activity on your account, you will get an email informing you that your house will be demolished if you don't log in. All you have to do is log into your account and walk into your house so the game server counts the activity and you are no longer considered inactive. After 45 days of inactivity your house will be demolished and the plot of land will be put up for sale, so make sure you log in so you don't lose your house. Is it worth it to buy yourself a personal house in the game? I think so. I have had a great experience with it having a place to unwind after adventures, decorating it, and inviting friends to come hang out and have fun. Getting your own house is pretty easy, you just need the gil and the permit to do it. Once you have it, go nuts and show off your style and have a great time! Thanks for reading, everyone. See you at the next adventure! 

See you at the next adventure!

*Final Fantasy XIV is available to play on the following platforms: PC and Playstation 4

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Mother Gamer Plays Okami HD

Okami is one of my personal favorite games. When it came out on the PS2 I played it often. When I saw that Okami HD was available for PS4, I got it immediately. I was thrilled to play one of my favorite games again. This was also a game I chose to stream on my Twitch channel. The things I loved about Okami were still here in the HD remastered version. The art style was as beautiful as ever and the music was great. The story and the characters that I remembered brought a smile to my face. Playing as the white wolf god Amaterasu with her little Poncle pal Issun was so much fun. Exploring everywhere is half the fun because each area is so different from the next.

Amaterasu exploring. 

The story is very much about helping nature as Amaterasu is a god and referred to as the mother of all. The goal is to find her celestial brush techniques and use them on your adventure as needed. For example a technique called Bloom, has you putting the celestial brush on a dead tree and when you do it, there is a beautiful cutscene that shows the tree blooming with cherry blossoms. When you do it with the guardian trees, an even prettier cutscene happens that rids the land of the curse and everything blooms and there are cute animals too. 

Using the celestial brush to use the bloom technique.

Since Amaterasu is a god, she needs praise in order to level up her skills and health. There are several ways to do this. One way is by feeding the animals throughout the lands. You can buy food for the animals from the merchants in the towns. When you feed the animals the food they like you earn praise. The biggest one of course is healing all the guardian trees and healing the trees throughout the different areas. You can also do all the side quests and help the people you meet and you earn praise from helping them. When you have enough praise for various things such as increasing your ink pots or your health, you can upgrade them with all the praise you have earned.

There are also digging mini games where Amaterasu uses her digging abilities and celestial brush skills to help people find things. The digging mini game can be a little frustrating because it does not give you a lot of time and you have to look for blossoms with timer orbs and use bloom on them to add extra time. When you use your brush skills, the timer is still counting down so you have to be as fast as you can. If you run out of time, you have to start over again. This is why it can be a little frustrating, but the game is still fun.

The digging mini game in action. Be fast!

There are all kinds of demons to fight and you earn experience points, yen, and extra ink when you beat them. For the story there are several boss demons you need to fight. There are different strategies for each boss and you need to use your celestial brush skills in order to defeat them. This is where the art style of Okami really shines as no two bosses are alike and using the skills is a creative way to handle them. However, I did have a huge issue with the final boss fight. It was over the top and ridiculous. While I understand that it was meant to be a challenge, this fight had everything but the kitchen sink. There were at least five different things I had to avoid, dodge, or not get crushed under. This also caused frustration with my streaming because from the beginning Okami had been very stream friendly and everyone was enjoying it. When I got to the final boss however, it blocked the scenes. If it was just the cutscenes I could understand that, but it blocked the entire final boss fight and the closing credits. I get that they want to avoid spoilers too, but at this point if a person is watching the streaming and people have been watching since the beginning, there is no point in blocking the final scenes. I know I am fairly new to streaming and currently I am streaming from my PS4 until I get the equipment I need, but this was definitely incredibly infuriating. I did finish the game, but I felt I had to apologize to my viewers for this happening and I did. Luckily, they were all very supportive and understanding about the whole thing. 

One of the boss battles in Okami. 

In spite of that frustration I did enjoy the game. Okami is still a game that is dear to my heart because of the story, the art style, the characters, and wonderful music. It is fun to play and overall I did enjoy streaming it because I got to share a game I loved with everyone. It is a game that celebrates friendship, love, and doing your best to be kind and help others which is something I talk about often. A game that is not only fun to play, but offers such a wonderful story with those ideals is a pretty fantastic thing. After the game is done, you can play a new game plus with all the items and upgrades you have earned. You can also get any side quests you missed. Okami was so much fun to play again and I'm happy that we got to go on that adventure together. Thanks for reading, everyone. See you at the next adventure!

Amaterasu and Issun in a village of wind. 

*Okami HD is available to play on the following platforms: PC, Playstation4, and XboxOne

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Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age, Great Adventure

I have loved the Dragon Quest games since I was a kid and have played many of them. I was quite thrilled that a new Dragon Quest game was coming out so as soon as I got my hands on Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age, I started playing immediately. Right from the start the game starts off with a fantastic introduction with music played by the Tokyo Symphonic Orchestra and beautiful scenes from the game. The story starts with an interesting beginning showing the hero who is known as the Luminary a hero of light who is the only one that can fight the powers of darkness and a villain known as Mordegon.

