As with any Final Fantasy game, some of the sidequests are just a massive pain to complete.
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Beast Tribes and their quests
- Some of the later Ixali beast tribe quests are brutally difficult due to the severe handicaps that the player is imposed with when crafting airship parts. Firstly, you have to use the crafting gloves the Ixali give you that are at level 1, which means you're already handicapped with your performance. Second, past the first set of quests you are always required to make the parts in high quality, and some quests have parts that are extremely difficult to make high quality. The handicaps and difficulties for some of the quests is hard for newbie crafters (since their gear isn't strong and they lack skills to make crafting easier) and veteran crafters (the big handicaps prevents them from performing optimally). While free company actions, materia, and food can slightly make the quests easier, it's only by a small margin. It wasn't until patch 2.5 that the more difficult Ixali quests were toned down, and even then they are still much more difficult than their suggested levels indicate, with the later quests being outright undoable at those levels even with all the variables and luck on your side — unless you're willing to try over and over again with a single-digit HQ percentage until you eventually succeed. It used to be even worse, because the status effect the game applies to let you use the crafting facilities that are necessary to craft airship parts would also randomly apply a debuff to you for no reason (such as lowering the amount of CP you have to use skills with or disabling cross-class skills) - and, if you were trying to craft multiple components to complete several quests at once, new debuffs would stack with previous ones, requiring you to cancel out the previous effect before starting on the next set of items.
- Unlocking the Moogle Beast Tribe in Heavensward is one of the most disliked sidequests in the game on account of how long it takes. The player has to do just shy of 20 normal quests just to unlock the blue marked quest that unlocks them, and the quests are all very repetitive (a Moogle goes off and gets into trouble, or a Dragoon has you go around and kill Dragons/gather items), which drags out the process for getting to the point where you can unlock the Beast Tribe quests. By the time the player is done, they finally unlock the ability to do the Beast Tribe quests, which itself takes a lot of time due how Beast Tribe quests are designed (usually taking several weeks to fully finish). Worse, these are the Churning Mists Moogles, one of the single most disliked group of characters in the game, meaning many players just never do them because of all those factors.
- Almost the entirety of the side quests given by the Churning Mists Moogles. Not only is the map massive in scale, but you'll always have to go so far out of your way just to get to your objectives, and heaven help you if you try to do most of the quests before you gain the ability to fly in the zone. To top if off, most of the side quests are from Moogles who are either too lazy to do work themselves or are too cowardly to fight the monsters and ask you to do it in their stead.
- The Vanu Vanu Beast Tribe quests are commonly viewed as the most frustrating beast tribe in the game (in terms of doing their daily quests) on account of the location. The Sea of Clouds is one of the largest zones in the game, and like the other beast tribes, you'll need to often go to far off parts of the map to complete them. The issue is that the only Aethercrystal locations are located on the far left side of the map, while a number of the quests are on the far right sides, meaning you spend more time flying across the zone then doing the quests. Combined with the zone having a confusing map because of how the islands are put on it, it can take a while to get just three quests done, meaning a number of players just never bother to do them in comparison to the Gnath.
FATEs
- All of the FATEs in Halfstone and the Sapsa Spawning Grounds at the westernmost portion of Western La Noscea have the bad combination of spawning in the middle of a ton of regular enemies at the same level and respawning way too quickly to be reasonable - less than two minutes after one ends, regardless of whether it ran out of time or you completed it successfully, either it will be back or an equivalent will start up (e.g. turn back the combination of "Gauging North Tidegate" and "Breaching North Tidegate", and the game will immediately start on "Gauging South Tidegate"). The absolute worst of the bunch, however, is "Watch Your Tongue", which is set in the middle of two separate sets of equivalently-leveled enemies, simply respawns into itself after a minute or two, and covers an area of the map where at least one main-story quest objective and several sidequest objectives are placed, giving it the dishonor of being one of the few FATEs that actively interferes with attempts to play other parts of the game.
