The Enlightenment Point (EP) system, intended to be the Global version's answer to making latent abilities more accessible, initially flopped harder than any Global-exclusive feature in the game. The system was originally intended to inject new life into old units by giving them new abilities. While Japan's version opted for a mission requirement of beating a high-level boss in 20 turns, the Global version decided to turn it into more Level Grinding. The problem is that it takes 5,000 Enlightenment Points to unlock one latent ability, originally costing cost 1 million Gil total. In contrast, the free daily only dropped 150 EP. The first round of backlash increased this to 250, they added 6,000 points worth of Keys to one event, but most of it was gated behind high-end rewards. If you did the free daily quest every day, it took a little more than a month to unlock one ability for one character. To add insult to injury, this rework came weeks after their announcement that they would rework the 3rd Anniversary rewards for rank and login days, angering veterans of the game even further. While it did help take the load off of new players, the EP system was originally implemented at the expense of long-time players and defeated the purpose of latent abilities. Instead of giving their older units more power, people just hoarded their EP and keys to unlock abilities for their favorite characters or meta units that they were already using. The system flopped so hard that even after the increases in EP drops, the team promised to implement significant changes. Those changes included Final Fantasy-based units coming with their latent abilities already unlocked (starting with Archmage Kefka and Assassin Shadow).
In its most current form, the system has evolved into another enhancement system for Global Original units, which effectively turned some players against the system. In Japan, latent abilities were used to inject new life into older units, like Dark Knight Cecil, Ignis, or Jecht. The Global version is much more sparing and much more conservative with their Latents, with some characters getting Latents and most of the others being skipped. This is made worse with Ability Awakenings all but disappearing from the Global version as well, with the unit enhancements only coming if the unit in question gets a Neo Vision Awakening.
EX Bonus, debuting in JP's 8th Anniversary, became reviled the instant it came out. This happened because of several factors. The first and main factor is that this enhancements is locked behind two layers of gacha: You need fragments to enhance these unitsHow many? Besides the usual 350 to get an unit to EX3, you need 800 more to get all bonuses. So what once asked for the equivalent to eight units, which people were once saying it was "greedy" for Alim standards when the NV rarity came out, is now three times worse, while not even providing an "Unit of Choice" system for older units once they reach EX3, and you can't choose which enhancements you get as they're picked at random by the game. Which is bad when only three of these are new abilities and enhancements for these units, with the rest relegated to base stat increases. The second factor is that most of these units get no relevant enhancements at all, with cases like Oracle Maiden Lunafreya where she got nothing of value out of these, or cases like Akstar & Cleome (whose EX Bonus came along with their Master Crown enhancements) where the enhancements almost put them in competition with Premium NV units. The third factor is that this came right along with Neo Vision+ units, the very new rarity that upended (if not outright damaged) the game's meta in the 8th Anniversary, itself causing its own instance of Broken Base among players and making any enhancements aimed at DPS units useless for the time being. Many question if there was even a need for such enhancement system, with some calling Alim out for becoming too greedy with the game if they want to force people to pull so much while giving nothing in return, and some even equating it to War Of The Visions's reviled Reincarnation system, accusing Alim of repeating the same thing they did when they introduced the Neo Vision rarity in the first place by bringing disliked elements from that game into FFBE. It's unanimous consensus however that EX Bonus is by far the worst enhancement system ever implemented in the game.
Battle Mechanics
One that can be frustrating at very high-level play is elemental affinities when Dual Wielding. Unlike most Final Fantasy games, using a weapon with an elemental affinity will apply that affinity to both attacks when dual wielding, even if the other ordinarily lacks it. Even if the player uses a skill that ordinarily applies a different element, 50% of the damage will still apply the original element. Since some of the best weapons in the game are elemental, such as Excalibur, and the game encourages the use of weapons which match an attacker's imperil, you may suddenly find your best attacker is flailing uselessly against something that has immunity to an element. This has become less prevalent as time passes, as newer units have the ability to imbue their own elements while wielding normal-typed weapons, and the variety of powerful normal-type weapons has vastly increased.
