FFXIV: NieR raid impressions

Last Updated on: 14th April 2021, 04:33 pm

Its been a long time coming since the initial reveal of the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse NieR raid for Final Fantasy XIV, and we’ve finally reached the conclusion to the story. XIV’s quality of the 24 man alliance raid series have been fairly up and down since release, so I figured as a longterm raider I could give my two cents on the final alliance raid in the series: The Tower at Paradigm’s Breach! Without further ado, here are my NieR raid impressions!

Story

To start out the NieR raid impressions, I’d like to first get out of the way the bit I can’t speak to much. Admittedly a good bit of the story this time was skipped by me in an effort to gun down the content, but the last two NieR raids didn’t particularly impress.

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The crossover, while neat, felt shoehorned into the XIV story unlike the Tactics inspired Rabanastre raid series from Stormblood. The hook wasn’t super interesting and many of the quests are running around areas within the raid.

Still, I won’t harp on it too much as, well, I did say the most recent act I breezed over.

Fights

This is where I get a lot more negative. I imagine to NieR fans, as quite a number of my friends are, the sheer spectacle of many of these fights and the references behind them are enough to entertain and make the raid fun.

I… don’t fall into that. I certainly have a passing interest in NieR, and was excited when some bosses were characters like 9S or notable robots, after all. For this raid specifically, though, the fights felt really boring. Maybe I am a cut above the average XIV player in terms of skill, and the raid was made to cater to a different demographic, but when the Rabanastre raids were a great mix of difficulty and fun it feels a bit disappointing.

This part of the NieR raid focuses primarily on Drakengard, and as I went through fans were ecstatic but I was left bored. Upon my first playthrough of the raid, when one is most likely to merely die from unfamiliarity, the first two bosses felt like a breeze. They had fairly simple and intuitive mechanics which is nice, but there were really only 3 mechanics in each fight. When the bosses for this raid series have been damage sponges, you can see the same repeat of mechanics up to 4 or 5 times easily before the group beats the boss.

The final two bosses I’ll give more credit to, as they’re notably more challenging and even more fun than usual. The third fight feels a bit scummy at times with a lengthy minigame and the occasional crazy mechanic, but both are improvements over the first two. The last boss, especially, is actually pretty fun, though as a two step boss I wish the HP was cut down a bit.

Overall, the difficulty for the entire NieR raid series has felt lacking, but the first two bosses here take the cake as some of the easiest in XIV 24 man history.

Music

Now this… This I cannot complain about. Ever since the beginning of the raid series, the blending of XIV and NieR’s music has been fantastic and that standard holds true for this raid as well.

With music being rather subjective and not knowing a ton of NieR’s soundtrack, I can’t really comment much besides saying there were some real bangers all around. The final boss of the most recent raid had fantastic music too.

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So overall… unfortunately I have to admit I feel this is, in a gameplay sense at least, possibly the worst 24 man raid since Void Ark over four years ago. I didn’t hate my time here, but the standard set was high, so mildly fun isn’t the WORST bar to have when the standard has been pretty great for a few years.

If you’re a NieR fan or not a particular stickler for content difficulty, most of my complains will likely not matter to you much and I won’t flame anyone for enjoying things I don’t. Even so, those are my NieR raid impressions.