YMMV / Final Fantasy Brave Exvius

A

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Shiva's weakness is women, apparently.
  • Beach Blaster Olive's melons. Lots and lots of melon puns in her skillset.
• Adorkable:
  • Ayaka's knack for giving Sakura candies to draw her out of hiding is very cute.
  • Citra. Of course, as Sakura's sister, she's pretty cute, even if her aging halted a little later than Sakura's did. And being from Sakura's family, the trope isn't as surprising. The "Piercing Light" side event emphasizes this, as Lightlord spends about 75% of the event flustered and somewhat ridiculous, particularly regarding how she treats the newly summon Darklord when nobody else is around.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • Jake for a while was by far the least liked of the protagonists in the Global side, due to smashing the Fire Crystal (part of a seal protecting the world) for thinking it would be better if no one had access to it. He also puts himself well into Squick territory by flirting with Fina and Lid (teenagers) when he is nearly 30, Sakura (who has the body of a child) and Kunshira (a cat-like Shibyra). The fact that his Season 2 unit, Nameless Gunner Jake, is considered very low tier for his maximum awakening level doesn't help.
    • The Jake situation is made far worse because Lid, who absolutely loathes him and at one occasion even violently dropkicks him across a room while screaming "DIE!" at him... apparently starts to fall for him by the end of Season 1. The implication is even that her Heavenly Technician variant adopted a sexier appearance and flashier attacks to impress Jake.
    • To put it in a simpler light, the problem with Jake is much more a case of Values Dissonance with Japan (where the age of consent is lower and cases like Jake's seem to be a tad more acceptable) than it is with his attitude when it comes to his romance subplot with Lid. The writers tried to address this in the "White Lily Bouquet" Story Event when Jake denies wanting romantic involvement with Lid to Dark Fina due to her age (though it doesn't help that, as shown earlier in the same Story Event, Dark Fina would later prod Lid about her relationship with Jake at the start of the Gronoa arc), but at that point he already had a stained reputation in the West.
  • In Season 2, Fina became utterly despised by a big chunk of the Global players, to the point they almost forgot about Jake. Many of these people bring up how useless she is over the course of Season 2, how insufferable she is when talking about her sexiness (and how the writers abuse the skit to no end), and her attitude at the end of the season, which implies she thinks on nothing but having adventures with Rain and Lasswell. It became so bad that Fina's haters reject Season 3 merely because she is the protagonist, especially as Chapter 1 has the writers force her "sexiness" joke to the limit in one particular scene, making the entire situation worse and seemingly flanderizing her into a Dumb Blonde obsessed with her beauty. That said, the Dark Visions Story Event, "Genesis of Chaos", and Season 3 as a whole, do a huge work on her Character Development, have her "sexiness" joke become more sparse (although there are still some glaring moments) and Fina becomes more serious as a character as the story progresses.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • The boss that's at the end of Chapter 7, Part 2 and the penultimate boss of Season 1, Sol of the Eight Sages, has an array of powerful magic attacks, 50% resistance to six elements (and full immunity to Light-element attacks, which are perhaps the easiest to build towards using with melee fighters), dispels your party if you buff yourself, and has nearly a half million hit points. On the other hand, the Final Boss of Season 1 the Chaotic Darkness, only has 50% Darkness resistance, weakness to Light attacks (see above about how easy it is to abuse those), and significantly weaker attacks. Even with the same number of hit points, the latter is a vastly easier boss for the most part (unless you have a very well-equipped Veritas of the Dark, who will make short work of the former). If anything, the One-Winged Angel form of Chaotic Darkness is even easier, with no offense to speak of, making its nearly one million HP more of a chore than anything else.
  • The Tower of Zot on ELT is comically easy for an ELT level, even accounting for the King Mog currency events being less challenging. This is for the simple reason that almost every enemy is vulnerable to Petrify, including the final boss. Any unit with Rikku's Pouch (for Chaos Grenade) makes the thing a cakewalk. You only need a single unit with decent damage to take out the Ice Lizard and Fell Turtle, which aren't all that dangerous. It's so easy you don't even really need a healer if the damage unit can kill in one or two hits. The redux fixed this exploit.
• Ass Pull:
  • Akstar's true identity as a disguised Rain from a Bad Future, an event usually described as The Akstar Asspull. Not only is the first time that Time Travel is ever mentioned by the story (apart from Rain and Raegen's Short Story, comments from a Moogle in the Farplane, and as flavor text on a Global-exclusive unit), but Akstar shares very little with Rain in terms of battle style or character quirks, sharing more in common with Lasswell, as Rain A: Despite knowing the Mirror of Equity, never ever based his techniques upon it, B: Is a Lethal Chef known to have accidentally poisoned Sakura with his food to the point she got PTSD from the event, C: Has very little handle on the Transformation Magic of the Whyt, used to don this disguise. Many feel that the reveal is a massive Voodoo Shark that does nothing but take whatever spotlight was still with Lasswell and gives it back to Rain, making him the protagonist again and invalidating half of Lasswell's Character Development, all while further undermining Vlad's modus operandi against both his motivations of resentment against the Aldore royalty and his end goal of ending all life and being the sole living being in existence. The Japanese fanbase was not pleased by this twist and many fanartists deleted their FFBE art off of their art profiles as a result of this chapter.
  • While lesser than the ones in Seasons 2 and 3, Rhus' fight with Rain halfway through Season 4 is often hailed as one of the main reasons why players hate the character. After Rain is finally made aware of his Levonian ancestry, Rhus challenges him to a fight, stating he intends to kill Rain so that he can absorb the Mirror of Equity from him^{A thing Rhus didn't seem to take the memo on} While Rain indeed did learn the Mirror of Equity via watching his father do it, he never bothered mastering it. That honor goes to his adopted brother Lasswell, who not only worked hard to learn the technique and master it, he evolved it into its stronger variants and then into his own spin via the Final Mirror of Equity in Season 2. Rhus only learns of this late in Season 4, while watching Lasswell fight, despite having fought him as a Hollow Keeper in Season 3. via Snovlinka's Gemini Lamina, which he reveals to possess. Rhus also reveals, for some reason, that he's Riddar's (Snovlinka's Best Friend) descendant which, thanks to Riddar having overcome an Omega infection, makes Rhus also able to naturally use Blood Awakening like Rain and Lasswell. Rhus then pulls one of the most unexplained I Am Not Left-Handed moments in the game, defeating a Rain who just days prior was able to best Vanharma, a fighter Rhus was having trouble with, and would have killed him had Metze, who was misteriously guided to the ruins of Elmont, not interfered and demanded Rhus to Take a Third Option to his quest for power. The actual main point of contention is how Rain was even defeated, as either Rain held back because he doesn't consider Rhus his enemy, or Rhus was actually stupid enough to hold back actually immense power that would had kept himself and his partners alive in critical situations... such as fighting someone as strong as Vanharma, causing some players to outright call Rhus a Marty Stu despite his own Character Development throughout the season and the story not necessarily revolving around him. Needless to say, players who saw that event unfold did not take well to how it was handled, and it was made worse by Rhus being revealed as the actual Deuteragonist of Season 4 in its second half.
  • The medicine made from the Tear of Provenance removing immortality. It had been used on characters before with no such caveat and comes across as an excuse to depower the Sworn Six. Even worse, it's not used to help the one character who wanted her immortality removed and simply disappears for no reason, in of itself another Ass Pull.
• Awesome Music: If there is one thing players will never complain about in this game, it's its soundtrack.
  • "Duel," the regular battle theme, immediately told new players they were getting into something really good.
    • Season 3 adds an epic orchestral version of this song going for very specific battles.
  • "Celestial Battle", the theme used for Esper fights and some epic boss fights.
  • "The Sky's the Limit", which is the song played for all of the Chamber of the Fallen trial battles, is a massive, frantic rock tune that clues you in on the level of challenge you're up against.
    • Has an orchestral mix in "Break the Limit", being the song used for the Scorn battles from the Chamber of the Indignant.
  • "The Zenith", Vlad's boss fight track in Season 2, has become closely associated with the character, to the point it was this track that played on the Home screen during Shielding Blade Charlotte's event in Japan, rather than a track fitting for Charlotte.

B

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Rain in Season 2 has become one due to joining the Orders as Hyoh of the Delta Star. Many fans found the reasoning for his actions to be ridiculous given that he is trying to prevent the Empire from committing further death and destruction to Paladia by... Joining them and perpetrating the exact same acts. Others think that the Hess side is to blame and seeing as they made things much worse for Rain in the past that he's right to not trust them at the very least and that changing the Empire from the inside might be the only way to make a real difference. Finally there is a third camp who find the whole plot to be a ridiculous Conflict Ball setup to justify Rain and Lasswell being on different sides of a conflict despite sharing the same end goals as one another.
    • Rain started to garner distaste from players after the third act of Season 2 thanks to the Akstar Asspull, which took the spotlight away from Lasswell and gave it back to Rain. Season 3 however made the situation worse: The writers made Fina perform a Heroic Sacrifice (one that was All for Nothing at that) so that Rain could be the star for most of the third act of that season. Needless to say, players got fed up with the amount of "protagonist power" and constant favoritism the writers give Rain^note This even comes off as a nasty surprise when you realize that both the producer and the writer of the game stated to have Dark Fina and Fina as their favorites every time they're creatively backed into the corner. Rain being made the protagonist of Season 4, without Lasswell and Fina with him this time, and the fact that Season 4 so far feels to some players like a re-enactment of the already base-breaking Season 2, doesn't help matters.
  • Fina has gotten this hard as well due to her behavior in Season 2, with many players decrying her as a dead weight on Lasswell's party for the total tally of what she did throughout the season, plus her letting herself get stabbed by Rain/Hyoh in Crystalis and not making any angst or fuss out of it. She is also decried as an extremely selfish person who only cares about having her adventures with Rain and Lasswell. It doesn't help that Season 2 also marked the beginning of her "sexy pose" joke, something the writers at Alim use incessantly to the point that by Season 3 the joke has become almost unbearable, despite Season 3 marking the start of actual, valid Character Development for her. The Story Event "Genesis of Chaos" does a good job at addressing some of Fina's flaws at the end of Season 2, having her realizing that she puts her friends at risk by not wanting her adventures to end as she loses the powers granted to her by Dark Fina.
  • Dark Fina herself is divisive among the game's fans, who either love her for acting like the actual Big Good, having a huge personality in contrast to Fina's, and being quite straight about her feelings when Rain and Fina themselves have problems doing so, or hate her for being an Attention Whore who hogs any and all spotlights whenever she makes an appearance and relies on Story Breaker Powers to be relevant, such as reviving Rain and the deceased Veritas, or being able to perform Time Travel to bring a Bad Future version of Rain to the game's timeline, often being decried as a "Deus ex Machina" button for when the writers slam themselves on a creative corner. Not helping is the fact that many of Dark Fina's fans also hate normal Fina, which causes fans of normal Fina to enter a constant clash with fans of Dark Fina.
  • Vlad, Season 2's Big Bad, is a matter of contention when it comes to his role and value in the story. While Sol, Season 1's Big Bad, got a huge deal of characterization in Season 2 and was considered one of the MVPs of the season, Vlad's characterization left a lot to be desired. Some consider him a valid threat in light of all his actions over the course of 700 years, plus his humongous One-Winged Angel form, something that Sol lacked outside having the Chaotic Darkness to cover for this, and a Final Boss fight that feels both spetacular and cathartic at the end as every deceased person Rain, Lasswell and Raegen ever knew appear in the form of Visions. His detractors however completely disregard him as one of the pettiest villains Final Fantasy ever had, with his insertion on the present story being so out of left field that it's seen as a massive Ass Pull to give the story a bigger threat than Quadis now that the Emperor doesn't seem to be so menacing anymore due to in-universe Power Creep against Lasswell's team. He's also not helped by not being a No-Nonsense Nemesis like Quadis was, with the Akstar Asspull further showing that he's willing to go out of his way (to the point of outright ignoring his plans) just to spite Rain in the Bad Future. The lack of cohesion in Vlad as a villain is such that people tend to compare him with other bad villains due to poor way he's written.
• Breather Boss:
  • Shadow Bahamut, in the Realm of the Dragon King. The trash are strong, with instant KO attacks, strong DPS, and the ability to pre-emptively strike your party. Bahamut is the most challenging "story boss" in Lapis, especially before the age of AoE magic tanks. Shadow Bahamut, however, takes a full turn to charge his Megaflare and has defenses made of paper. If you have strong chainers, he should die before he even has a chance to get Megaflare off.
  • The Wicked Beast Cerberus trial from the Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV event was hilariously easy. His DEF and SPR were very low, even for a trial boss, and most of his attacks were fire-elemental. His biggest concern was a ST Death attack, but this could be Provoked and nullified with Safety Bit or Genji Shield. It also was susceptible to all breaks, and even Poison for more damage potential. In short, this meant that you could easily buff/gear for fire resistance and gear for paralysis, and the fight was incredibly easy.
  • For trials, the Elafikeras qualifies. In contrast to Glacial's RNG-based gameplay or Bloody Moon and Malboro's sheer difficulty, Elafikeras is a fairly easy Rush Boss with an 8-turn limit. If you don't kill it by then, it kills you. On its first turn, it gives your party a full Refresh for eight turns. Every turn after the first, it uses a single attack that hits your party for physical damage. At the 75% and 50% thresholds, it will use a more powerful physical attack if hit with actual magic (a magical skill like Chaos Wave or Aureole Ray won't work) or a magic attack otherwise. As long as you attack with only magic spells, a dodge tank or a decent physical tank with Mechanical Heart for healing will render it completely impotent and remove any need for a healer. Its SPR is paper-thin, allowing mages to do obscene damage. It's so easy that it can be completed with two Tornado-chaining Shantottos and two Wind-based finishers.
  • Among the 3* espers, Siren is appropriately the easiest. With a mere 1.2 million HP, she's extremely easy to wipe out in one or two turns. Her Water-element attacks are easily nullified by a properly-geared magic tank, and her sleep attacks can be protected against or simply cured away. Her only real threat is her non-elemental threshold attack which comes packaged with AoE sleep, and this can be beaten with guard or Reraise.
  • Ifrit's 3-star form is far bulkier than Siren, to the tune of 50 million HP compared to her 1.2 million, but he suffers from an even greater weakness to tanks. A magic tank geared for 200% Fire resistance will absorb all of Ifrit's magic attacks despite the fire debuff, and his physical attacks can be absorbed by a Provoke tank. Ifrit doesn't have anything else to fall back on, so your damage-dealers can attack with impunity, making his high HP more of a slog than anything else.
  • Golem's 3-star form looks very intimidating at first. He has physical and magical AoE damage and powerful ST attacks. The biggest problem is that all of his AoE attacks are Earth-elemental. A Veritas of the Earth with 100% Evade can take the boss down by himself, if rather tediously. He absorbs every Earth attack and dodges everything else. If you want to finish the trial faster, it's still possible if you can build one physical cover/provoke tank with 100% evade and Earth resistance and one magical cover tank with Earth resistance. It's extremely rare for Golem to trigger both AoE attacks on a single turn, effectively making the rest of your team invincible as long as you can dispel the debuffs.
  • 3* Fenrir is a joke compared to his peers. Fenrir possesses no innate imperils for his elemental attacks and only uses a combination of AoE magical and single-target physical attacks, plus some minor status effects. This allows a player to negate nearly all of the damage he can do through a combination of elemental resistance and physical evasion. While he does have a fairly powerful non-elemental magic attack, 3* Fenrir was added after the introduction of 7* magic tanks, who have health and magical resistance more than high enough to take the hit without any risk of dying. With a decent breaker and a source of dispel, Fenrir is practically a free upgrade for anyone capable of beating the previous espers.
  • 3* Phoenix is, rather paradoxically, easier than his 2* form. 3* Phoenix has no imperils, uses a combination of fire and non-elemental magic, and single-target physical attacks. This means all of his damage can be absorbed by tanks. Though his health is bumped up to 100 million, his ice and wind weaknesses are also increased to 300%, allowing elemental attackers to chew through his health with ease. Finally, he trades the threshold-based healing of his 2* form for a full heal every nine turns, which is more than enough for even 6* chainers to bring him down.
  • In the Series Boss Battles, Ardyn and Chaos are dramatically easier compared to the others. Ardyn has an incredibly simple rotation of magic attacks and physical attacks that ignore provoke, and his physical attacks don't hit that hard if you have decent gear and buffs. Ardyn's low-health gimmick is an extremely powerful hybrid AoE attack, but this can be completely negated if you build your magic tank with full evasion. Chaos, meanwhile, just needs to be killed before Turn 12 and has easily manageable attacks before that point, which is trivial with most current DPS units.
• Broken Base: Here.

