Gameplay And Story Segregation / Final Fantasy

Multiple Games/General

• Summons or other spells with extensive animations that never affect reality in the RPG world. The earthquake spell never takes out any buildings, Bahamut Zero can fly out of space and zap your enemies even when you're underground, and the most infamous offender, Final Fantasy VII's Supernova, destroys Earth's whole solar system, doing some damage to the characters but leaving them and the planet, which is not even Earth, intact.^note The attack is implied to be an illusion, though, which would make it make more sense. Moreover, the villain can cast it multiple times. On the other hand, little girl Rydia summons Titan in a battle-cutscene and creates an entire mountain range.^note Long before she learns how to summon Titan, at that. Likewise, in Final Fantasy IX summons are pivotal to the plot as the beasts enact massive actions in cutscenes; apparently, their attacks are much more surgically precise during gameplay.
• There are numerous examples throughout the series and its spinoffs where locations, including towns and geographic landmarks, are either set on fire or in the process of being attacked, yet instead of party characters utilizing any of the helpful magical spells they may have acquired up to this point (which could include Cure, Ice or Wind spells) to either dispel the ongoing fires or attempt to heal the residents, the player character and their party never thinks to act on this.
  • This was averted in FFVI when the residents of Thamasa try to use their magic to extinguish a fire that is consuming a mansion in the town. Their efforts fail however because said mansion is storing too many Fire Rods.
• Numerous installments have instances where the plot presumes that all party members are present in the active party, but simply don't appear on-screen due to said group usually being hardcoded at three-to-four members. This can lead to oddities where the player will reach a story event, the rest of the team will magically appear out of the lead party member's body, have a conversation and walk back into them. This occurs even in installments (like VII) where an in-universe reason is given for why party members aren't made immediately accessible to the player, due to needing a communication device to switch members into the active party.
• If a party member dies in battle, Phoenix Downs will revive them. However, when a party member dies as part of the story, or when other NPC's on your side die, the party never thinks to use Phoenix Downs on them, except in Final Fantasy V when Galuf dies, though to no effect. Similarly, Gold Needles or Soft can be used to restore party members petrified in battle, but are never used on the Queen of the Ancient Castle in Final Fantasy VI or Seto in Final Fantasy VII. (Averted in Final Fantasy IV when characters attempt to restore Porom and Palom, but it doesn't work due to them having turned themselves to stone.) Furthermore, if the party leader is dead or petrified by the end of a battle but other party members still alive, you can continue to walk around as him/her outside of battle mode.

Final Fantasy II

• Final Fantasy II:
  • Early into the game you can learn a magic attack called Teleport, which is said to "banish enemies to another dimension", and can be used to take out almost any boss (with a few exceptions like Red Soul and the Emperor) in one shot. So, you're banishing them to another dimension, right? Well, if you use it on Borghen, he will remain in the area after battle mode ends, activating his final trap and dying up front, the same as if you'd beaten him normally.

Final Fantasy IV

• Final Fantasy IV:
  • Rydia doesn't learn Fire until a plot event, because she gained a phobia of fire when Cecil inadvertantly burned down her village. However, with excessive Level Grinding, it's possible to have her learn Firaga before said plot event occurs.
  • When you get to Damcyan Castle, you find it under attack and filled with injured and dying people. Yet, despite having two white mages in your party and most likely dozens of potions and phoenix downs in your inventory, you can't do a thing to help any of them. This becomes utterly jarring when an important NPC passes away in your healer's arms without him even attempting to heal her, and despite there being two magical healing pots capable of fully restoring all your health with a single touch in the very same room.
  • After falling for the pitfall trap in the Tower of Babil, you'd think a Warp spell would've taken the party back up a floor. Yet nobody even suggests the idea.
  • The Tower of Babil appears on the Overworld map surrounded by a large black hole. You'd think it'd be possible to fly an airship through, much like the hole that's sometimes open near Agart, but you'd be wrong.

