Interview with Aniero, Host from LimitBreakRadio, for Vana'diel Profiles Who's who on FFXI.

Seshamaru: We wanted to do this interview because you are really popular. People are always talking about you; they listen to every episode. We’re looking to find out about your background. How did you guys start? What made you pick FFXI?

Kixxi: Let’s go right back to the beginning. What came first – did you know Kallo and Sayl [LBA co-hosts – Ed] prior to FFXI or did you meet them through the game? Why was FFXI your MMO of choice?

Aniero: There’s no other way to put it; I’m a Final Fantasy fan boy! I’ve loved the series ever since I played my first Final Fantasy game, which was FFVII. When FFXI came out, I was actually playing Ultima: Online, but when Electronic Arts took over from Origin in running the game, they changed it and I found it very difficult to adapt after a break.

At this time, a friend told me about FFXI coming out and I was so curious I had to get it. So for my birthday in 2003, my parents bought me the game. At first I jumped between FFXI and Ultima: Online, but after months of playing I got my WAR to L30, I switched to DRK and thought that it was great. It was then that I got really stuck in.

I was at college during this period, and I had never met another player face-to-face, but during my third year, I walked past Kallo’s room and his door was open. I could see him hanging out in his living room and he was playing FFXI on his laptop, climbing the mountain in Attohwa Chasm. I said, “wow you play FFXI as well!” and we got talking.

Sayl and I were already roommates at the time but he didn’t play. Kallo knew Argetlam [former co-host – Ed] as they were also roommates, and Arget didn’t play either. Sayl was a long-time fan of the Final Fantasy series so we were able to get him to play after a lot or persuasion, and Kallo did the same with Arget too.

The following year we all started working together, and we would sit around talking about FFXI, so one day it dawned on me that this would make compelling radio. I am a broadcasting student, so after seeing how much fun it was to talk about the game, I wanted to expand on it. I was then introduced to Podcasting. I searched for FFXI Podcasts and found PetFoodAlpha and Mega Elixir, and I really enjoyed PFA, so I listened hard to what worked for them, and decided to take the hard facts of sites like FFXIclopedia and discuss strategies, events and jobs et cetera.

After the second episode we decided to invite guests to the show, as our website was up and running and people had started to sign up to the forums. We experimented with Skype and our first guest was Spaz; it worked remarkably well. It was very easy to do as I am an audio producer and have an abundance of equipment. We were able to get a configuration that worked for us and the rest is history.

Originally we had intended LBR to be a weekly show, but after awhile we began to think about the overall aesthetic to the show. There are very few Podcasts out there who have hosts with strong radio backgrounds, so our goal was to make the show sound like you were listening to top-forty terrestrial radio. As this took more time, we bumped our schedule down to whenever we could do it, which has been the way we have done it for the last year and a half now.

Seshamaru: We wanted to ask you: you obviously have a strong radio voice – how did you get into broadcasting? What inspired you and made you choose to go in that direction?

Aniero: I was involved in radio and audio production from a young age. I was fortunate to go to a high school with a radio programme. My school’s station, WBFH, in Detroit, Michigan, have gone on to win all kinds of awards since I left. Many of the kids from there have dynamite talent, and that’s where I got my feet wet.

The first show that I produced was a show that primarily played punk rock music but even back then I was still trying to bring about the same aesthetic. As it was quite clean cut, some people liked but it never really caught on in the way that we wanted it to. We had built a website around it, and uploaded shows for people to listen to but I think we had designed it for a community which was larger than our listening audience. Perhaps the production was too clean on it, but that was my first broadcasting experience and I learned an immense amount from it.

After I left high school I decided that this was what I wanted to do. During those three years I had been honing my skills and interviewing big names in punk rock, such as Pat Thetic from Anti Flag and Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, so when I got to college I became active on the college broadcasting programme and I continued producing the same show. It became so successful that it started out at two hours in length and soon became three hours long. It was very cool but also very unmanageable; we couldn’t keep coming in each week as we just didn’t have the material, so we changed it to bi-weekly [fortnightly? – Ed] but it burnt us out so we had to kill it.

