1975: Bahamut Down

In the early hours of this morning, Wuckle and I achieved something I hoped we’d achieve before Friday: we defeated Bahamut Prime in The Burning Heart, bringing our expeditions into the Final Coil of Bahamut to a close — for now, at least; we have some members of our static raid group who are still yet to clear these fights, so we’ll be helping them through at some point soon.

As the “true final boss” of the game, I was hoping that the Bahamut Prime fight would be pretty spectacular, and sure enough I wasn’t disappointed. Here’s a video (from my character’s perspective as a Black Mage) of our clear:

The fight is not only a suitably challenging battle to bring the main endgame raid of “vanilla” Final Fantasy XIV to a close, it’s also a fitting conclusion for a Final Fantasy game. Japanese role-playing games are often known for getting a little… peculiar in their final confrontations, with final bosses often being fought in space, in clouds of darkness, in strange swirling miasmas or inside the cores of planets. In the case of Final Fantasy XIV, your battle against Bahamut Prime takes place within Bahamut’s own heart — Bahamut Prime, it seems, is not literally Bahamut himself (since he is both absolutely massive and in the process of being regenerated by the various Coils) but rather a manifestation of his will and rage.

This doesn’t stop him being a formidable opponent, mind you. The fight combines mechanics from a number of earlier battles to create a confrontation where you have to use everything you’ve learned about handling mechanics to be successful. There’s heavy amounts of damage. There’s people taking responsibility for ensuring the group isn’t wiped out by carelessness or inattention. There’s puddles of nasty shit on the floor that you have to drop carefully. And, of course, there are Divebombs, Final Fantasy XIV’s most notorious enemy ability, first introduced in the Turn 5 fight against Twintania, later seen in a somewhat different format in the Turn 9 fight against Nael deus Darnus and finally seen from not one but two independent sources in the Bahamut Prime battle.

Divebombs are notorious because in the case of Turn 5 in particular, they were the “roadblock” that stopped a lot of groups from progressing further, simply because they’re tricky to handle properly and can have devastating consequences for the whole group if handled incorrectly. Their inclusion in each of the three “final” battles in the three separate parts of Coil shows the battle designers’ awareness that they are a challenge — albeit a surmountable one — and a desire to test players’ abilities to the maximum, often without the helpful visual telegraphs that many of the other enemy attacks in the game have.

But anyway. You didn’t come for a deconstruction of the mechanics of Final Fantasy XIV’s raids. (Probably.) You came to hear me enthuse about beating a spectacular final boss fight — and, if you’ve watched the video, you’ll see that it most certainly is.

As I’ve written about a few times previously on these pages, I’m a big fan of well-done final confrontations, and a big part of an effective one in my book is good use of music. Turn 5 and Turn 9 (the previous “final bosses” of the game prior to the introduction of Final Coil) both had great music that was unique to the fight (or “almost unique” in the case of Turn 5 — it’s also used for the final boss of the main 2.0 storyline as well as a later confrontation); Turn 13, meanwhile, makes stunningly effective use of the game’s main theme song “Answers”.

“Answers” is one of the first things you hear in A Realm Reborn, since it accompanies the dramatic introduction sequence that depicts the end of the 1.0 world through the Calamity — an event that those who played the original incarnation of Final Fantasy XIV actually lived through.

The Calamity saw the descent of the artificial moon Dalamud as a result of the machinations of Nael van Darnus, an overly ambitious Imperial legatus and the main antagonist of the 1.0 storyline. As the moon approached Eorzea, however, an unexpected thing happened: it burst open to reveal a very angry Bahamut, who proceeded to lay waste to the realm in his somewhat understandable rage — after all, you’d be pissed off if you’d been locked inside a moon since ancient times, wouldn’t you?

All looks lost for Eorzea, but the intervention of Archon Louisoix, a major character in the 1.0 storyline and quests, sees something mysterious happen that no-one quite understands or remembers. Everyone wakes up five years later in a realm that is somewhat different to what it once was, but still very much intact. This is how A Realm Reborn kicks off, but the main storyline then goes off in its own direction and the truth of what really happened in the Calamity doesn’t start to be revealed when (if) you venture into the Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Through your explorations of the three Coils, you discover not only the truth behind the Calamity, but also what happened to a number of important characters who had apparently disappeared or died — most notably, Louisoix himself and Nael. Needless to say, everything comes back to Bahamut in the end — but during your investigations you also discover exactly what it was that led to Bahamut’s imprisonment inside the artificial moon, and why he’s so full of rage and resentment towards humanity.

Since “Answers” is a song so closely tied to this storyline, it’s fitting that it should be the accompaniment for its final conclusion. And it’s used beautifully throughout the fight, too, beginning with the mournful baritone lyrics speaking of suffering and pain, moving through the gentler, sweeter female lyrics that speak of “the land’s light of justice” and walking free before eventually culminating in the gloriously thick-sounding choral finale. The music isn’t just played straight through, though; the simple, sparse baritone singing is used in the fight’s first phase, the female lyrics come in in the second phase as you start having to deal with Bahamut’s minions as well as the dragon god himself, and the explosion of passion that is the finale comes as Bahamut Prime begins casting his ultimate attack Teraflare: a devastating blast of flaming energy that, assuming you survive, signals the beginning of the end.

Final Fantasy XIV uses music spectacularly well throughout to help with its storytelling. Each of the story’s main confrontations are accompanied by their own unique theme tunes, many of which have relevant lyrics. The presentation of the game’s absolutely, positively, definitely final battle (until Heavensward, obviously) is no exception to this, and I’m very excited to hear what Soken and his team come up with to accompany our new adventures.

It’s now 1am, though, and since I’ve had like three hours sleep, I think it’s probably time I caught up a bit.