Final Fantasy VI

• Final Fantasy VI:
  • The game has a cutscene where character uses a smoke bomb to escape from a fire; in-game a smoke bomb only escapes battle (leaving you in the same location), a Warp Stone is what you use if you want to escape a location. Zig-Zagging Trope: Why on Earth would you expect a smoke bomb to help in escaping from a burning building if you didn't know that it lets you escape from battle?
  • Magic is said to have weakened in the world after the War of the Magi, and no normal human can use it without a Magitek infusion. Doesn't really explain all the special attacks and abilities characters can use that deal magic damage, like Shadow's Skeans, some of Edgar's Tools, and Sabin's Blitzes. While it is feasible that perhaps monsters can still use magic and humans may have minor latent magical abilities (since supernatural things do still exist), that doesn't explain how Gau can somehow gain the ability to use magic by mimicing the behavior of monsters with his Rages, yet once he comes out of it he suddenly forgets.
  • The entire party faces Kefka as the final boss, but as usual only four party members fight at a time. Although party members who are dead at the end of any Statue of the Gods phase are replaced with the next party members when the next phase begins, if all four party members die against Kefka or the Statue of the Gods, then it's game over and the other party members don't jump in to fight him in their place.

Compilation of Final Fantasy VII

• Final Fantasy VII:
  • The Buster Sword. Its attack power and materia slots are some of the lowest in the game, but Cloud is always depicted wielding it in cutscenes, no matter what he's actually equipped with. This also applies to the rest of the characters. No matter what weapon they're equipped with, official art and cutscenes always shows them with the crappy, low-rent equipment they started with. (The Remake averts this by giving every weapon owned by all major characters a set of upgradable abilities, with weapons suited for different playstyles and offensive capabilities, as well as equipped weapons carrying into cutscenes with certain Materia visible.)
  • After Cloud, Tifa and Aerith are dumped into the sewers under Don Corneo's mansion, both Tifa and Aerith are lying passed out on the ground and will not get up until Cloud talks to them. Despite this, it is possible to run around and get into a random battle, and both will be present and active in the battle party.
  • Cait Sith's Ultimate Weapon, the "HP Shout" megaphone, can be found extremely early in the game, during the infiltration into the Shinra Building to rescue Aerith. To note, it's found in a locker on the employee recreation floor... but Cloud and the party will refuse to pick it up (until the end of Disc 2), not knowing what value it has. This doesn't stop the player from being a Kleptomaniac Hero and picking up virtually everything in sight, including items that shouldn't logically function as weapons (such as Aerith's own Joke Weapon, the Parasol [Umbrella]) or items for party members who haven't been acquired up to that point (such as the various shotguns and pistols for Vincent).
  • The quintessential example, and one that was parodied at the time the game came out, is Aerith's death. The game arbitrarily renders the equipment that the character was wearing as impossible to retrieve.^note Yet it gives you back all the equipped materia. It's also never suggested that anyone could try to use a Phoenix Down to revive the character in question (a notion that would later be explored in the New Threat mod, which has this exact same scenario play out). This is despite characters routinely falling in battle, with a 0 HP meter, who can be easily revived with a single use of the object. This is because the story relies on Aeris' actions from beyond the grave.
    • The real reason for this is that Phoenix Downs and their ilk don't actually cure "Death"; they merely revive a knocked out character. This is confusing since the spell equivalents are called something to the effect of "Life" or "Revive" in the games. Think of them less as resurrection potions and more like smelling salts.
  • The problem with Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke attacks is all the more problematic in a game where the actual plot involves Sephiroth trying to use the Meteor spell to blast a chunk out of the world. Over the course of the game, you'll pick up or observe spells and summons that (in other games, anyway) are far more powerful than Meteor, and whose attack animations seem like they should do even more damage to the planet in general. The infamous Supernova attack should be more than enough to fulfill Sephiroth's plan, for instance. (To the game's credit, Meteor itself is off-limits to the player and enemies.)
  • Cid's Level 4 Limit Break involves him summoning the Highwind (the party's airship) to conduct a bombing run against the enemy. This can occur even when the party is fighting Ultimate Weapon in the air... on the top deck of the Highwind, as a copy of itself flies in. Conversely, using the Limit Break during said aerial encounter results in the Highwind destroying pieces of itself... only to be fine moments later.
  • The Gelnika is a plane that gets shot down after transporting the Huge Materia to Rocket Town, and you can explore the wreckage using the sub. However, if you immediately take the sub back down to the ocean floor once you get it, but before going to Junon, you can actually explore the wreckage of the Gelnika before it gets destroyed, and then go back to the surface and watch it take off.
  • You can Take Your Time during the race to stop Professor Hojo from destabilizing the city by taking a detour over to the Shinra Building... where the enemies are the same low-level grunts you fought all the way back at the beginning of Disc 1, and don't even count as pushovers.
• In Crisis Core, much of the Level Grinding takes place through a menu-based 'SOLDIER Mission' system, where you undertake various missions for Shinra Inc at any save point. However, you're still able to use this system during the latter leg of the game, where Zack is on the run with Shinra Company hunting him down and gunning for his blood. In fact, it is completely impossible to avoid this segregation by finishing all the side missions early. There are missions released only after the Nibelheim incident. Even before this, these missions send him all over the world, even at times when he clearly is not free to just go wherever he wants, such as during the attack on the Shinra building.
• Final Fantasy VII Remake:
  • Getting any of the pre-order bonus Summons (Carbuncle / Cactuar / Chocobo Chick), which can be unlocked and used at the very beginning of the game, can play havoc with later cutscenes, as other characters (like Jessie, Barret and Tifa) introduce the concept to Cloud like he's never found or utilized a Summoning Materia before. Barret even treats the Choco/Mog Materia you can find in the runup to the Reactor 5 bombing run as a rare and powerful item that he's rarely (if ever) glimpsed before... but Cloud may have been using any of the three other summons during the Reactor 1 run that took place shortly before this, and he never comments on it at that point.
  • It's possible to complete several of Chadley's challenges (though it won't officially unlock) before you've met him proper, as the game will track certain statistics such as specific numbers of enemy types killed from the very beginning of the game. Like the aforementioned Summon Materia example, doing these missions early enough allows you to unlock the Shiva Summon before Barret or Jessie bring it up.