Mana Burn is common among Global-exclusive bosses, much to the chagrin of the community. It doesn't help that the main offender, Hasiko, was issued six times - two of which were limited-time event trials. Even with significantly better MP batteries, most people consider bosses with MP attacks to be a huge pain once the initial salvo finishes. It certainly didn't help that for a 3-month stretch (from October to December 2018), Gumi's approach to "add challenge" was to stick pre-emptive Mana Burn on it and make a no-item or no-Limit Burst mission.
While extremely rare, any appearance of break resistance on enemies is widely hated. It first appeared on the Ifrit Raid during the first Final Fantasy XIV event, which could very well decimate the whole party when players failed to apply the break. The latest appearance of the mechanic is in Behemoth K's Fallen trial, the hardest trial pre-Neo Vision era. Since its physical and magical damage hits extremely hard, break is pretty much required, but since Behemoth K has a 30% chance to resist each stat break, those who are capable of dualcasting (or more) breaks like Steadfast Soldier Machina and Seeker of Freedom Vaan are pretty much required, otherwise units are pretty much guaranteed to die.
Single-target auto-cover is now considered one of the worst passives in the game. In addition to having no control over who the unit chooses to cover, their cover overrides the cover abilities of the unit. If an auto-cover unit chooses to cover a tank that was covering against all physical or magical damage, prepare to get wiped. It's so bad that some ability awakening actually nerf or completely eliminate auto-cover. On the other hand, it has some niche usefulness in the arena, since it breaks chains and increases party survivability on account of damage being capped.
CG Protagonists (Also some Esper Units note Infernal Fire Rain, Mystical Ice Lasswell, Draconian Princess Fina (through a GL-exclusive buff) and Umbral Dragon Dark Fina, plus Neo Sol (who happens to be capable of chaining his LB with Umbral Dragon Dark Fina), and in JP Neo Rain once he got his EX Ability) and their Unleashed Potential ability, which gives them a full Limit Burst gauge at the first turn or when revived, made Arena a literal hell for non-spending players. Whales are often seen with multiple of these units, which they have no shame on fielding in Arena against you. In Global, if an unit in Arena has a full LB gauge, it will use the Limit Burst. If they get a turn before you do, expect to be chained to death. The worst part of it all is that Gumi took notice of it when Radiant Lightning first landed and "supposedly" fixed it, but once Warrior of Light Bartz came, the code came back with him and Gumi just didn't bother fixing it, leaving players miffed and bitter about an Arena that already had problems with teams of Lilith (and eventually Lucas) counter-chaining parties to death. To rub further salt in the wound, the Japanese version doesn't have this AI quirk; starting a turn with a full LB gauge doesn't guarantee that the CPU will chain a player to death in Arena there. This has become a bad problem for GL players, to the point Arena nowadays is more seen as an annoyance rather than anything fun, even after Gumi took the reward changes from JP and fused it with GL's current rewards.
The JP side started getting its own flavor of Arena cancer with Conche and Belmera arriving as units that have AoE Bolting Strike chaining as their normal attack. It took a mere bugfixing for whales to realize they can just fit the two with Auto Berserk and dual wield (and an Aurora Scarf to double the amount of attacks for good measure) to become able to win a fight before the opponent even gets a turn. JP players were obviously not happy with this. Fortunately, just the following month, Alim gave Sieghard an NVA and reworked his kit, including making his Brave Stance (an ability he already starts with as an unit) now cover the whole party, which turned him into the physical version of Shoreline Fina & Daisy and made possible to survive such onslaught... but made it WORSE for players, making first-turn wins impossible (as Sieghard soaks all physical damage for the first turn and whales will be smart enough to also bring Shoreline Fina & Daisy to soak magic damage, and thanks to a bug their pre-emptive Cover is undispellable), and completely screwing players who don't have access to units or gear with Charm immunity (as Sieghard's attack is now an AoE AMoE chain that inflicts that status), and if a player has Sieghard, no matter how much HP Sieghard has, he's not capable of surviving even two of Belmera or Conche slamming all of the chaining at him. The only way to bypass the tanks is bringing units that can AoE chain defense-ignoring attacks (Red XIII, Untamed Wolf Edel, Nerine), which allow players to go past the defenses and straight for Belmera/Conche. Needless to say, players were not happy with JP Arena getting cancer levels on par with GL, and Arena attendance dropped sharply in light of this.
