Final Fantasy XIV is like a theme park, a singular location that weaves in elements of nearly every other game in the franchise and uses them as attractions. The MMO is at its best when it's playfully utilizing characters and elements from previous games, with new twists. Nowhere is that more present than with the Return to Ivalice Alliance Raid introduced with Stormblood, a masterclass of dynamic dungeon design that Square Enix hasn’t been able to top, and I’m starting to have doubts they ever will.
With Shadowbringers and Endwalker there’s a case to be made that Final Fantasy XIV’s content has become more homogenized, using a lot of the same mechanics and ideas. As great as the NieR raid series and Myths of the Realm are, you can’t deny that they suffer from the same thing. There’s a real lack of unique mechanics across the board, with much of both series’ battles revolving around dodging AoEs, stack markers, and the rest of the usual, just on a bigger scale. The narrative surrounding those two Alliance Raids is another story, but on a mechanical level, they simply don’t feel as vibrant as imaginative.
That’s especially true when you compare them to Ivalice, with three wildly different raids that brilliantly adapt mechanics from both Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII. For regular dungeons, and even normal raids, it makes sense that you’d want some kind of standardization for players to know, not too many surprises to throw them off. But the Ivalice raids don’t care about that one bit, they want to throw as many weird one-off mechanics at you as they can. Things we’ve quite literally never seen before.
Chief among these is the infamous Construct 7 and his math equations. These raids had the gumption to make players know what prime numbers are and do math in the middle of the battle to avoid taking massive damage. It takes real gumption to put a math equation in the middle of the raid, especially when it’s a mechanic that no one will ever see again. What’s even smarter is how the battle essentially adapts the arithmetic abilities of the character from Tactics into FFXIV.
But that’s not nearly the only battle that does that. Mustadio takes aim as a machinist and forces everyone to properly position themselves, Famfrit launches massive water tornadoes that roam the battlefield, Argath commands players to take action, but has a demon and angel form to portray his status as a backstabber. Each and every battle is meticulously thought out to not only pay homage to the original character but also adapt something central to their original gameplay or story into the framework of FFXIV.
That’s what gives the Ivalice raids such a unique flavor, they don’t just feel like a piece of FFXIV content, but an extension of the game they’re based on. This fact is only enhanced by the general presentation and scale of the raids, taking you through the opulent royal capital of Rabanastre, dank sewers you have to swim through, massive gear-filled towers, and ethereal frozen cities. That visual variety works hand-in-hand with the mechanics, making each battle feel like a proper event, tied together by the throughline of the Ivalice story, which fascinatingly works as an epilogue to Final Fantasy Tactics itself, bringing closure to some of the character relationships from that game.
The NieR raid series massively succeeds in terms of storytelling and has plenty of visual pizazz, but it simply lacks that mechanical variety to make it stand out and feel like the source material. Myths of the Realm similarly has dazzling sights and fantastic characters, but it falls into the camp of feeling too similar to every other piece of content in FFXIV, just like a large-scale dungeon.
Having played all these Alliance Raids countless times, there’s no doubt in my mind that Ivalice stands head and shoulders above the rest. But more than that it’s one of the very best pieces of content in the entire game, the epitome of Final Fantasy XIV at its best, using the rich history of the franchise to create something vibrantly new. The only hope I have now is that Dawntrail’s Final Fantasy XI-inspired raid looks back at Ivalice for inspiration.
