While at FanFest 2023, the return of the official Final Fantasy 14 live gathering, fans were given the opportunity to take on one of the new bosses from Dawntrail, which was announced at the event. Fans reserved time to take on the Final Fantasy 4-inspired trial Asura, partying in groups of eight for that first glimpse and Battle Challenge, as they called it.
I was able to hop in with my static and some others at the event to take her on. It’s always a bit hectic taking on a new boss, but it was a lot of fun—so here’s what I observed.
For one, using a FF4 boss seems to cut out the possibility of real spoilers. We already know that Dawntrail, the new expansion, is taking a lot of inspiration from other franchise games, especially FF6, though Endwalker also draws heavily from FF4. It’s also not unheard of for multiple games to be referenced, as we saw FFX’s Anima in Endwalker, too.
As for the actual battle itself, the setting and boss design were gorgeous. Gold hues lined both the arena and the boss, and bright colors of stained glass windows underlined them well. None of this took away from being able to see the attacks, either (though perhaps my divided attention did).
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to hear new music; they used one of the “Battle With the Four Fiends” themes. Mixed with the aesthetics parallel to Thavnair’s South Asian themes, some are speculating that this would be a late 6.5 trial, though they’ve already officially declared that this is a 7.0 trial.
I’m going to be honest in that I zoned out when I was doing mechanics. But if you’ve done FFXIV’s newest Alliance Raids, there shouldn’t be anything particularly outlandish to look out for.
There were some memorization dodges, at least, where they show the order of the attacks and you have to move in that order. They also do the “mirrored familiar” stuff that should be familiar from Eden’s 8th trial (“Shiva”), where one unit does an attack and the other mirrors it, giving a smaller safe zone to dodge.
Partied Too Hard
However, when mechanics got interesting, we didn’t get to see much. We watched the floor split in half between red and blue — and then things ended. Huh? Why?
…we kind of kicked her ass too early.
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It does seem that this particular Battle Challenge was set to not just a lower player level, but a lower difficulty in some manner – which is entirely fair, because there were a lot of people at this FanFest, and it’s in their favor to have people clear quicker. In fact, I don’t think I heard of anyone actually failing this.
And frankly, it was chaos as everyone kept dying, which is extremely normal for a new duty. At least our healer managed to get us all back up so we could keep going, and he had a lot of fun surviving, and doing so, so I guess that’s what counts? (It also gave me time to take these photos, because, as a Black Mage, “dead” is my default state.)
Still, I think it would have been nice to see more of the boss, as she was pretty gorgeous and at least mechanically interesting, even before the implied uptick in mechanics. When Asura arrives in Dawntrail, I’m sure she’ll be a highlight for long-time fans of the Final Fantasy franchise.
What other bosses do you hope will show up in the new FFXIV expansion?