The crowner to what amounts to Arena cancer in JP has to be Fenrir Knight Riesz. After her rework, her normal attack was replaced by a semi-chaining, AoE evoke attack. Evoke attacks are untyped and thus impossible to cover against, evade or mitigate. Whales or players who are not new to Trials of Mana events often deploy two or three copies of FKR on Arena, preferably geared with Auto-Berserk, Dual Wield and an Aurora Scarf, for the sole purpose of effortlessly laying waste to teams without pressing a single button. If you happen to meet a team with two or more of her and your team is not massively tanky and Riesz's team gets a turn first, you're guaranteed to lose your winning streak.
High Summoner Braska and Summoner Lenna have LBs that can do considerable damage, but with a twist: It also installs a field that decreases damage for their element on both sides of the arena. This is not a serious problem if it's a single burst and they're the last units to go (and both units have chaining LBs), but when presented to a multi-round battle, players are greeted with the fact that the field stays between rounds... which means players are stuck with bad damage thanks to how Alim planned Lenna and Braska out, making them look bad in comparison to the other evokers. Lots of JP players sent complaints to Alim about the field being one of the worst ideas implemented into evoker units, and they seem to be aware of the issue, but it took quite a while for them to even touch Lenna's abilities, eventually using her Master Crown enhancements to fix her field and make her usable in her base form.
In score-based events like Dark Visions and Clash of Wills, the behavior of AoE attacks vs single-target attacks can be frustrating. If a unit queues up several single-target attacks through multicast, all of those attacks will connect, regardless of how much overkill it is. AoE attacks, however, automatically cut off if the target is considered dead (0% or below), which can seriously mess up chains when trying to mix in a finisher. For those events, enemies often die fairly easily and the overkill is the main component of the high score, forcing players to find units that have compatible attacks even though others would work if not for the interaction. Alim eventually fixed this problem, after taking a long time to do so.
Counterattacks are also the bane of Dark Visions for the same reason. A unit activating its counterattack is likely to outright kill whatever you're fighting in most cases, and the only way to mitigate that danger is to either avoid breaking the boss's defenses or deliberately avoiding imbuing the unit with the right element until the kill turn, which isn't always practical. The only situation in which counters won't trigger if if the unit fully resists the attack through elemental absorption, and while most DV bosses use elemental attacks almost exclusively, if said unit evades an attack with Mirage, that trumps your resistance and triggers the counter.
Similarly, bosses that give themselves permanent damage mitigation buffs at the start of the battle are just as annoying and made specifically to kill your single-turn damage score. It says something when the solution for your problem is bounce Reraise into the boss, then kill it so that it gets reborn without the mitigation buff, allowing for the player to properly do damage to them, which makes the fight more of a chore than a challenge.
Events
Wave Battle events are hated by the community. Despite being a Global-exclusive event type based on fan ideas note similar to an endless fight, Wave Battles have been implemented as a poorly-disguised, watered-down reskin of other event types. In its first form, it offered a long grind for replacement-level equipment (similar to other failed Global-exclusive events), giving no point to running the event past its initial missions. Starting with the 2019 Chinese Year event, they added a raid summon. Its variants (Elemental and Story Battles) are much more well-received because they have more milestone rewards similar to Mog King events. In contrast, true Wave Battle events have little to offer aside from cactuars and gil.
As of the Black Friday event, they have decided to add these rewards to the trial portion, converting it into a weaker Chamber of the Vengeful. Even then, the grind for the 5-star EX is still annoying because of the constant re-gearing to clear an easy boss.
