History YMMV / FinalFantasyRecordKeeper

** Goldor from the 10 Million Players Celebration event. The boss description touted his attacks as [[FixedDamageAttack all inflicting 1000 damage]] and his immensely high Defense and Resistance. As it turns out, his DEF and RES were '''[[UpToEleven 99,999,999]]'''...and his HP was 50. It's even more anticlimactic with a DEF/RES-ignoring attack.

*** Aside from Ceodore and Ursula, the entire cast of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIVTheAfterYears'' is missing. While that game had LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters, Ceodore and Ursula still made it in, and many of the others could make cases for their additions to ''Record Keeper'' in terms of what utility they could offer the ''IV'' realm. Zemus is also pretty assuredly never getting in, since Golbez has long eclipsed him as the iconic BigBad of the game, and the Mysterious Girl/Maenad is probably not going to make the cut either.

*** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' has lots of characters missing, though this is inevitably given that the ''Compilation'' [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters has a lot of major players]]. Still, the exclusion of Tseng when Rufus and the other three Turks are here is noticeable, same with any of the Tsviets other than Shelke.

** Beatrix. There's a number of players out there who loathe her for the amount of attention she gets compared to other ''FFIX'' characters and her difficult boss battles as mentioned in the [[CreatorsPet Creator's Pet section]] but she also has many fans many of whom are generally FFIX fans that are generally excited when ever she gets a new relic and pull for her.

** [[BreakoutCharacter Cloud]] tends to get all the new toys first. For a while, this rendered him susceptible to PowerCreep since all the new toys also got better when characters got them later, but he later reversed this trend by getting stuff early that also happened to remain good, such as his Ultra, which, for its time, was considered greatly overpowered, and to this day remains his big claim to fame as a DPS/burst option.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'' is often viewed as receiving too much attention compared to other more-popular games. The second Eiko event further stoked this flame by giving the realm its fourth and ''fifth'' Burst Soul Burst (not even ''FFVII'' had yet received five [=BSBs=] at the time) before several realms had even received ''one'' Burst Soul Break, particularly with Eiko's event taking place before the teased and heavily-anticipated ''FFII'' Guy event.
** ''Final Fantasy X'' also receives a massive number of events, second only to ''FFVII''. Despite this, it gets even more content than ''FFVII'', including having a full third of all of the Wardrobe Records in the game (Yuna is currently the character with ''the biggest amount of Wardrobes''[[note]]Her ''FFX-2'' outfit, her bride outfit from ''FFX'', and a special festive outfit[[/note]]), a second OSB before many realms had even received their first, and Yuna being the one of the first characters to get a second Burst Soul Break.
** It took only one event for ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTactics'' to receive this, due to its first characters (Ramza and Agrias) both having exceptional ability options, good stats, and very powerful Soul Breaks (with Ramza's Super Soul Break, ''Shout'', considered a [[GameBreaker game-changer]] by many for months). While the new characters of the second event (Delita, Ovelia, and Mustadio) aren't considered ''as'' high-tier, Ramza receiving a Burst Soul Break before [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyI the Warrior of Light]], [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyII Firion]], or [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII Luneth]] hasn't helped the matter. With the release of [[PurposefullyOverpowered Orlandeau]], this has gone UpToEleven, and Rapha's Burst Soul Break is a poor man's version of Cid Raines's Burst.
** Bartz. The fandom loved him for a long time due to his FourElementEnsemble SpellBlade gimmick, but the developers kept pushing him at it. He started with a generic Spellblade Awakening and then got four more specializing him in Wind, Water, Earth, and Fire, and they each came with a Glint+ to give him an Elemental Infusion for the same element. And he has a Glint that gives him Quad Element mode, letting him gain an Elemental Infusion for any of his four elements when he uses a corresponding Spellblade. This not only means that Bartz has ''five'' Awakenings when no one else has more than two, but he is the most supported character in the game with more than two dozen Relics to his name. He was also one of the first characters to get a Record Ability when Record Boards were added to the game, and of course it was a 6* Spellblade that hits five times in his four elements, letting him synergize all the pieces of his kit around it.
* CreatorsPet:
** Beatrix, a temporarily-playable RecurringBoss in her [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX home game]] and a divisive character there as well, has already had two events of her own (compared to [[BigBad Kuja]] and [[EnsembleDarkhorse Vivi]]), got access to Legend Spheres before the female lead Garnet, and was in the second debuting wave of Legend Materia even before Terra, Squall and Cloud. On a banner themed around the significantly less popular Freya, Beatrix's new Ultra Soul Break was slotted first on the list and got a new Burst Soul Break, while Freya only had a single, much weaker Ultra added to the pool besides the typical balance, Legend Materia, and Record Sphere updates.
** ''FFIV'''s Kain also gets accused of this. Starting from the Ceodore event his relics have appeared in every ''IV'' event to date and it doesn't help that ''FFIV'' had 15+ characters already, and he's one of the few characters to get three 6 star relics[[note]]Overstrike, Ultra, and a Chain SB[[/note]] when most protagonists only have two 6-star relics at most. Hell, he even got one of the first Awakening Soul Breaks, though this can be argued as having get [[PowerCreep powercrept]] as Lightning and Noctis got theirs later.
** Tidus has starred in nearly every ''FFX'' event since the realm stopped adding new characters. While other characters get new relics, most events still star Tidus, or at least will have a banner with many of his relics.

