Echoes of Vana'diel FFXI Alliance Raid

[Yuella]

It's a love letter of FFXI players. They compiled all the memorable parts of FFXI into these 3 raids.

Bosses:
Shadowlords, Ark Angels, Omega and Ultima, the archdukes, Alexander, Promathia, Shinryu


Promyvion's Memory Receptacles
Fafnir (HNM camping)
Kirin (Sky camping)
Besieged

Prishe and Shantotto, the two most popular characters based on survey

It's done a good job evoking those memories back for FFXI players

[Scott]

After this Raid I'm even more Sad we never saw Bastok.... its really unfair for Bastok Players.
And after I saw the Adventurer Plate and Portait Material I'm even more sad.

Jeuno, San d'oria and Windurst all get their cool Adventurer Plate Decoration... only Bastok Players can't represent their Home Nation... They at least could have released an Adventurer Plate for Bastok as a little show of good will.

[KateHarthing]

whilst I never played 11 I genuinely cry every time at that last fight. These were SO good

[Valence]

If you had never played ff14 and had a raid series in another game themed about ff14 the same way this one was, and everything would be about telling you how great memories the characters have of that fight at star's end with the endsinger, or how bitterly they remember about that character emet selch, I bet you'd get bored out of your mind too since you would have zero connections about any of those.

[Iscah]

Not a single really interesting new mechanic (aside from the last boss taking turns to shield).

The two-tiered arena was a neat idea, although it never got used for anything beyond fairly basic up/down mechanics and then vanished from the second part of the fight.

[Clerith]

Went in blind as healer - and enjoyed my time! (Many revives, saves and heals - but sadly no wipes.) ^^
Looking forward to the NGE alliance raids.
I never played FF11 (= no nostalgia) – but with Evangelion, I'll definitely feel the hype and use my Asuka glams.

[Anarnee]

I think I need to give it some time to settle, but this may be my favorite raid series since Ivalice. I did like Myths of the Realm, but it ended kinda flatly for me.

I had fun with this all the way through... Though the end boss was giving muppet.

Never played 11 but I have been thinking of trying it because of this, fell in love with all the characters and boss, and want to know more about them all.

[Voidmage]

For me the whole thing was "meh" from beginning to end.
Fun fights, sure and the glamour outside the first one was also good enough but the story was, like Nier, just there for fan service.
There weren't even any consequences like Prishe traveling around or Jeuno actually affecting Tural. Everything is separated to an absolute degree.
Not even additional dialogue that we basically met Shantottos counterpart (BLM quest line) or Iroha (who actually searches desperately for a way back).

I acknowledge the work and all that went in and I do think the devs did a great job of showing the XI locations with this games graphics but I am tired of Alliance raids being delegated to crossovers.
Imo the Ivalice raids were far better in that regard because it wasn't just an Isekai for the second time.

A fun raid series but completely forgettable outside the fights.

[Carin-Eri]

whilst I never played 11 I genuinely cry every time at that last fight. These were SO good

Same

And this moment at the very end choked me up too:

[DoubleJustice]

Coming off of completing the final raid and resulting cutscenes raw, so my thoughts might be a little incoherent, but here goes.

I have to say this raid set felt like it had very little substance outside of blatant fan service.

There's basically no story to follow beyond "these are places and bosses from Vana' diel." Sareel Ja was a throwaway villain from the throwaway portion of DTs MSQ. It's quite impossible to take him as a threat. In fact the only thing that happens is Bakool Jaja gets injured by a clone of Gullol Jaja, and some nameless soldiers died to monster clones. Legitimately why should I care about this guy? Prishe and the player character insert say the word "adventure", but do all of their adventuring offscreen, why should I, the player, care about them being clones with implanted memories? Whether or not they blink out of existance or go back home to Vana'Diel. I've spent like a total of 10 minutes with these characters walking through DT zones.

If they wanted players to actually care about these characters, we needed more fleshed out story with them inside of XiV. Create some sort of active threat that we have to resolve in the down time between alliance raid releases that we work together to solve.

Like idk, ppl complain about Nier raids being fan service, but I've only played the tutorial of automata and was engaged with the alliance raid story they put together for us, because they actually put a story together.

As a side note, I think some of the fights were really cool, but because we just teleport from "XI hype moment" to "XI hype moment" there's no thematic cohesion for anyone who hasn't played XI present within the actual alliance raids themselves. Compare for example with weeping city of mhach, where we progress from outside the city, then we enter the city and descend into the outskirts of the underground ruins of the city, then we enter the city, disable the ruins defensive mechanisms, and then finally enter the deepest point of the ruins.

Oh and most of the gear looks terrible too. There's like 2 sets that have any sort of appeal beyond looking like a xiv 1.0 fodder soldier.

And honestly, I don't even feel any desire to reverse flow into 11, because it feels like there won't be anything for me to discover. We fought so many final boss enemies, that it will be apparant quite quickly what leads into what, along side blatant spoilers with the brothers from the second raid, and all of the data notes from the npc they encourage you to speak with after.

This was honestly a 4/10 experience for me, down there with the EW post patch void quests. Which speaking of, the moment to moment raw nostalgia baiting and general amateur storytelling flow feel quite identical. Same writers maybe?