Once the initial introduction is done, this is where Dragon Quest really gets going. You have a few side quests that give you a tutorial on how the battle system works and there is a small bit of exploration in the hero's home village.

The hero exploring a cave in his village. 

Exploration is very much encouraged in Dragon Quest without being overwhelming. Dungeons are fairly linear so there's no confusion about where to go. The battle system has been revamped a bit with the ability to have the AI on your party members set to specific things such as focusing on healing or fighting wisely. The way I had mine set up was that I had control of the hero with the follow orders setting and had the party members set to certain AI controls like having designated healers and melee fighters. 

Another part of fighting in these turn based battles is something called pep powers. Basically after party members take a certain amount of damage from enemies they gain the power of pep. Each pep power is different and you unlock more for your hero and party members as you level up. These pep powers allow the hero and his friends to team up during battles to unleash epic attacks or heal everyone depending on what the situation calls for. Pep powers do not last forever however and if you don't use them right away they can wear off. A trick around this is to have the party member who is pepped up swap places with a party member who isn't. This is where the tactics and line up option in the battle menu comes in handy. It allows you to swap members in and out as needed until everyone has their pep powers ready to go. 

Use the pep powers to defeat enemies in battle.

There are tons of side quests in Dragon Quest where you help villagers find items, defeat monsters for them, or just wear the right outfit and you get rewarded with not just experience but items for crafting, healing items, or gear for your party members. There are also some mini games like horse racing and a casino where you can exchange tokens for things like costumes and crafting recipes. 

Horse racing is just one of the mini games you can play in the game.

Crafting is a big part of Dragon Quest XI. When you are at campfires, you can use the fun sized forge to craft weapons, armor, and accessories for your hero and his friends. I enjoyed this part of the game a lot because there are a variety of items you can make and if you make them well you get some pretty good stats on them. As you level up, you unlock abilities that can enhance your forging skills and increase your chances of successfully crafting items. If you screw up a crafting session you can always go back and rework the item if you have the right number of perfectionist's pearls. Some of the side quests require you to craft specific items so this is where the fun sized forge comes in handy. It's a nice break from level grinding and adventuring and you can save your game progress at the campfire as well. 

Craft a variety of items with the fun sized forge. 

Another fun aspect of the game is the variety of costumes you can get for your hero and party members. Some do offer pretty great defense stats and some are just for fun like Jade's bunny costume. There are a few side quests that offer costumes as rewards and some of the costumes you can craft with the forge. Running around getting all the costumes is a lot of fun and each one looks great and goes well with the party member it's for. 

Just one of the many costumes you can get in the game. 

Does Dragon Quest XI have flaws? In a word, yes. While I loved running around exploring everywhere, enjoyed the story, and didn't mind the level grinding there are serious issues with many of the boss battles in the game. My biggest one is that the old fashioned way of not being able to see a boss battle's HP bar does not work. There are times where a battle will drag on a little too long and there is no way to tell if you are even doing any damage at all or if the boss is close to being defeated. Fighting and hoping for the best just does not work. 

Another factor is just how much level grinding is needed in order to win against certain bosses. I love Dragon Quest and while I don't mind challenging having to run around for long periods of time to level grind just to win a boss fight is incredibly tedious which brings me to the next major issue with the game. Towards the end of the game there is a final boss that is the biggest pain in the ass to fight. To add to the frustration in this final area there is only one save point and it's at the beginning of the dungeon. There is no warning about the final boss coming up, no save point before it, and it just throws you into the fray. I did not win the first time or even the second because the boss fight was in two parts and the second part had an outrageous difficulty spike to the point of being so frustrating that I had to take a break from the game. 

I did finish the game eventually, but that part of the game alone and the odd spikes in difficulty in various boss fights shows that Dragon Quest needs to modernize a bit and get with the times. It does not need to do anything drastic, but it at least needs to make some changes that are more friendly to the people playing their game such as showing an enemy's HP gauge and not have such a steep learning curve for important boss battles. 

Other than those things, I enjoyed Dragon Quest XI a lot. It has an interesting story, wonderful characters, and is a great adventure overall. There is a lot to see and do, the mini games are fun, and the voice acting in the game is very well done. The artwork in the game is terrific and you definitely notice Akira Toriyama's unique art style. The music for the game is great also. When you finish the game, there are things you can do afterwards such as collecting all the crafting recipes and finishing some level 60 side quests. If you are a fan of the series, it is one that you will enjoy playing because it is a great addition to the Dragon Quest universe. 

Adventuring post game. Fun times!

*Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age is available to play on the following platforms: Playstation4, Nintendo 3DS, PC, and soon the Nintendo Switch