Steel Castle Melfikya, a weapon enhancement dungeon where players battle through ten floors to imbue their weapons with stat increases or other passive abilities, is agreed to be one of the worst implemented systems in the game. After beating each floor, you can choose between one of three enhancements, with the weapon only able to hold three at maximum. The chance of better enhancements increases as you move to higher floors. However, most of the time, the effort doesn't yield a good result, either because the game gives players the stat increase they want with horrible modifiers in deeper levels (1% ATK for a katana in 7th floor) or flat-out gives players enhancements they don't need (15% ATK increase on a MAG-focused rod). Even worse, the enhancements players don't want have chances of coming back on the next floor or arriving more than once on the same floor. Some people choose not to enhance their weapons simply because the effort is too luck-based and time-consuming. Alim (and eventually Gumi after a long delay) started taking steps to make the Steel Castle more enticing, making it last longer, increasing the chance to obtain rare passives, adding better passives and eliminating some of the bad ones, and eventually in JP, just making the event permanent.
Event Points (EP) have evolved into a despised system in Japan. When they overhauled the reward system for King Mog events (starting with CG Warrior of Light's event), the highest tier reached as far as 100,000 EP, even with a one-time only special EP battle and easier NRG resources. The tickets, which were the main draw, were all shifted over to the Event Point tier, often being locked behind the higher milestones. Alim would make things better with time, but the arrival of Neo Visions caused a dial-back they had to work upon again as the event became even grindier thanks to the Forticite additions to the Mog King shop.
After a brief rocky period during Wave Battle events (which are more difficult than traditional raids or Mog King events), Global fixed this system somewhat. Although they still nerfed the amount of Rare Summon Tickets given and locked them behind the EvP system, they kept the UoC ticket in the main rewards and put the second 5-star ticket at 60k EvP. While it was still challenging, it was much more manageable than 100k. More importantly, they increased the EvP dropped from 400 to 600. This makes the grind much easier than it was before, let alone in Japan.
Brave Insignia grinding is yet another type of grind that people hate because of how poorly designed it was, in both JP and GL. For context, Brave Insignia is a material needed to upgrade the NV and NVA units' Static Brave Abilities, gained by clearing Challenge Dungeons several times, with Base NV units usually needing 180 of these (60 per ability, Base NV units usually come with three) and NVA units 225 of these (45 per ability, NVA units usually get five). The problems people find with this system are: 1) The upgrade only applies to a single unit, so if one feels they need a duplicate of a certain unit, the grind is doubled, 2) The type of insignias are different per unit batches. Gumi tried to mitigate this problem with giving GL Original units the same Insignia to upgrade their abilities and giving more access without the daily for the GL Insignias through Daily Coin Exchange updates, but 3) The Challenge dungeon has a "Break Bar" mechanic (itself considered a Scrappy Mechanic by players who tend to just work around it most of the time) that makes the the boss harder to damage as long as the bar is active unless they were hit by a specific type of weapon, or certain skills that increase break damage from certain types of weapons. To make it worse, Global's first two challenge dungeons were notoriously despised for overinflating the Break Gauge, giving players a far harder time to clear the dungeon than the ones coming from JP, and causing some to not even bother with it, and to make it worse, 4) The dungeons are time-limited and in a rotation, giving players a false sense of urgency to grind for them in case they pull units that need certain type of insignias. These dungeons do occasionally come back, but the fact that they are still time-limited remains. Some people thought that the Latent Ability system, despite its rocky start and relative irrelevance as of late (as Gumi basically abandoned the system and the Series Boss Battles that came with it), should've been how the Brave Insignia system was implemented, because while it was gated behind materials to unlock the grind (Enlightenment Keys to enter dungeons with different tiered rewards), they were available all the time, the currency needed to unlock the abilities (Enlightenment Points) were universal, and the abilities were unlocked to every copy of the unit automatically.