** The game has a small pool of options for magical Wind damage. For the first three years of the game there was ''no'' 5-star Wind-elemental Black Magic command, meaning the only ways to do respectable Wind-elemental magic damage were through Summons, Ninjutsu, and the 6-star Black Magic Meltdown, which is a one-of-a-kind command. This fortunately was fixed eventually with the addition of the 5-star Tornado and 6-star Chain Tornado as Black Magic spells. As for Wind mages, there's only a handful -- Onion Knight, Barbariccia, Terra, Fujin, Ultimecia, Alphinaud, and Wedge, and some of them didn't exist in the game's early years, either. By contrast, physical Wind characters are all over the place and almost every realm has at least one.

** The game has a small pool of options for magical Wind damage. For the first three years of the game there was ''no'' 5-star Wind-elemental Black Magic command, meaning the only ways to do Wind-elemental magic damage were through Summons, Ninjutsu, and the 6-star Black Magic Meltdown, which is a one-of-a-kind command. This fortunately was fixed eventually with the addition of the 5-star Tornado and 6-star Chain Tornado as Black Magic spells. As for Wind mages, there's only a handful -- Fujin, Alphinaud, Ultimecia, Barbariccia, Terra, and Wedge are the only ones dedicated to Wind, while Onion Knight has some FourElementEnsemble tools and The Emperor's Awakening lets him run Wind spells. By contrast, physical Wind characters are all over the place.

** Gilgamesh's event delivered [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv3AshPeBpM&t=33s a new mix of "Battle at the Big Bridge"]] that sounds as if ''VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy'' and "One-Winged Angel" had a lovechild. It's so good, it was even remastered for ''VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy2015''!

** Basch is also quite infamous among players. He's not that ignored in terms of getting relics regularly. However many are convinced DeNA hates him because of the recent relics he gets are considered bad to being mediocre at best. His Hero Ability is considered to be the worst Hero Ability in the game as it only deals 4 physical Holy attacks and heals him for 2000 HP. In other words, it managed to be worse than ''Healing Smite'' as that attack deals 5 hits and heals the member with the lowest HP for the same ammount of 2000 HP.

** Ability charge-restoring effects, nicknamed "Ether" by the playerbase. In a game where abilities can only be used so many times, you'd think effects to restore ability charges would be very valuable. However, the game's meta-stragegies have evolved in such a way that Ether effects aren't very useful. If the player has honed their abilities to Rank 5 and runs out of charges against a boss, the battle is either almost over or the party is just not strong enough. That aside, Awakening Soul Breaks allow characters infinite ability charges, making Ethers useless for those characters, and there's always Burst Soul Breaks if you need them. The only characters who would want or need Ether effects are Summoners, since Summon abilities have fewer charges than others, and most top-tier summoners ''do'' have access to Ether effects in some way, so there you go.

** "Beyond" characters, consisting of characters from various assorted spin-offs. While what they have is often good when they come out, Beyond events are uncommon and it's rare for a pre-existing Beyond character to get new Relics, so inevitably no matter how good they are they'll be [[{{Power Creep}} Power Crept]] within a year at best, if not months. Further, there has never a Beyond Torment and there will likely not be a Dreambreaker either, so however good the Beyond character might be, they'll not be as useful as a character from one of the main seventeen realms who could be used in the Cadia dungeons.

*** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' has lots of characters missing, though this is inevitably given that the ''Compilation'' [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters has a lot of major players]]. Still, the exclusion of Tseng when Rufus and the other three Turks are here is noticable, same with any of the Tsviets other than Shelke.
*** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'' as a whole gets little attention, since the game was already winding down to its final content additions when ''Record Keeper'' was just coming out, and ''XI'' has always been a BlackSheep of the series. As a result the realm has very few representatives, particularly no villains. ''XIV'' is slightly better off with more characters than ''XI'', but ''XIV'' too has infrequent events and few Relics for its characters who aren't Ysh'tola, Papalymo, and Alphinaud.

