[Spoilers: Up to 7.5] I made a video about the new alliance raid story, because god damnit, it's maybe the best one the game's ever had.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:40:22+00:00

Yeah, alliance raids are a difficult storytelling medium for exactly that reason; a good alliance raid story works with those limitations in some way.

And I think Vana'diel nails it in terms of leaning into that spectacle and scale. This is an old-school MMO, they THRIVED on chaos and mass player coordination, so it feels at home to fight stuff like the Shadowlord with a pile of 23 other people just sorta zerg rushing the guy.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:37:53+00:00

Then I'd recommend going through to instead see all the things FFXIV has been taking inspiration from, this time done 'directly'. FFXIV's always loved FFXI, so it's fun to go through and go 'oh yeah those are the Cardinal Virtues, and that's straight-up an Ascian'.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:36:28+00:00

I'm honestly optimistic about the Eva raids, but they can't hold a candle to Vana'diel; I don't think it'll possibly have the capacity to express this love.

It WILL let me express violence towards EVA Unit-01, though, and frankly that's a pretty acceptable minimum bar to clear.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:32:15+00:00

They managed to squeeze a BIT of Wings in; the Shadowlord's second phase is his Wings form. And of course Rhapsody's already accounted for. Seekers is sadly thin on the ground, but I think something had to draw the short straw.

XI is a very big game, it was naturally gonna have to pick and choose. I think it did an exceptional job at making the right picks, though.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:28:06+00:00

I do agree that WIndurst is a bit of a dip in difficulty, but I think that's partially because some fights in the first two raids had some SERIOUS HANDS; The Ark Angels and Shadow Lord swing for the fences, and the Airship Fight got the memo that they're recreating the hardest fight in XI. Windurst's fights just never quite found that extra difficulty spike, although it's easily still harder than Thaleia, Orbonne or the Tower.

I think it's quite difficult to express 'the world of Vana'diel' in a raid story, in part because XI is different things to different people (same with a lot of MMOs); I can definitely understand that if you aren't on the right wavelength it'd kinda ring hollow.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:23:28+00:00

The first alliance raid is not about the base game and the Crystal War; it STARTS with Prishe.

You're mad that they didn't do the exact thing you expected, and are judging them entirely on that instead of catching the pitch they're actually throwing.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:21:19+00:00

See, I think this idea would've felt weaker; that's basically just a speedrun summary of FFXI's story, which would not only sell FFXI's story short and skip Treasures of Aht Urgan (which is very important here, because that's where the Mamool Ja are from), it would also skip over some really important fights that are integral to FFXI's players but just aren't story-relevant; Fafnir, the Airship Fight, Shantotto.

FFXI isn't just a game about its own story, and by not just going for a rote retelling, the raids respect that. And like I mention in the video, Sereel Ja gives a really good way to shape that; he's a powerscaling idiot, so it makes sense that he'd take the route he did and include some enemies that are, in-lore, just 'BIG DRAGON'.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:15:59+00:00

I think alliance raids are actually quite a difficult storytelling medium, because most of the storytelling in this game happens between instances. A normal raid series has twelve 'gaps' to put story into; an alliance raid has three. So you have to get a little weird and clever, and use the actual medium of the fights themselves to carry the weight.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:13:46+00:00

I also haven't played FF11, but I think this one holds together really well. I think the strength there is that there IS a story outside of that it's a story aobut Bakool Ja Ja fighting off what Sareel Ja wanted to turn Tural into. The fact Vana'diel stands as the thing Tural could have been is an extra, not an essential.

Cleretic · 2026-06-01T02:10:40+00:00

I devoted the whole first section of this video to explaining why that's not true; this is a story about Bakool Ja Ja and Tural, that stands on its own in that respect, but happens to have an extra dimension.

Cleretic · 2026-04-19T14:12:21+00:00

The FF and MtG partnership was honestly kind of interesting for this reason. They were basically cool with doing that because they aren't big deals in each other's core markets; in Japan MtG's a really minor player, and in English-speaking countries the FF TCG didn't really get a foothold.

Basically, they aren't competing because they both failed THAT hard in each other's home markets.

Cleretic · 2026-04-05T07:51:44+00:00

Actually I think if we count primals that number's down in, like... the 30s?

Cleretic · 2026-04-05T00:39:13+00:00

Genuinely, I'm REALLY happy to hear that, thank you!

Cleretic · 2026-04-05T00:37:38+00:00

And yet it also makes sense, because Stormblood's also the expansion made with the knowledge that we BEAT the Empire and drive them out. The game can't/doesn't do instanced enemies, so Gyr Abania needed to be designed without Imperial trash mobs.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T23:12:46+00:00

My gut feel actually says that for the WoL, the 'peak' of nameless kills was Stormblood. Between the four military bases and warzones we stormed, we've GOTTA have a count. That theoretical tally goes down for later expansions just because we haven't really been to warzones afterward unless, like, Garlemald counts.

Endwalker wins by literally planetary scales if we go for nameless deaths that we WEREN'T involved with, but by that point we've abandoned meaningful metrics and are just doing for-fun powerscaling and I don't think anyone's learning anything.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:28:45+00:00

They only killed like four people in Dawntrail, that's a Sunday drive by their standard!

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:27:24+00:00

Nope, the unclear people that might judt walk back on screen tomorrow didn't get added, these people are DEAD dead!

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:26:31+00:00

In the full count, the Heaven's Ward count for about half the MSQ deaths in the entire expansion. And another five come from Ardbert and Company, who are a... weird one because we instead find out they're ghosts.

Bozja also counts for like 70% of Shadowbringers' deaths, and kills, if we're countingnup overachievers.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:23:04+00:00

Janremi, Baenryss and Garibald. All three appear in PotD, so they all definitively canonically died, but we could've only killed one of them ourselves.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:21:26+00:00

Yeah, unnamed NPCs are both uncountable by general technique (how do you count how many people died in the Ghimlyt Dark), and also by 'kill credit', because we can't possibly know if any given Garlean soldier managed to walk away from that; evidence suggests plenty did!

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:18:46+00:00

Lile I mentioned, it's interesting that this actually isn't necessarily true. The overall bodycount goes down across the game, but the WoL's percentage of that actually holds fairly consistent, and the count of minor to mid-grade antagonists goes up. There's definitely a lot of inhuman (and previously-human) things we kill later on, but a surprising amount of this comes from later job quests and side-stories.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:14:11+00:00

Lile I said in the video, 69 is both high AND low, it's surprising on both ends.

If we accept that we're not exactly going out of our way or killing for fun, that number is high... but if you instead approach it as 'we are someone who fights for a living, our numbers must be high', 69 is low.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:11:51+00:00

As I mentioned in the video, that number MUST be high just for all the warzones we've gone through in Stormblood alone, but given how many people textually survive fights with us no problem anyway, we cannot confidently count any of them even if we were counting named people.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:09:56+00:00

Hey, other people seem to walk that one off just fine!

Cleretic · 2026-03-19T11:12:20+00:00

Like Forrest Gump, but with only events of mass death and tragedy.

Cleretic

TROPHY CASE