Summons
Over in Japan, the Summon Fest pool has become so hated that Global players were worried about its implementation. This system was intended to create a new pool for rainbows - ironically, a commonly-requested feature for Global that culls most of the bad and obsolete 5-star bases out of the pool. Rainbow rates and on-banner rates are higher on Summon Fest banners than regular banners, but all Summon Fest units are limited to Summon Fest banners only with no rate-ups for off-banners. Unlike the polarizing 7-star awakening process, which saw similar community outrage that was quelled by the introduction of more Anti-Frustration Features, the Summon Fest is universally reviled because it marks the phasing out of the Unit of Choice system. note The community largely accepts this to be the only thing keeping the 7-star awakening system afloat. Fest units are excluded from the Select Ticket summon, and there are no current plans to create a new Select Ticket for the pool. The attempted reduction of Unit of Choice tickets on the Global side caused one of the two largest player riots in the history of the game, and the Japanese community took it as badly. Nevertheless, they expanded the Fest system to the remaining Final Fantasy games' CG protagonists and even non-CG units. The backlash got so strong at one point that one of Alim's presenters cried on stream. When they figured out how they would implement the system, it ended in the irreparable erosion of the community.
The system wound up being massively changed in Global, exchanging a slightly lower on-banner rate for the ability to UoC prisms. This, in effect, saved the game, especially after mixed reviews for the game's sequel, War of the Visions. When the Neo Vision tier of units reached Global, Gumi then decided to scrap whatever was left of the Fest idea by making every single non-NV unit UoC-able.
The Japanese version of Final Fantasy XV's Steyliff Grove event was the straw that broke the camel's back. At first, it introduced CG Noctis, who split a banner with Aldore King Rain. Not only was this the first banner split between two Fest units, it was the first time in the game's history that a banner featured an unit that didn't receive a bonus in its Mog King event. The decision saw huge backlash, but the true storm began after Lunafreya's release: three days after the start of the event, they announced a surprise banner for Lunafreya - the first of its kind, featuring the first non-CG Fest unit - splitting the banner with White Lily Dark Fina. What was an experimental new banner system turned into a perfect storm of negativity, with every bad move being implemented at the same time. It caused many players, including high-ranking whales, to quit the game altogether. The producer, Kei Hirono, publicly admitted that the way they handled the event was a mistake, and Global's version of the banner had Noctis and Lunafreya on one banner, albeit with its own problem as Gumi was initially struggling to find a balance with the new banners as they ditched the Fest Unit system for a different idea in order to avert the backlash coming to Global. While there were initial promises after to slow the system down, they never did. Up until the coming of Neo Visions, every banner in Japan fell under the Summon Fest pool, and even though Alim did eventually take measures to lessen the damage, such as giving unit Prisms for free, the damage was already done and to this day the Japanese server sort of limps onnote Although in a better state than Gumi was by the time of Global's Fourth Anniversary.
In Japan, the gacha box system for the Dragon Quest XI collaboration events is heavily despised by players to the point that some say it's worse than the Summon Fest. The step-ups only feature the villains; Jasper Unbound, Mondregon, and Great Dragon. The four featured heroes (Eleven, Veronica, Serena, and Erik) can only be obtained through the silver and gold gacha boxes which can be opened through their respective keys in the step-up. The silver box contains four copies of the hero units, 4 copies of 10% trust moogles, and 5 copies of 5% trust moogles, all of which are obtainable once per pull and only once. The gold boxes, however, have unlimited amount of pulls you can do to randomly obtain one of the four heroes. Not only does the system lock the heroes behind another layer of gacha, it also forces those who want all units to spend money for lapis to do the step-ups (as opposed to spending summon tickets). To make matters worse, this event came after the second Kingdom Hearts' collaboration event. Most people saw the system as an obvious way for Alim to make as much money as possible. While collabs with popular franchises or popular Summon Fest characters usually fall in or around the Top 10 most grossing apps, the Dragon Quest XI event failed to break the top 50 in a country where its home franchise is a cultural phenomenon.
