To round up 2024, I decided to write up the core achievements I managed to hit this year. These weren’t really goals I set out with at the start, but they were things I did. And they are things I am proud of. In hindsight, this year was pretty significant. I cleared my first Ultimate raid, my first Savage tier on-patch, caught every Big Fish in the game, and solo’d not one but two deep dungeons. That’s a pretty insane series of achievements, reliant significantly on luck and significantly on skill. A lot of luck, though.
Ultimatum (Complete The Weapon’s Refrain (Ultimate))
Well, I did it! I completed my first Ultimate raid. I think all told it took about 2 weeks? A lot of sitting around in pf, but I was fortunate to find some good souls who were also progging it in pf and had some discords around to help with it. I won’t say it was easy—it wasn’t, but it was probably easier than doing P8S on content. The 2 weeks mark is around the time the longer or more annoying savage fights have taken me (looking at you, M2S), and it was definitely funner than those. The mechanical variety alone keeps you generally engaged.
It was a weird experience, though. The mechanical speed of an Ultimate is its own beast, even UWU with its now-non-existent DPS checks. But you also adjust like you do for everything else. I remember when I started the first phase against Garuda seemed impossibly fast and difficult to keep track of. Now I could do it half-asleep.
I think one of the charms of doing high-end content in FF14 is that feeling of building a well-oiled machine. You start and nobody knows what they’re doing, including you. The gears are all out of sync, the machine is constantly breaking, things are where they shouldn’t be and none of the outputs are recognisable. If you produce anything it feels almost by accident, and three quarters of the machine is a smoking ruin when it happens. But over time you refine that machine. The gears work more and more smoothly. Less of the machine breaks with every run. And by the end everything is so smooth. Every part knows exactly where it has to be and what it has to do, and while there are hiccups and errors the whole apparatus is broadly working as intended. Every fight in FF14 is like this, but Ultimates are where it’s most visible because the machine is at its most optimised.
That said, people who say “UWU is more like an extreme these days” are lying. They have either never done it or they have done it far too much. It’s way more intense than even the harder extremes, even now. Yeah, the DPS check is effectively non-existent, but that’s not really the thing you have to worry about outside of like… Ifrit nails.
All By Eurekaself II (Solo Eureka Orthos floors 1-100)
Since Eureka Orthos released and I saw the title I wanted to finish the solo—Once and Future Queen is just such a fantastic title. I did the first 30 floors solo when it launched for the initial story, and even managed to get all the way to 40 after a few attempts before I was unceremoniously one-hit-KO’d by Twintania’s Twister. Since then I made a few attempts, but never got much higher than the low 40s. Then I shelved it for a while, until I saw a friend with the title (looking at you Abi) and, my god, I needed it. I don’t think I’ve ever needed a title in a game that much. And so I did it, and my god it took so many attempts. I see people writing up threads on reddit like “easiest deep dungeon,” “took me 7 attempts,” “took me 3.” Maybe they’re just god-tier players compared to me but I did not do this thing in a handful of attempts. Heck, I stopped counting at some point. I do know that I had 5 attempts that managed to pass floor 80, and 3 managed to get passed 90. That’s the best I can offer with numbers. But in the end I did it, my very first deep dungeon solo. And it took. So. Much. I think this might be the single piece of content I have dedicated the most consistent time with—I wanted the title, I needed to become the Once and Future Queen. The mechanical focus of EO compared to earlier deep dungeons was also something I enjoyed. The milestones of each 10 floors and their boss felt excellent—even if the Twintania Clone did one-shot me with twister the first time I got to her, and Administrator blasted me into oblivion with a giant laser cleave I didn’t notice because I was too focused on the mechanics. I somehow never died to a sasquatch, though. Probably because I was paying attention and had forewarning. Counting down the teleport sound in that room while two of them sat there only to warp out just as one of them ate its banana will haunt me forever.