** Rem in the Dreambreaker era. Dreambreaker bosses like to inflict Full Break on the party at phase changes, but Rem's primary attacking stat is MND, which they ''don't'' debuff, so she can power through it, and with her Ultra, Awakening, and Sync combined, she can dish out multi-casting Holy attacks every turn that can go up to 29,999 a hit. She's so powerful that with the right support, she can be your sole DPS character and ''still'' carry off-realm teams to sub 30 wins.

** The first Ultimate+ boss, Hojo. A plethora of StandardStatusEffects and powerful counters with a high hit rate make him rather annoying to face.

** Kite's Shop isn't exactly what players have envisioned when it comes to a system to convert non-orb items like motes. The main problem is how painfully slow and laggy it is to simply exchange even one item in it. And it doesn't help that you can only convert an item up to a max of 10 once per week for most of them. Many players have decided that it's simply not worth to invest in it.

** In old times it wasn't uncommon to see any team meant to tackle the top-level dungeons having at least one of Tyro, Cloud, Y'shtola, Ramza, and Orlandeau. They also appear a lot as Roaming Warriors, but their functions changed as PowerCreep advanced.
*** Tyro will be there for his utility (being able to equip ''anything'' lets him be whatever the player needs him to be) and his ''Divine Veil Grimoire'' (boost the party's Defense and Resistance, gives the party Hastega, Shellga and Protectga). He may also bring his first Ultra, ''Warder's Apocrypha'' (Hastega, Autoheal 2k and ''Astra''), or his newer fourth one, ''Arbiter's Tome'' (Hastega, 50% Crit, Hi-Quickcast and a chase that increases Crit chance even more).

*** Lately this trope has been averted, as more characters have been getting new and ''very powerful'' tools, giving huge variance to the game, and Magicite and Torment fights are made to force players to mount teams around elements or the Realms these bosses pertain to.

** The general party for D??? Jenova SYNTHESIS is Cloud, Aerith, Zack, Cait Sith, and Shelke. Cloud is among the best characters in the game and has his first Ultra Soul Break which allows him to deal up to 99999 damage which helps a huge amount against her 2 million HP, Aerith is VII's main healer, Zack has his Chain Soul Break which boosts wind DPS and the party's ATK and Critical damage which is a boon for Cloud along with one of his Imperil Wind soul breaks, Cait Sith is used as a back up white mage to dispel Jenova's Protect and use Shellga as well as using Magicites and the RW, and Shelke acts as an entrust battery for Cloud to get his Soul Breaks going.
** Dreambreakers are lenient enough to allow 1 off-realm character. When they first debuted, Tyro was the most common off-realm character as his Overstrike Soulbreak was the only soulbreak to counter the fullbreak used by them each phase change. DeNA caught on to this method and later Dreambreakers included Dreambreaker Stop to their arsenal which only affected off-realm characters. A high mind was needed to shrug the stops off, which Tyro's was too low to shrug off without help. Mog eventually became the most common off-realm character to use once his second awakening was released as aside from the fullbreak counter, it gave a general quickcast to the entire party for the 15 second duration and every second use of a dancer ability activates Mog Step which heals the party and esunas them, this made Mog an excellent back-up or even primary healer, especially when his Heroic Ability released.

** Leviathan is considered the easiest 6* Magicite. His unique gimmick is that he inflicts Doom on the party at the start of the battle and has various attacks that lower the Doom counter or set it to 5 or 10 seconds. However, he also provides a mitigation mechanic in that he regularly spawns Air Bubbles that can be attacked to increase the Doom timer, and he doesn't use his Doom-affecting attacks all that much. His other gimmick is that he can inflict Stop, but he always targets the same three characters with it and his Mind stat is pathetic, so characters with even only a modest Mind stat of their own will be immune to Stop. Beyond Doom and Stop, his attacks don't hurt as much as the other 6* Magicites, his uses of Lightning Diffusion are infrequent and easy to strategize around to minimize their impact, and his only way of bolstering his defenses are to cast Protect and Shell on himself one time in his second phase and raising his Lightning resistance one time in his third (other 6* Magicites raise their element resistance and/or lower the party's elemental damage more frequently). This makes Leviathan a much simpler boss than his brethren, especially in comparison to the Magicite that preceded him, [[ThatOneBoss Ramuh]].

