After a long day of doing nothing, I logged onto Twitch to watch something. I noticed one of my followed streamers playing FFXIV. Upon further investigation, I learned through the stream that FFXIV offers a free month subscription for trial. Having a previous WOW and FFXI subscription, as much as I loved MMORPGs, paying a monthly fee was what steered me away from ever trying it in the first place. Let alone having the news of it being a bad start before A Realm Reborn. Good thing the free trial doesn’t require a credit card either, so it was all-the-more reassuring to try it out.

I first tried it out at my friends house, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. Since I was on my own time now, I could give my full attention. Coming from a Hunter on WOW, I decided to stick with it and make an Archer. Especially because Rogue isn’t available from the creation screen. It didn’t take long to get the hang of the controls, but I’d say that to this day, I’m still not comfortable with console controls. I would guess that it’s easier with a mouse and keyboard.

It didn’t take long to hit trial level cap with my first class, so I decided to level another, then another, then another, until eventually hitting 20 with all available battling classes. I pretty much found a workflow to get to 20 within a couple of hours. Crafting/gathering classes were another story. But after inefficiently grinding to 20 with most (alchemy and cooking were hard =[ ), I pretty much ran out of things to do.

Grinding everything to 20 took almost the whole 30 days, and being hooked on the game, I decided to buy the full game. To my surprise, it had another 30 day free trial. So for about two months, I’ve played the game without inputting a credit card for a subscription. Next time I’ll take about my journey to end-game.