This Goes Against EVERYTHING I'm Used To... Coils Of Bahamut 

Fun fact: If you don't do coils before HW/SB Allisae treats you like a stranger when she joins the main plot but if you went through coil with her she treats you as a trusted friend after what you went through together in Coil.

FFXIV: here's all the info you need in game to be a part of the story Blizzard: here's an incomprehensible 30 second cutscene. Now go and buy threee books to understand what happened.

Can you imagine doing the Coils of Bahamut with your static, completing the bosses as you go and getting what story is there. But the Final Coil of Bahamut (Turn 3 & 4) is told through a £16.99 book? That's what WoW does.

I love how turn 3 sticks outlike a sore thumb. the original plan was for every phase of 8-man raids to have 5 parts with a trash phase in middle, but after players responded with basically "do we really need this?", the devs went "you know what? no, we don't" and from then on every phase of 8-man raid was 4 parts, all killer no filler

I find it so amusing that good king moogle mog, one of the more comical bosses, actually sets up a lot for people before coils with questions of what a primal actually is.

I’ll never get tired of hearing WoW players genuinely express amazement that the story is actually told in the video game. Like what kind of brain washing took place where it became a totally expected norm for the story to not be told in the video game lol.

Coil is the closing chapter on 1.0, putting the finishing touches to the story of transition to 2.0. Any question you may have about what happened in the intervening 5 years between 1.0 and 2.0, any possible lingering plot points, are addressed and given a proper conclusion. As a legacy 1.0 player, this is why my favorite raid is Coil.

Little fun fact the floor design in the Bahamut fight is based of the phylogenetic tree of life, and the outer ring represents Bahamut destroying all of it. Just goes to show how much detail is given into every aspect of this game.

To comment on the sense of scale: Each Turn of Coil's zone loading screen has a name and a 'X Yalms' displayed. That Yalms is your depth from the surface. Final Coil takes place 6,836 yalms below the surface. Since Yalms = Yards, you're about 3.88 MILES (6.25 km) underground during that fight. In contrast, the deepest shaft mine in the world, the Mponeng Gold Mine, is only 2.5 miles below ground at its lowest point.

Loisoux is the honorary dragoon. He performed the dopest of high jumps, killed a First Brood dragon incarnation and died immediately after. The truest dragoon this world has ever seen.

The music of FF isn't just there to fill the background. It tells a very deliberate story, it is written much like a play or movie - you have leitmotifs and themes that return and intermingle to reintroduce and hint at exactly what's going on. They are definitely important parts of the game... that many of them turn into these awesome, energetic pieces part way through is not a mistake, either.

Louisoix scenes in Coils is the first time I teared up in FFXIV. It's amazing. And Answers playing while fighting Bahamut makes so much sense, since Bahamut's children were sacrificed by the Allag, so it kind of serves as a somber song of grief that Bahamut's singing. Lyrics make perfect sense even from his point of view. Just beautiful writing. BTW. It's written by Ishikawa.

Most of the community doesn’t do coils synced it’s all good. The story is really why you need to do it. Glad you enjoyed.

I'm not sure if you did it yet given that it's an optional dungeon in ARR, but Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard) contains some interesting story moments too for some characters met at the very beginning of your adventure. Highly recommended :)

Fun thing of note regarding Poetics, it actually helps with the cooperation aspect that 14 is noted for. In WoW, when a new player to a dungeon or raid it's met with derision because the new person is seen to be holding people back. In 14, that bonus helps with a positive response (the term "newbie bonus" is a common response) and it also tells people "hey, new person here, good idea to explain stuff". Doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen and it's a good thing.

I once had a dude tell me that WoW must have a better story than FFXIV because there's a lot more lore videos for it on RU-vid But it's like no FFXIV just doesn't need all this supplemental material to enjoy the story It's all _in the game_

there is an option in the settings that you can check off to auto skip all previously viewed cut scenes. it saves time when farming while allowing you to view it to completion the first time. you can also do the same thing to travel cut scenes like the airship/boat/ferry. along with the housing cut scenes.

Not only do you get Poetics, but more importantly in my opinion helping new players do fresh new content also earn you Wondrous Tails Second Chance points, which you unlock after meeting a certain Miqo child in Heavensward, it's a simple stamp minigame that earns you a bunch of EXP, Tomestones, Maps, Items, MGP the whole lot, it's a really nice extra incentive to help out new people.

The only thing i dont like about coils is that its not mandatory (maybe make an easy version for story purposes). Coils essentially contains the true ending of 1.0 and 2.0 (also alisae will treat you like a friend if you did it before you meet her again).