I will say, the final fight with Excalibur will be one of my favourite memories. The use of the Shadowbringer’s boss music—heck yeah, I *am* Insatiable—and the return of Hot & Cold from my beloved Delubrum Reginae. The fact I set it up to record in advance rather than clipped it like a sensible person. And then the victory, and the warping into that final floor. My face when I saw how far I had to run to the end point—the horror, the drive, the hope and despair. And the setpiece of the room—the long, winding path towards the sphere where the sword is locked in stasis, looming in a horizon that is so near and yet so, so far away. I literally cleared with 1 second left on the clock. ONE. SECOND. I would have failed if I hadn’t been playing Ninja between Shikuchi and its increased move speed. ONE SECOND. What the hell. Why had I taken the time to record the fight before I started? XD
EO wasn’t the only deep dungeon I managed to clear. I could also add Heaven is a Lonely Place II to this list, because I also managed to solo Heaven-on-High. But that didn’t feel like as much of an accomplishment. It wasn’t EO, and Lonely Hero will never beat Once and Future Queen. This one felt more like the reports the people on Reddit made: it went by fairly quickly, over the course of a couple of weeks and just over a half-dozen attempts. In general, though, it was less memorable. The bosses felt less fun, and the older focus on raw autoattack damage over mechanical complexity was just less appealing to me. And there wasn’t an Excalibur fight, or a one second sprint to the looming finale.
Fish Fear Me
Every Big Fish. Every. One. From all the expansions. I think this might actually be a bigger achievement than the two deep dungeon solos and the Ultimate clear. And equally dependent on a bit of luck. Well, a lot of luck. It definitely still took a long time.
In 2024 I started fishing n FF14, spurred on entirely by the addition of a PS5 trophy in 6.5 for catching one thousand four hundred and sixty unique fish. At the time, that was about 95% of the fish in the game, I think. When Dawntrail launched I was forty fish shy of the benchmark, and I unlocked it easily during Dawntrail ‘s MSQ itself. But that was only the start of the journey. When I began that journey I had amassed about 350 fish, only one of which was a “big fish,” and I only had one big fish: Pirate’s Bane, because of course it was Pirate’s Bane—the big fish you catch while trying for the Titanic Swordfish. But I went from one caught to all of them caught in probably about 9-10 months, which is absolutely insane. I did get incredibly lucky with some of the rarer fish, though. I caught Ealad Skaan and Cinder Surprise on the second window I attended and the first time they hooked (even if the second had me waking up at 4:45am. Never again.) I also got lucky with Furcacauda at the tail end of Endwalker, the only legendary I actually caught when it was “current.”
The first legendary fish I caught was Kuno the Killer in Mor Dhona. I think that was when I decided that I could do it. Standing amidst the broken shards of the Calamity, casting into the abyss, mooching endless strings of goldfish.
One of the interesting things with fishing is you kind of build up a sense of community. You see the same faces again and again as you go back to spots to catch those rare bites. I remember chatting shit on ocean trips, at the docks waiting for the pop, or commiserating after yet another failure to catch Aquamaton in Kholusia. Once, a member of the FC decided to show up while me and another FC member were attempting Sidereal Whale and do a running commentary on our efforts. I believe that was the time I actually managed to keep the buff up for the entire 22 minute window—a double Phallaina that re-procced the Intuition window (this was post-DT) and then a third refresh off a random EBE I hooked trying for yet another Horizon Event. The whale didn’t even show up that time.
I do have strong memories of the amount of effort it took to get relatively “easy” big fish, though. The number of times I went to that bridge in Raincatcher Gully for another failed Terpsichorean window, the nights at the lonely lighthouse trying for Armorer, the sheer, Minfilia-PTSD inducing pray returning to the Waking Sands for that shitty Lobster off the dock. Or the collective six hours I spent in Il Mheg casting my rod again and again for the horror that was Dammroen Herring. That fish will haunt my nightmares with its boredom. Who knew an always-up fish that bit about 30 times before I caught it would be the one that I have the most neurotic memories of. Not a legendary fish. Dammroen Herring. No tension, no excitement, no skill. Just the sheer, mind-numbing drudgery of cast, rest, cast, rest, cast, rest. If hell exists it is Dammroen Herring.
The one that managed to crown me as the Final Fish was, perhaps appropriately, Ruby Dragon. And also appropriately after attending who knows how many windows, on the one I caught it the thing was the first bite.
So that’s my inexhaustive retrospective of some of the core achievements I managed to attain in FF14 this year. I have no idea what 2025 is going to bring, but I hope good things. Looking forward to it, either way!
Signing out,
Mireille Marchand—
Ultimate Legend
Final Fish
Once and Future Queen.