C

• Catharsis Factor: A particular mission in Grandore Central Block is to finish Vlad's second form with Bahamut's Megaflare. If you are fully aware of the lore, you know that Bahamut was one of the Eight Sages of Hess which Vlad banished to Lapis. Having a fully maxed 3* Bahamut, with tons of Evoke damage geared, spitting Vlad, who is responsible for seven hundred years of misery, death and destruction in Paladia, out of commission by himself? Epic satisfaction.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In the Arena, units with potential for AoE Stop are fairly common, because most units don't possess immunity to it. Amelia and Noctis were the earliest units with this ability, though have since become outdated, and Kryla remains a staple since her Stop is tied to her limit burst and therefore never forbidden. A greater selection of Stop-immune units and readily-available Stop cure skills on them has somewhat nerfed their effectiveness, though it's still very useful against whale parties filled with tanks that use AoE counter-attacks.
  • Most people tend to fall back on their top-tier units, especially for common trials. It first came to light with Ayaka and Lotus Mage Fina, who were head and shoulders above their healing competitors, but can be seen with most top-class units today. It was most commonly seen in the form of Esther and Sylvie, who were head and shoulders above their competition at the time of their release. For example, all but three of the Scorn of the Octopus and Teacher trial clears on the official wiki feature one of the Easter units, with all but five using Esther herself. When the Scorn of Tiamat trial was released, so many people were using Xuan Wu and Qing Long (a powerful limited-time DPS unit) that the curator for the Reddit megathread made a rule limiting the amount of DPS clears that could be featured at any given time.
  • Despite stressing varied teams of individual units to reach the clear conditions faster, the Chamber of the Vengeful's re-issue events are tailor-made for the units featured in their original appearance. They also get bonuses on top of being easy to kill. Those who have the original units (Esther for Armeggeddon, Elena for The Empress Supreme) wind up using those while swapping around utility units, making the grind more time-consuming but far more consistent. All but three clears on the wiki's page for both bosses feature the original units as DPS.
  • Mastermind Xon and Xuan Wu & Qing Long are two examples of this in Dark Visions (DV for short). Mastermind Xon's ability to copy and spread buffs to allies make him a staple for high-score runs, allowing players to steal stat and killer buffs far beyond what any support unit can cast normally with a finisher's help (usually Crown Prince Noctis, enhanced Regina, Sakura of the Delta Star or Flame of Rebirth Jake). This is especially useful since the first two DV instances factored turn count in scoring and Mastermind Xon's kit is capable of enabling OTKO strategies by shortening the process of buffing the entire party. Meanwhile, Xuan Wu & Qing Long, themselves an enormous case of the trope outside of Dark Visions (it was so bad that Sinzar, curator for trial threads on the game's subreddit, had to impose rules for clear submissions), are one of the most used DPS for magic stages despite being a physical attacker for multiple reasons; 1) Their damage calculation uses their SPR stat as damage which targets enemies' SPR, 2) Their attacks are physical in nature so they can be imbued with any element, giving them edge among conventional mages in elemental flexibility, which made them the go-to unit before Wild Card Ace and Benevolent Beauty Rem came, 3) Their Magnus ability hits very hard, and 4) Their main chaining family, Bolting Strike, is much easier to use than conventional mages' Chaos Wave Awakening, which doesn't always chain properly due to an encoding bug caused by Gumi messing with the frames, and until Ace and Rem, was heavily hampered by nearly every mage with the chain family having AoE attacks with no ST, which causes the chain to break once the enemy dies. What makes the two a downplayed example is that not many people have the benefit of using them, because Mastermind Xon's step-up banner was so bad that it turned people away from pulling and his kit was initially considered niche enough to skip before DV came, while Xuan Wu & Qing Long were a time-limited unit whose banner minimal spenders commonly avoid.

D - E

• Demonic Spiders: In the Arena, units with certain skills can be problematic if you don't have the means to counter them. While Power Creep has eliminated some problem units, there are a few that have remained consistent thorns.
  • Units with single-target auto cover will protect other units from suffering damage for one turn, thus leaving you open to potential retaliation. Units innately possessing cover skills generally have high health pools that will allow them to survive a barrage of unchained damage from all but a few units. The espers Golem and Alexander also come with unlockable auto-cover traits, meaning any unit can potentially be one. This can spell doom for your party if certain units are covered, unless you have the means to shield against it. For example, they cover a unit with an AoE Death Limit Break, forcing you to waste a turn reviving, assuming you prepared and had your healer/rezzer death-proofed. The only way around them is piercing damage, which most units don't have.
  • Speaking of, units with a Death Limit Break can kill an entire party in one turn. While most of these are limited to 3* and 4* units, it's little comfort when they can be geared so their limit gauge is filled at the start of battle, meaning you may not get a chance to act before they can fire it off. Hopefully you've death-proofed a revive unit.
  • Units with Osmose are among the more annoying units, because Osmose is not restricted by the 999 damage cap and will generally do a full drain as long as the base damage behind it is strong enough. Rem's Mog King event gives her Siphon Delta, a unique ability that acts as an AoE Osmose. Seven's Osmoselash is also AoE once it is enhanced twice. Either one of these can zero out the MP of an entire party in one hit if their MAG stat is high enough, and since most MP refresh abilities are rather cost-prohibitive, this can leave you unable to meaningfully fight for at least several rounds (if not the entire match). It takes an extremely buffed MP stat to come out of it with any chance of recovering, and even that isn't a guarantee. Seabreeze Dark Fina puts both to shame in her 7* form. With her TMR/STMR equipped, her limit burst gains an AoE MP drain. This is guaranteed to zero out your team no matter how strong you are, and the sheer number of hits means she's almost guaranteed to pull it off every turn if she's allowed to do it once, especially if her team has been thinned out.
  • Units with AoE chaining counter skills are some of the worst out there, because if you don't kill them on the first try, they almost certainly will kill you in response. Esther (7* form), Lilith, Lucas, Starlight Elena, and Eldryn are all examples of units that have high health and will cast multiple chaining counters in response to damage, which will be fatal unless your tank covers the hits.
  • Units that have an ability which completely fills their limit burst on turn one. This means a guaranteed limit burst on their first turn. Get two or more copies with a chaining limit burst (Radiant Lightning, for example) and the opponent can get wiped before they even get a turn. Even the AI can't screw it up. This only gets worse when it comes to Radiant Lightning, Angel of Death Kuja and Umbral Dragon Dark Fina, all units with chainable Limit Bursts and access to Dual Blade Mastery, which increases their chaining damage by 50%, allowing a team with multiples of these to just wipe out the enemy party. Your only hope is to have a party bulky enough to survive five of them chaining at once (above 28,000 health does the trick, generally limited to Neo Vision units).
  • The Neo Vision era brought in normal attack replacement skills. As the name suggests, this replaces the unit's basic attack with a special attack. By combining this with a skill that berserks the unit, some truly frightening combos can be made.
    • Avalanche's Jessie, Avalanche's Biggs & Wedge, and Conche all have physical AoE normal attack replacements that can, with proper gearing, be made to fire off four times when berserked. This is so powerful that they can rip through a preemptive cover tank like King Behemy and still hit your party, though usually not fatally. If you aren't covering the damage, you're dead. Period. There's also Neo Vision Awakened Sieghard, who not only does chaining damage, but charms your party on top of that.
    • The Christmas 2021 event brings in Whimsical Winter Tiana as a Neo Vision unit, who might be the most aggravating unit ever for the Arena. When her Trust Master Ability is active (and because she's an update for a seasonal unit, she can activate this with the TMR or Super TMR of either her original or Neo Vision version), her regular attack instead becomes an at-will, no-cost Full Life and Reraise. And if you equip her with something that inflicts Berserk on her, that's all she'll ever do. If she can get going (either because you can't rush her down before she gets going, she's paired with powerful cover units, and/or her side goes first), she can guarantee an Arena loss. She can't do damage, but by ensuring her side is constantly alive and healed, she doesn't need to. AoE Dispel skills like Bushido - Freedom works well to remove the raise, however.
    • Paladin Sylvie's upgraded normal attack is an even worse version of Whimsical Winter Tiana because hers ads fixed 20% HP/MP restoration on top of the revive/reraise, making the next turn you fail to wipe the party even more of a hurdle when there are enemy units not dead from your attempt and total party kill. While this is bad enough, Paladin Sylvie is harder to kill due to her natural bulk thus easier gearing requirements for survival.
    • Fenrir Knight Riesz (5* units in JP, NV Riesz's Brave Shift form in Global) is perhaps the worst of all. Her normal attack replacement is an AoE evoke attack. This means it doesn't miss. Ever. A batch of them can fire off four undodgeable, uncoverable attacks each that will shred all but the bulkiest parties. The only saving grace is that, at a mere three hits, it's nowhere near as deadly as the physical attacks above can be when not blocked and the requirement to reach a full team of evoker Riesz in GL is steep enough she's not found that often in arena because of it.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • In Story Mode, the game slaps you with this hard once you hit the second half of Dirnado. While the bosses prior to this were tanky but manageable, the ones after the Dwarven Mines both hit like trucks and take Scratch Damage from most attacks unless you've started to get your characters to 5* and high levels, with matching quality gear. For the Colosseum, this hits hard in the Advanced section, where enemies suddenly gain immunity to Gravity spells and have the Stone Wall spike in stats that monsters gained as of Dirnado.
  • Season 4 as a whole is this compared to everything that came before in the main story. Enemies are far tougher, come with abilities like single-target cover and pre-emptive mitigation, and you're expected to have a properly set team of Neo Visions with you to handle the increased challenge, compared to being able to breeze through previous content with a single, powerful unit (even a decent AoE tag chainer, like Oliviera, will struggle at times). The EX Battles in particular are mini-trials unto themselves. Even the characters in-story lampshade how much more powerful the enemies are compared to Lapis and Paladia.
  • In Vortex events, the jump from Pro to Elite is punishing. Bosses are typically twice as strong at the least with more than double the health. If your team doesn't have several Trust Master rewards amping them up and/or a very capable friend unit, expect to get stomped. This isn't as bad with the exchange events, which are typically easier than standard Vortex missions.
  • With the introduction of 3* espers, Siren starts off as a relatively normal boss with a measly 1.2 million HP, single-target Sleep, and Water-based magic attacks with a non-elemental threshold attack, nothing too difficult for a party capable of beating the latest story missions. The next on the list, Ifrit, has 50 million HP, has hard-hitting physical and magical fire attacks, and opens with a 100% fire resistance debuff that he'll reapply every so often. Beating this one basically requires a magic tank designed to completely nullify fire damage. If you don't have that, you better have beaten Gilgamesh and obtained Bushido Freeform, else it'll be a wipe.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Most of the game breakers mentioned on their own page (Zidane, Gilgamesh, Noctis, Refia, Chizuru and Paladin Cecil) are such coveted units that they became the subject of their own summon batch, the "People's Choice" summon, where their drop rates were increased.
  • More generally, some of the FFBE-exclusive characters, especially the more powerful ones, have proven very popular, particularly some of the Global exclusives, with Ling, Olive, Fryevia and Reberta all being particular examples.
  • Zargabaath, in the Final Fantasy XII event, was introduced to promote The Zodiac Age. In his source game, he has a bit role as the reasonable judge and a Superboss fight with the rest of the judges. He was originally meant to help bridge the gap between the current support units and Ramza's enhancements (which were delayed due to being far past the power curve). In contrast to his bit part, he is a 5-star base in Brave Exvius. Despite displacing a popular playable character in Balthier, he was received positively by the player base long after release. He was revealed to be a useful support unit who had a longer lifespan than Ramza himself did, and became one of the game's most fondly remembered units
  • Ruggles is popular as a character due to his role in Bran and Lunera's story event. While few people still use him, his mere mention in another story event brought a lot of excitement.
  • Chow got massive community hype for being a dog. Being a Game-Breaker was just icing on the cake.
  • Elfreeda is one of the most beloved original units. Her TMR is arguably the best in the game, but people love her for her design and animations. Most other original add-ons, especially for a popular character like Cloud, are glossed over, but Elfreeda managed to stick.
  • Out of all Fan Festa 2017 Unit Design winners, Malphasie is regarded as the most popular. Aside from her cool crow-themed design, she is a hybrid chainer with multiple chaining family options, making her suitable in most damage-dealing team compositions.
  • The Fan Festa poll named Duane their favorite 3-star base. The development team is now planning to add a 5-star version of him to the game, complete with his own story event. Japan's version of the poll saw Charlotte winning, which gave us Sacred Shield Charlotte.
  • On the matter of Charlotte, she's extremely popular among players, having got a lot of fame for someone whose only appearances in Season 1 was a Character Quest and bit scenes in events and at the end of the season. The aforementioned popularity poll net her a CG unit of her own in Season 2 complete with a Story Event^note And eventually that unit received a Neo Vision Awakening in Neo Physalis' Story Event banner, she appeared in the Brave Frontier side of the crossover even above Jake, Nichol and Sakura, members of Rain's team, she got her own Esper Unit^note Hallowed Aegis Charlotte, a physical tank bonded to Alexander in Brave Exvius, and it finally culminated in her becoming a main party member in Season 3.
  • Esther and Elena become fan-favorite units because of their powerful kits which are capable of staying relevant months (about a year, in Esther's case) after their release and their design; Esther for her cute bunny hood and Elena for being the first Global Original unit to receive a CG Limit Burst, and a cool one at that too. They are so popular that both of them are the top two units on the poll to choose which one to receive a "new unit with revamped kit" treatment despite being relatively new. Elena won the poll, which resulted in the existence of Starlight Elena.^However... Both Yoshikiri and Starlight Elena were meant to be released as 7* units by the time the S3 Story Events would be rolling. Gumi however rushed the Neo Vision rarity, which caused a huge change in plans and made Gumi rework both units' kits into those of a Base-NV unit. The end result of this act has become a huge point of contention among the community to say the least, especially with their main kit now split among Base and Shifted forms (Alim rarely if ever does this even with NVA units in JP), Yoshikiri being a rather subpar buffer and bad DPS, and Elena being turned into a Glass Cannon (albeit a strong one as her damage parallels Awakened Dragon Akstar) worse than CG Kuja, and the whole events surrounding the two screaming that Gumi rushed the entire affair to make a quick buck out of the two, which caused players to enter a fierce duel over the utility of both units and stained Elena's reputation. It was no different when she was released on JP, where hybrid units tend to be outright reviled, but Alim for once decided to show mercy for her with her Master Enhancements and reworked her kit, giving her power output comparable to a modern Premium NV unit.
  • Out of the story characters, Sieghard gets a lot of attention due to his memetic use of word "beautiful" and a surprising depth in his personality. Most of the time, he plays the Narcissist to the point of irritating his companions (especially Folka and Citra), but underneath he cares deeply for his companions, using his act to lighten the otherwise grim mood the entire second season is flooded with, gets heavily disturbed at Mombert's plan to undo Quadis' paling by sacrificing children to the point he's almost an Audience Surrogate, and even has enough charisma to win Nagi and Shamlin to the heroes' side just with his usual act. That and his flamboyant, memetic personality made players crown him as one of the MVPs of Season 2.
  • Regina quickly became this. Her being an interesting finisher from the get go helped, but her Story Event did an actually good number on endearing not only her but Vesvia as well, and many people consider Regina one of their favorite characters in Season 2. It says something that the moment she and Krowa died in Season 2 was the moment many players lost their patience with how dark Season 2 was getting. She was voted by the Japanese fanbase as the most popular unit in need of an NVA... and Alim eventually decided to give her a new Neo Vision unit in the late parts of the 6.5th Anniversary.
  • Physalis became an instant darkhorse the moment she was introduced. For starters, she's a Plucky Comic Relief in a season that up to that point has abused its edginess to the point of causing Too Bleak, Stopped Caring. Her upbeat Keet Genki Girl Cloud Cuckoo Lander optimistic personality and the fact that she managed to actually win Lasswell's heart where Charlotte seemingly failed won her numerous fans. She's further aided by her activity in the story, actually being very powerful due to her mixed blood, joining Lasswell's party the exact instant she realizes the Aldore Empire is evil, resisting being assimilated by a Weapon Monster and having two very powerful units by the time of release in both her regular variant and her Esper Unit, Four Winds Physalis. She was eventually promoted to main character status in Season 3, even getting a Neo Vision Base unit with CG, something that repeated in Season 4 once she and Lasswell got actively involved in the story.
  • Madam Edel isn't even part of the main story, covering only the massive Sidequest that spans all of Season 2, and despite that she's immensely popular. What wins her position here is just how over the top she is as a very old half-Dark Elf with absurd strength to the point people say even Vlad would shit his pants at seeing her. Her sidequest also does massive characterization for both her and her Soiree, as well as her own Story Event, "Edel the Mole", portraying Edel as a deep, interesting character. As an unit, she's also obscenely strong for her time of release (she was unrivaled until War Hero Raegen came in JP, and Edward Elric on GL), and popular to the point she of all people got her own Esper Unit, Untamed Wolf Edel, who also became the strongest free unit for quite a while. She even got a Neo Vision Base unit before Lasswell did, with her power further solidified by her Master Enhancements giving her tremendous burst capability on par with Legendary Hero Sephiroth. Hell, Untamed Wolf Edel became the first free unit (and the first of the Esper Units at that) to get a Neo Vision Awakening.
    • This might apply to the whole Soiree as well, in particular Amber and Vesvia thanks to the former's prominence in Edel's questline and relevance to her story, and the latter's origins explained in Regina's Story Event, which makes her part of the sidequest in Rubiena much more endearing. It helps that, with the Neo Visions era, every member of the Soiree, not just Edel, started getting 5*-base variants and new stories^note So far, True Akstar's Mog King event "Learning the Mirror of Equity" has him and Lasswell meeting Shinju and Pecciotta in between Seasons 2 and 3, and Neo Edel's event has the whole Soiree appear..
  • It says something that, among the members of Fina's party, Cleome is the one who got the most popular, past even Poppy and Nerine. Cleome is the Token Mini-Moe Samurai in Fina's team with a rather deep history explained in her Story Event which unfortunately got shafted in favor of the Neo Visions rush in Global. Even then, she's highly popular on both sides of the game, particularly in Japan, which resulted in her of all people being featured in the game's fifth anniversary, getting a dual unit with Akstar, and being the only of Fina's party members to be constantly active even after her party disbands following Fina's Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Taivas took some time but he won people over. He is Season 4's idea of a Darkhorse: He's a Knight in Sour Armor with a rather tragic backstory that doesn't get any better over the course of his story, but he's a big Foil to Rain (whom he's the ancestor of) and even Rhus, the latter being one of the biggest Scrappies of the season, with the personality and determination to match. Taivas is so popular that the most recent JP popularity poll landed him at the top five, alongside Dark Fina, Rain, Fina and Dark Rain.