** Torments are what is meant to be this.
** Most Final Fantasy V Elite dungeons are regarded as the toughest of the bunch.
** Heroic difficulty daily dungeons, which were meant for characters who broke the level 50 limit, something that wasn't introduced in the english version of the game at their release. They are still doable with a fully leveled to 50 team, but expect some hard encounters. As for the Exp Dungeon, it is very difficult to master it with low level characters, characters already at 50 won't gain any exp, and it is the only dungeon of the game where you can't benefit from synergy. The introduction of memory crystals, allowing characters to break the level 50 limit, made those dungeons more manageable.

** Dreambreakers are lenient enough to allow 1 off-realm character. When they first debuted, Tyro was the most common off-realm character as his Overstrike Soulbreak was the only soulbreak to counter the fullbreak used by them each phase change. DeNA caught on to this method and later Dreambreakers included Dreamkbreaker Stop to their arsenal which only affected off-realm characters. A high mind was needed to shrug the stops off, which Tyro's was too low. Mog eventually became the most common off-realm character to use once his second awakening was released as aside from the fullbreak counter, it gave a general quickcast to the entire party for the 15 second duration and every second use of a dancer ability activates Mog Step which heals the party and esunas them, this made mog an excellent back-up or even primary healer, especially when his Heroic Ability released.

** The general party for D??? Jenova SYNTHESIS is Cloud, Aerith, Zack, Cait Sith, and Shelke. Cloud is among the best characters in the game and has his first Ultra Soul Break which allows him to deal up to 99999 damage which helps a huge ammount against her, Aerith is VII's main healer, Zack has his Chain Soul Break which boosts wind DPS and the party's ATK and Critcal damage which is a boon for Cloud along with one of his Imperil Wind soul breaks, Cait Sith is used as a back up white mage to dispel Jenova's Protect and use Shellga as well as using Magicites and the RW, and Shelke acts as an entrust battery for Cloud to get his Soul Breaks going.

** Out of all the 6* Magicites, Ifrit is generally agreed to be the most annoying one to fight: he begins the fight with 4 Pillars of Fire present and when he reaches specific HP thresholds, he uses Perdition Hellfire which deals massive damage by default and is further strenghtened by any pillars currently present when he uses it: with 1, 2 or 3 pillars present, it will also temporarily reduce your party's healing by 30, 50 or 70% and if all 4 pillars are present when he uses it, it results in a TotalPartyKill. Killing the pillars before focusing on Ifrit seems like the obvious thing to do then, but that also has another mechanic tied to it: while the pillars themselves do nothing by default, any non-[=AoE=] or non-Soul Break attacks will result in Counter Flare which deals a fixed 2000 damage to whoever attacks them, and killing a pillar will cause it to cast Painflare, which deals a fixed 4000 damage and inflicts the character with 3 stacks of Pain, which increases all the damage they take by 10% for every stack. Thus, using a single character to kill all the pillars in a single [=AoE=] move will be guaranteed to kill them off via the Painflare counters, forcing you to target each one individually, and if you try to use a magicite to kill one off, the Painflare counter will hit everyone for 3000 damage instead and inflict 2 stacks of Pain on them. He also resummons the pillars in phase 2 and 3, and has a number of attacks that specifically target characters with En-Water, characters without En-Water and characters with the highest Pain, with the latter attack also inflicting Berserk, which can only be mitigated with healers with extremely high Mind stat. In summary, he forces you to waste time killing off the pillars before you can start focusing on him, you need to repeat the process 3 times over the duration of the fight, and an unlucky doublecast might result in multiple Counter Flares or one followed by Painflare which can kill off the character or weaken them too much to survive a followup attack, or it might end up pushing Ifrit's HP low enough for him to use Perdition Hellfire with pillars still present or with the party at too low HP or without Last Stand active to survive it. Much like with the original Mote Ifrit with a banner filled with relics designed to make beating him easier as described on the main page, Rydia's water Sync Soul Break which was released after 6* Magicite Ifrit is custom-made for the purpose of nuking an entire set of pillars with no consequences, thanks to it giving her 4 Damage Reduction Barriers and 10k HP worth of autoheal to let her easily tank the counters from killing all of them at the same time.

** The ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsX'' collaboration event. Not only is ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'' itself a matter of contention among the ''Final Fantasy'' fanbase, the event is a simultaneous worldwide event, which means that (assuming the banner isn't neutered in Global) Riku will drop with Dark Aura, the first Ultimate Overstrike Soul Break in Global (or Arcane Overstrike, as they are known now). While the much appreciated Soul Break Gauge rework would arrive with the update, a few players aren't particularly happy about [=AOSBs=] potentially debuting on a character that gets zero Realm Synergy in any relevant content outside of his own event.

