Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood - 4.35

The new dungeon isn’t quite heaven on high.

- Daniella Lucas

Back in 2016, Final Fantasy XIV released its first ‘Deep Dungeon’, The Palace of the Dead. Featuring 200 randomised floors full of traps, curses and beasts for your party of four adventurers to challenge itself against, you never quite knew what you’d come up against. Patch 4.35 brings a new Deep Dungeon, Heaven-on-High, with new twists and a beautiful east Asian design aesthetic – albeit this time across just 100 floors.

After being thoroughly impressed by The Palace of the Dead, I went into this patch expecting similar tales of near-death and derring-do – being bundled together with three other people of the exact same class, but still managing to scrape through by the skin of our teeth despite limited resources. It’s an incredibly hard act to follow: Heaven-on-High follows the same format, so the element of surprise is gone. Nevertheless, I wanted to see if it was capable of recapturing that magic.