Final Fantasy VIII

• Final Fantasy VIII:
  • The player gets a regular paycheck from their organization, SeeD, which is based on their SeeD rank. This works fine, until about halfway through Disc 2 when the player is made the commander of Balamb Garden. You would think that this would give you a pay raise. But no, your rank doesn't so much as rise a single level when you are promoted, and it is still possible to be demoted and receive a pay cut. Storywise, you're the highest ranking person in the Garden. You can even be demoted in the few areas where you only control Rinoa, the only member of the party who isn't working for SeeD, near the end of Disc 1. Even more confusing, after time starts compressing at the end of the game and you are thrown out of time into the future and can no longer interact with towns and most NPCs, you still are paid at regular intervals. That's a pretty impressive banking system. Unfortunately, the party is funded only by Squall's salary. Despite Quistis, Zell and Selphie also being SeeDs, the player does not have access to their finances.
  • Rinoa becomes a Sorceress later in the game. The Sorceress are able to naturally use magic, without needing to Draw spells from monsters. Obviously, this doesn't apply to Rinoa (she can do this during her Limit Break, though, but the same applies to Selphie as well, who is not a Sorceress).
  • One interesting case comes up during a Self-Imposed Challenge in which the player doesn't use the Junction system. One person doing the challenge reflected on how, after learning that the Guardian Forces caused memory loss, the heroes acknowledged that they only got this far because they used them, and pointed out that this was not the case.
  • During the prison sequence, you're told that there's an anti-magic field in the prison that prevents magic from being cast properly. Selphie attempts to use cure, but it doesn't work very well. As such, they say that they have to rely on their weapons, so it's up to Zell, since he uses his fists as his weapons. However, the second you gain control of Zell, he has full access to and use of magic, and so do your other characters during the battle with Biggs and Wedge. Afterwards, when you leave the cell, an announcement comes on that the anti-magic field will be lifted. This, however, doesn't explain why your characters were able to use magic before it was lifted.

Final Fantasy IX

• Final Fantasy IX has Garnet go through a phase of being practically useless in battles, incapable of using her healing spells or even skipping her turn because she cannot concentrate. This only applies to battles, though, as she is perfectly capable of using any healing spell from the menu.