F - G

• Fandom Rivalry: With War Of The Visions, its own child. Many FFBE players despise the game and deride it as "The Alchemist Code made worse", condemn the game's plot as "recycled from the same premise Alim/Gumi uses on every game", and blame the project for the increasing instance of neglectful behavior the producers have been showing toward FFBE (namely introducing the Neo Vision rarity, which has similar level of grind and complexity as WotV's unit upgrade system^note It also breaks a promise from Hirono that there would not be an 8* rarity in Brave Exvius, which a Neo Vision technically is, and making a collab event with WotV (granted, Sterne and Kitone were bound to come anyways) during FFBE's Anniversary celebration to name a few), plus using the anniversary to rush Neo Visions at the expense of Fina's entire party. The other side, especially among players who quit FFBE but still play WotV, counters that Alim/Gumi's management has run FFBE into the ground over the course of five years and it's time to leave the old game and stick with the new one.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some circles like to refer to Agrias as "Poorlandeau", since her enhanced 6* form is a slight downgrade from Orlandeau, but starts as a 4* base rarity instead of 5, hence she's easier to pull without spending money for more Gacha Summons.
  • "Earth Shrine Exterminator Squad" and variants are a common nickname for a team assembled to grind for Trust Master points, as the most efficient place to do so is the very first mission, which is in the Earth Shrine and spawns only rats and bats.
  • Zargabaath received many of these, solely because of his name. The most common are Zargabargle, Zargarbage (before his release revealed him to be good), Zargabae, and Zargabro.
  • "CG units" are a collective nickname for the Season 2 characters that get CG-animated Limit Breaks, with most of them being rereleased versions of Season 1 story characters. Individual units also sometimes get called "CG Unit name" (for example, CG Lasswell for Pyro Glacial Lasswell) for either consistency or because of dissatisfaction with the unit's official name.
  • "Carry unit" is the term used for any unit that can solo a King Mog event (particularly if they can do it at the Elite or Legendary level), allowing the player to round out the other four spots in their party (plus the companion unit) with the highest bonus units they have available, even if said units are at level 1. Frequently, this will be one of the units listed under Game-Breaker; it's particularly welcomed when the carry unit is also a bonus unit (such as Beatrix during the Final Fantasy IX event or Noctis during the Final Fantasy XV event). It can also be used in cases of trials, often involving stacking physical evasion.
  • "Elemental Tetris" is the fan term for the need to prepare for multiple elemental resistances (starting with the Scorn of the Beasts of the Dark trial) when facing a trial boss. This was relatively common in Japan, and came to Global starting with the Dark Espers trial.
  • "Item World" has become a very common nickname for Steel Castle Melfikya (the other nickname being "Melfuckya"), as its purpose is to allow players to imbue extra passives into their weapons, similar to how Item World works in the Disgaea series.
  • Lampshaded with the Chain Family update, officially listing which skills chained with each other. Instead of going with the Ur-Example, the official translation, or the official updates' names, this Global-exclusive update canonized the community's names. Graviton Cannon is still called Graviton Cannon, as opposed to its Global translation of Short-Range Graviton or YoRHa Sword Dance, and Bolting Strike frames are called Bolting Strike instead of the update videos' Storm Brand. The only major exception to this rule is the Chaos Wave Awakened family, which absorbed the Japanese version's Mystic Cross family.
  • Less approving community members call Anniversary Follow-Up tickets F-U Tickets, since they are worse versions of the original Anniversary Tickets that Japan got for their login day and rank rewards. Most people understood why UoC tickets were removed, but the rage started after they removed Supercites for regular Megacites and Magicite and added Gil Snappers. The rewards were weighted to the point that it was nearly impossible to pull blank Prism Moogles, the drop rates for 5-star EX tickets were dramatically nerfed, and Gil Snapper drops were weighted at a worse ratio than the raid and Wave Battle summons. While some saw it as a necessity and accepted the nerfs, the section of the community that disapproved took it as a middle finger to veteran players.
  • Some fans call the Kingdom Hearts versions of Cloud and Sephiroth KHloud and KHephiroth for convenience.
  • Aldore King Rain and Hess King Lasswell are generally called CG Chair Rain/Lasswell, partly because very large thrones take up a good portion of their sprite, and partly because their actual names are fairly large spoilers for Season 2.
  • Some people call the Season 2 version of Dark Fina unit CG Legs because of the sexy leg pose on her sprite and her LB having a prominently suggestive leg stomp.
  • Dual units tend to go with Portmanteau Couple Names to ease on typing/namecalling, like Fid (Summer Fina & Lid), Cilka (Summer Folka & Citra), Siegnacio (Sieghard & Ignacio) and so on. On the CNY units, Bai Hu & Zhu Qe and Xuan Wu and Qing Long are named BHZQ and XWQL, respectively.
  • Before getting their translated names, Esper Units (Infernal Fire Rain, Mystical Ice Lasswell, Draconian Princess Fina and the such) were merely called by "Esper name" "character bonded to him/her", like Ifrit Rain, Shiva Lasswell, Bahamut Fina and so on. In more extreme cases, Portmanteau Couple Name is invoked, with Raedin (War Hero Raegen), Fendel (Untamed Wolf Edel), BADFina (Umbral Dragon Dark Fina), and so on.
  • Story wise, there are some nicknames for certain story points as well. The Visectrum arc in Season 2 for example is so disliked that it has gotten some quite derisive nicknames, such as "The Culling of Visectrum" and "The Visectrumy".
  • "Fina Ex Machina" is a nice nickname given for every time the writers want Dark Fina to be relevant by means of Story-Breaker Power, such as reviving Rain and the Veritas, projecting a Vision of herself, bringing Future Rain to the present to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, and as of Season 3, reincarnating as Roca, who despite not being the same person anymore, seems to have inherited all of her brokenness.
  • "The Akstar Ass Pull" became a thing due to the reveal that the Akstar that accompanied the party throughout Season 2 is actually a Bad Future version of Rain, known as one of the worst twists of Season 2.
    • Because of this plot reveal, people started joking that everyone is secretly Rain. Thus, the "Rainception" was born.
  • Rain himself got a nickname due to his now legendary soup scene in Season 2: "The Tongue-Tormenting Soup Man", courtesy of Akstar. Fans of the scene go the extra mile and call Rain "King Soupman".
  • Akstar's nickname for Lasswell (Lassworm) caught on among fans.
    • Due to how Lasswell keeps pining for Rain and living in his shadow (not helped by the writers themselves constantly locking him to Rain's shadow), "Lassbitch" is used by more derisive detractors of Lasswell.
    • With the End of Season 2 reveal that Akstar is actually Rain from a Bad Future doubling as Akstar, Future Rain became a thing, as well as Rainstar.
  • There is also "Shera Squad" or "Shera Rangers" for Shera's personal guard.
  • "Ducklord", "Frost Chicken", among other numerous jokes are given to Brave Exvius's version of Gilgamesh due to his sprite making his silhouette similar to a bird.
  • Brave Insignias and Forticite crysts got from the JP community the curious nicknames of "Pogs" and "Doritos", respectively, due to their formats.
  • "Rainwell" is one nickname given to the Knights of Grandshelt unit that came with the 6th Anniversary.
  • "Mahou Shoujo Fina" is a derisive nickname detractors use to describe Season 3.
  • "One-Punch Tifa" became a thing once Tifa's NVA appeared and her Shifted Limit Burst (an upgraded Final Heaven) proved powerful enough to take even Behemoth down.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Some fans prefer to pair Rain and Lasswell together despite the game's nudge toward Rain/Fina and Lasswell/Physalis because of their very, very strong display of bromance in two seasons. However, many fans are Squicked by this pairing because the two are brothers.
• Friendly Fandoms: Although the fandoms would also tend to compare their games' mechanics, the relationship between Granblue Fantasy players and those from Final Fantasy Brave Exvius still turn out to be generally positive as both sides remember that a lot of Cygames employees used to work for Final Fantasy titles in the past, and that both games are bound to have similar art and music styles because of this. It also helps that Granblue is itself a Genre Throwback to the older 2D Final Fantasy titles that the players try both games out of nostalgia.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The tablet enemies used to be one on the early stages of the game. They have extremely high resistance to physical attacks, but are brought down by even the weakest of magic or elemental abilities. Their attacks are extremely weak but they have the ability to cast Flash, which can blind the entire party. None of these things make them dangerous, but they seem purposefully designed to disrupt you when you're auto-attacking through a level, forcing you to waste a bit of mana removing them. Some levels which feature them also have a "No magic" mission just to make you waste time chipping away at them. Four years later when magic attacks mainly comes from active abilities instead of spells and physical damage dealers easily reaching 3.000 ATK with appropriate resistance to blind, these tablets lose their threat level significantly.
  • The zombie mobs in Halloween 2022's "One Cut of the Undead" event are annoying not because they're sturdy but because they use skills that inflict zombie, petrify, and disease status upon death. Post-mortem skills give players hindrance for farming event points because they won't activate until every unit uses their action and friend units will stand idle on auto unless they're given command on the first wave. While the status effects themselves in general are mild inconvenience at best since they except for disease don't carry over to the next wave, characters with upgraded normal attack that heal, revive, or reraise (Paladin Sylvie is a bonus unit for this event) and are equipped with as many counter chance increase as possible can easily kill the party.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Wiegraf, from the first Final Fantasy Tactics event when it was originally released. He is scripted to use an AoE Confusion attack, which is particularly deadly because it might kill you before you can even take a turn. In addition, the only ways to resist Confuse at the time of its release were through two accessories — one of which was a Trust Mastery farm. This was about two months into the game, well before the days of Minfilia or Lakshmi, so you either had to zerg him down quickly or die.
  • Hartmannellidae, boss of Subterranean Stream. The boss starts with massive defense. If you use physical attacks, it gains physical defense but less resistance to magic. If you use magic, it gains full elemental resistance but gains physical weakness. These two stack, effectively eliminating all its weaknesses if you don't have some form of dispel. If any of your weapons have elemental properties, you're basically screwed. Even if you work up a pattern and have a dualcasting lightning mage to exploit its weakness, the boss is still a massive tank with a debuff spell, a powerful leech spell that can kill some units outright, and a move with instadeath chance which is all the more likely to succeed since it will have numerous chances to pull it off while you chip away at it. On top of all that nonsense, one of the missions is to beat it without a single character being knocked out. Have fun managing that feat. It says something that the local Veritas can be easier to beat than Hartmannellidae. The Ribosome in Mysidia Underground is similar, with the added bonus that it appears as the boss of the final stage and the exploration.
    • The first example of this type of boss is the Amoebozoa from the Lands of Plenty event and the Kolobos Marsh. He has the same sky-high defense as other amoeba-like enemies, but counters every magical attack with Osmose. This made for a very annoying fight.
  • The Shadow Lord, from the Final Fantasy XI raid event. He starts out with nearly impenetrable defense and spirit. After the first turn, he debuffs either his defense or spirit. Two turns later, he'll dispel himself and debuff the other, repeating every three turns. In addition, he'll cast Silence when he's vulnerable to physical attacks, and Blind if he's weak to magic. Without Fryevia's hybrid damage, you either have to bring a hybrid party or focus on one damage type and wait out the turns between the right weakness. This makes defeating him more of a chore than anything, so long as you can survive his attacks reliably. Furthermore, the versions below ELT run away after six turns, so you only get one shot at each damage type.
  • The updated Golbez trial, The Man In Black, is considered to be a pain rather than outright difficult. The boss starts out easy enough, with marginal physical and magic attacks. These can be mitigated easily with enough Dark resistance stacked on a Provoke tank and Fire and Lightning resistance buffs. Once you pass the 50% threshold, however, is where the boss starts to get annoying. Golbez summons the Shadow Dragon, which does a fixed 999,999 damage per turn to someone in your party, much like the Aigaion trial with less outside damage. If you take out Golbez before the Dragon, the Dragon's fixed-damage attack becomes AoE and will wipe your party every turn until it's dead or you are. Meanwhile, Golbez adds a Drain attack to his arsenal, which is non-elemental. The most infuriating part is the Phase 3 transition, which starts after you kill the dragon. Golbez has a 3-in-8 chance to reduce everyone's HP to 10 followed with a bunch of attacks (adding Osmose to his arsenal as well). If you are not buffed with elemental resistances or you don't have Reraise on your party, you die. If he uses Drain, his only non-elemental attack, your tank dies. He also uses Osmose every turn, has a 25% chance to cap off his turn by reducing your HP to 10, and has a very small chance to repeat his Binding Cold-into-AoE combo. However, with two compatible AoE chainers, an EVO MAG-stacked summoner, and Bahamut, you can skip the third phase altogether.
  • The Glacial trial is the first permanent trial example. He starts by summoning 2 minions, which do a decent amount of damage. After that, he casts Reflect on him and his minions, nukes 1-3 members of your party with a massive Ice and Wind-elemental attack, and kills everyone. If the minions survive, they decrease your ice resistance even further and add Ice to your attacks. If you don't Dispel your party's buffs, Glacial's Ice resistance means you cannot damage the boss. The Glacial itself also counters every attack with a 10 million HP heal. He also uses Frozen Hurricane, which does even higher Ice and Wind-elemental damage, at every 20% of his HP. Mystea makes the second phase manageable, but it's very telling that the main strategy is to reset until you get a Hail Powder roll that doesn't kill your DPS units and kill the Glacial on Turn 1.
  • 2* Phoenix isn't all that difficult a boss if you know what you're doing, but the problem is knowing what to do is incredibly counter-intuitive. If Phoenix drops below 40% health and survives, he'll do a full heal. There is no limit to how much he can do this. You have two choices here: overwhelming force to do more than 40% damage, or disable his healing. The latter you could not possibly figure out on purpose without a guide. Phoenix will start off by imperiling himself with 50% fire, lightning, wind, and light. If you use one of those elements on him, he'll dispel and then imperil himself with 50% ice, water, earth, and dark. He'll switch back to the first set if you use those, repeat. In order to disable his healing, you have to hit him with a fire attack while he's imperiled himself with fire, and you have to do this four times. This means switching between two element types for eight turns until you've triggered his Red Hot Feathers buff, which buffs his stats by 40% and disables his healing. After that, he's pretty much a pushover as long as you have a decent magic tank built for fire/earth resistance.
  • 3* Diabolos is a Luck-Based Mission once you drop him below 50%. Getting there is easy enough, as he's a light-vulnerable boss that has breakable physical defense, making him a prime target for light chainers. Once he passes that, though, he adds a skill which casts one of three effects: complete physical immunity for three turns, an AoE dispel, or an AoE break. The first two can make the fight drag on forever, as the immunity forces you to wait turns while the dispel shuts off your magic and provoke tanks, forcing you to spend rounds rebooting your tanks and possibly reviving your units, potentially leading to an endless cycle of turns where you simply aren't in a position to deal damage, until the RNG favors you with the break skill so you have a reprieve.
  • Vindemiatrix in the Chamber of Arms isn't a particularly difficult boss as long as you have a solid magic tank and a decent breaker, but it stands out because it has five different thresholds. It starts out physical immune, switches to magic immune, switches back to physical immune two thresholds later, and finally swaps to magic immune halfway through its fourth and fifth thresholds. As you're swapping units back and forth to deal with the immunities, you also have to keep breaking the boss and buff up your magic tank so it will survive the threshold nukes. This is on top of Vindemiatrix using an MP drain every four turns. This is certainly doable with the right units, but you also have to finish the trial in 30 turns to turn the materia.
  • Most Global-exclusive event trials fall under here. The second-week event trials ported from Japan are usually cakewalks for veterans, but challenging content for newer players that can net rewards. Global-exclusive ones wind up adding minor annoyances like Mana Burn, unresistable status effects like Berserk, and Dispelga. This causes a lot of complaints from Global players, who argue that these annoyances add no challenge and make the game less fun. The most infamous of these is Hasiko, who has recurred six times (including her raid events).
    • The Incarnation of Hatred from the Darkness Awakens and Darkness Apocalyse raids is extremely annoying without powerful magic units. It has a slight resistance to every element but Holy, to which has a slight weakness, and a whopping 350 defense (compare to normal raid bosses, which rarely break 100). If not immediately killed, it has Berserk for your unit with the highest SPR, AoE MP drain, and AoE Petrify. In short, the boss hits your white mage with an incurable status and leaves you with little to no way to recover, plus its constant Mana drains make it nearly impossible to mount offense against it if you can't rush it down in one or two turns. Power Creep makes her re-issue much more manageable, but she is still incredibly annoying.
    • Hasiko's Revenge, the upgraded limited-time trial for the Darkness Awakens event, is equally frustrating. She gains a pre-emptive strike which consists of her Berserk effect, Petrify, and mana drain. This forces you to bring a tank with innate Draw Attacks to avoid Berserk. You also need a mana battery with enough MP/SPR to not be completely drained, so your party can get back on its feet. And because this is a preemptive strike, all of this happens before you can apply breaks. After breaks, she's much weaker, but is still annoying, especially since her missions involve not using items or Limit Bursts.
    • The Trial of Vengeance is roughly the same fight, but with two spirits. Killing them causes Hasiko to debuff her light and dark resistance, which makes it slightly more manageable, but the MP drain is still annoying.
    • The Shadows of Ruination trial consists of the fights from Hasiko's Revenge and the Trial of Vengeance fought back-to-back, complete with pre-emptive AoE MP drain. The only minor difference is that Berserk is moved to the second fight (as opposed to the first). The release of Folka (who has enough bulk to survive each MP drain and access to dualcastable, LB-based MP restoration) makes this more manageable, but most players groaned at having to deal with her again.
  • Compared to some of the other Chamber of the Fallen bosses, the Venomous Vines of Death isn't as brutal (with a decent magical cover tank, a physical provoke tank, and buffer, it's doable even without 7-star units or super TMR gear, and a healer with Reraise makes it even easier), but it's almost guaranteed to be a slog. It's technically a Sequential Boss, with a Great Marlboro followed by a Queen Marlboro and a retinue of three Mini Marlboro. The first part is against an enemy with ridiculously high defense, necessitating a focus on magical attacks to wear it down. The second is against an enemy with ridiculously high spirit, necessitating a focus on physical attacks to wear it down. If you don't have a pair of high-powered hybrid units to chain (and the damage must be non-elemental, fire, lightning, or wind; the other elements either are ignored or outright absorbed, sorry Fryevia), at least one part of the fight will go slowly (and taking one mage and one fighter means that both will probably be slow). On top of that, the mini-marlboros accompanying the Queen Marlboro can heal 5% of their health every round and do a jump attack, so even if the Queen can be taken down quickly, her retinue (two of which have high spirit, so they'll shrug off blows that can quickly bring down the Queen) can heal off damage and make itself immune to attacks for a round regularly (it's not unusual for the mini-marlboros to outlive their queen by several dozen rounds). About the only saving grace is that the side missions are fairly easy - avoiding items isn't a problem with a competent healer/mana battery, you'll almost certainly build up to have a Limit Break ready to combo in for the final blow against the Great Marlboro, and the sheer length of the fights makes filling the summon gauge enough to summon 3 times is more an inevitability than anything else.