- To a lesser extent is "The Eyes Have It" in the Coerthas Central Highlands, for several reasons: it being one of the few raid boss-style FATEs in the 2.0 areas, and the one whose target, Steropes, has a mountain of HP that generally requires half of the allotted 30 minutes to take down; his instant-kill area of effect attack, which when he uses he likes to use a lot, and which for some reason only got the charge bar saying that he's preparing for it, and not the usual marker actually showing its area of effect (and thus how far you need to go to avoid it), until patch 5.3; the sheer number of "Second Eyes" he has as backup, who will constantly pelt you with boulders from afar, and even once they've been killed will all respawn in one group after a few minutes to overwhelm you again; the FATE's location also placing you in the middle of a group of Chincillas, who will aggro on you if you get too close due to the FATE bringing you back down to their level range; its placement putting it in the way of several sidequests and leves for that part of the Highlands; and the simple fact that, in the process of dodging the constant stream of shit from four or five different enemies at once, it's incredibly easy to accidentally pull Steropes out of the FATE's area, whereupon unless there's someone else able to pull his attention he will lose interest, run back to the center, and instantly regenerate his far-too-high HP. On the other hand, it rightfully doesn't spawn very often, and if you do complete it you get an absolutely adorable Pudgy Puk minion.
Gold Saucer Sidequests
- Chocobo Challenges: you race chocobos like normal, except now you have designated rivals and the tracks will have set gimmicks for that challenge. The first few are easy as long as you been training your bird, but the very last one is an absolute nightmare since you have to beat three rivals and the track takes place in the Black Shroud, which has a lot of turns, malboros that can reduce your speed, imps that can steal your items, and mandragoas that almost perfectly blend in with the scenery. One rival in particular, Max Power, will always be ahead of everyone else and you'll likely never beat him (even if your chocobo has perfect stats) unless you get extremely lucky with items and the weather being in your favor.
- Getting anything in the Gold Saucer is a headache, due to the absurd prices and the relatively low payouts for the mini-games. It's genuinely faster to rely on the related weekly challenges in your Challenge Log (which, tellingly, mainly consist of playing minigames and not winning particularly big at them).
- You could try your luck at the weekly Cactpot Lottery and hope you hit it big, but like any lottery, it's all based on luck. The only upside is that unlike real-world lotteries, you're guaranteed to win more than you paid... just not much more. The odds of hitting the jackpot in the weekly drawing are abysmal - you've got to guess a randomized four-digit number, with every number in the right order like Powerball jackpots in real life. At most, you have a 3-in-10000 chance of hitting it, or 0.03%. And this lottery only gets drawn once a week on Saturday night/Sunday morning, so you can't repeatedly try your luck. There are players who have played the Cactpot Lottery every week since its inception and never hit the jackpot. Which wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't in-game achievements and a unique ring tied to hitting the jackpot. Getting there as soon as the drawing is done is also a good way to earn MGP, since you get an "early-bird bonus" for playing early, and it always draws a massive crowd of players that briefly turn the entire floor into a Cloudcuckooland of chaotic energy. But it's still an achievement that you're unlikely to ever get, even if you do everything you can. Good luck!
- "Any Way the Wind Blows" is a GATE that, unlike other events in the Gold Saucer, is completely luck-based. You have to avoid Typhon's snort attack five times in a row in order to win the game. How do you win? Pick a spot and pray Typhon doesn't hit there. You can move around a bit before you're rooted in place and hope that you aren't caught in the snort — not that moving around helps any, as you have no hint whatsoever as to what attack he'll use or where it'll hit until after you're rooted. It's entirely possible, through luck of the draw, to win this event without doing anything. If you get hit, you're eliminated from the game. Naturally, there's achievements tied to doing well in this event.
- "Vase Off" was a Stealth-Based Mission in a game not at all designed for stealth, and the NPCs you had to avoid are poorly marked and nigh-impossible to identify. Despite being ostensibly skill-based, it was possibly the only GATE more despised than "Any Way the Wind Blows", until being removed in 4.4.
- Mahjong in the Gold Saucer is the actual, real-life game of Mahjong, which at least allows you to form a strategy, learn the rules, and understand the win-loss conditions. But it's also the most despised challenge that can pop up in one's list. Mahjong usually takes multiple hours of playtime to earn enough to make it worth the trouble. For many western players, the game is not something they're likely to know the rules for; it's like being dropped into a seat at a poker table without ever having seen a playing card. There is a tutorial for how the game is played, but it's not a very good one, basically just running through the rules while doing little to show you how it works.