Six months or so later the idea for LBR surfaced and I started doing some freelance production, and now I work at the CMU Public Radio Network, a seven transmitter network which covers the majority of the northern half of the lower peninsula of Michigan, around a third of the upper peninsula and it even spreads into upper Ontario, which is a huge area of coverage and it is the best job I have ever had. I absolutely love public radio.

Kixxi: Let’s hope we hear your show for many years to come! Going back to LBR, I want to talk about the group dynamic. When I listen to LBR, it’s clear that you are the ‘leader’. How did you become the leader of the show?

Aniero: This really bears mentioning and I think is the coolest part of LBR. Sayl, Kallo, Gamer [new host – Ed] and Arget didn’t have any broadcasting experience. Kallo is an actor, and Sayl and Arget were studying to be actors (but they later changed the focus of their studies). I was unsure which direction it would take at first but seeing as I have the broadcasting experience I take the lead, whilst they concentrate on their characters.

If you notice, we don’t ever talk about who we are on the show. When we do interviews like this, or when I was on the Jester’s Court, or PFA or Geek Speak, it’s a very different feel. My personality is distinctly different to Aniero’s; Aniero is responsible, and I am not necessarily the most responsible person on the planet! (laughs).

We didn’t sit down and assign roles. We decided not to talk about politics or the weather as the audience wanted to hear about FFXI. When we do the show, we’re in Norg, and I am Aniero, Robbie is Kallo. Kallo, Sayl and Arget had really solid ideas about who their characters were and they were able to express them really well with their acting experience. The goal is to ‘keep it in Vana’diel’, not in the real world.

Kixxi: That’s definitely how it comes across. Speaking of characters actually, who came up with the ‘intern’ idea? Stuffing Juxtaposition in the cupboard – what’s that all about!

Aniero: (laughs) Juxta has been a friend of ours for a long, long time. I’ve known him for almost six years, and Kallo and Arget have lived with him for several years now. Juxta was not originally a FFXI player, and still remains primarily a World of Warcraft player – I almost hate to say it! (light-hearted groans from the interviewers) But that’s really his game.

Growing up I listened to a local Detroit radio show called Drew & Mike, and this show really influenced my delivery and production style. They always had an ‘off-mic’ character that would speak up every so often to say something funny, and then they would berate him on air. We approached Juxta with the idea, as after moving in with Kallo and Arget he had started up a FFXI character, and he had helped admin and moderate our boards, even before we made him an ‘intern’. We really wanted an ‘off-mic’ character who was comedic relief, and he was interested.

I don’t think there is a character on the show as popular as Juxta is. Love him or hate him, you cannot ignore him. If you ever met Juxta in real life, the character of Juxta makes more sense as he is so funny as a person. He takes the role well, never getting upset by anything that is said against him, and I am eternally grateful, because a lot of people wouldn’t put up with that crap! (laughs)

Seshamaru: He adds a great dynamic to the show; he’s really funny. I remember laughing at the whole closet-thing; it was hilarious!

Kixxi: When you said that he had escaped into the air vents, it actually sounded like he had really gotten into the vents!

Aniero: (laughs) That was just us shaking a filing cabinet! (all laugh) It’s amazing what you can do with sound; that’s what’s so fun about the show – trying to make a gag believable and I think we do a pretty okay job of that most of the time.

Seshamaru: I think that’s what really separates you guys from PFA, The Mog House, or anybody else; you can feel a uniqueness in the things that you do, just like making sound effects. It draws people in.

Aniero: I take this approach from Mystery Science Theatre 3000; I’m an immense fan! That show knows that its comedy and we take that from it. If we tried to take everything seriously, we’d be cracking jokes but I think they would be more mean-spirited. I don’t know why but in radio, when you’re cracking jokes, they’re usually at someone else’s expense (for example Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony). The fact we have this preset role for Juxta, and not taking ourselves too seriously really helps lower the stress level. We can go in and improvise, and come up with something funny and that’s ok.