  • The Obake Lantern from the Demon Parade wave battle event seems to have been intentionally designed to punish players trying to beat it with a party full of bonus units. Obake Lantern gets a preemptive attack where it damages your units, inflicts a ten-turn damage-over-time effect, and casts break resistance on itself. Unless you awaken and gear up all your bonus units, they'll be dead before turn one. You also have to dispel the resistance buff before breaking. Even if you do all that, its dual Demon/Fairy typing means killers are half as effective, so you need a really strong unit to finish it in one or two turns. Unless you have a 7-star Kaito, whose damage-over-time attacks can kill the boss in one hit, the Lantern can be extremely annoying.
  • The Youkai Lantern replaces Hasiko's Mana Burn with a powerful pre-emptive AoE physical attack that does damage over time for 10 turns. This is very manageable if you have access to AoE Reraise or AoE Raise, but the real challenge comes in completing the no KOs mission. Doing so requires obscene amounts of physical defense-based gear (which is impossible to reach for most mages), Guts (available on the esper Titan, Queen and Primrose STMRs, and a trial reward), pre-emptive Mirage (only available from a limited-time event or Lila's STMR), or a full evade build, and then you still have to deal with the damage over time. Past the damage-over-time, it is vulnerable to statuses, making it very easy once you've applied Sleep, Paralysis, or Confusion. Most people skipped the no KO mission due to the reward only being 10 Lapis, and the pre-emptive caused a lot of frustration.
  • The Series Boss Battle against Emperor isn't an especially complicated fight, but earns its difficulty through two mechanics. First, every three turns and after thresholds, Emperor restores 10% of his HP, so your damage dealers have to be able to outpace that. This is harder than it sounds, because Emperor is immune to breaks and casts an undispellable DEF/SPR buff on himself which he'll refresh consistently. On every second turn of his three-turn rotation, he will also give himself an undispellable 50% mitigation buff for one turn, requiring specific timing as well for burst-based damage dealers. Anything short of the meta damage dealers at the time simply can't keep up. Second, Emperor has a provoke-ignoring magic attack that randomly targets your units, which he will use with increased frequency as he loses health. Coupled with his cover-ignoring magic nuke every second turn of his rotation, a bad roll can easily see your damage dealers be killed and force you to spend turns recovering, during which he'll heal and possibly do it again three turns later. If you drop him below 10%, you have one turn to kill him before he starts healing himself for 10% every turn, making the fight unwinnable if you can't keep up. And like all SBB battles, 1000 Lapis is awarded for winning in 25 turns. Have fun.
  • The Defiance of Fate - The Lightning Tyrant trial is simple in theory, but heavily relies on your ability to barrel through the first two rounds of the trial as fast as possible. This is because the first two bosses have an extremely cheap mechanic where they can cast an ATK/MAG buff on themselves at nearly any point during their rotation, meaning the type of damage you aren't covering is going to hit like a truck. There's no way to prevent this from happening. You simply have to hope the boss has exhausted its AoE moves for that turn when it casts the buff. This is further exacerbated by the fact that both bosses can also randomly cast survivability buffs to make you take even longer to kill them and thus increase the likelihood of RNG coming down on you. About the only way to reliably beat this is to protect your units with evasion, which requires a lot of gear. Mirage can work in a pinch, assuming the bosses don't waste it with weaker attacks before the buff. Mercifully, if you can make it to the final boss, he does not share this mechanic.
    • The Fixed-Party version of the fight against the Maw of Malice also counts. Unlike the first fight, which you can pretty easily win in four turns or so through a large chain of fire damage, Maw of Malice has two HP locks to slow the fight down. Furthermore, you have to chain the limit bursts of King Rain and Mastermind Xon, and it is hell getting those two to line up because Mastermind Xon isn't built to fill his gauge like Rain. This is coupled with the fact that Xon is wielding a wind weapon, which takes a bite out of your damage. Maw of Malice can also buff its resistances to elemental and physical damage at random. All the time you spent powering up can be wasted by a simple coin flip.
    • Tyrant Unleashed, the harder redux of this fight, manages to be even worse. Now the Maw of Malice is guaranteed to inflict your party with Disease on death, regardless of how much protection you have against it, thus guaranteeing that Tel-Fulsanis will cast Zombie on your party as a pre-emptive. The only way to prevent is to cast five limit bursts on five different turns after the 5% threshold without killing him. Alternatively, you can use Carbuncle's Reflect to cast Reraise on the boss, triggering his Disease attack but also reviving him so you have a chance to cure it away before killing him again, but that means grinding through 80% of his health again. In either case, you're forced to spend more time during the fight than you should have to, thus making it that much more likely RNG will screw you.
  • The "Vs Itachi" Insignia farming battle for "Fundamental Forces: Shinobi Arc" story event is yet another example of Gumi being very unforgiving to newcomers in terms of their own original content's difficulty due to how heavily overtuned her Break Gauge was. Itachi's break gauge doesn't seem to register the listed weapon weaknesses^note Daggers, katanas, thrown weapons and rods and can't easily be broken in one turn unlike the other Insignia farming stages, needing around four units with barrage skills to bring it down to zero and even making Awakened Dragon Akstar's main selling point, his skill meant to do heavy damage to a Break Gauge when using katanas, do pitiful damage to it. Most veterans decided to just melt her HP with OTKO trial teams since it's much easier, but clearing a battle this difficult for farming purposes to increase ability potential is either time and resource-consuming for veterans or outright impossible for newcomers.
  • Dark Visions 11 has the final boss, Dark Kokuryu, who seems to have been intentionally designed to screw over anyone incapable of building an STMR-heavy burst damage team and stands out as one of the most blatantly unfair bosses before or since. At least two finishers and a metric ton of Dragon Killer materia are needed to even hope to clear the trial, much less get a decent score. Dark Kokuryu starts the battle by preemptively casting a 96% physical/magical mitigation buff that can't be dispelled or otherwise removed (such as through certain actions or attacks) and is refreshed every turn. If you can't burst down Dark Kokuryu through that mitigation to 50% within five turns, he instantly and unblockably kills your entire party. If you spend Lapis to revive, he just keeps doing it. Every. Single. Turn. The only upside is that he only uses one AoE physical attack per round, so Mirage renders him harmless, but this is little comfort when actually winning the fight is nearly impossible without extremely good units and gear. This caused JP players to complain that Alim did this to screw players over after Neo Terra completely broke the previous instance and numerous players reached the first position, and resulted in Alim making future DV events easier, if only the last boss is slightly tankier, but never again they pulled something like Dark Kokuryu. The GL version, which had Ibara way before Terra came, suffered the same problem.
  • The Clash of Wills manages to pump out frustrating bosses on a semi-regular basis.
    • Brawler from Another World has Kyros the Invincible, a name the boss earns by having a very cheap moveset designed to make fighting him a hair-pulling experience. Kryos has a preemptive MP drain that, unless mitigated by a breaker that has a preemptive break skill, will zero out most if not all of your party, a move he will use again the next turn and periodically beyond that. He casts numerous single-target MP drains every turn, draining whichever unit is provoking the hits. Kryos buffs his accuracy (which can't be dispelled) to defeat evasion builds, and hits like a truck on top of that. Only Blind can take the edge off, and that only works three times. He has a dispel counter-attack that hits the first unit(s) to cause him physical and magical damage. He casts a DEF/SPR buff every few turns on his first few turns that can't be dispelled. He has a 49% hard HP lock to prevent one-turn kills, and casts a party-wide HP to One attack on that threshold, a move that is meant to kill your tank when it covers it unless you hit the threshold on a specific turn and have full evasion. Finally, if you can't burst him down from from 30% to 0, he berserks your entire team and kills you. All of this comes together to make a boss more or less designed to lock you out of earning the rewards without specific builds, and makes his predecessors look tame by comparion. It's so bad in fact that simply being able to clear the level 99 trial is sufficient to reach the top 5000, even with no score mods active.
    • After a relatively easier (if evasion gear heavy) break with Morturrim, the Chamber of Wills doubled down on the bad aspects of Kyros with Three-Headed Hydra Treshen. Treshen has an extremely cheap gimmick where it will dispel all debuffs on itself and buff its accuracy on the first and third turns of its four-turn rotation before processing with a massive barrage of physical or magical attacks, depending on which half of the rotation it's in. The physical attacks are damn near impossible to survive without a massive amount of resistance buffs (unsurprisingly, headline unit Maeve is purpose-built to do this), unless you cheese it by using Cressnik or NVA Sieghard to imbue the boss with an element that you can then absorb, but this only works once because both of those abilities are single-use. On top of that, almost all of its abilities build morale, making it difficult to push the bar in a positive direction unless you have several units that are dedicated to the task. The trial more or less requires beating it within four or five turns max, a tall order for some players to pull off.
    • Vestige of the Nian Beast continues the trend. The boss uses both physical and magical AoE, with accuracy on certain turns, but the real problem is that the end of its rotation use a randomized sequence of possible attacks that can include both in any order and in any amount. On one turn your magic tank can be slammed by repeating hits of non-elemental magic AoE, and on another you can be hit with enough physical attacks to break past even five stacks of evasion. This is on top of the boss buffing itself to do more damage against humans (which the majority of units are) for the first five turns until you can disable it, and building morale like crazy all the while. The only upside is that the boss loses a lot of damage output past that point, but it's a big hill to climb without certain units.
    • The Dragon Spirit of Unknown gets even cheaper by incorporating past movesets with one simple addition: uncoverable magic AoE. Every single turn, the boss will cast a random assortment of moves that can include Chromatic Wave, a magic attack that ignores cover and hits your entire party. It's entirely RNG how many times the boss chooses to spam this against you, and can easily lead to a Total Party Kill on a bad roll. Worse still, it's non-elemental, so it can't be negated, only resisted with damage mitigation. But if that weren't bad enough, the boss starts the battle with a 99% HP drain combined with a debuff that reduces healing effectiveness for several turns. Even if you recover from that, it has a mechanic designed to punish you for using limits bursts outside of turns that are multiples of three, so you either have to forgo the best sources of mitigation or push the 50% threshold by turn five to reset his pattern for another five turns, after which the entire thing starts over with an undispellable damage buff. Having Triumphant General Celes is a big help, assuming you can manage to fire off her limit burst every turn (80% general/magical/aquatic mitigation for one turn), but otherwise you have to dedicate a fair portion of your team to survivability and your damage suffers as a result.
    • The Dream Wraith isn't as damaging as previous bosses, with proper cover, but trades that for some pretty punishing mechanics. The boss builds morale at an absurd rate, such that you'll at best break even without exploiting certain counter-attacks (NV Chow, for example), so morale units will have trouble reaching their full potential. If not brought below 50% in five turns, he instantly kills the entire party, so you need to do damage fairly quickly without having high morale. Finally, once brought to that threshold, he has an extremely cheap threshold retaliation which dispels your party, imperils all status ailments, then hits your party with sleep. This is a setup for the next turn where he hits your party with a non-elemental physical attack followed by a dark physical attack, to make sure any units that triggered Guts don't survive unless they are innately immune to dark. This is only avoidable by a unit that can hide for a turn, or wielding the modded Seraph Staff, and even the latter won't work if you've enabled the condition that reduces your status ailment resistances. Gumi actually had to nerf the boss, removing its preemptive sleep attack, because the status ailment condition actually made surviving the first turn impossible without the Seraph Staff. The only saving grace is that the boss does much less damage if you survive the threshold, but as a tradeoff gains an undispellable defense buff.
    • Janhasvara is a unique case in that the boss probably wouldn't be that bad if its mechanics worked as intended. It's a physical-locked boss with a gimmick that it can unblockably kill a single unit every single round, which serves as a hefty morale drain both as a result of the attack itself and the unit death penalty. You're supposed to be able to disable this attack by using Mana Drain on the boss, with the boss refreshing its MP every so often as a counter. This doesn't work. The attack always goes off no matter what, so Janhasvara builds morale at an unstoppable rate without specific equipment. This is so bad that Gumi actually had to hold off on fixing the overly powerful Empress's Rod from the Morgana redux in the Chamber of the Vengeful (the rod is supposed to grant a start-of-battle boost of 1500 after enhancement, it instead granted said bonus as a on-revive/Brave Shift effect, allowing it to grant upwards of 4500 morale every turn), simply because the rod's morale-building mechanic is the only way to counter the ridiculous morale the boss builds.
• Good Bad Bugs: Gumi has earned a notorious reputation of quickly patching bugs that benefit the player while taking eons to fix the ones that harm the game.
  • The way the game interacted with the magnification features of Android made chaining easier. On Android, enabling the magnification feature created a bit of lag, allowing for users to chain hard-to-chain units like Fryevia, Tidus, and Onion Knight more easily. This was later patched out, to the chagrin of the community.
  • Strangely, Global Original equipment boosts were calculated separately from the equipment cap. This was discovered after the release of Cloud and Elfreeda, and people discovered how they interacted with Randi's enhancements. Unlike JP, Randi received a boost in DEF and SPR, which made it a different interaction. Through this, Randi can outright circumvent the equipment cap, increasing his ATK to be on the level of JP's 7-star units. Grim Lord Sakura also had the same problem, with Kaliva's Unmatched Wizardry TMR applying to her and her 2-handed Reaver weapon. This was later patched in the 2.6.0 update.
  • The Torturous Trio trial is a Global-exclusive boss rush containing three previous trial bosses: Elafikeras, Echidna, and Bloody Moon in that order. It was hyped as fearsome on release until players discovered that you could escape from Bloody Moon, effectively skipping the most difficult boss without losing any of the rewards for winning the trial. This was patched the same day.
  • Reberta's ability Crimson Raid was intended to only improve modifier on Death Crimson. However, after maintenance on September 5th 2019, it was able to increase damage modifier on all physical abilities as long as she can use it in any way, including those granted from Esper abilities. Gumi took notice of this and planned to fix it on the next maintenance.
  • Beatrix's Latent abilities came with a weird dualcast bug. If she used Sword of the Clear Mind, and then casted one of the abilities unlocked by it, the unlocked ability would cast twice, effectively resulting in a triplecast. The announced Latents were detailed and they would bring Beatrix to the same level of damage as Madam Edel and King Bradley, but such a bug was able to ramp her damage up to the same levels War Hero Raegen would later get in Global. Gumi had to fix the Latents as to stop that, and the only viable solution was to remove the modifiers on these Latents for her abilities, which killed a nice chunk of her damage and demoted what would have been a fantastic buff into something at the level of Lilisette. While this power boost is still good for the then-current meta level, players were already miffed at Esther's underwhelming enhancements bringing her at a level lower than Yego, and this was followed by the horrible enhancements on the Valkyrie Profile units, essentially starting the chain of shitstorms Gumi would get into in 2020 with the Neo Vision rush and the fourth Global anniversary.
  • The coin shop for the 4th Anniversary in its last update (following from the 4.5-Year Anniversary JP had) mistakenly put Gil Snapper Towers (worth half a million each) instead of Families (worth 30 grand gil each). For a hour and half, quick players were able to just max out their gil ^{HOW MUCH GIL?} 500 Gil Snapper Towers are only 250 million gil. A player's gil cap is at 200 million because of this oversight. Gumi went at lightining-fast speed to fix the issue and ended up causing connection issues that led to a quick emergency maintenance. The bug was fixed, and Gumi let those who managed to get the towers keep it; this instantly caused a massive amount of drama on Reddit ^note Mainly thanks mainly to Gumi's Neo Vision rush forcing players into a gil (as the insanely fast-paced succession of Mog King events and strong enhancements/units left people strapped for gil) and cryst drought (as they skipped the Story Events for Fina's entire party for this), while seemingly using the fourth anniversary as a cover for their move. This forced Gumi to start improving methods to acquire gil in Global, mainly altering the Gil King Mog Maps to give five times the original amount of Towers, giving players a one-time 100 Lapis bundle for ten million gil and instating a half-cost unit awakening period.
  • Magic damage LB has this weird (but useful) bug that when they have multiple hits, they can't have only some of the hit partially ignore Spirit. Ibara's LB in Global, for example, is describe to be a 2-hit LB with the first one hits normally while the second one partially ignores spirit. However, due to said bug, both of them become hits that partially ignore spirit. This makes Ibara's intended 180x mod (60x mod on the first hit and 60x mod on the second hit that doubles into 120x because it partially ignore defensive stat) becomes 240x effectively and it greatly increases with both active and passive LB damage buffs. Since the bug hasn't been fixed due to the coding, she becomes one of the most valuable magic damage dealers before evoke LB damage era.
  • October 2022's Clash of Wills boss, The Crumblier, is a mixed undead and stone type. Naturally, undead bosses are programmed so that it won't be damaged from healing abilities or killed from revive spells. This boss, however, can be killed using Raise or unenhanced Full-Life^note enhanced Full-Life targets all allies, so it can't be retargeted to an enemy unit. Not only that, the fight has a weird bug where if the Raise/Full-Life user cast the spell after other units use their chaining abilities when the 50% HP lock modifier is active, the spell will act like a finishing skill and the HP will stop at 49% but the boss will be treated as if it's already dead so it won't use any command at all. Gumi decides not to fix it, hence players abusing this feature to fast climb to level 99 or slowly build a safe Rank 1 strategy.
  • Daily Fragment dungeons have a funny quirk in that it's possible to confirm the amount of Fragments dropped if you pause just as the battle victory is declared^note Made much easier by having a shifted unit on the party, as their return to base form causes a slight lag even on the PC version for JP. From there, you can opt to quit the battle, losing the spent NRG but retaining your attempt chance, allowing players to reroll the Fragment dungeon until they get the desired amount. This glitch works in both JP and GL and in an unusual turn of events, Gumi didn't bother patching this one out when it came to GL.
  • A common strategy in JP Dark Visions and Vision World is the Berserk Fruit glitch. Turns out that with very precise timing, one unit can give another a Berserk Fruit to cause Berserk status and quickly enter the Berserked unit's command... which results in the Berserk Fruit taking effect before the attack does, granting that unit an extra boost to their ATK while still performing their action that turn. Which means that players are able to do a much bigger burst than normal if they have the timing and dedication.