- "The Slice Is Right" is essentially "Any Way the Wind Blows" without as many luck-based elements, but there's still enough of them to grate on someone's nerves — particularly the second-to-last phase, where Yojimbo sets out three cups, where which one you pick gets you either nothing, a pile of MGP to double your earnings, or knocked off the stage by his pet Daigoro. Like Typhon's attacks in his GATE, which cup holds which is entirely luck-based — you have technically better odds of being able to finish it at this point, at least in as far as you can actually calculate your chances of success or failure, but the fact that one choice out of the three available immediately knocks you out of the game still makes it incredibly annoying. Also, while most other GATEs have the decency to shake things up by leading into a different GATE after one repeat at most, once "The Slice is Right" starts showing up in the rotation it has a strange tendency to never stop showing up several times in a row over the course of at least two hours, only giving breaks at the turn of each hour simply because it is literally set never to pop up at that time. Patch 6.2 mitigated this by setting it so "The Slice Is Right" only shows up once per hour, but then 6.3 undid it.
Relic Quests and Equivalents
- The process of obtaining your relic. While getting your relic at launch was tough (mostly due to Titan), as time progressed, it wasn't so bad. Getting your Zenith only requires that you get three Mists using tomestones. Then we get the Atma step, which requires you to farm FATEs in twelve specific areas using your Zenith weapon. Before Patch 2.5, the drop rate for Atma's was abysmally low. If you were lucky, you would have it in a few days. RNG absolutely hates your guts? Weeks, or even months. Then, you have the Animus step, which requires you to do a total of nine books that has you defeat a total of 900 enemies, do 27 dungeons, FATEs, and Guildleves. These weren't so bad except for the FATEs part. Novus wasn't so bad, it just required you to give up lots of money if you wanted a perfect weapon, but there are ways around it. Neither was the Nexus step, which requires you to gain a total of 2000 "points" of light by doing random instances in the game. It may take a while, but you would see a slow and steady progress. Last but not least, you have the Zodiac questline, which sends you to do 4 quests for random NPCs that require you to farm specific dungeons for drops that you have a small chance of obtaining. It is essentially the Atma version of dungeons and obtain crafted HQ items (and ONLY HQ) and certain Desynth materials. You will also need to farm some Soldiery and GC seals but those are arguably the easiest parts of the Zodiac questline. If you manage to get through all this, you either have sheer dumb luck or have a lot of time on your hands.
- 3.15 introduced an equivalent version to the Relic Questline, the Anima Weapon. The 1st step being similar to the Zodiac Atma quest, but this time you need 18 of them. This step can be skipped by players who have the Zodiac Zeta weapon and can be done with any class this time. Once you have done that and got the i170 weapon, then getting it Awakened is just a simple marathon of 10 dungeons. But the step after that hammers it into players' heads that they have grown too complacent with the nerfs to the previous relic chain and make up for it by requiring a large assortment of items, up to and including items that need to be crafted by specialist crafters (and as a result are liable to be expensive). The non-crafted items also need a large amount of various currencies and are themselves needed in large quantities. The result being a grand total of 100 items needed for one single relic (and 96 of those being needed to trade for the other 4). And given the timetable for the patches, even with the first phase being skipped, the odds of getting the Anima weapon to a point where it is on par with the Gordian weapons before 3.2 are slim at best.
- While the Shadowbringers relic quest line has been made overall easier, one of the last steps requires getting eighteen of a specific type of crystal. All of them can be obtained through Fates, the Bozjan Front, and Alliance Raids, but where it becomes an issue is the second part of the quest where you must obtain two different sets of crystals. The issue is that both sets are divided into different areas; one set can only be obtained by running either the Heavensward Alliance Raids, or by doing FATEs in Gyr Abania, while the other set is obtained from either the Stormblood Alliance Raids, or by doing FATEs in Othard. The issue is that FATEs, the most time-efficient method for the previous set, lack a one-hundred percent drop rate, meaning a player may need to grind a lot of different FATEs to even get a single drop, between two different areas complete with three zones each. Due to this on top of low drop chances in Bozja, it's seen as the worst part of the quest line and many hope it gets fixed to remove the excess grinding.