When they brought the event over to Global, Gumi's changes initially made things worse. While they removed everything but the featured heroes (and Erik) from the Silver Key summon and made the Gold Key a limited-time UoC ticket, they increased the cost of Silver Keys from 1 to 5. The step-up was only limited to one lap (as opposed to JP's 3-lap limit), the banner had none of the positive qualities of the Summon Fest, and the one lap available didn't even give enough Gold Keys to summon a Hero unit, which forced those who wanted to UoC the units of their choice to pull on the banner's 10+1 summon. The prisms and STMR Moogles went into the Summon Coin shop, costing the standard rate of 50 coins (which usually costs 25,000 Lapis). This event also came after Global's version of Kingdom Hearts and the Katy Perry collaboration, attracting even more ire for being the third limited-time banner in two weeks. While Global's box gacha saw debate over how it benefited smaller spenders, it was objectively worse for whales. In Japan, 125,000 Lapis guaranteed 4 copies of each hero, 5 extra random heroes, and a wealth of Trust Moogles. In Global, the same amount guaranteed 2 copies of each hero, their prisms, and an exclusive 50% STMR for each unit. Even worse, the silver key system didn't benefit free-to-players much since Gumi only provided enough silver keys to pull for one unit at the highest EP milestone. It was counterproductive for KM currency farming because the unit bonus would be too late to be usable and it essentially reduced their value into TMR fodder. All of those didn't include Serena's kit adjustments, unlike Eleven and Veronica's which made them still usable, were nerfs so huge that it put her on the earlier 7* healers' tier. Many considered JP's system to be much better than what Global had, with some even putting this event as a contender of the worst event in FFBE history.
The second collaboration (which added Erik and Jasper Unbound, along with the other units) kept most of the box system that Japan got, along with giving players unlimited step-up laps. The main difference for the hero gacha was that they decided to keep the Gold Key as a UoC ticket for the heroes. For the villains, they combined them into a 3-way split between Mordegon, Jasper Unbound, and the Lord of Shadows, increasing on-banner rates from 1.5% to 3% instead of having two separate banners. At first, players panned the new system, but after they revealed the increased on-banner rates and increased the free Silver Key drops from 1 to 5, it helped quell the outrage. The event is actually seen as a success.
The experimental 2-step step-ups have drawn massive ire among the community. Starting with the Black Friday banner, these banners eschew the benefits of a traditional 5-step step-up for a guaranteed 5-star pull with no rate-ups at the end. The safety net is in the form of "flexible tickets", given after every step or 5,000 Lapis pull. The main problem with these is that they effectively increased the price of a guaranteed banner 5-star from 25,000 Lapis to 36,000. A UoC of a banner unit is 72,000 Lapis, as opposed to the 50k seen from a limited unit. The community views these step-ups as barely a step above 5k pulls as is, and the increased prices for guaranteed units and inability to UoC a first copy have driven some to say these changes are worse than the Summon Fest. The Christmas event set the guarantee back to 25k, making them at least tolerable, but the community still prefers the 25k step-ups like Magitek Warrior Terra and Regis had. Gumi decided to scrap this idea after a month.
The change to raid summons, when ported to Global from the Vanquish Lady Lilith Raid Event, enraged both veteran and new players. Raid events now behave like King Mog events in that banner units give bonus drops to raid currency, but the bonus is a fraction of the Mog standard (the highest is 60% for a banner 7*, as opposed to 200% in a Mog event), while the summoning cost for box summons is doubled and the summoning cost for the normal raid summon is quadrupled (both now cost 400 raid currency per 1 item pull). The changes don't benefit new players since the cost increase makes farming for gil and cactuars much harder, while veteran players can still earn enough raid currency without a single on-banner unit to clear all the boxes while only getting a few pulls from the normal raid summon. There's no adjustment to raid currency earned, either, so to make up for the disparity in summoning cost, you'd need 300% in bonus units. Or, to put that another way, five 7* units. What makes this even worse is that Gumi gave no announcement for the changes despite editing the event-related banner announcement five times. The fact that Gumi chose to not change the infinite pool with the Neo Edel raid, which Alim changed in JP and made Raid dungeons far more alluring there, made it far worse for players on Global, who were already suffering with the Cryst drought caused by Gumi's refusal to bring Story Events while pushing more and more for the Power Creep. Meanwhile Alim in JP made the Cryst Caves permanent for players who want to farm, and turned their raids into a more viable source of Crysts and Forticites.