H - I

• Harsher in Hindsight: When the Chinese New Year event came out in February, players overlooked Ling. She was a limited unit that had AoE breaks at the same potency as Warrior of Light's Eraser abilities, and she had slightly weaker versions of Tilith's AoE revive (hers was 30%, Tilith's was full) and AoE MP recovery (her 30 vs Tilith's 50). She was undeniably a good unit, but clearly worse than a few upcoming, established upgrades to units who received a previous release. Due to foresight of Tilith and Warrior of Light's 6-star forms, some people decided to forgo pulling for her and figured that they would get her benefits in April, when they were expected to be released. What they didn't see was that Tilith and Warrior of Light's upgrades were both significantly delayed until June, with Warrior of Light being almost delayed until July. Those who successfully got Ling had a much easier time completing high-level content, while those who didn't regretted their judgment after seeing Tilith and Warrior of Light get delayed. Her overall kit still helps take the load off of other units, still making her a strong support unit.
  • This gave rise to the Ling Effect, which refers to the increased hype for almost every Global Original and/or limited budget unit. Some, like Tilith or 9S, lived up to the massive hype. Conversely, after Cupid Artemios was originally unheralded due to his lackluster skills, Xon was hyped as the next big unit. He could steal from all enemies, had a one-turn Hide, and could even Provoke in a pinch. Most importantly, he could steal buffs and apply them to your team. This led to a lot of people chasing Xon, despite him not being a limited unit. The problem with this was that most bosses' buffs were either at the potency of your buffs or close to it, and whatever buffs were stronger were only available for three turns. Those who chased him eventually realized that he wasn't worth the unit slot and moved on, regretting their pulls.
    • Ironically, Ling herself would fall victim to the Ling Effect on her re-issue in mid-November. Veterans pulled because they missed her on the first go-around, and new players pulled because they heard good things about her in the past. The community's stance on her as a unit is mixed. Her supporters state that her uniquely diverse support kit is still useful today, while her evasion gives her the ability to dodge tank with Illusionist Nichol. Her detractors believe that she is a Master of None: everything she does can be matched or outdone by another unit. Also, her banner was fairly poor, with an average healer in Charming Kitty Ariana and a poor 3-star support in Penelo. In essence, she's simply a good limited unit instead of game-breaking.
  • Very similar things happened with White Knight Noel. Despite being limited, everyone overlooked his banner, with a middling healer in Santa Roselia (long after Refia) as the 4-star unit, Cerius (a largely unheralded green mage who was overlooked for Cloud of Darkness's Omni-Veil), and Medius (arguably the worst 6-star max in the game). To make matters worse, this banner came behind the release of Noctis - a well-hyped unit who broke the current metagame in two. For the first week, the Christmas banner ran concurrently with the Noctis banner. The free-to-play players did not spend. Originally, White Knight Noel was heralded as weaker than Cecil due to his ability to cover singular members of the team and off-healing (on par with a strong White Mage). However, White Knight Noel's Provoke gave him a flat 50% damage mitigation for 3 turns as well. It also stacked with WKN's own Draw Attacks passive, which made it a full Provoke. When harder content like Gilgamesh and the Dark Espers came out, the meta changed to a dual-tanking meta. Instead of just using Cecil, most would use Snow to Provoke the attack and Cecil to heal or buff. That way, Cecil could take advantage of the mitigation from Saintly Wall. White Knight Noel could taunt and mitigate damage at once, and had the stats to survive. This made many players disappointed because they did not go harder for him. If you pulled WKN, you could save an entire ability slot for another unit, which made it sought-after.
  • Early raid events, plus the Egg Seeker event, gave copious amounts of unit-specific Trust Moogles in the gacha. Lower-rarity characters like Kain, Aiden, and Zyrus were easy to Moogle for their free rewards, but Fryevia and Reberta's Moogles were considered dust collectors due to how rare rainbows were. Spending 400 Lapis for unit space just to store 20 5-star Moogles was considered cost-ineffective - especially considering Fryevia and Reberta were about a month apart. Most players sold the Moogles out of convenience, especially considering this came before the update where one could combine them (so space and Lapis became a non-issue). However, if a player pulled Fry or Reberta later down the line, they found themselves regretting selling their Moogles.
  • In a story example, Sieghard/Veritas of the Earth's pining for Dark Fina in Season 1 and during the Time for Revenge side story to the point where he wants to destroy Lapis out of grief can come across as Dogged Nice Guy Wangst until The Reveal in his Season 2 side story, where it's shown that he gave up his family and became only a Veritas in the first place because he was risking everything to fight either with her or by her side.
  • In Japan, Karlette is only available through the Exvius Point ladder, with a single copy gated behind $500. In Global, they released her in the original summon pool, as they did with the other two point-exclusive units. The most bitter part of this was when Gumi decided to release a limited-time paid bundle guaranteeing a Karlette for $25, or 5% of the cost of a Karlette in Japan.
  • Another story-related example, Dark Fina asking Fina about whether she recovered her memories when climbing the Aldore Tower takes a rather dark twist once people learn in Season 3 about how Fina's life actually was in Andigo, and the true reason the Aldore Empire experimented on her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The reason that Final Fantasy V was not brought over during the SNES era was due to the time and budget that would have gone towards a translation going towards Secret of Mana instead (by the time that was finished, it was easier for Square to instead translate Final Fantasy VI, which is what they did). When the Secret of Mana event launched, it turns out, due to a combination of his magical power and his wide range of elemental attacks, that one of the best choices to take on the event was Final Fantasy V Big Bad Exdeath, who could practically solo the whole event with the right equipment.
  • Balthier was bumped off of his banner by Zargabaath, a Support unit. Zargabaath's ostensible purpose was to help bridge the gap between buffers and Ramza because the latter was too game-breaking (and it would cause less people to pull for Roy, who did the same thing). However, in order to fit Balthier within the schedule, they released Basch, who could cover. In short, the displacement of Balthier to help soothe the delay of a Game-Breaker caused another Game-Breaker to be released months ahead of schedule.
  • In September 2019, Reberta had a bug in her cooldown ability that boost modifiers of every physical abilities available to her. In January 2021, Alim released Neo Vision Awakening of Ignis with a cooldown ability that increases modifier for physical attacks (excluding LB) for all allies, somehow making it look like an unintentional Ascended Glitch.
• Ho Yay:
  • A bit of an unexpected pair develop this in the Land of the Crystals - Nichol and Jake. Even as the two readily acknowledge just how different they are, the two are very keen on spending more time together and learning from the other to get better. They even wrap arms around each others' shoulders and walk off ahead of the others. Twice. Lampshaded in the Wandering Lands, where Jake outright makes a gay joke and Nichol takes it seriously.
  • In season 3, Fina starts developing this with Daisy, the first Hollow Breaker that Fina recruits. It's most obvious in the CG limit burst for their summertime dual unit - whereas most CG limit bursts are a flurry of attacks, a single mighty blow, or magical incantations, theirs involves Fina and Daisy floating in water, looking longingly at each other, and leaning in with effects obscuring view just before the two can kiss.
• Iron Woobie: Dark Fina. Her life is nothing short of a Trauma Conga Line; she lived a life of complete misery, being treated as a creature by everyone, and then was dragged into Paladia and experimented on because of her unique traits, and is only allowed to leave due to the head of the project, Yuraisha, obtaining guardianship over her. She later consents to be the first human to have Yuraisha's immortality procedure performed on her, only to be feared and shunned due to having to this power when she survives. When she joins Hess's side out of loyalty to her she then watches the Eight Sages she'd made friends with all get imprisoned in crystal and is then imprisoned herself for 700 years while aware the whole time. Raegen betrays his promise to her and keeps her within the crystal even after knowing where she was. When she is finally freed from the crystal she loses her memory and only reawakens to her true self due to an accident, and then must kill all her former friends whose minds have devolved due to their time in the crystals. And then to save the world from Sol she willingly returns to her prison with little to no chance of escape and has her own sense of self destroyed by the Earth Crystal, which forces her to make a Vision of herself with the last of her existence in order to try and help Rain's party in Paladia, and eventually fades out just in time to finish the job she has set out to do. She gives off a tough front but this woman needs a hug.
  • Take a check at everything that is revealed about Fina's past on Season 3 and then you finally realize why the fuck Vesvia was actually made: Vlad wanted access to Fina's interdimensional powers and was willing to reproduce Dark Fina in order to obtain that power.
• It Was His Sled: Due to how newcomer login bonuses and 5* pool in general work, people new to the game or those who took a break before Season 1 climax will justifiably be confused when they pull some of the latest versions of main cast units that will inevitably spoil at least some of the much later plot points such as Sol, Aldore King Rain, Hess King Lasswell, Sakura of the Delta Star, and Nichol of the Epsilon Star.