- The steps for obtaining a relic weapon in Pagos are a lot more grindy compared to Anemos. Unlike Anemos, you can't even begin your relic building until you hit level 25. Once you can begin, you're required to grind for aether that is obtained either randomly from random monsters, or a guarantee from Notorious Monsters. Once you fill up the bar, you have to find the crystal forge that can convert your aether to frosted crystals, which requires jumping off a cliff, sneaking past a dragon, and reaching the forge without disturbing the plant monsters inside the cave. However, your kettle can only hold up to 9 charges worth of aether, which means excess aether will not be stored. The first step of the relic just requires a handful of frosted crystals. The second step requires a bit more and five hundred crystals that drop from Notorious Monsters. The final step requires even more frosted crystals and five of a special item that only drops from one specific Notorious Monster. While it is possible to obtain aether beyond the "feeble" amount, no one can figure out how you can gain more. Ergo, be prepared to kill a lot of monsters.
Miscellaneous/Other Sidequests
- The Forbidden Land of Eureka is a case of Be Careful What You Wish For and is notorious in the fandom for its brutality, as many players describe this as the unholy fusion of the Palace of the Dead, the Diadem and the Anima grind. There's a laundry list of problems to be mentioned (to the point that it comes off as the development team actively doing everything they could to make it as infuriating as possible), but the issues mentioned below are the most glaring.
- Players cross the transformed Isle of Val in search of answers, battling incredibly tough monsters. As you battle these creatures, you gain Elemental EXP that can be used to boost up your elemental affinity as you level up and get crystals that transform your Level 70 Job Gear into the Eureka Relic Gear. However, the problems with that is that the amount of EXP is completely inconsistent as the more people who fight a monster, the EXP is distributed between them and if you don't contribute enough, you get a piddling amount. Even more, if you're past Level 5 and you die, you actually start losing EXP, meaning you'll actually level down, similar to how it was done in XI.
- Throughout the Eureka storyline, Krile sends you to obtain information or items - the problem is that the level you need to be to unlock the quest does not match up with the level you need to safely fight the monsters in the area the objective hides in, meaning that if you're not careful, you'll find yourself at the mercy of enemies that can wipe you very, very easily. This doesn't change in any of the Eureka levels, either - don't go exploring unless you know the instance has players that can come and revive you, or risk losing experience because you pissed off a dragon or even just a mob.
- Obtaining the necessary crystals, at least in Anemos, is also heavily random as you could grind for hours one day and only end up with one or two crystals, then go to it the next with 10-12. Further, it was determined that it would take a whopping 1300 crystals just to upgrade your gear. At the very least, reaching level 8 makes things pick up, since you'd be able to reliably take on Notorious Monsters with a sizable group of players.
- Pagos, however, has a Difficulty Spike that borders on Fake Difficulty. Notorious Monsters are far more difficult to spawn, and random mobs are very durable and hit very hard, making solo grinding in classes without self sustain a very tricky prospect. The intention was to encourage players to chain mob kills, but despite that, the chain window is quite small, making it too easy to drop it. You are expected to play with other players, except Pagos also adds a mechanic where players 2 levels higher than the lowest level player in a party receive zero experience, making finding random players to play with much more of a chore than it was in Anemos. Claiming monsters for EXP is also ripe for drama between parties because if multiple parties attack the same enemy, the EXP gains between every will be drastically divided between everyone that claimed it, which makes it incredibly easy for trolls to attack anyone's target to reduce EXP gained. To top it all off, during the day and during heat waves, there is a constant glare as the entire zone is covered in bright white snow. The playerbase in general was not amused in what was seen as an attempt by the devs to make players play the content in a very specific way. The devs did quickly release a hotfix that gave EXP from Notorious Monsters a massive boost.
