If it’s “Final Fantasy”, why are there 15 of them?

For some light entertainment I decided to fire up FF14 yesterday, which was entertaining in a “I should get a dozen levels of EXP for just figuring out how to install this thing” sort of way.

I’ve played FF14 before, but it was on a PC and through Steam… And as I no longer have a PC and Square Enix insists on selling you separate versions of the game for various platforms — and that Steam account has gone the way of the dodo anyway, I needed to start over.

This isn’t really a bad thing as I didn’t have a lot of progress in the game from the last time I played. And $60 for the game, all of the expansions, 30 days of playtime, and some neat goodies for being a truly new player wasn’t a deal breaker.

So, the epic quest to get FF14 running started with going to the Square Enix website and purchasing the game.

I’m not sure what sort of hell Square Enix has been through with the game over the years, but the security involved makes my bank look like a chump…

I buy the game and AmEx immediately sends me an email stating I bought the game, and then an email from Square comes in stating that someone is verifying my purchase on their end and if I’ve not heard back in 48 hours to get ahold of customer support.

What?

So, a half an hour goes by before the next email comes in that congratulates me for buying the game and offers a link to download it. Clicking the link takes me to a web page that says something to the effect that, when ready, a link to the download and a key will appear in the space below. There’s also a link to some install instructions, which is where the actual download link resides — so I get the game downloaded and start the install.

The installer says I need to create an account. So I press that button and fill out the form, and then press submit — which is where the installer locks up and then consumes system memory until MacOS pops up a window stating bad things have happened and I should force-quit the installer.

Okay.

While this is going on I get an email from Square Enix with a confirmation code I need to put somewhere to verify that I actually use this email address…

So I restart the installer, press the new account button, fill out the form again, and it tells me that my email address has already been used and I can’t use it again.

Well, darn. This is okay though as I own my domain and mail server, so I can quite literally create an infinite number of email addresses… So I make another one, put that one in the email box on the form, press submit, and the installer locks up again.

And once again MacOS kindly informs me that the FF14 installer has consumed 30 gigs of memory and that I should kill it before it kills me.

Right… Off to the Internet!

It turns out that the anti-cheat FF14 uses really hates VPNs, and as I rarely get on the information superhighway without a VPN running to foil the personal data vampires, mine was making the installer mad. But, that aside, everyone suggested going to some web site called “mog station” and creating an account there as it just works better.

Welp, who am I to argue?

To the collective Internet brain-trust’s credit, they were right and in short order (and with the aid of a third email account), I successfully created an account for FF14!

And now all I have to do is put the key from the download page into the form and…

Oh, right — no key yet.

After a couple of hours of waiting I eventually gave up and decided to check in the morning… And when I checked at about 6am this morning, I was rewarded with a key to the game!

Okay! Put key in web form, start installer, press the button that sys I already have an account, put in login name and crazily complicated password, and presto! An hour of patching…

Heh.

Anyway, with patience and perseverance I did eventually log into FF14 and create a character at about 10am today. I’m in the datacenter called “Aether” on the world called “Midgardsormr” should anyone be looking for me.