J - L

• Jerkass Woobie: Folka/Veritas of the Waters, who hypnotized herself into being the heartless monster who killed Elle due to not being able to stand the horrors of war 700 years ago. On one hand, she did not want to continue seeking out revenge and was only carrying on for her friends' sake and has become actively suicidal by the end of Season 1 after killing one of her descendants under said hypnosis, but on the other she chose to hypnotize herself into a monster rather than standing up to the other Veritas, meaning she brought all her misfortune on herself and is still a villainous person. The fact that Season 2 did almost nothing to fix Folka's character doesn't help matters.
• Junk Rare:
  • A few units available via special summons are derided for being dramatically underpowered for their pull rarity. Queen gets flack for this - she only pops up as a five-star base, which means there's only a 1% chance of even having a chance at her. However, outside of very rare circumstances, she gets outperformed by several three-star base units - most damningly, Krile could outdo Queen at most of her roles, and Krile only maxes out at a five-star rating. Some 4-star units are considered better than their 5-star counterparts on their banner - the most common examples being Mystea over Duke and Tilith over Elza and Vargas.
  • Lightning has firmly fallen into this category as the game has progressed. Despite being a damage-based unit, she has no chaining skills aside from Area Blast, which uses her regular attack instead of a fixed number of frames. Crushing Blow is technically multi-hit, but the frames are so far apart that even another copy can't chain their hits together. In addition, she is hampered by the game's lack of access to strong Lightning weapons, so she can't even take advantage of her Imperil. Unenhanced, her Imperil is dreadful, at only 20% compared to every other unit's 50%. It also costs 2 million gil to enhance it to its full 70% potential, and it doesn't even fix its chaining ability. In short, as more 5-star units have been released, she has fallen from Game-Breaker to Scrappy.
    • Perhaps in acknowledgement, she's been reduced to a free 5-star earned simply by beating Veritas of the Dark at the end of Lanzelt. Ironically, this makes her less junky if you pull a second copy, giving the player a surprisingly less mediocre unit.
  • Before unit/rate equalization happened, 4-star max units had higher rates than 5-star and 6-star max units. For example, instead of gaining a powerful unit or a TMR fodder unit, you had a higher chance of pulling a low-tier character like Shadow, Lani, or Fran out of a blue (or even a gold) crystal than you did pulling a Zidane. This was exaggerated with the introduction of 5-star bases and the 6-star cap. If a rainbow crystal popped out, you could get a powerful 5-star base unit (like Noctis or Luneth) or a 3-star base that goes up to a 5-star maximum (like Kuja, Gilbert, or even former "common units" like Galuf or Kain).
  • Eve, as a unit, has reached memetic status despite being a 4-star base. While other Nie R: Automata units are either good, have game-breaking Trust Mastery Rewards, or both, Eve is neither of those. The community's main gripe is that he is based off of Adam, who was handed out for free (and as a very common unit in the raid gacha too). He has marginal DPS skills along the same lines as his brother and nearly identical stats to him. Most damning was his TMR after being revealed to be a worse version of his brother's (increasing MP instead of HP). Even after it was buffed to increase HP by 30%, Eve grew to be the most hated unit in the history of the game, solely because he was only moved from the raid pool to dilute the drop rate for a hyped unit.
  • Ray Jack might be the worst 5-star base on sheer design. While he was a mediocre chainer on the surface, he had one fatal flaw: a cover passive. He also had a clone of Brave Presence, which was fairly useless due to the wealth of units who could reach 100% Provoke, but his cover passive was the most damning part of his skillset. Not only did it force you to choose between having him as a mediocre tank, it was on the same level as Charlotte's original physical cover passive. Even before Cecil's Saintly Wall (which outclassed Ray Jack as well), Charlotte had the same cover tanking ability as a 5-star max unit. To add further insult to injury, Ray Jack's TMR is a slightly better version of Veritas of the Earth's. Earthlord is a 4-star base. Ray Jack was such a bad unit that the community actually hoped for off-banners, referring to pulling him as "getting Ray Jacked".
    • His enhancements did make him somewhat redeemable, giving his chaining skill Octaslash frames and reducing his cover passive's proc rate to 5%. For a short time, he was a usable unit, but was never top tier like some of the other enhanced units in-game. Unfortunately, his 7-star form never came due to his game being shut down, and he never truly had a chance at redemption.
  • Whimsical Winter Tiana. She's intended to be a brave shift unit where she's a healer and support in one form and a damage dealer in another form but she lacks the capability of doing those roles effectively, only being useful on the Clash of Wills that featured her banner during 2021 Christmas event and sees virtually no use elsewhere. Her healing and support kit is acceptable, but many others can do what she can do better. She loses to Cressnik in terms of healing and morale fill, her element amp is too weak despite having 5 different elements you're better off with bringing a dedicated element buffer, and her damage takes way too much time to reach full potential in a game where burst damage is more valued. Her upgraded normal attack is a menace in arena due to being a party revive and reraise, but Sylvie's is a better upgrade to hers, making her lose out on the only niche she has. The final nail in the coffin is her Intrinsic Ability adds so little to what she has, failing to bring her into the spotlight. Some players often refer to her whenever someone asks which GLEX unit is bad.

M - N

• Memetic Loser:
  • Eve is the game's resident Memetic Loser. The players saw him as the symbolization of greed in gacha games. This was because Gumi included him as a Global Original "bonus" in the normal gacha, despite being based off of a unit from the free raid pool. The other 4-star unit on the banner, 9S, was considered to have a top tier Trust Mastery Reward to the point where he was the unit everyone was pulling for. Even after the NieR: Automata event ended, its resident Scrappy received quite a bit of hate. One would have been hard-pressed to not find "F**k Eve" posts on certain communities during and after the event, and the backlash has become a meme in the community.
  • Whenever anyone gets a rainbow (usually on stream), other players jokingly say it's a bad unit like Delita.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • White Witch Fina's visual design was largely similar to her original design, but with ghosts around her and a bright orange witch's hat that looked more like a traffic cone. Instead of being known by her name, the community eventually called her Traffic Cone Fina or VLC Fina (after the VLC Media Player's traffic cone). She actually got a redesign in the next Halloween event making her hat white to match her outfit.
    • Lampshaded with the Halloween Hat, which was actually released in a bundle for $1.
  • It is common for very delayed units to be memed as JP-exclusive upgrades. With Gumi's definition of "soon" taking months, the community tends to make fun of Gumi for soon. The most common are Warrior of Light's 6-star form and Ramza's ability awakenings. Even Orlandeau, whose gimmick is being Purposely Overpowered, and Rikku, a 4-star unit who's regarded as the best defensive support in the game, never saw as significant of a delay as Warrior of Light did. Ramza's enhancements suffered a nine-month delay.
  • Telling streamers or other users that they will get a Memetic Loser from a rainbow crystal like Delita and Lightning are rather common joke in the community as well.
  • Gungnir (Kain's TMR) has become synonymous with pitchfork due to the abnormally high amount players have received. It has been given out three times as an event reward, frequently returns to Item World, and copious amounts of trust moogles for Kain were given out as rewards for both runs of the Shadow Bahamut raid event. The abnormally high amount of Global-exclusive Gungnirs given out as a reward has become a bit of a meme.
  • Gumi's statement regarding "working hard" for rainbows became a community meme. The first launch of the Trust Coin shop didn't have limited-time unit prisms. While they originally promised to put them in due to the difference in time, the response was overshadowed by them saying they considered "the players who worked hard for their rainbow units". The concept of attributing blind luck to hard work was so ridiculous that even those who brushed it off as PR-speak joined in.
  • Gumi's PR backpedal in Easter 2019 after stealth-nerfing their advertised units gave birth to people calling FFBETubers' content and datamines "unofficial information". Originally, Esther and Sylvie were so strong that they could keep up with Japan's metagame, which was 10 months into the future. A stealth-nerf dropped 20 minutes after, angering the community. Gumi's response effectively denounced content creators as "unofficial sources" ^note which are directly ripped from the game's data, telling players to only listen to their then-inadequate (and often wrong) "official information" birthed a new meme.
  • In Japan, CG Chair Rain and Lasswell are now memes due to the prominent thrones featured in their designs.
    • The trend is carried over to Global, and the chair family has new Global Original members in the form of Emperor Foo and Morgana.
  • Gumi's tendencies to extend the weekly maintenance period due to "unforseen circumstances" has become a source of jokes within the playerbase. The display of incompetence is so bad that the extended maintenance has become something players anticipate every week.
  • The beautiful Sieghard makes the word "beautiful" to be beautifully used in the beautiful community. Get it, beautiful?
  • Ashe is ruining the game. ^note based on this thread on Reddit when someone asked whether the game giving out a 5* Ashe would ruin the game balance. People went along with it because she was one of the most valuable 4* base unit before the 7* era. The joke then came full circle when Alim released a 7* version of Ashe in March 23rd 2020.
  • Feener. ^note The massive Narm in the trailer for Season 3 had, among other things, Fina's name pronounced like this. This caused many players to call Fina by this butchered name for fun. Not only this; people couldn't stop making jokes at just how low-budget the dub for the trailer was to the point where Gumi referenced it in Edel's story event. The meme may even have been the catalyst for Gumi to hire an actual dub team for War Of The Visions.
• Memetic Troll: Sol of all people achieved this status in Season 2 thanks to his stunted morality and logic, involving moments such as taking down a guard to make him count as a tournament participant, and in particular a scene in Rubiena where he makes Sakura taste a horrible soup made by Rain.
• Moe:
  • Refia's chocobo hugging win animation. Awwwwwwww.
  • Luka, as a character, is also pretty much Moe personified. (Which, big surprise, helps fuel her popularity.)
  • Global-exclusive Olive also operates on a Small Girl, Big Gun level of this. Her victory animation involving Sparky tipping over is what really seals it.
  • Kelsus's victory animation involves one of his giant magic hands picking him up and giving a peace sign as the other cradles him.
  • Sylvie's victory animation has the eggs in her basket hatch into rabbits which surround her.
• Mood Whiplash: One of the chapters from the "Way of the Warrior" story event features a character dying... and then the Dungeon Clear message appeared and the Victory Fanfare played.
• My Real Daddy: Quite a few JP players didn't take well to Kei Hirono passing the torch of FFBE's producer to Yusuke Suda. This is mostly owed to Hirono's status as a living meme in the community, and also due to people tying the deteriorating state of the game to Suda^Explanation Story Events all but disappearing from the game, an increasing list of unfulfilled promises, and Suda being overall perceived as a much lazier producer than Hirono was thanks to several new ideas for events being only half-implemented. Due to this, some people often comment this game was much better off when Hirono was the producer, helped by Hirono's charisma on streams when he was in charge of the game.
• Narm:
  • One bad delivery of a scene in Season 2 is Mombert's death to Quadis in the final parts of the Visectrum arc, with Quadis holding him by the neck and burning him to a crisp. Some players can't help but chuckle at how easily Mombert was disposed of by the Emperor, and the delivery of the scene is fuel for a few jokes.
  • The Global Trailer for Season 3 would've brought more hype had the narrator not been so... Engrish-y. Notable unintentionally funny moments include the butchered pronounciation of Fina (Feener) and a word "Baby"^note granted it's justified randomly popping out on the screen.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Fina's detractors refuse to let slide the Season 3 scene where Fina asks Bruce to breast feed a baby due to having zero knowledge of being a mother or having kids. The Japanese script wrote the scene as a humorous take, but Fina's detractors found it a source of massive fuel to throw against her fans.
  • Fina's obsession with being as sexy as Dark Fina was already a source of derision in the fandom. Then the writers themselves started throwing it into every scene Fina was a part of, causing Fina to get even more hate for it in the fandom. The writers have finally eased off on it as of the middle of Season 3, but Fina detractors remember it well.
• Nightmare Fuel: The final stage of Season 2, Vlad's final form, is a gigantic beast made out of millions of screaming faces. The background plays through the entire time you're in the dungeon, even in the menu screen.
• No Yay:
  • The Lid/Jake pairing. Most fans in decry it as pedophilic, given the large age gap between the two characters (Lid is a teenager while Jake is almost 30), which is not helped by the Values Dissonance employed by the Japanese writers. Add the general distaste for Jake, who flirts with absolutely anyone or anything into the mix and the ship is by far the most hated of any teased ship in the series.
  • Fans have similarly shied away from the story's increasing hints at Nichol/Sakura, because Sakura is a 700-year old stuck in the body of a child and herself in-story claimed she would not pursue a relationship due to the Squick that her condition invoked.

