Final Fantasy XIV’s Occult Crescent is fine, but it needed to be so much more

It’s been roughly a month and a half since Final Fantasy XIV Patch 7.25, which brought with it the first part of Occult Crescent. Occult Crescent follows in the footsteps of Eureka and Bozja as large-scale content that’s intended to keep players occupied for longer than the usual dungeon dailies.

Having played through Occult Crescent: South Horn on and off since its release, I’ve come to a few conclusions. What’s there is serviceable, and some of the ideas (like Phantom Jobs) are neat in theory. However, it’s a downgrade over what came before in a number of ways, at a time where players are already split on how content is being handled in Final Fantasy XIV.

Map Design and Progression

Occult Crescent does a pretty terrible job at making it feel like you’re actually progressing through a previously unexplored land. I’d say there are a number of reasons for this, starting with the actual main quest.

While it’s been a good few years since I’ve stepped foot in Eureka and Bozja, I don’t remember the story quests for either being so brief. In Occult Crescent: South Horn, you’re only given a handful of objectives, and half of them are basically just returning to areas you’ve already visited to unlock the quest in the first place.

Said quests are also not locked behind any sort of level requirement, meaning you can finish them well in advance of actually reaching the current max level. Sure, you might have to hide from a few high level enemies, but it almost feels anticlimactic with how early the quest line ends right now.

Some of this is in part due to Forked Tower (more on that later), but I’d say a lot of it is down to the map itself. Most of it is just based on areas we’ve already seen before, with the entire midsection just being a boring plain. And yes, I know that this is explained by the story, but it’s not exactly exciting to retread old ground like this.

What makes this worse is that, despite sections of the map having enemies with defined level ranges, this has no real relevance on leveling up. And that’s because…

Fate and Critical Encounter Spam

Fate and Critical Encounters are the most efficient way to level up in Occult Crescent, and they’re up almost constantly. You can do them at any level while still getting full credit even at Knowledge Level 1 solo.

There’s no need for the average player to fight regular mobs after the initial quests, and general gameplay just ends up as a rush to whatever the next Fate or Critical Encounter is. Rather than feeling like new content, it’s closer to Fate grinding in any of the existing zones.

The thing is, Critical Encounters are actually pretty decent. They have mechanics that can kill (at least at lower levels), with a few unique attacks every now and then. But you’ll quickly see most of these after a few hours of grinding, taking away from their uniqueness.

Honestly, I’m not sure why something like Critical Encounters aren’t a thing in the regular zones. Fate grinding is incredibly dull, so something to spice it up (perhaps with some extra rewards) would be more than welcome.

Phantom Jobs

Phantom Jobs work as the extra gameplay system for Occult Crescent, and they’re… fine. They can be used to cover for your jobs weaknesses, or for synergy with your party. Yet, they’re so limited compared to what came before.

Both Logos and Lost Actions let you mix and match different abilities, while Phantom Jobs are just rigid groups of abilities that all function the same between players. There’s no customisation, nothing really interesting about them.

Of course, I’m not going to pretend that the majority of Logos and Lost Actions weren’t relatively boring either (most being “do more damage”, or “do a big attack”), but the fact that you could choose which combo to take was already a big upgrade over this new system.

I think what makes it worse is that a number of the jobs clearly only exist for utility in Forked Tower, kneecapping their potential in the normal zone. This kinda sucks when you take into account that actually doing Forked Tower now is not exactly simple.

Forked Tower

Forked Tower is the big capstone raid for Occult Crescent: South Horn storyline, and unlike Bozja, it only comes in a single difficulty. This means that you’re out of luck if you can’t get into a premade party, something that was especially true until around a week ago.

See, Forked Tower has no matchmaking at all. It’s a 48 player raid, with Occult Crescent instances only holding up to 72 players. See the problem?

Trying to get a full group of players together was a nightmare, as you not only had to get all players into the same instance, but you also needed to make sure other random players didn’t join the raid instead. Not to mention the short timeframe where the entrance to Forked Tower was even available.

Now, you’re able to queue into Occult Crescent with a preformed alliance, with the weather requirement for Forked Tower popping far earlier into the instance. However, this still doesn’t fix the other main problem.

Forked Tower isn’t easy content, even if it’s not at the level of Savage raids. Because of this, there’s no incentive for to try and group for it with other random players in an instance (despite this clearly being the way the dev team intended for people to do it). This relegates it to another piece of content that only really exists in the Party Finder, or via Discord servers split across regions and data centres.

Without any sort of lower difficulty variant, most players going into Occult Crescent: South Horn are likely never actually going to attempt Forked Tower. With how much of the game has been simplified in recent years, it’s odd that things went in the complete opposite direction this time.

Occult Crescent has at least some potential, but it doesn’t really deliver on it in any meaningful way. What’s worse is that there likely wont be any more major updates to it until next year. I personally don’t see myself going back to it any time soon, and it’s hard to be excited for what comes next when any improvements are so far away.

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