The Best bit of a lot of these raid stories is they add so much to the story, without being required to understand things moving forward. They are a great way to close out stories if you want it.

One thing about this game is that now you did coils there are changes to cutscenes later that will be different because you did coils

What really helps FF's story is that, within the context of the story, everyone acts naturally, everyone feels human. Humans that can use magic, of course, but there's still a logical, sensible train of thought that the characters take the actions that they do. They don't just get cosmic inhuman God like powers, they're just normal humans.

"The music is so much more "out" then I'm used to...Garuda has vocals!" Oh you sweet summer child. Your mind will be blown by the end of MSQ.

I wanna clarify something real quick: The reason you unlock every floor when you unlock the raid is because this is old content. All the future raids will have you progress and unlock sequentially, but once they are unlocked you have them. Except savage, which is all unlocked at once (when you clear the normal mode and you do the relevant savage unlock quest) When a current raid tier comes out, you **have** to progress sequentially through each floor on savage every week. There are caveats, such as someone with the second floor done taking a freshie into the third floor, and so on, but yea. Those lockouts get removed sometime in the odd patch, usually near the very end (the community wants it fully unlocked in the odd patch as it comes out, but we'll get there when we get there, yoshi p please)

To be fair, there was a fair bit of "mystery endings" when you were doing the raids as they came out, before all the turns were playable. Particularly after you beat Twintania and watch the subsequent cutscene, it's a big tease that didn't get resolved for months, especially since we knew a lot less about the Allagans than we do now. But yes, it's still satisfying that it was all tied up in the game itself through your journey as the WoL, and getting to unravel the mysteries yourself as you play.

Next time you run the final coil, look at the floor in Bahamut's arena. Then realize the pure symbolism of the burning ring of fire that acts as the edge of the arena and will kill you if you touch it is also terminating the phylogenetic tree. The floor itself is a flippin' metaphor.

If you think about stormblood, the "Trash" equivalent are done in a single player instance while you are unlocking the raids.

Is it just me or does Bellular look...happier? Like I don't mean just expression and voice. His skin is like looking healthier with a glow and he seems to be more fit?! Like I'm in a relationship and all but he's looking good! Better than before imo, like DAYUM

That raid is crazy with detail. Bahamut is standing on top of the tree of life and phylogenic trees of every species radiates from the center and terminates at the ring of fire, signifying the catastrophe.

I just finished crystal tower and patch 2.55… holy shit, time to start heavensward. Wow has never emotionally come close to this quality of story telling

The joy Bellular gets from discovering ff14 is so much fun. Just the shock of seeing a functional MMO actually living up to and exceeding expectations. You can just see his energy being raised from his copium detox.

Glad to hear you enjoyed Coils! The next ones will be really fun as well!

Imagine being given Valor points [uncapped weekly even] for simply helping first time dungeon clears/"sprouts" in WoW. Would make those normal and heroic qeues that much more interesting and rewarding. Or hell, even seeking out new players to help get them through the content.

Damn this video dropping the same day EW's alliance raid got a new little blurb on the main site feels poetic. Resolving plots that occur naturally in the world indeed.

The edge of Bahamut's arena is really neat. It's a demonstration of an evolutionary tree just within the boundary, and then at and past the boundary denotes a *mass extinction event* where most of those evolutionary lines just *end*.

What you say about having all the information needed to understand something in the moment, but later learning new information that gives you a new apreciation for those older scenes (which you can, of course, replay to your heart's content later) is actually something that happens A LOT in this game. Like, I really enjoy watching people play through the story, and after finishing Shadowbringers there's just SO MUCH you notice and understand that you didn't before. Details, nuance, certain phrasings or dialogue lines... It's amazing. I've actually rarely seen this in any medium ever, period.

if theres one thing i love about ff compared to wow its feeling like my character is actually important

Honestly you should try every hard mode dungeon and new raid/instance whenever you can because they're _all_ good but definitely each expansion's alliance/raid.

really enjoyed this video! but also i enjoyed you getting to grips with coils, the story, the revelations etc.. and then hearing the ending music for your video and knowing you've got it all coming again. enjoy the journey!

It's so nice seeing all the WoW players who've transitioned to FF14 (myself included) seeing just how much can actually been done in an MMO's story when the developers actually care about it.

The high level members just auto attacking is I think a great balance between getting a feel of the fight and getting to know the story quickly. Coils was too difficult when it was first released and many players complained that they just wanted to see the story, so they came up with Savage difficulty later for hardcore players and made normal mode easy to clear.