O - P

• Overshadowed by Controversy:
  • The Trust Coin shop was a massive boon for players. It came to the Global version months ahead of schedule compared to the Japanese version, but initially had no limited unit prisms like Japan did. These prisms allowed players to awaken their limited-time 5-star units to their maximum 7-star potential. In the explanation for why they were left out, the developers said it would be added in at a later date, partially because they wanted to consider the players who "worked hard for their units". This wound up offending many players, some of whom were angry that their bad luck was attributed to not working hard enough. Even though the prisms would be added early as well, Gumi's poor response eclipsed the positives of the Trust Coin shop, and "working hard" became a long-lasting community meme.
  • The first Valkyrie Profile event was overshadowed by massive drop rate nerfs compared to the Japanese version's banner. In Japan, they increased on-banner rates for the step-up to 2%, had rotating banners for each unit, and removed all off-banner units from the banners. The only added "bonus" was a 25k step-up with the rate split between all 3 units. All of the units were outside of the meta because they could only chain with copies of themselves. The only thing that caught players' attention was Arngrim's STMR, and even then most slapped in on their Hyoh. Most players wound up not pulling because the rates were so bad, and the nerfs even received negative media attention. The second event, which brought Mystina and Lezard Valeth, got equally as divisive when Gumi decided it was a good idea to have these two units (who are pretty good mages in their own right) share the banner with the old units, making it a 7-unit banner with five of them being 5*. The enhancements for the old units being considered some of the worst Gumi has done (even worse than Esther's case just prior) by a good chunk of players just added more fuel to the fire, starting a fierce debate on the value of enhancements versus new units.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Nagi acts like a Yandere towards Hyoh, being violently protective of him and wanting to kill anyone who gains his attention. Later, the writers tried to justify this behavior because she had a brother names Hyoh who died during the tournament that promoted her into the Stars. Unfortunately, due to her previous behavior, the relationship still doesn't come off as sibling-like but like Nagi had incestuous feelings towards her brother that she then projected onto Hyoh.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Brave Exvius features an extensive, involving and well-written campaign, worthy of the 16-bit RPGs in whose footsteps it follows. It also unlocks basically no ability to access post-game content, as its default characters are not very strong (especially as Power Creep has set in with a vengeance) and do not have TMR rewards. Its only value to a hardcore live-events-focused player is 1) the Summon Magic, which is unlocked there; and 2) the (admittedly large) amounts of Lapis which can be gotten by completing its levels. And even then, players may want to prioritize the live events, since the same Anti Poop-Socking Energy supply is used to handle those and campaign levels. The quality of the writing starting with Season 2 doesn't help as well, especially with certain incidents including entire arcs like Visectrum, which caused some players to stop following the story and just following the hardcore players in Lapis farming.
• Porting Disaster: On a bad day, Gumi can be quite bad at bringing content from JP. This has become better in recent days, though they are still managing to get some bad stuff through.
  • The Memories of the Aquapolis event was riddled with crashes for some reason: something that was detrimental to gameplay because you could not continue from a crash. In essence, the game kept crashing, destroying all of your progress. This was so bad that they re-issued the event shortly after. During the second re-issue, however, the crashes were still an issue.
  • The Mog King raid event. While porting it over, Gumi did not adjust for its new quality of life adjustments. 1-star and 2-star Metal Cactuars and Gil Snappers were added to the summoning pool, and given the same rates as 4-star Cactuars in the previous raids. 4-star rates were nerfed by a sixth. Megacite made a return to the pool from Bahamut event, but regular Magicite, vanilla Magicite, and Magicite Shards were added to the pool (again, with nerfed drop rates for Megacites). This resulted in an unprecedentedly weaker pool since the first raid, and largely nullified the point of running the event past the King Burst Pot. Worst of all was that the Multi-Summon limit was decreased from 50 at a time to 10 at a time, despite doubling the coin drop rates. It was later ramped up to 100 at a time, though the rate nerfs still remained in place.
    • The same thing happened in the Shadow Lord event. Despite being delayed past the NieR: Automata event, it had the same bad drops as the Mog King raid. Vanilla magicite and shards still returned. However, there was still a point to running it, as the coins sold for 50 gil per coin instead of 1.
    • For a period of nine months, the weekly patches copied and pasted the Japanese version's original code, bugs and all. Bugs that surfaced in Japan (like the raid damage bug) were ported over and took weeks to fix, despite solutions already existing. It eventually caused a riot on the levels of the Unit of Choice scandal, since the game became outright unplayable and Gumi did nothing for weeks.

R

• Replacement Scrappy: Arex replacing Dah Sol as a speaker (and becoming the primary speaker) in update video announcements is not received well by fans. While the former has better fluency in English, his knowledge about the game mechanics or Final Fantasy lore in general is minimal at best, he sometimes misses or gives the wrong information on updates, and he frequently misgenders units.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • In general, most units who started with 5* max forms at release and later got their 6-star forms. Most of these units are used in budget compositions, due to the majority of them being 3*s from the first Type-0 event onward (that set the pattern of 4* and 5* base units with 6* max forms at release, and 3* units capped at 5*). Due to Early-Installment Weirdness, many promising 4* units were held back by a 5* max limitation, most notably Tilith, Agrias, and Warrior of Light. One couldn't help but feel a little let down a little later down the road when more recent 4* units like Refia were upgradeable to 6* from day one. When they finally received their 6* upgrades, they received skills that put them close to (or, in some cases, above) certain 5-star bases, with Tilith and Warrior of Light changing their respective class's metas. With the enhancement system, some characters who were received poorly when they were released were greatly improved to become much greater units or even game-breaking themselves.
  • Veritas of the Light was originally seen as a low-tier 5-star unit. This is because a Japanese site rated her fairly low due to being locked into the light element for damage and being a hybrid unit. There was also the lack of usable hybrid-based throwing weapons and guns to take advantage of her Masteries. One non-elemental magical gun be acquired in her event, and the other could be acquired by paying $12 for a limited bundle. The two MAG throwing weapons are in Season 2's story or a TMR from Hope. However, when Fryevia showed that hybrids were just as good as (if not better than) their physical and magical-based counterparts, people started to revisit Veritas of the Light. Her reputation was fully rehabilitated in Global by the time she was released.
  • Ace fits this trope after his enhancements. Ace, before his enhancements, was a mediocre mage, with mostly RNG-based skills that support himself and a skill that can take advantage of Dual Wield. After enhancements, he becomes a very strong support with limited chaining capabilities. Specifically, his Tri-beam Laser skill becomes a beastly DPS ability that can chain, has a chance to increase its potency (topping off with a 10% chance to do 22.5x damage in 7 hits), and decreases the enemy's elemental resistance to Fire, Lightning, and Light by 75%. Spirit Hand becomes a potent AoE MP restore with a chance to restore 45, 100, or 140 MP. This makes Ace one of the best support units in the game, and arguably the best MP battery due to the full on-demand restore capability it has.
  • Dark Knight Cecil was originally as bad as Lightning or Queen due to his highly prohibitive HP cost for his abilities. After enhancements, DKC gets better modifiers and a 9999 HP auto-Regen after every turn. Soul Eater has a 100% dark Imperil and a massively increased multiplier. Dark Cannon gets a slightly increased multiplier and a 50% Imperil. Unfortunately, it requires timing a heal if you use Dual Wield, but he's a very strong finisher if you get the timing down.
    • After being briefly rescued, he has returned to being a Scrappy, with a 7-star form that is nearly indistinguishable from his 6-star and a bottom-tier STMR. His cooldown skill is worse than Delita's due to it being 3 turns shorter and his self-buff only working on humans.
  • Soleil was originally a poor buffer, with her best buffs only being for one turn and having nothing over other buffers to compensate. However, her enhancements (which were Global-exclusive) allow her to massively buff the party AND debuff the enemy at the same time (especially if you use all four in conjunction with each other), turning her into one of the top support characters in the game. Fully enhanced, she has an AoE 120% full buff and a 35% AoE Full Break, but the buff string takes 3 turns to set up and the debuff strike takes 4 turns to set up. In short, Gumi designed Soleil to be the bridge unit between other buffers and 5-star bards, and a powerful budget unit for the years to come.
  • For all the jokes at her expense, Queen saw noticeable improvements in her Global enhancements. Some additions were made to her pinch buffs (300% Attack and 200% DEF/SPR) and some improvement to her Magic Martyr skill to work as an MP battery. By far the biggest, though, was Devastate being changed from a Barrage style move to a regular chain attack (albeit one that only works with a copy), letting her rotate Magic Martyr to trigger her crisis buffs with Devastate for damage in the intervening turns. Provided she has Imperil support to use with a weapon, she at least goes from being a Memetic Loser to usable, albeit an extremely expensive investment.
    • Her 7-star form is unironically good. She becomes a True Doublehand chainer with W-Ability who can also finish. Her STMR is also one of the best in the game, offering a strong 55 ATK and guaranteed Guts. The latter is extremely important, considering how powerful stacks are.
  • Demon Rain, one of the first global-exclusive units released, is considered to be the worst 5-star base in the game without his enhancements. He was designed as a cover/counter tank, but had no mitigation skills or DEF buffs, and his counter was weak. His only plus was his TMR, which was the highest best-in-slot ATK accessory until Desch's Earrings came out in September. His enhancements, however, re-invent him into a powerful Counter/Provoke tank. His counter's strength becomes 3 times as strong as the generic counter with a 30% crit rate, and its proc rate is upped from 75% (including Demon's Revenge) to 100%. His Demonic Fury buff gives him 30% more HP and increases his low-HP buff to 120% ATK/DEF at 50% HP - which is permanent as long as you can keep him alive. His Defend skill becomes Demon's Taunt, which at full enhancement is a 3-turn 100% Provoke with 50% flat damage mitigation. Ignite, however, turns into an 80% 3-turn ATK/MAG buff that grants him access to a finishing skill and a self-MP sustain for 3 turns. This means that he can also become a strong finisher as well. To top it all off, his Doublehand gets increased to a 150% equipment ATK increase for single wielding weapons and includes 2-handed weapons. This allows you to take advantage of other weapons with high positive variance. This makes him a very useful unit, albeit expensive to fully enhance. At 7-Star form he finally gains an area of effect move, allowing him to cover all units and then counter for massive damage. This skillset puts him just below Wilhelm in effectiveness and potentially even more useful given the right circumstances.
  • White Witch Fina was originally a meme unit. She was considered amazingly terrible for 6-star units, with her skillset being based off of Fina's 5-star form with Raise and a meager MP restore. Her SPR+20%+MP+10% skill becomes Witchhood, boosting it to 50% SPR, 30% MP, 50% Camouflage, and a 100% SPR Doublehand that includes 2-handed weapons. You're probably going to be using the Doublehand anyway, since VLC Fina cannot equip shields. Her raise becomes on par with Full-Life. Her only downside is her lack of Curaga, but she finally reaches the higher echelon of healing with her enhancements. Her Entrust skill becomes a true Esuna and has an 80% Reraise added onto it. Divine Ritual becomes an AoE SPR finishing move, with the ATK portion irrelevant. Ritual becomes a very respectable MP refresh that recovers 50% of everyone else's HP and 25% MP. This makes her one of the better healers in the game.
  • Cupid Artemios was originally an overlooked 4-star unit, but his enhancements make him one of the best finishers in the game. His Sun Cupid is enhanced to a 40% ATK boost, but the real power comes in his Flash Barrage move. What was originally a Holy-elemental Barrage increases to a 2-hit finishing move. In addition, the imperil is increased from 35% to 50%, and the potency increases to 8x (which even eclipses most 5-star units). Finally, he is one of three units with an ATK boost when equipping a throwing weapon, which makes him a force to be reckoned with when using Fixed Dice. The only one who outright surpasses him is Ang, and even then he's also limited.
  • Mercenary Ramza, at his base form, was initially one of the worst 5-star units in the game. He tried to be a hybrid between a tank and a DPS, but his cover passive tended to get people killed when he's a DPS and ST cover is inferior to AoE Cover. His chaining skills were unable to chain with anyone else and had no elemental Imperil, and he had a single-target cover passive that made him a Master of None. In effect, he was a marginally worse Ray Jack.
    • Gumi decided to scrap his Japanese enhancements entirely and focus more on his utility kit. Throw Stone turns from a throwaway skill into a strong Provoke skill. Blade of Justice, his chaining skill, turns into a 45% ATK/MAG break that increases Weapon and Mind Break's power from 40% to 60% for 6 turns. He gets passives that outright incentivize using him as a tank over chaining. Out go the unsynergistic hat/helm passive enhancements, and in come heavy/light armor and heavy/light shield passives. Gumi completely redid Mercenary Ramza's enhancements from the ground up for the Global version, and he becomes one of the best Provoke tanks in the game. His 7-star form only adds to his power, offering an AoE physical cover, an AoE magical cover on a cooldown, a splash of elemental resistance, and Entrust, making him a well-rounded tank.
  • Beatrix has been looked down upon by players because she had no chaining partners and her moveset doesn't stand out among other 5-star base units, barring a powerful hybrid finisher attack. Her enhancements make her somewhat viable in other areas, but it doesn't fix her clunky rotation and heavy reliance on her cooldown ability. Gumi took notice of this and made her significantly stronger. When fully enhanced, all of her breaking abilities can be powered up to full by using them on their own, her Graceful Paladin passive grants her True Dualwield and increases her stats when equipping a greatsword, her cooldown ability adds a 200% ATK/MAG increase and fills her whole LB gauge, and Seiken - Saint Bringer can be powered up by itself after using the cooldown ability, gains a 120% light Imperil, and can chain with the Absolute Mirror Of Equity family. The much more comfortable turn rotation, improved stats, and slot efficiency are enough for some into using her in various team compositions despite the expensive enhancement costs. While her latent abilities initially pointed to her being Rescued, Gumi decided to delay her latents for the sole purpose of nerfing her.
  • While Fan Festa units are generally favored design-wise, a majority of them have fallen out of the meta because of their outdated kits. A free upgrade for them at the end of June 2019 brought players' attention back because the upgrade was a massive improvement that followed (or broke) the meta standard at that time. Circe turns from a mediocre magic chainer and finisher into a very powerful magic chainer upon release (whose damage calculation beats Sol and Exdeath who haven't even come to Global at that time. Sol would become far more powerful when he came to Global, and his enhancements in Global completely eclipse Circe's power nowadays), securing the best mage spot for months to come. Malphasie's damage modifiers grow bigger and she gains access to Bolting Strike frames. Her STMR becomes arguably one of the best TDW accessories in the game. Myra's now permanent dualcast allows for a more comfortable and flexible rotation between healing, buffing, status effect resistance and recovery, damage mitigation, and LB gauge manipulation. Ellesperis becomes a solid True Doublehand Bolting Strike chainer with additional two elemental options (ice and darkness) and a small utility. Beryl's non-tanking roles are improved, allowing him to fill his roles better while his TMR becomes one of the best magic tank and mage materia in the game.
  • Kurasame is a mixed case in comparison to both Global and JP version due to SBB abilities coming into play. His enhancement in JP is very lackluster, adding nothing much on his already frail build (only 30% additional HP), no mod boost on his chaining skills other than Diamond Rain (a 30-hit cooldown that can only chain with a copy) and Zekken - Sudden Downpour, enhancements that focused on unnecessary skills and most importantly, no increase on magic and physical TDH. His Latent abilities give him another chaining ability and a (much needed) TDH and massive passive mod boost to fix some of his problems, but his survivability is still poor. A lot of his enhancements are tweaked in Global, making them miles better than JP counterpart. The situational enhancement of Flames of Life is scrapped entirely, hitframes for several skills are changed (Zekken - Cloudless Rain and Zekken - Freezing Showers into proper Disorder frames, Diamond Rain into Aureole Ray frame, and Zekken - Sudden Downpour and Zekken - Twilight Rain into Absolute Mirror of Equity frames), his decaying imperil on Instant Hellfreeze becomes a fixed 100% ice imperil, his Double Zekken can now be used for all skills for better setup, his self-buff for Ice Magic Unleashed becomes undispellable, and he gets passive and active modifier boosts. His stat is still bad, but he gets DEF, SPR, and MP compared to JP. However, with how Gumi neglects giving units their Latent abilities at the time of the enhancement's release, the enhancement looks underwhelming in comparison.
  • Starlight Elena has been widely regarded as inferior to her NVA version, trading utility for subpar damage while her dual wielding nature has made her less effective that doublehand users after the weapon variance and magic variance updates. Gumi tried to salvage her capability as a damage dealer with EX abilities and by making her brave shift LB morale-scaling, but it was still not enough. It wasn't until she received her Intrinsic Ability^note a character-exclusive materia obtainable from crafting, a Global Exclusive feature that she became relevant again. Said Intrinsic Ability, Hidden Power, gives her 2000 static ATK and MAG (for comparison, 500 is generally the ceiling for exclusive abilities, premium Vision Cards, etc.), 80% ATK and MAG (needed because, unlike her NVA version, Starlight Elena has pitifully low passive boosts for a NV base), and a 400x mod boost to ALL of her own non-LB skills. While 400x mod boost doesn't sound impressive given the meta at the time it was given, it greatly affects her Gemini Blade since it's a backloaded chaining skill in the Bolting Strike family, giving the skill an 800x mod boost due to how modifier boosts affect separated mods individually. Coupled with the 10x mod boost from Merciful Aurora passive and base form LB (becomes 40x total), 20x mod boost from itself (becomes 40x), and 125x from her EX 2 ability (becomes 250x), the 60x-modifier chain skill suddenly has 1190x per cast at maximum, with triple cast becoming a whopping 3570x modifier, effortlessly dealing damage equivalent to around 400-500x modifier LB without complicated setup. While she's still stuck in dual wielding without proper equipments to support doublehand and hybrid damage dealers are harder to equip in general, her sustained damage is still amazing.
  • Olivera undergoes a veeeery long journey of redemption for this. For context, he's what players considered a subpar Global Original unit due to how half of his kit is locked behind morale mechanic in the base form with low damage outside of it and an MP-scaling damage dealer in Brave Shift form which is hard to gear because of the lack of equipment with high MP stat. Gumi tries to fix this by giving away free yet limited MP equipment, but it does nothing to his base form and does little in helping his brave shift form. He is finally saved after Global Exclusive Vision Card "Dazzling Demoness" is released during Final Fantasy II's banner and his intrinsic ability "Peak Crescendo." The Dazzling Demoness card has more base MAG and MP than his own card alongside 500 static MAG/MP and 100% MAG/MP boost, has reduce MP cost passive, 200% TDH, and 100% chain cap boost which Olivera desperately needs, making the card a perfect fit for him. Meanwhile, Peak crescendo boosts his stat even further with its 3000 static MP and 1000 static MAG. 80% boost to his MP and MAG, 150% killer against beasts, humans, insects and plants, and chain start boost by 200%. Outside of Clash of Wills, his MP scaling damage, provided you have all of the above alongside some limited-time MP gears, beats Dark Rain's Super Limit Burst with a dupe finisher combo by a ton. Outside of Clash of Wills, His base form LB after using MAG Store skills becomes one of hardest-hitting magic damage dealers provided the enemy is weak to dark.
    • "A Cool Smile," Global Exclusive Vision Card released on Beach Blaster Olive's banner can be a very good alternative if players want to focus on single burst turn. While lacking in static stat, the card makes up for it with 50x mod boost to morale-scaling LB for the first 5 turns. Given that Olivera's base form LB is a quadcast Chaos Wave Awakening chain with four separate hits, the mod boost becomes 200x making his LB at max morale into 735x 32-hit LB that deals even higher damage after MAG store. All in all, while him being pure MAG damage dealer means he is locked to dark, he becomes one of the best options when the element aligns.