Unfortunately with live radio you can’t do that. It’s a huge benefit to be able to fix things in post-production and repeat them until we get them right, and I think that helps with the overall aesthetic of the show.

Seshamaru: Oh definitely. Now after you started the show and got inspired, which of you had a background in web design? Who created the website and manages it?

Aniero: (laughs) Anyone who ever saw the original LBR site before it was updated knows that it was atrociously ugly! I take credit for that. I know HTML, but just enough to get by, so I threw it together, and that was basically it. I’m the primary web master and I maintain the site. As for the new design, that was made for us so graciously by a fan called Marvin Neice (www.mneice.com – Ed), and we wanted to use it, but as far as my skills go I know just enough to get by.

Seshamaru: Yeah, and we’re going to talk about that later – what your community and fans do to really inspire you. That’s just one example of a fan of LBR showing that you guys really are that popular.

Aniero: Well we would definitely not be where we are without the support of our community and our fan base. Every day, every /tell and every banner – anything – I’m always so grateful to the people who donate their time to do stuff for us, and the forums wouldn’t look the way that they do now without them. We have a strong fan art section of the site which contains work by immensely talented people doing really cool stuff and just browsing it for awhile is very cool. I am so thankful to everyone. So obviously the show means a lot to some people which is very flattering, and up until this point I had never produced anything that people cared about. When I stopped doing my punk rock show it faded out with a whimper but I know that if LBR were to stop today, there would be people who would not be pleased. That’s what keeps us going.

I won’t lie, for as fun as the show is, it can really be a hassle to coordinate everyone’s schedules! Seshamaru, you know: recording times can be ridiculous; I think ours [LBR episode with Sesh – Ed] was about four and a half hours yesterday. On top of recording the show, we have to come up with outlines, banners – Selphiie has been doing our banners for a long time, and TamTu also – just an incredible amount of artwork to make the site look great. I’m totally indebted to these people. It can be a hassle, but the enjoyment that people will get from listening to the show is one hundred percent worth it. No, a hundred and twenty percent worth it.

Kixxi: Thanks! Let’s go back to what you said earlier about being ‘characters’. With regards to the game itself, what are Aniero’s origins? Does the name have a meaning? Do you role-play in game? And also, what do you like to do when you log in?

Aniero: That’s a good question. The name Aniero actually comes from JRR Tolkien’s Elvish. I was a big fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and there is a website out there called The Elvish Language Fellowship (www.elvish.org – Ed), which has an article called the Elvish Baby Book, and Aniero is my own name, Nathan, in Elvish according to JRR Tolkien. I picked that name because the name I was using in Ultima: Online was already taken, which was Raine. I was given the URL by a co-worker of mine at the time, so that’s how the name came about.

As far as role-playing is concerned, I don’t do very much role-playing; in the game I’m pretty much ‘more me’ than I am on the show to be honest with you, so when I log in I’m looking to do what anyone else looks to do – missions, quests, Assaults, Campaign (I’m a huge Campaign addict!), EXP parties – anything. The appeal of FFXI is that you can do so much; you can log in and constantly do things for three, four or five hours and that is immensely appealing to me.

Kixxi: And right now you’re doing the Promathia missions, aren’t you? How are you finding those?

Aniero: Very, very difficult, although I am proud to report that as of a few days ago, I got access to Al’Taieu (Sea), so I’m on CoP 8-2 or 8-3 now. I’ve also got access to the Grand Palace too. I really want my Rajas Ring – it’s killing me! So hopefully I’ll be able to get that sometime soon. I have to say, that storyline is just incredible; some of the cutscenes are just so epic! We talked about this a lot on the episode that Seshamaru is on; when I log on, I can get stuff done and, when I got Sea, I felt accomplished. I felt like I had really achieved something, and it’s that feeling of satisfaction that keeps me coming back to the game over and over again.

