Final Fantasy XIV’s Arcadion raid race ends in jaw-dropping photo finish

The raid race for the first tier of the Arcadion in Final Fantasy XIV has ended in a photo finish, with the first team beating the final boss mere seconds before their competitors.

The savage raids have finally been released into Final Fantasy XIV. Patch 7.05 saw the introduction of the new difficulty for the first four fights of the Arcadion, with Black Cat, Honey B. Lovely, Brute Bomber, and Wicked Thunder stepping up to face the Warriors of Light.

As per usual with new content, a race to see who can complete all the fights took place. Many of the teams competing were streaming on Twitch, with channel Mogtalk hosting a show so that players could follow along with the race.

And what a race it was, with a nail-biting photo finish that saw raid team Grind take down Wicked Thunder just seconds before competitor Serenity.

Mogtalk host Frosty announced that using Eorzean time, “Grind is world first, they got the Eorzean time of 3:14, Serenity is world second with the Eorzean time of 3:21.”

A minute in Eorzea translates to roughly three seconds in real life, making the gap between first and second only 21 seconds in total. With each fight being around 10 minutes or so, this just goes to show how neck and neck the two teams were.

Neither of these two teams happened to be streaming their point of view, meaning we don’t get to see their excited reactions to their clears.

According to the MogTalk website, the raid tier as a whole was cleared relatively quickly, with plenty of teams making it over the line 9-10 hours after the servers came back online. This is pretty expected for the first tier of a raid series, which is generally the easiest of the expansion.

Grind was able to clear all four fights in just under nine hours, a truly monumental achievement that has the Final Fantasy XIV community heralding their praise.