Final Fantasy 14's latest raids have me fully convinced that Square Enix can still cook, even as job design lags behind

Final Fantasy 14's second major patch of expansion Dawntrail landed this week, and while I'll have to wait a little longer for my most-anticipated addition—the field operation Occult Crescent isn't arriving until late May—I do have the thing I was the second most-excited for: The next tier of the Arcadion raids.

The first tier absolutely banged. Four colourful, all-out fights steeped in WWE shenanigans, running concurrently with a deeply interesting narrative around a deadly disease, with your Warrior of Light's soul seemingly the only cure. I've been excited to continue not only the story, but to see what fights Square Enix would throw at me next.

After all, the developer has undeniably been at the top of its battle design game this expansion. Middling main story narrative aside—something which seems to be improving this patch—Dawntrail's dungeons, alliance raids, normal raids, and trials have been a joy to play. Yet somehow, the bar has been raised even higher with the latest four fights, and I'm already itching to dive into the savage versions next week.

I mean, what isn't to love? A disco-dancing bunny boy who turns into a toad on the dancefloor-slash-arena, a graffiti-spraying lalafell who can bring her images to life, and even the chance to revisit some of the foes we encountered in the last tier, seeing them in a whole new light.

Just like Dawntrail's first four raids, these are bright and outlandish spectacles where every dodge and death is declared by a ring announcer, letting the real audience (the seven other bozos who have to deal with you eating every AOE), and the in-game one soak in every moment of the action.

And you know what? Even for normal mode, these fights are challenging in a way I didn't expect. I'm so used to closing my eyes and snoozing through lower-difficulty content that I was completely caught off guard when I started eating shit, patiently waiting on the floor for an overworked healer to bring me back to life.

Mechanically, there wasn't actually much new going on—half-room cleaves are basically a running gag at this point. But I feel like half the fun with these things is using your tens, hundreds, or thousands of hours plugged into past raids to figure out what's going to happen on your first try. As I watched Sugar Riot, the second fight of the tier, graffiti the air with winged bombs, I was able to dive into my Final Fantasy 14 Mechanics file in my brain cabinet and pull out an approximation of what was going to happen.

While anyone who's sunk enough time into the game isn't likely to be caught out, I still really dug the way each fight was able to uniquely present common mechanics in a flavour that fit whichever boss I was facing. Square Enix is really starting to nail that formula—thanks in part to a lot of work it's done over the years to universally mark different mechanics like tank busters and stacks—and it made figuring things out on the fly a whole lotta fun.

I know there's been a little hoo-ha around job design lately—Black Mage players aren't super thrilled about the changes that've come this patch, and there's increasing concern around homogenisation in favour of player ease and focusing that complexity into fights instead—but things like the Arcadion raids prove that Square Enix can still very much cook.

It makes me excited to see what wicked encounters the developer can unleash on me for the rest of the expansion—I'm sure the savage raids are going to give me an absolute beating next week, for starters—but if fights within Occult Crescent are as dastardly as they were in Shadowbringers' Bozja, I think the battle-loving sickos are going to be in for a real treat.