So after a week of Final Fantasy XIV’s latest field exploration area, I have to say that I’m… not really sure if this is, in fact, it, chief. Not because I think the Occult Crescent in and of itself is bad or anything, but more because I don’t think that it addresses a lot of the problems that these maps have had more or less throughout their existence. Some of them, sure. All of them? Not so much. The majority? Maybe not.

I trust that I don’t really need to address the broad strokes of the mechanics for most of the people who are reading this; indeed, I imagine most people have already dived in and either bounced off it hard (meaning that they want an evaluation of “it bad” and nothing further) or have been playing it for the past week, one or the other. And there are, to be clear, some definite improvements in how the area is structured! But I don’t know if those improvements are really applied equally across the board in a lot of ways.

Let’s start with the positive. First of all, there are no locked boxes to pick up! There are coffers spread around the map that you can go farming for, but there’s less of an emphasis on picking up specific prizes that may or may not be worthwhile. Thus, the rewards you get from given CEs and FATEs are always a net positive. There are also still an assortment of things to get, but nearly all of them are gated behind silver pieces and gold pieces, so they are under your control.

The swap of abilities to specifically be tied to phantom jobs is perhaps a bit limiting in some regards (some jobs are just better than others, for example, and the fact that you can’t mix and match these jobs can feel a bit off-spec compared to the obvious inspiration of Final Fantasy V), but it definitely works better than either of the prior exploration zones have. And the mix of abilities that the jobs have are useful in a variety of broad scenarios. Yes, some matchups are less useful than others, but few jobs have one Phantom Job that wildly surpasses all others.

And let’s not overlook the fact that this zone is really making an effort to make individual grinding or group grinding worthwhile instead of just pitting you into FATEs and CEs. That’s still the dominant model, of course, and that is definitely something to be more critical about, but going around sweeping up enemies on the map and thrashing them is productive and worthwhile. You do want to do this. This is important and worthwhile, full stop.

Plus, unlike Bozja, here we get challenge log entries! Happy day.

So what are the negatives? Well… I mean, the biggest one is still just in the basic structure. It’s still just FATE farming.

This isn’t exactly a surprise. It was always going to be FATE farming because Eureka was just FATE farming and Bozja was just FATE farming and the fact of the matter is that as I have said before, open-world content in FFXIV is just not structured to provide a whole lot of other choices. The strengths of FFXIV‘s combat are on display in controlled encounters, and during mass-rush content you just don’t have that. Heck, the southern horn sort of shows this, because every encounter features some sort of boss fight. There are a couple of fights that incorporate mass enemy rushes, but those are… well, boring.

Not that the fights as they stand are exactly wild takes. They tend to feature about 40% more Random Garbage than I like in a boss fight, but that’s also meant to account for the scaling of unpredictable group sizes. You throw several dozen people into a meat grinder and you don’t really care how many of them get got or just get nearly impossible-to-dodge battle mechanics. And that’s not to say these are inherently bad, just that they aren’t somehow more engaging than other content, except that it’s easier to do badly without it really influencing clear times.

The costs for items in terms of coins is also a bit high, at least for gold pieces. I don’t think it’s massively out of whack with where the game is currently at; my personal take is that gold piece drops should be doubled or maybe tripled, enough so that they’re still expensive but not made trivial. Silver is about tuned right; it actually doesn’t take too long to get gear pieces, and I appreciate that the gear is useful both in and out of the map but it is clearly meant for use within the crescent. It’s a little less ideal because you do kinda get narrowly channeled into a specific role as a result, but I have a sense that a lot of this progress is meant to be spread over the next couple of patches rather than just this one, so that really does track.

Last but not least, we have to talk about relic weapons… and to the shock of absolutely no one, it starts with a demiatma grind which, like always, sucks! It’s just not fun! It has never been fun, and the weirdest part is that the game has a mechanism to address how badly it sucks already! Like, it seems almost trivially obvious to me that the game could have fixed a lot by letting the expedition supplier sell demiatma for, say, 600 silver a pop.

That would simultaneously keep the current state of multiple approaches while also making the Crescent the best place to farm for these items, and it would also create a fine tension (sure, you could buy the demiatma, but 600 silver is a lot when you want your riding map and your gear and so forth). The fact that you have to do this lousy step once instead of each time you want a weapon is a better change, don’t get me wrong, but “more FATE grinding” is not exactly engaging or interesting content.

None of this is to say that I hate the zone or anything; it’s still an improvement on both Eureka and Bozja, and I have been playing it all week. Heck, some of its failings are things that may not even be wholly possible to fix (I can point out that FATE farming is pretty boring until the end of days, but I do not have a clear portrait of how to fix that being the obvious way to do open-world content in the game, and the CEs are better than the ones in Bozja by orders of magnitude). But that doesn’t mean it should be wholly graded on a curve, and even if it’s a good first draft, there are things to be fixed in later passes.

Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I’m going to still be on the Crescent, specifically in examining some of the region’s connections to FFV and the little lore nods it has all over the place. Is that also going to involve some talk about the original game? You know it.

The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.