Last night, like many of you out there reading this, I spent a good three or four hours playing Final Fantasy XI’s latest expansion: Seekers of Adoulin. I can safely say that I wasted 4 hours of my life. Be it walking around with no clue where to go, traversing the same pathways of a zone myriad times, fighting tough mobs that took twenty minutes to kill, wasting half an hour in a reive I couldn’t beat, or getting killed by an uragnite NM I didn’t mean to spawn. I can safely say I accomplished absolutely nothing last night and I loved every last moment of it.

Seekers of Adoulin will serve as a reminder to many of us of why we play this game. As a nine year veteran, I can remember back to when Chains of Promathia was announced, and it’s really stunning to stop and think about how much the game has changed since then. People actually played Ranger back in the day! Ranger, I say! I’m not saying that Seekers is going to take us back to the days of tractoring people through Sacrarium or lining up 18 Red Mages to chain-stun Dynamis Lord into submission; I am saying however, that for a solid few hours last night, I felt exactly how I did as a fledgling dragoon back in 2004. For a solid few hours last night, I witnessed Square Enix finding that magic combination of giving their players everything by giving them nothing.

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