Kixxi: And it’s interesting you say that you log in and “get stuff done”, because I was thinking, back at the start you said that people are always complimenting you and you are flattered – do you feel like celebrities? Are you always getting pestered, /tells, requests and all sorts? What’s it like? You must hear a lot of twinkles on your speakers (referring to the /tell chime – Ed)!

Aniero: (laughs) I would never use the word ‘pestered’, because I am always flattered to hear from someone who enjoys the show. I do get a large amount of /tells like “hey, I’m a real big fan of the show, can I have a Linkpearl?” or “hey, I’m listening to you guys right now, it’s really fantastic!” Most of the time it’s just someone popping in and saying how much they enjoy the show, but other times I’ll get into long discussions and I love that. I love meeting people and talking to them, whether they know about the show or not – I really enjoy the FFXI community. Even before the show, I would love the people that I met and the friends that I had.

When the show started and the /tells came along, I would be in a CoP mission and I’d get a “hey, I love your show!” I’ll never purposefully ignore someone. If you don’t get a response from me, I’m not at my computer. I’m the king of AFK. I’m so bad at not typing those three letters. I’ll never ignore anyone that says anything to me, whether it be about the show or not. That above all else is the payoff; to be able to meet people and get to know them. As a result, I’ve met a lot of people I consider really close friends.

In episode thirty-two, Maxx-V and Tigerfury travelled all the way out to where we live, which is in the middle of nowhere, as they were making a big move from the east coast to the west. In episode thirty, Atamusk was visiting some relatives, and he and his cousin decided to see us in ‘Norg’. That is amazing to me. To have people go out of their way to see us just because we do a radio show – that floors me.

Seshamaru: Let me ask you: what is your most exciting or outrageous fan story? The funniest one you can think of!

Aniero: Hmmm. (thinks) That’s a good question.

Seshamaru: I’m sure you have stories of people stalking you!

Aniero: No, actually, to be honest I don’t think we’ve ever had that problem. All of the fans that I’ve talked to have always been super-nice. If they send me a /tell and I say “Can I talk to you in a sec, I’m in a CoP mission”, they’re always very respectful of that, so I don’t think I’ve ever had a stalker as a result of LBR. I just can’t think of a wild fan story.

I think going to the Fanfest was the coolest fan story that I have because I was just getting recognised by my voice and that’s never happened to me before. Working in radio, you think you’d be prepared for something like that, but to have someone come up to you and say “hey you’re Aniero!” is so amazing. I think that’s the closest to a wild fan story that I have.

Kixxi: So no need to hire a Galka bodyguard then?

Aniero: (laughs) Nope! Not yet.

Kixxi: (laughs) Just before Sesh goes back to the LBR website and community, since you started the show, has it affected the way you play? Do you feel you have to live up to anything in front of other people in the game? Has it changed you?

Aniero: Yes, it has changed me in the sense that I have learned so much from doing the show. Do I feel obligated? Not necessarily. I’ve always had the motto that real life takes precedence over the game and I have other obligations that I have to meet, but once those are done I can make time for the game and that has never changed. But I have changed in that I have taken something away from every guest that we have had on the show. Even my ideas about my own job, DRK, have changed from hearing about BLM or Dark Magic Skill, or whatever.

Kixxi: I’m sure that’s Kallo bullying you about that! (all laugh) You two always seem to have this banter going on between you on the show, he being a THF and you a DRK – it’s great!

Seshamaru: But TamTu was putting Kallo in his place yesterday!

Aniero: (laughs) And me too! The dynamic that Kallo and Aniero have is very different from the dynamic we have as individual people. I respect Kallo so much. He’s such a good guy and a great friend. I think the banter between us is funny but sometimes I almost feel bad and I’ll send him PMs apologising. So it’s a good dynamic on the show and I think it’s even better we have a different dynamic as friends.

Seshamaru: Tell me about how when you started the show, did you ever expect it to grow as big as it has?

Aniero: No!

Seshamaru: It really is big! When I think FFXI Podcasts, I think PFA, LBR, and The Mog House occasionally, but they’re brand new.