Final Fantasy X

• Final Fantasy X:
  • The intro cutscene is dozens of hours into the story, yet the pile of weapons it opens looking at includes Yuna's original staff (which you likely ditched after the first temple, if you got the Destruction Sphere). It also has Wakka's bright blue Official Ball, at a point where your primary weapon for Wakka is most likely either wrapped in iron rings or encrusted in Spikes of Doom, but it wouldn't be out of character for him to have brought a spare ball for practice; hard to do that when a bad catch will turn you to stone.
  • Prior to the first Blitzball tournament, everyone talks about how the Luca Goers are the best team and they always win every tournament. However, once you get past the first tournament and start playing for real, you find that's not the case. In terms of player stats, the Al Bhed Psyches are by far the best team and the Goers are kind of middling. It raises the question of how the Aurochs were able to beat the Psyches in the first tournament, especially when their star player Tidus was off trying to rescue Yuna.
  • The thing that made Final Fantasy X different from the other Final Fantasy games (besides the Sphere Grid system) was the ability to switch Yuna's seven guardians between the three battle line spots to the four reserve spots. Even though the cast have valiantly fought together side by side in cutscenes, if the three main battle contenders are KO'ed, then it doesn't matter how strong or healthy your reserve members are, the entire world is doomed because they couldn't be bothered to toss you over a Phoenix Down.....

Final Fantasy X-2

• Final Fantasy X-2:
  • It doesn't matter which dressphere Yuna and co. have currently equipped, barring rare exceptions usually involving Songstress dressphere they are always shown in their base dresspheres during cutscenes, including those that take place immediately before and after the battle. And speaking of Songstress, during said cutscenes Yuna or Rikku will equip it even if it's not on their currently used Garment Grid.
  • This gets much worse in International and HD Remaster versions, where you can capture and use creatures in battle instead of girls. So during cutscene you'll see Yuna and others dashing into the battle only for a trio of a Red Element, a Chocobo and a Tonberry immediately taking their place when the battle starts.
  • If you have a Chocobo in your currently active party, Calli's quest for searching for one for her during Chapter 2 comes out as a bit nonsensical. Though this can be partially excused by the fact that such Chocobo is not suitable for riding and is used to its owners and not strangers.

Final Fantasy XII

• Final Fantasy XII: Some of the Bestiary entries don't accurately describe the enemies they're about. For example, some of the piranha-type enemies' entries describe them as being aggressive, yet the actual enemies won't attack until the player attacks them.

Final Fantasy XIII

• In Final Fantasy XIII characters seemingly pick their cutscene weapons at random.

Final Fantasy XIV

• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • At the end the A Realm Reborn story, the Player Character is forced into exile to Ishgard during the events of Heavensward following their being framed in the sultana's death. Outside of the story, however, the player is free to travel between Ishgard and the rest of Eorzea. This is later explained as the leaders of Limsa Lominsa and Gridania reassuring everyone that your character is a-okay and the citizens of Ul'dah left in the dark and too scared to let the Crystal Braves know of your existence.
  • Fantastic Racism is a huge part of the game's backdrop, racism against beastmen in particular is exceptionally bad, which Little Bit Beastly races can get away with being seen as more "civilized". Shadowbringers threw a hard wrench into this by introducing the Hrothgar as a playable race, who are completely anthropomorphic cat men, yet the story doesn't change at all to acknowledge the fact that Hrothgar fit pretty much every description of beastmen (except for having a primal they worship and being less verboise than your average person), and you face no more adversity on your path to becoming a worshipped hero than a more human character would.

Non-Mainline Entries

• In World of Final Fantasy, even when participating in an intervention battle in which Reynn and Lanna are taking the place of one of the champions, it is still possible to summon that champion if you have their medal equipped.
• Final Fantasy Tactics:
  • Dying enemies either turn into crystals or drop an equipment box if they've been dead long enough. In cutscenes, bodies will hang around long after they should have changed into the aforementioned items.
  • The first battle against Miluda has the Instant-Win Condition of defeating her, at which point Ramza will call for the others to surrender, claiming that he'll spare them if they do. He'll still say this if the player has elected to kill all of Miluda's minions first.

---