Echoes of Vana'diel FFXI Alliance Raid

[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?

[BlackThought]

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.

I thought I'd made my peace with a Bastok omission a while ago but to be excluded from the rewards feels like malice.

[Khutulun]

Ngl, was expecting more from the third portion of the Alliance Raid (fight wise).

Not going to comment on bad fan service vs good fan service debate too much. The writing did lose me, but idk what I'd suggest beyond a massive shakeup of the raid series in terms of its structure.

[FuturePastNow]

I've never played XI but I've read and watched a bit about it, and the little "siege" add phase in the raid makes me sad nothing interesting like that happens to the cities in this game.

[SkankyRoe]

I still haven't bothered even taking on the quest yet I'm so utterly disinterested in the final raid. The first two were boring as hell and there isn't even really any story, this entire series seems be just "hey look at this thing from FFXI! REMEMBER!?" without anything else to really pull me in like the Nier raids did with their alien aesthetics and a story that was decent up until the ending.

[Wyssahtyn]

they really ruined a vaguely interesting fight with a knockoff king ghidorah, huh

[Kisshu]

As an old FFXI player, it's been nice to see some of the locations, enemies and especially gear remade for FFXIV. Plus lots of FFXI music scrolls.
But it fails as a story. It's much too stuck in a collab bubble, like any other game where the NPCs leave in the end and it's all gone. And the story was much to basic, so all the fights were just highlights from FFXI with no regards on how they are used. It's just a memberberries raid where you get to fight an HNM, a Sky god, and then end bosses or noticeable fights like Ark Angels or Ultima/Omega.

As for the raids themselves, they were on the easier side, especially third walk.

I've also noticed that some TT card descriptions like Promathia and Alexander, seems to contradict or add entirely new lore up regarding them. Like saying Alexander was an embodiment of Vana'diel's will, or that Promathia was "an empty-hearted incarnation born of arrogance, envy, cowardice, apathy, and rage" when the FFXI lore is rather different since he's one of the original gods born from the sentient crystal.

[Shinun]

As an EX FFXI Player who came over to FF14 during 1.0 I was very happy with the Alliance raid, the nostalgia for alot of these raids enemies were great the music is still top notch, and seeing some of the areas in better graphics was amazing. I also like how the FFXI Raid/Rhapsody rerun are happening right before FFXI does it's biyearly Return to Vanadiel for free campaign, so itll be great to go back to FFXI for a few weeks to re-experience the game and maybe resub afterwards

[papandbuddyg]

amazing raids tbh i just wish they would combine the subs so many more people would buy and play 11 it be great for both games

[arstoka]

Coming out of my hiatus pillow fort to chime in.

I, personally, did not like or appreciate the premise of the raid series itself. Electrope as a concept is much like Dynamis, too vague to be used effectively and too overpowered to be used wisely. The story, from this point of view, was doomed from the start. Any new lore we get will contradict old lore or backpedal on lore to downplay how powerful it is. It just feels haphazard.

I played XI for a little bit and, while I really enjoyed the combat system and the adventuring, I never got to any of the key boss moments in the game. It just feels like massive spoilers for XI which, to be fair, has been out for a considerably longer time. Enticing people into XI with fighting the biggest bosses from the game is one hell of a way to do that. It feels almost comedic, ironic moreso in retrospect (seeing how little they put into the story side of things).

At the very least, I enjoyed the first 2/3 raids. The last boss of the 3rd raid felt extremely easy in comparison to Shadow Lord (final boss in 1/3).

I'm still a staunch believer of a story has to stand on its own merits in order to be good, nostalgia baiting should be an afterthought otherwise it will inevitably be hamfisted. (This seems to be one of the core issues of Dawntrail's writing as a whole but I digress.)

Cheers to those who enjoyed it though.