Aniero: They’re still new, but I love what they do, it’s really good work.

Seshamaru: But are you amazed at the response and the numbers over the years? You have a really big community now!

Aniero: Every single day. When I browse the forums and look at the posts, or read emails – every day I’m amazed and humbled too. We couldn’t do this without the fans. The response we’ve gotten is totally amazing.

Kixxi: With over one thousand members now, it doesn’t show signs of stopping! So what are the plans for the show’s future? You’re obviously going to get more and more popular, it seems, so are there any plans to develop the show, add new themes? Tell us!

Aniero: That’s actually a really good question. Usually when something about the show changes it’s because of something outside the show. We introduced Erufailon as a new intern (a close friend of mine for years), Gamer as well, but Arget made the choice to leave. So usually when anything changes it’s because of our real lives.

As for the future, I’m sure hosts and members will come and go as they do. We’ve been trying to arrange another call-in extravaganza, but we can’t all seem to agree on a schedule. We’ve also been collecting clips for a second LOL clip-show. The first came as a result of summer, so as people went to do what they do for summer, we thought, “what do we do?” So we took a bunch of clips that didn’t make the show and made an entire new show out of it.

Now the shows are getting much longer. Originally they started out at around an hour, or an hour and twenty minutes max, but we asked the community if they’d rather have longer or shorter shows so they could be burned onto a CD, but the fans asked for the longer show, wanting more! As a result, we end up cutting out less material, so we have less to use for things like LOL clip-shows. But those are two things you’ll see in the future.

If there is another Fanfest, we will be there, as the 2007 Fanfest was so spectacular; we really had a good time. That’s about it, other than that we’re pretty much playing it by ear (all laugh).

Kixxi: it’s a shame because we don’t get [FFXI – Ed] Fanfests here in England. We always seem to miss out!

Aniero: It is a shame. I can’t tell you how cool it was to be in a room where you could say “Souleater!” or “Provoke!” or “Eagle Eye Shot!” (Seshamaru laughs) and people wouldn’t give you the thousand-yard stare. Everyone was focussed on FFXI; I had never experienced anything like that before.

Kixxi: Well I’m glad you covered it.

Seshamaru: I would definitely love to go to that next year. Maybe if Vana’diel Profiles kicks off, maybe we can set up and bring some Admins!

Aniero: That would be great.

Kixxi: Well you’ll be funding my plane ticket then! (all laugh)

Aniero: We tried to get Square Enix to fund our plane tickets, but they said they couldn’t do that. They let us in for free though. That was nice. But we tried! (laughs) No shame in asking, I guess!

Seshamaru: Well this has been an awesome interview. I want to ask you one more thing: do you have anything you would like to say to your community and fans?

Aniero: I love you guys. Seriously. All of you. It’s been a crazy ride, and there’s no way it would have been possible without any of them, and I absolutely adore all of them. Other than that: thank you.

Kixxi: In return, thank you for taking the time out to speak with us. It’s a real pleasure to actually speak with you person-to-person, having listened to your show for several months. Hope to listen to many, many more!

Aniero: We hope to put out many, many more! And I’ll tell you what, Vana’diel Profiles is such a cool idea for a site, and the design is just so well done; I hope you guys do nothing but great things, so good luck and thank you. I really appreciate that you think I am worthy of interviewing. It’s very flattering.

Seshamaru: Yes, this has been really fun. You guys are Junes Who's Who on FFXI, on Vana’diel Profiles. This has been a really great time – thanks for taking the time to talk with us, and we’ll make sure you get a write-up of the article to put on your site if you want.

Aniero: Fantastic, absolutely.

Seshamaru: And I want to thank you for signing up (Aniero laughs) – I see you have a profile on the site too.

Aniero: Definitely, and if anyone wants to connect with us, feel free. I encourage people to contact us, to get a hold of us – email, Skype, Xbox Live! (I don’t think we have a MySpace), but Vana’diel Profiles, the boards, PM – whatever – we love hearing it.