Many years after I was lucky enough to be able to experience these dungeons as intended, I finally made it back to this point in Final Fantasy XIV through my New Game+ run. It’s an inelegant solution - and it’s rather telling that from Heavensward onwards, all Final Fantasy XIV cutscenes occur either before you start or, more commonly, after you clear a dungeon - but it does at least allow people to experience the whole thing in context when they get there for the first time.
The situation got so bad that Square Enix eventually made the cutscenes in Castrum and Prae unskippable, so that people could actually enjoy this part of the story rather than being bothered by impatient people. To make matters worse, even if there was someone in the party reaching this dramatic part of the story for the first time, these wannabe speedrunners would still race ahead, telling the newbies that they should just “watch the cutscenes later” rather than being able to enjoy them in context.Īnd let me tell you Gaius van Baelsar’s Big Speech is meant to be experienced in context. If you had been umming and ahhing over whether Final Fantasy XIV felt like a “real” Final Fantasy up until this point, Castrum and Prae should put any of those doubts to rest.īut the cutscene-heavy aspect of these dungeons caused a few problems over the years, since a lot of people who had long since reached Final Fantasy XIV’s endgame just wanted to grind these two dungeons for the rewards they offered - and people who wanted to play like that just wanted to rush through without watching cutscenes. They are the final two “story” dungeons, after all, and they feature some of the base game’s most spectacular boss fights - concluding with a multi-part “final boss” confrontation against Ultima Weapon.
They differ significantly from everything you’ve taken on before in that they involve eight players in a party instead of four, and they are very heavy on the cutscenes. For the unfamiliar, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium - Castrum and Prae for short - are the two dungeons you run pretty much immediately on hitting level 50 in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, assuming you’ve been keeping up to date with the storyline.
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