Love all your input and have followed you for many years through your WoW coverage. So glad to have you here in Eorzea with us, Bellular!

Just a tidbit to get you excited for the future, Bellular : the main writer for the Coils storyline, Natsuko Ishikawa, has become the main writer for the Main Story Quest starting in Shadowbringers, and will continue her work in Endwalker. She's also famous as being the one that wrote the Dark Knight quest line - frequently lauded as the best Job Quest Line in the game. So yea... you're in for a treat! ;)

The importance of poetics for the heavensward relic weapons means I always have something to sink them into

Your thought about sowing the seeds makes a lot of sense. FF14 started, in Yoshi P's words, with over confidence and it not only hurt the game, it almost ruined the entire brand of final fantasy. Yoshi's approach in the 1.X patches all the way until now have just been "let's plant our seeds, let's start a nice little garden" and now it's this greenhouse of a really lovely game and it's Square's most profitable final fantasy. And it's because he and the dev team treated it with the time and care it needed to grow and be the game it is now.

WoW: "Here's five seconds of CGI we paid a billion dollars for to tell you to buy the new book for $59.99 thank you goodbye." FF14: *seven hours of IN-ENGINE cutscenes retcon-explaining how the fuck all that shit happened and then establishing new lore*

Do you realize how OLD the content you're doing? It's still so good.

Pretty crazy how well the FF team can tell a story, and don't fear closing the chapter on any of them because they know they can just tell more stories.

About the "minilvl no echo sync" thing: WoW took until 2018 to institute a "party sync" mechanic. In an extremely limited capacity. FF14 has had this system _from launch_ since 2013 and it's such an ingrained, foundational part of the game's progression system and content management that it's just normalized beyond conscious thought for most players. It's such a good system that it's almost insulting that Blizz took FIVE FUCKING YEARS to steal it.

Watching this... and along other people's reactions to just the way XIV tells its stories and I'm starting to believe that dedicated WoW-only people have been Stockholm'd by legit bad game design. Hearing you talk about story has me shrugging like "you mean conventional narrative structure found in plenty of video games?" and it really makes me wonder just what the hell kind of experience people have over in WoW.

You can really tell that you’ve been having a lot of fun with playing this game! Cant wait to see future vids for this!

Not sure if this is a spoiler but about those poetics, we still use them for relevant content at level 80.

Note - Coils (and ARR in general) is unique among FF14 expansions in that there are lengthy, story-driving cutscenes in the middle of raids and dungeons that interrupt gameplay. Heavensward raid series "Alexander" has a few, but not nearly to the degree and length that Coils does - they save the more lengthy story cutscenes for between raids, out-of-instance. The still HAVE the story, but you don't have to have the rest of your raid team waiting for 5-10 minutes while you watch a cutscene, so there's not that biting urge to skip and not keep your party waiting.

I'm so happy that you have such a great time with the game. Can't wait for more of your impressions. The game has so much awesome content.

That GShade preset is doing wonders for the cinematic stuff man goddamn

“Yeah not all of them!” The pure pain in this man’s voice.

Correction regarding the Poetics, the bonus reward of +100 is only granted once. However you will still earn between 10-30 Poetics even if you've done it before. Meaning you'll always get at least some Poetics if you do ANY old content that's at least for level 50.

Fun part about Poetics is that some content that didn't touch the system previously can be changed to use Poetics as a form of catch-up. HW Relics can be done in an afternoon if you spend the 14k poetics in advance for the items. There is *always* something to buy with poetics and you should never cap them.

The best part of the music is that even it adds to the lore of whatever fight it's a part of. With primal fights, it's either the primal singing (Garuda, Shiva), the adds singing (King Moggle Mog XII), or the primal's followers singing (Titan, Leviathan). For "Answers" in the Bahamut fight, it's supposed to be Hydaelyn herself singing. It's why I always promote players looking into lyrics for a lot of the themes for fights in FFXIV, because those lyrics can help explain some additional details. Also a fun fact, the singer for the Shiva theme was used as the model for the primal. So it's not just her voice she provided to the primal, but her face as well.

Congrats Bellular! I too will totally echo the "Do Coils!" club. It's SO good. Congrats on getting to finally see a monumental moment in the entire game for sure. Definitely return synced and you'll probably find the fights fun and challenging ;)

The stormblood* 24 man raids on scale level will blow your mind :)

Great to hear you liked the Coils =) hope you will enjoy the Story of the Raids to come as well

My favorite part of my first run of Coils was when all the veterans in my group misremembered a mechanic and walked into a kill wall. All of the sprouts were so confused, just trying to burn down the boss.

