As you guys know Mike had an absolute blast with the Heavensward expansion – and to be honest the story for it was SO GOOD thats its easy for other things to get overshadowed. But, now is the time – today we take a look at the Alexander raid and what Mike thought of it.
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Evening folks, Chris here again – its time for us to go back to Heavensward to take a look at this awesome raid set in the bowels of a giant robot. I, being a man of exquisite taste love mechs so a raid like this is right up my street. How about you, what did you think of Alexander?
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Brute Justice isn't the Constructicons — he's the Combaticons! The names of each of the constituent parts are allusions to each of the Combaticons' names (Blaster/Blast Off, Swindler/Swindle, Vortexer/Vortex, etc.), and of course Brute Justice corresponds to Bruticus.
love that raid so much
Omega's my goddamn FAVORITE. Not saying the next two are bad but DANG, what fanservice!
Also unpopular opinion but I liked the usage of Duty Actions, which were introduced that expansion so we had one like every other fight. lol
Everybody is talking about Mide and and the timeloop. But did anyone actually notice that you have a second time loop in the story? When you encounter Alexander for the first time he freezes you in time and charges his laser… And then, for no reason, the time freeze suddenly just stops. Why? Well, during the fight with Alexander he summons Adds, which open portals that go back in time… Some players have to enter them and destroy the adds. Have you ever stopped and looked at what's going on in the background? It's actually THOSE ADDS that keep the time freeze from back then up. You destroying them actually saves the old you in the past. I LOVED that detail. It's small, but it makes all the difference.
Doing these as they came out the story for me was pretty underwhelming. Yes it pays of at the end but the first two tiers really are pretty light on story. That's a trap most Raid Series Stories fall into. Bahamut had some of that for sure. Omega also has pretty weak story until the last tier.
Shadowbringers Eden broke the mold there, almost feels like it's part of the MSQ.
I started skipping the Alexander story after 3 or 4 raids because it just took too long and I wanted to play. This is a problem I often have with FF, though I feel like it got better with ShB. But sometimes, as much as I adore the writing, it can get in the way of playing the game and I'm not always in the mood for long, drawn-out stories. This is also why I haven't unlocked SB and ShB raids, yet (after almost a year of playing the game), because I don't want to skip the story again and I know that right now I probably would. I need a weekend where I'm not doing anything else to just do all of it in one go.
When I did the Alexander Prime battle, I was speechless how epic it was. Alexander is my favorite Esper/Summon/GF/Primal to this day and I was really hoping they give him an awesome trial. It was way better than I could ever expect. The idea that he created all the plot only to save everything by stopping the Ilumminati and freezing himself in a single moment for the eternity made me cry. And how he was able to recreate Mide and her beloved's bodies and release them in the past proved me one thing I aways knew: Alexander is not evil. I aways saw him like a "mechanical Paladin" of sorts. By the way, if you liked him on this FF, you should try FFIX. He got maybe the most badass moment of this game!!
Completely agree with preach. Unfortunately that feeling doesn't disappear with savage, I would definitely recommend doing A8s and A12s though as they have a few iconic mechanics that people should try out
If you're going to get into savage, I do not recommend starting with Alexander. In my opinion, the fights are too similar to normal mode, just way harder, but not really in a fun way.
I would recommend the Omega raids instead, they're much better designed, much more of a spectacle, and in my opinion just more fun and less of a hassle.
Can't wait for him to get to savage omega. He's going to love it.
"constructicons"
you're really close! They're actually directly named after the Combaticons, who were also a set of 80s Decepticon combiners. And it's not just a joke reference added by the English team either, it's in the japanese script as well.
Not sure preach but if you want to skip cutscenes because friends are waiting etc. I am sure you can replay them in you're mog house or at a NPC. Love the videos of FFXIV keep them rolling.
I wish you would mention the music! That is the most memorable to me!
I have a soft spot for Alexander because he's a recurring summon in FF games, so having HIM be the dungeon we're invading is super cool. Then the second reason is because Cruise Chaser is based on Ark, my favourite summon and a namesake of mine since I was a kid.
I for one can't wait until Preach starts doing Ultimates.
You can almost say it's…
The Epic of Alexander
Its FFXIV, making people wait cause story isn’t even an issue, seriously its FFXIV, to think that wouldn’t happen is silly.
Agree 100% on boss designs being a bit unmemorable for the most part. I only remember 3 or so of them, and the rest are just "another robot/mech/vehicle". Not that they're bad fights or anything but it does make my memory of most merge together.
Mide doesn't go into a simulation, Alexander sends them to the past, where they start the Xaela tribe.
Stormblood's raids are gonna blow your fucking mind
…a okay, Preach. I was intrigued before, but now you’ve got my subscription
Big sell for those raids for me was the music honestly.
I started in ARR and ran through coils. I loved coils way more than Alexander. Alexander felt underwhelming and I actually took a break for the Alexander raids. Didn't come back till Shadowbringers. Alexander has grown on me a bit since then, but still prefer coils.
I think Alexander set the standard of having a relatively casual "normal mode" raid experience. Once I got over the performance anxiety of being in a raid, I found it was really easy to queue up, PUG it, take time with the story, then queue up for the next. Between the Roulettes and Khloe's Wonderous Tales encouraging replay, it didn't take all that long to jump in to these, even during late Shadowbringers. Even now that I'm doing at-level raiding, I got dragged into the first two Pandaemoneum raids as the roulette, and managed to pug them without a wipe as the off-tank.
I love it. It allowed me to bring a couple friends who are not hard-core players through the Omega raids before they finished Endwalker.
Its really interesting to me seeing Preach go through this in 2022 with how vast MMO knowledge since I originally did Alexander as it came out starting over 6 years ago and I barely remember anything besides thinking it was really cool lol
PS Heavenward introduced the current savage/normal raid structure when they started doing normal as a story mode since it used to be only one difficulty (except one tier where they tried it mix things up in Coils) and they wanted to let non raiders more easily see the story. The ability bloat was so ridiculous back in HW too before they did some extremely needed pruning in Stormblood because it was like WOTLK and TBC had a demon baby. All the skills did almost the exact same things but with slightly different buffs/debuffs and they wouldn't naturally rank down in duties so you needed so many bars. It was so bad LOL
I disagree about Alexander story being much better than Coils. When it comes to story. Coils is my favorite. Omega's my 2nd favorite. But I still really love Alexander.
You can imagine my name in XIV, so when an NPC talked to the cat, it confused me for a moment.
cant wait to see him do MATH in Ivalice.
He’s gonna have a good time in Pandemonium
i loved the omega raids. and the dun scaithe ones
One thing that helped alot with the monotony of the aestetic and all bosses being robots was the fact that it was 6 months between each set of 4 bosses, and between were the primals, demons of the 24 man raid etc which certainly helped aleviate the monotony, the raids in 14 in general arnt designed to do 12 fights with 20 min cutscenes in between in an evening, but rather in sets of 4 over 2 years 🙂
big circle boss rooms. very epic