- In Eureka Pyros, the player is granted the ability to utilize Logos actions and also increase their elemental capacity (which is a massive determinate on how hard enemies hit and how hard you hit them). These also have their own problems on top of problems:
- Once you are able to make more than one Logos action at a time (essentially giving you two at a time), the chances of it actually failing increase. This wouldn't be too big a concern, except that the stated 30% chance of success with maximum logograms really translates to "If RNG is in a good mood, and right now it is not." Compounding this is that logograms are particularly hard to come by. While they can mercifully be bought off the Market Board, they're also expensive due to the rarity. So if you have a particular combination you want to try, expect many of your attempts to fail. And if you have a logogram that's particularly rare or expensive, and it fails, it's gone.
- As for the elemental increases, those can be gotten by obtaining items from certain Notorious Monsters... randomly. With a low chance. And those monsters only show up once an hour. A real life hour. And those are the only way to enhance your anima stacks beyond five.
- Completionists are likely to have their own horror stories about fishing and completing the sightseeing log. Fishing is a matter of getting to a point during a certain time of day and a certain type of weather, and praying that the Random Number God smiles upon you. Sightseeing logs dispense with the RNG, but they introduce platforming challenges into a game which wasn't exactly built around them.
- Before Heavensward, the Sightseeing Log was an entirely different, horrid beast. To start with, just like with fishing, the logs would only activate under the right time of day and correct weather condition. The hints the logs give for the precise location are vague at best and nonexistent at worst, with there being multiple points that could describe the area. There were no visual indicators of the spot on the map; one would have to rely on the chatbox proclaiming that "you have arrived at a vista!" to know that you're in the right location, and many spots are incredibly precise, with one wrong step knocking you out of the area outright. Most of the spots are also incredibly reliant on precise platforming, which the game was never built for; have fun trying to get into the correct position with no way to change speed or direction once a jump has started and incredibly finicky controls to gauge a correct speed. Even worse, many of the precise jumps require Sprint to make, which only lasts for about 15 seconds and has a stupidly long cooldown, so if you mess up the jump repeatedly, you're stuck waiting until the timer wears off before you can try again. While most of the poses required to activate a sightseeing log are simply /lookout, there are a few that aren't that are only vaguely hinted at in the log itself, so if one didn't know about them beforehand, they could be screwed. To top it all off, the amount of time allotted to activate the logs before they expire is multiple minutes at best, after which it could easily be hours or days before the right conditions arise to try again. Guides are practically necessary to make this sidequest even slightly doable, and even then, all of these restrictions make a lot of players give up on it as it's not worth the hassle for just a few achievements and a minion.
- Patch 4.5 released the Blue Mage, a long-desired class which has a couple restrictions on it, like having a separate level cap from other classes that only gets raised when the devs add support for enough copiable spells to raise the cap by 10 (it launched with a cap of 50, and as of patch 6.45 has only been raised to 80). Many of the abilities are perfectly simple to get, like Thousand Needles. Many of them, like Glass Dance, have a 5% drop rate from boss trials. And you're going to need almost all of the abilities to beat the associated challenges.
- Blue Mage has a few particular mechanics that makes their playstyle somewhat more grating. The spellbook only gives out a vague location as to where the spell could be found as opposed to what enemy it's on, so there's a good chance that if you're not using a guide, you could fight an enemy who actually has a copyable move but not think they have one because the enemy decides to just not use it. Blue Mage is also a restricted class, meaning that unless the player unsyncs and joins a party (or in the case of free trial players, asks other friends that are paid players for help), they are not allowed to enter dungeons or trials with them, which the Blue Mage needs to do to gain a lot of their spells. The questline for Blue Mage somewhat helps with guiding players to get specific moves, but requires the Blue Mage to enter a dungeon as early as the second quest, so if you can't form a party or get ridiculously overpowered to solo the dungeon yourself, you're SOL. Even though dungeons have a higher chance of dropping the move if the player is an appropriate level, it's still not a guarantee, with some drop rates being quite low, and in the case of some enemies, requires the Blue Mage to put the entire party in danger by failing a DPS check. As a parting shot, the Blue Mage is one of the squishiest classes in the entire game by design due to the spells they can steal, and if you die before the enemy you want a move from does, you don't get the spell.
