Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's new raid ranked among the MMO's best as fans praise its "neat twists on mechanics" and "amazing f***ing music"

Concept art for Final Fantasy 14's new Arcadion raid showing a purple cyberpunk tower in a city
(Image credit: Square Enix)

Final Fantasy 14's latest raid, the Arcadion, is already a massive hit, so much so that many MMORPG enjoyers are even placing it as one of the game's best raids.

With the release of Final Fantasy 14 patch 7.01, the first four Arcadion fights (the Normal difficulty fights for the AAC Light-heavyweight tier) are available for those who've completed the main story quests for the recently released expansion, Dawntrail. They've only been out for a few days, but the response has been exceptionally positive across the player base. 

"Having slept on it, I feel confident in saying Arcadion wing one as a whole is the best normal difficulty eight-man content [Creative Business Unit 3] has put out," one Reddit user writes, noting that although there are "individual fights in other raids that peak higher," as it stands, "every single fight in Arcadion so far has been delightful."

They explain: "Neat twists on mechanics, more playing around with long-time FF14 cliches like vuln stacks being replaced with other failure punishments or more messing with arena layouts/terrain, solid difficulty that makes you pay attention without being overwhelming or impossible for eight randoms to clear it, every boss is hot, good music on every fight, great visuals, the works."

They're far from the only one who feels this way, with one Twitter user saying: "The fourth fight in Arcadion has probably been the BEST raid I have ever been in. This is the highest praise that I will ever give to a single individual fight in this game." Another says that it has "easily the best first tier from any normal raid and frankly some of the best fights in all of 14," with "amazing fucking music," while another concludes that it's "the best eight-man normal experience I ever had in FF14."

Considering the rather mixed but hopeful community reaction to the Dawntrail expansion so far, with Metacritic's current average user score sitting at a middling 6.4/10, this reaction to its raid is no doubt going to be welcomed by plenty. There's still much more of the Arcadion to come, with Savage difficulty planned to roll out in patch 7.05.

Final Fantasy 14 director Yoshi-P cannot understand why people are hot for the MMO's new two-headed lizard: "The entire dev team was like, 'Huh?!'"

Catherine Lewis
News Writer

I'm one of GamesRadar+'s news writers, who works alongside the rest of the news team to deliver cool gaming stories that we love. After spending more hours than I can count filling The University of Sheffield's student newspaper with Pokemon and indie game content, and picking up a degree in Journalism Studies, I started my career at GAMINGbible where I worked as a journalist for over a year and a half. I then became TechRadar Gaming's news writer, where I sourced stories and wrote about all sorts of intriguing topics. In my spare time, you're sure to find me on my Nintendo Switch or PS5 playing through story-driven RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal, nuzlocking old Pokemon games, or going for a Victory Royale in Fortnite.

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