Even the beastmen are here

The next morning, due to a mistake with my alarm clock, or maybe I slept through it, I was a bit late arriving. I wasn't the only one late in my party, so no harm done. Our party finally assembled about noon, and we decided to try one more Heroes Combat battle. If you're wondering why we kept trying, we would get a better score if we won more battles. Since the party that had the most points gets a prize, we had to keep trying.. Unfortunately there was a two hour wait, so we had some time to kill. Since we had done all the other quests, I decided to run around taking pictures of more people in costume. The costume contest was in the afternoon, so there were a lot more people in costume on the second day.

While waiting, we had time to attend the third and final developers' panel. After a recap from the last two developer sessions as well as their recent efforts battling inflation of the servers. economies, they opened it up to broad Q&A. Lots of good questions can be found here.

Finally it was our time to fight the heroes, and we headed in. Due to someone selecting the wrong battle, we had to fight against two heroes instead of one, and lost yet again. Disappointed, we decided to hand in our quest sheet with only one victory marked. Oh well.

Four sets of six machines for Heroes Combat

After some lunch, it was time for the raffle and costume contest. Someone came as a Dragoon, and I was happy she won first place. Second and third place went to the Yagudo and Goblin. It made me almost want to cosplay again, but I just don't have time or patience for that anymore.

The next event was the Tarutaru Marathon, where players race across a dangerous zone as a level 1 Tarutaru White Mage. They must first find the NPC with the Cure spell, buy it, and then find the second NPC to cure. The first three to cure the second NPC win. I hated sneaking to Jeuno back in the day. I can't imagine what strategy they planned to use in this kind of race. As it turned out, only one person actually made it to the goal in the time allowed, so they picked the closest people to the final NPC.

After about 20 minutes of setup, the Ballista Royale battle began between the teams from the Phoenix and Siren servers. This was the last battle in the long running tournament. It was one of the most exciting Ballista battles I had ever seen. Even though Siren had built more than a ten point lead, Phoenix made a great run at the end and only lost by two points. The final score was 26-24. After that, Square Enix surprised Siren with an announcement that they would battle the Japanese championship team, also from Siren. The Japanese team had a superior strategy and blew the North American team away, 44-0. The North American team admitted that playing people like these on their server is what made them so good in the first place. I guess they have a little more work to do on their strategy.

First place goes to the Dragoon!

At last it was time for the Star Onion concert. I had been looking forward to this since I decided to attend this event. While I couldn't get many good pictures because of the mist in the air, I had a great seat for the show. The concert was shorter than I expected, but I was losing my voice anyway from shouting and cheering at all the exciting events.

Then the fan festival was over. I didn't come away with anything physically special, but had a great time. I think forcing people to form parties was a unique experience. One that shows what an MMORPG might be in real life. I partied with six people I'd never seen before, and we managed to complete the entire live quest. Even though it wasn't the perfect party, we all had fun. I hope they have the same kind of event next year.

« 1 2