I’d been putting it off, but I finally beat the Garuda boss fight in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, renowned by some as one of the harder battles in the game’s main story.

The “Primal” fights that you engage in over the course of the main quest’s narrative are genuinely thrilling engagements that reward cooperation, communication and everyone knowing what they’re doing. Sure, the fact that there’s the possibility of instakill moves is frustrating, but with a good party gathered you shouldn’t fall foul of them, particularly if you’ve taken the time to either discuss the fight with more experienced combatants beforehand, or learned from past mistakes.

The thing I’ve been most impressed with by the Primal battles in particular but also a number of other setpiece engagements in the game is how exciting they are. This is something I’m not altogether used to in MMOs, many of which are focused on doing things by rote as efficiently as possible. Final Fantasy XIV’s combat, while not deviating hugely from the template set by World of Warcraft, requires that you stay on your toes, survey your surroundings and move around the battlefield according to what’s going on. In the case of the Garuda fight, there’s a lot of cowering behind pillars (until the horrid harpy destroys them all, anyway) and then ensuring that you don’t get sucked into the increasingly tumultuous storm all around you during the latter stages of the fight.

I played through most of World of Warcraft up through Wrath of the Lich King and I can only think of a few fights I participated in that elicited the same feeling of heart-in-mouth excitement as these Final Fantasy XIV battles. The difference is that in World of Warcraft’s case they were all high-level or endgame content, while Final Fantasy XIV spreads them out over the course of its entire main quest. And then you get to do them all again, but harder, once you hit the level cap. They’re some beautifully designed encounters, and I’m interested to see how Yoshi-P and the team intend to top them in the coming content updates.

It’s that heart-in-mouth feeling that feels most authentically Final Fantasy to me. I can vividly recall the first few times I beat Final Fantasy VII (because I beat it a whole bunch of times in my teenage years) — every single time I reached that final cutscene before the final boss (“And Sephiroth! … To the settling of everything!” — God bless that game’s appalling translation) I would feel real, honest-to-goodness excitement. I’d get a delightful feeling of “butterflies in the stomach” before the screen went all swirly and Birth of a God started playing, and it would continue right through the final fights, even if I was hopelessly overlevelled, which I usually was.

In fact, a good JRPG (hell, game, full stop) these days will still give me that feeling, and if a game makes me feel that way I’ll immediately think considerably more fondly of it than those that don’t. It’ll be a sad day for me when I can’t get fired up by a game’s final confrontation at all — I hope that day never comes, and I shall continue to enjoy that pleasurably anxious feeling for as long as I can in the meantime.