One thing I enjoyed doing, as a former WoW raider, was watching the evolution of XIV's 8-man raiding from its WoW-like origins in Coil to its present state, as well as its bifurcation into normal and savage tiers to improve story accessibility.

Also there is a great setting where you auto skip already seen cutscenes.

As solo player, I wish they made these mandatory. Queue is so long, even for healer, so I've only done one Turn so far.

You do get poetics for lvl 50+ content, even if replaying/farming it. You just get a bonus chunk if one player has yet to complete the duty. Similar for the newer stones: You do get some stones from the appropriate duties, but many more with the daily roulette.

Glad you are enjoying the game, bud :) I'm excited to see what you think of more stuff you get to enjoy down the line!

Don't feel pressured about the synced version and the usual wankery people fabricate around it. As long as you got the story you've gotten the most important bits out of it. You can get into synced raids later, as they aren't going anywhere.

I've been thoroughly enjoying hearing all your thoughts on XIV. I'm really excited to hear what you think of Heavensward and on. The one thing I'd ask for is that you do more spoiler discussion. You can segment it out like you did with this video where the first half is non-spoiler and the second half is full spoiler discussion. This is obviously coming from my perspective as someone who has played the game for over 8 years now. I love hearing what people think of the narrative because it's narrative is just so strong!

I could barely hear Answers in the background in the music section and it still gave me chills

The main suggestion I make is: Do the Dark Knight quests. They're amazingly well written. 50-60, the Heavensward section, is a tearjerker. Many of the class quests are well written - Warrior 60-70 being an exception - but of the ones I've played only Dark Knight and Samurai brought me to tears. Be prepared, Bellular. Heavensward is a much more emotional experience than ARR.

"there is no speculation to do" And that is something that Pyromancer does not understand :O and for the raids, Coils are unique iin that, you get whole wing uncovered, while later (Alexander, alpha/deltascape, Eden), you have to uncover one boss at a time, during story.

Can you keep giving updates on where you are in the story? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the msq as it develops throughout heavensward and not just all at the end

The tomestone boost for new players is both to help them acquire them for endgame-ish gear of that portion of the game (lvl 50, 60, 70 and just before Endwalker launches 80), but it also encourages veteran players to run older content too.

just to clarify on your comment on turn/boss selection. when they are current and savage difficulty (look for HW and onwards), you have to do them in turn to get to then next fight in current tier. so 3 fights to get to the 4th. they just remove that barrier when it's no longer current so people can do the fight they want. they also remove the loot restriction.

I feel like the writing team at Blizz is weirdly fixated on the big bad guy, the thanos, the poster child. They look at TBC and WotLK and think "hmm, what made this so good" whilst staring at the box art. Then suddenly it dawns on them. "Since we can't put Illidan on the cover for a 4th time, we just need to make a new big bad guy." But making a new big bad guy takes tons of development and foreshadowing, so what are they going to do? They're going to make everything super convoluted and mysterious. Make him 7 parallel universes ahead of us, because thats like our one weakness as champyuns of Azeroth - bad writing.

I love content creators saying they love the early game. Everyone who knows, knows it just gets better and better. By the time you finish current content you will be thrilled for Endwalker.

On the topic of being able to select the fights you want - in the later xpacs, the normal mode is unlocked sequentially (each fight is a quest that unlocks the next) while the savage version of raids are weekly locked behind progression while they're current. So while you'll be able to always select whichever normal mode fight you want once you've unlocked all the fights, you still have to do savage fights turn by turn for about four months unless you piggyback off someone else's progression and forego getting weekly loot from earlier turns.

I watched this vid yesterday and today I got a level 80 friend to do Coils with me (lvl 52 sprout) unsynced. He hadn't actually unlocked the third coil so we both were in for a nice treat and man did it deliver!

Personally, WoW has felt like they are just throwing story beats at the wall and seeing what sticks. Like a lot of people, I stopped playing in Warlords of Draenor, it felt like that whole storyline was undoing a lot of the established lore and just rehashing old content. I felt like that expansion purposefully obsfucated what was canon and really opened the door to a lot of bad story telling. I'm just waiting for the next expansion cycle to magically find a way to add Deathwing 2.0 to the game. The FF14 story has felt earned over years of playing. The twists make sense and are often foreshadowed, surprising moments are wonderous rather than feeling like a blindside. Expansion stories, raids and dungeons all feel like self contained stories that make sense both alone and as a part of the larger world. It's a game that is constantly building on its own lore and rewards players that invest their time rather than tearing it all down and making players start from scratch with endless unexplained retcons.

this is mostly a bi product of japanese games, where many times, the cutscene is the reward. Of course, raids give you gear and whatnot but in a big way the story is a big part of the overall exp.