** Out of all the 6* Magicites, Ifrit is generally agreed to be the most annoying one to fight: he begins the fight with 4 Pillars of Fire present and when he reaches specific HP thresholds, he uses Perdition Hellfire which deals massive damage by default and is further strenghtened by any pillars currently present when he uses it: with 1, 2 or 3 pillars present, it will also temporarily reduce your party's healing by 30, 50 or 70% and if all 4 pillars are present when he uses it, it results in a TotalPartyKill. Killing the pillars before focusing on Ifrit seems like the obvious thing to do then, but that also has another mechanic tied to it: while the pillars themselves do nothing by default, any non-[=AoE=] or non-Soul Break attacks will result in Counter Flare which deals a fixed 2000 damage to whoever attacks them, and killing a pillar will cause it to cast Painflare, which deals a fixed 4000 damage and inflicts the character with 3 stacks of Pain, which increases all the damage they take by 10% for every stack. Thus, using a single character to kill all the pillars in a single [=AoE=] move will be guaranteed to kill them off via the Painflare counters, forcing you to target each one individually, and if you try to use a magicite to kill one off, the Painflare counter will hit everyone for 3000 damage instead and inflict 2 stacks of Pain on them. He also resummons the pillars in phase 2 and 3, and has a number of attacks that specifically target characters with En-Water, characters without En-Water and characters with the highest Pain, with the latter attack also inflicting Berserk, which can only be mitigated with healers with extremely high Mind stat. In summary, he forces you to waste time killing off the pillars before you can start focusing on him, you need to repeat the process 3 times over the duration of the fight, and an unlucky doublecast might result in multiple Counter Flares or one followed by Painflare which can kill off the character or weaken them too much to survive a followup attack, or it might end up pushing Ifrit's HP low enough for him to use Perdition Hellfire with pillars still present or with the party at too low HP or without Last Stand active to survive it.

** Bartz and Sora. When their Awakenings dropped in 2019, they broke the metagame (at that time, the 6* rank Magicites and Odin) over their knees, as together they cover six of the game's main eight elements and can bring ridiculous DPS in them. Even in the third-tier Torments, which heavily penalize the player by buffing the boss for bringing in an off-realm character (and this was before the 2020 nerf to Torments), Bartz and Sora were strong enough that they could still pull their weight and even carry a team to a sub-30 win. As for Magicites, the 5* rank is plain screwed, because even in their off-elements the two can still break the damage cap and again carry teams to sub-30 wins.

** Bartz and Sora. When their Awakenings dropped in 2019, they broke the metagame over their knees, as together they cover six of the game's main eight elements and can bring ridiculous DPS in them. Even in the third-tier Torments, which heavily penalize the player by buffing the boss for bringing in an off-realm character (and this was before the 2020 nerf to Torments), Bartz and Sora were strong enough that they could still pull their weight and even carry a team to a sub-30 win. As for Magicites, the 5* rank is plain screwed, because even in their off-elements the two can still break the damage cap and again carry teams to sub-30 wins.

** "lolbio"[[labelnote:Explanation]]The Poison element is regarded as the worst and least covered element in the game, having only [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyII Leila]], [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI Edgar]] and [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII Quistis]] as its most notable users. The element lacks any dedicated Magicites to empower it, there are no Poison-element Chains, and nobody is capable of stacking a poison aura. The one consolation is that realm-focused chains and Memoria Crystals allow the poison element to be used in the respective realm teams, but the other elements will almost always have better options even there. As a result, the Poison-element version of the Dark Odin fight is considered the hardest one to do in the intended manner.[[/labelnote]]

** Even worse, the Poison element; [=DeNA=] seemingly tried to phase it out of the game but can't make up their minds. Many characters who started out as Poison specialists have been shifted to other roles that downplay their Poison affinity, there's no Poison Magicite or Chain Soul Break, there's only a handful of Poison abilities, and no top-tier bosses are vulnerable to Poison save for ones that are vulnerable to everything else. On the other hand, some Poison-focused characters have continued to get Relics that let them run Poison kits, and Kefka and Thancred, who started in Poison and then transitioned into other elements, transitioned ''back'' to Poison in the game's 6th year. This is why the very idea of Poison is a MemeticMutation -- the developers give players enough that they could put together a half-decent team if they really wanted to, but won't give the element the same kind of support that they gave the other eight.