Over eighteen hours to kill a single boss.
It turns out, the guys behind FFXI are completely fucking insane. I don't know if Jonathan Blow knows anything about FFXI, but if he thinks WoW is "unethical" because you can choose to grind in it, he'd probably say FFXI is pure evil.
Oh hey, and I should mention that a similarly difficult boss called Absolute Virtue can kill an entire raid in one attack, as well as heal itself to full hit points. It can do this at any time. It's been around for over two years, and has only been killed legitimately like 3 times.
The guild estimates that at the rate they were killing it it'd take another five or six hours to down, they just quit at 18 hours. So roughly a boss that 24 hours to kill.
I'd just like to point out that this boss has something like 20 different forms, all with unique appearances and art and spells and abilities (correct me if I'm wrong and there's recycled stuff). That's a big effort and a lot of man-hours dedicated to concept art, modeling, texture art and skinning, rigging, spell design, spell coding, spell visual effect design, scripting, and AI for all of those, on top of the standard amount of design time going into the items it drops (graphics and stats).
That's a lot of work that's only going to be experienced by the most dedicated of the best geared of the highest-end guilds; a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase. Content that almost nobody will see.
I'd argue that it's interesting on some far-out artistic level, like a performance piece, or a buddhist sand mandala. It's also very bad game design.