For as you go forward, something I'd like to point out that I don't think is made super clear in the game is that unlike WoW, certain pieces of content in the game are gated by older pieces of content because of story and lore connections, even if the locked content may be in another expansion. The biggest example of this I've found so far is that one of the Shadowbringers end game areas requires that you have completed the Stormblood 24-man alliance raid content before you will have any option to unlock it. But there's also some stuff like the ARR Hildibrand quest chain where the initial story appears to be kind of a goofy comedy piece that personally didn't hit for me, with the rewards being mostly cosmetic. After the first chunk of it, I put it off indefinitely, only to discover down the line when collecting Triple Triad cards that there are several trial encounters that unlock during the full Hildibrand line. Another smaller example is that some of the vendors involved in end game turn-ins (I think mostly around Rowena) won't unlock in later expansions until you have unlocked them in each of the preceding ones. So if you've only unlocked the ARR one, you may not see the option to unlock the Stormblood version until you've also opened the Heavensward variant. Basically what it comes down to is, it's a really good idea, both from a game systems and story perspective, to do as many of the + quests as you encounter them as possible. I realize that there's probably a very strong desire to reach Endwalker before the launch of the expansion, but I just wanted to get across that there can, and surprisingly often is, merit to at least unlocking the content in order, if not completing it. I took the WoW mentality of "push through, the latest systems won't need the old stuff anyway" and I really regret not only missing some really great story content, but all the time I ended up spending trying to untangle which quests were pre-requisites on the wiki when I went looking for something mentioned in a Shadowbringers Live Letter that I had never seen pop up despite being at the end of the MSQ.

Don't forget to do your Wondrous Tails when you get to HW. If your a crafter speak to her sister Zhloe. Such an adorable quest line. Highly recommended. One of my favorite quests in FF. But it takes a few weeks to unlock all the content but well worth it.

So glad you got to enjoy the lore of Coils. When you get to Heavenward, be sure to do The Warring Triad raids. There are past and future payoffs tied to this; and I think implications we haven’t even seen yet as of the end of Shadowbringers.

Why is every single new FFXIV player surprised at how good things are? We literally say it all the time.

Its incredible to me that bellular can make this video without any spoilers. Such great content and a big reason why I am hyped for his coverage of the game

The cut to the Bozja theme song as you roll into the end credits gets me everytime

Hey, y'all mentioned skipping the cutscenes for future, snappier runs... y'all do know there's a "skip already seen cutscenes" option, right? Never have to watch or skip a cutscene you already seen before. 👍🏻

Never get tired of this Asmongold quote: "These days Wow wastes your time, back then we used to love wasting our time"

6:02 one of my favorite tracks in the game is Spiral, seriously good baseline and synths followed by the Answers melody done with chimes. I forget exactly which fights it plays in specifically, but I have it on my jukebox in my player house lol.

Love the background music. Fits perfectly with the zone its for.

Good to see he’s still a cat girl. I wonder if he’s grown attached to his character now that he’s gone this far xD

FFXIV does 'making a fight feel epic', better than any other MMO out there. It may not BE epic, but it certainly feels it thanks to the music and story

Thanks again for sharing your journey. I can't wait see more!

I really loved your observations. Thats what i actually love of every Final Fantasy game, they always have this cinematic touch, there is no such thing as a few cinematics on every game, quite te contrary and man, do they make them amazing

Louisoix is so cool he 1v1'ed Bahamut. The pre-rendered cinematic really did his badassery justice.

Something no one talking about regarding FF14 and old raid content: Blue Mage.

I did coils so long ago, it was an FC run unsynced as well. It was awesome! We also did Alexander and today I got Alexander Prime or something like that in my Normal raid roulette and I had no idea how to do that. It was fun, though.

I am actually fortunate enough to be able to run coil during leveling experience, synced. At the time I am just a stupid sprout who don't know any better and just try to use DF to queue in, apparently 7 other sprout are also stupid enough to do that. After we drag our corpse through first raid, one of us said it is very hard to find other people interested in running this synced, so we add each other as friend. We ran every day, all 8 of us, we got discord setup, we run it one by one, its still the greatest experience I ever had. After coils we still talk with each other both in and out of game from time to time, and 4 of us is still in same static, that ''stupid'' DF sprout mistake is the best mistake ever happened.