S

• The Scrappy:
  • Out of the party members, Jake is by far the least liked. Even outside the issues with the playable unit versions of him (outside of Pirate Jake, a unit limited to Halloween that's excellent for item and gold farming - even then, Awakened Xon, Chow, and Lara Croft are just as good at that), he's got a bad combination of Small Name, Big Ego, Casanova Wannabe, and the writers' idea that he has a romance with a teenager twelve years his junior. Fortunately, he's probably the least plot-critical of the main party and a Butt-Monkey in the hands of said teenager.
  • Fina's underwhelming performance on Season 2 earned her a big share of haters, to the point Jake seems more popular than her at times. Aside from most of the units she gets being quickly powercrept^{How bad?} Lotus Mage Fina got quickly outpaced by Folka and then Warrior of Light Lenna and so it stayed until her NVA put her closer to the top tier; Kimono Fina despite her Global upgrades got quickly upstaged by White Lily Dark Fina and the advent of Chaos Wave Awakened chainers, and her enhancements don't seem to be hitting Global anytime soon, and even then Neo Visions already made her useless in Global; Chocobo Fina was never in the competition to begin with; Draconian Princess Fina was relevant for all of two banners and Dark Spirit Sol still upstaged her due to not being dependent on the evocation gauge, her lack of initiative throughout the course of the season, underlying need to always have Rain and Lasswell by her side to the point players decry her as extremely selfish, and the fact that she got to remain in the story while Dark Fina (a much controversial character herself due to her abuse of Story Breaker Powers) got the shaft, and the writers' constant abuse of her "Sexy Pose" joke, has earned her stark detractors who will throw crap at her at every single opportunity.
  • The final acts of Seasons 2 and 3 did a big number in tanking Rain's popularity thanks to what these acts entail. Season 2 has Lasswell shoved aside for the story to reveal that Akstar is a version of Rain from a Bad Future, but Season 3 tops it by having Fina perform a useless Heroic Sacrifice followed by a six-month Time Skip that puts Rain back at the helm of the party. People following the story didn't take either of the instances well, and it only got worse by Season 4, where Rain is the intended protagonist again, this time without Lasswell and Fina beside him, with the much more unlikable Rhus as his rival this time. Players started accusing the writers of picking Rain as a Creator's Pet worse than either Fina or Dark Fina ever were, especially as the season follows beats already done on Season 2. It says something that players empathized more with Taivas' side of the story in Season 4, particularly before it was revealed that he is Rain's ancestor, rather than Rain's. It also doesn't help that Rain steals yet another spotlight from Raegen at the climax of the Dark Lineage 7th Anniversary Story Event. The insistence from the writers on having Rain taking command of the story every time it climaxes squandered whatever good will players ever had for him as their patience for his "protagonist power" waned.
  • Rhus is the case of a character who became hated from his very introduction. He did no favors to win players over, especially because before being properly introduced as a character, he and Neilikka were working for the Big Bad of Season 3 as The Mole ^note Not helped by them being introduced only after Season 3's aforementioned jarring Ass Pull that led to players disliking Rain of all people. Comes Season 4, and it turns out Rhus simply refuses to communicate with his party, essentially hiding and dripfeeding important lore to Rain, made even more jarring by his unhealthy obsession with defeating Rain, which comes to a head after Chapter 5 when he reveals he wants to kill Rain so he can complete Omnibus on his own. This, plus a case of unresolved romance with Neilikka that manages to be worse than Rain and Fina's relationship, caused several players to have little to no sympathy for him. Made even worse by the second half of Season 4 eventually making Rhus the Deuteragonist (while shafting Lasswell, Fina and Physalis into smaller roles, no less) to take over the vaccuum left by the end of Taivas's story.
  • For a boss example, the Global-exclusive Hasiko is hated due to her boss battle involving the Scrappy Mechanic of mana burn and her recurrence. As of March 2019 she has appeared six times as a boss at different periods, including her appearances as a raid boss. There are jokes that her appearance is a way of punishing the playerbase for complaining about bugs or lack of high difficulty content.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Here.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Delita's STMR, The Subservient, is a materia that gives the unit an 80% attack boost with no preconditions. There are only a handful of STMRs that give such a boost, all requiring a specific weapon to be equipped. The catch is that at the beginning of every turn, The Subservient deals 2000 fixed damage to the equipped unit. The unit therefore has to be kept healed every round, and if the opponent manages to drop that unit's health below 2000 on their turn, it's dead on yours guaranteed. There's virtually no reason to use the materia aside from parameter missions, and it can prove an unwelcome discovery when a player has attached it to their friend unit. In JP, however, the impossible happened as Alim finally brought a Final Fantasy Tactics event to the Neo Visions era, and removed the fixed damage aspect of his STMR, which was previously buffed to provide 100% ATK and MAG.
  • The Angel Slayer from the Valkyrie Profile collaboration looks equivalent to a STMR in Brave Exvius, but its hidden mechanics make it dramatically worse. It looks strong on the surface, boasting 180 ATK, but has a variance from 0.01x power to 1.00x. Unlike the original game, where its sky-high attack made the high variance irrelevant, the variance makes it useless aside from parameter missions. The only unit who might want to equip this sword is Kaito since his Damage Over Time doesn't use weapon variance to calculate damage, but using it requires whaling for an STMR that is better used defensively.
  • Chorale's STMR, Fedeltà Whip, is hit with this. First of all, it's a whip, a weapon mostly associated with mages. Second of all, whips in general have very limited support in either version of the game. There's no whip-based weapon imperial, severely limiting its damage output, thus discouraging players from equipping it. Arguably the most crucial disadvantage, however, is that it's a dark-element weapon. In an era where elemental attacks are easy to get due to how common self-imbues and supports with party-wide imbues are, having a weapon locked to a specific element is heavily discouraged since it reduces attack efficacy for those with non-dark innate element or reduces flexibility for elementless physical attackers. Other than for Chorale himself, it's basically a waste to equip it to any unit when there are both stronger and more compatible weapons available.
  • Among the espers, Siren is hit very hard by this, to the point of being a Crutch Character. For one, while espers do give stat boosts to the character equipped with them, tweaking characters towards specific roles, Siren is hit by the Master of None problem. Siren also has some of the least useful skills that she can impart to a character, along with fewer points per esper level with which to buy abilities or stat boosts. Finally, her summon does Non-Elemental damage when her theoretical element (water) is one of the least common resistances and elements in the game. Her main use is to give one character minor stat boosts while waiting for a sixth summon to equip, which doesn't happen until a decent way into the fourth major area, to give a character access to a Water spell to complete a mission, or to give a character 50% Water resistance for a tough boss fight.
  • Fenrir was also hit hard for this for similar reasons to Siren. While he does have an extra Resistance (specifically 25% to Dark), almost all of his skills are useless. His stats are mainly geared towards hybrid characters, and all of his moves are weak hybrid moves. He has no Killer passives (like Odin or Tetra Sylphid), and he has no useful active skills (like Lakshmi or Golem). For stats, Bahamut was a better option for hybrids anyway. He at least has a useful evoke skill, with a single charge of Mirage and a strong buff, but was inferior in every way. Fenrir's Master of None Syndrome was particularly egregious because he is acquired in Paladia, while Siren is the first esper released in-game. His 3-star form, however, fixed most of his problems, making him a solid stat esper.
  • Nyx's Trust Mastery Reward, Guard of the Future, gets the Scrappy treatment due to being the Master of None of Trust Mastery Rewards. This materia, despite coming from a 5-star base, is 20% ATK/MAG/DEF/SPR, auto-Regen, and a 5% Auto-Refresh. Multiple TMRs of each stat boost+20% and above (including Adventurer III, which provides all four at once) have been given out for free. Auto-Regen is a poor ability (not to mention also easy to get for free), and auto-Refresh can be gotten from the Fat Chocobo in Mysidia. In addition, the Refresh is inferior to King's (who is a 4-star base) and Ayaka's TMRs, making it largely inferior. In short, Guard of the Future does a lot of things, but doesn't really excel enough in any of them to make it farmable. It's even Scrappier because according to the document leak, Gumi was weighing whether or not to change Nyx's Trust Mastery to a 100 ATK/70 MAG Fire-elemental dagger. This would not only have improved other units down the road, but would have given Nyx a powerful Fire-elemental option that wasn't limited to event rewards. If you missed the Brave Frontier collaborations, this means your only options for taking advantage of the Fire imperil are Cannon's Blade (which has 106 ATK) and Flametongue, which has a paltry 33 ATK. Gumi went with the original reward instead, and the community was disappointed - especially after the free Halloween dagger was revealed to share its fire element with a dark element and was locked behind a limited That One Boss.
  • Engulfing Light, a materia gained from clearing Chamber of Vengeance's The Empress Supreme's LGD difficulty, is a materia that gives its user a 80% MAG boost from equipping a light-elemental weapon. While the stat boost is comparable to STMRs and is beneficial for mages or hybrids who want to maximize their damage, there are few light-elemental weapons for mages. The highest MAG a light weapon can offer is the Staff of Osiris from the limited-time Tomb Raider collab. The highest MAG rod is the Holy Rod from the Henne Mines event with a measly 53 MAG. The highest MAG for light sword is Astral Blade which was locked behind a difficult second week trial event (The Empress of Virtue) and has a low MAG stat (one point below the Holy Rod). In a game where equipment stat contributes majority of characters' overall parameter, equipping those weapons with Engulfing Light will lower units' overall damage output.
• Seasonal Rot: An opinion a fair good chunk of the players have of Season 3. Rain and Lasswell are nowhere to be found for the first chapter and half, seemingly making Fina the sole main protagonist until Physalis and Charlotte go after her and drag Rain and Lasswell with them. Many wouldn't have problem with that had Fina's arc throughout the past two seasons for finding her own identity not been seemingly forgotten in the way that she based her actions on what Rain and Lasswell would do in the situations she faced (that said, she does get a fair bit of initiative, something she was heavily criticized for lacking in Season 2). Her sexy pose gag and the writers' heavy insistence on it has become tiresome for players, even more after a particular scene in the Wohlstok Theater where Fina just lets it loose and out of control. The sudden appearance of a baby that can form barrier around her and obvious future plot device wasn't received quite well by fans. Some also felt that the premise of cleaning out Hollow wormholes in multiple dimensions felt vague. That said, the villains so far have generally gotten a far better characterization than Vlad of Season 2 did for example, and a good part of Fina's party (Bruce and Cleome in particular) are fan favorites. For JP players, it has come to a head with Chapter 6, which manages to upstage the fabled Akstar Asspull from the end of Season 2 by almost rewriting Fina's origins, and again at the end of Chapter 7 with Fina's Heroic Sacrifice shunting Rain back to protagonist status, which effectively is a worse version of said Season 2 asspull and got players pretty much fed up with the writers.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Because Power Creep (both in general and compared to the Japanese version) has accelerated faster than the increase in stats for story characters, the endgame for Season 2 is much less difficult than the endgame for Season 1 when you account for units and abilities available at their respective releases. Whereas Behemoth K could easily perform a Total Party Kill unless particular tank units were used, and Sol was infamously That One Boss unless the player had access to Veritas of the Dark as a Vision, the Big Bad of Season 2, Emperor Vlad in his various guises, was vulnerable to any number of 7-star chainers, not to mention how he could easily be chipped away with access to any of the several buffers and/or debuffers that have been released. Plus, while the Season 1 bosses all required lots of luck to receive particular 5-star base characters, Season 2 introduced step-up banners and 5-star select summon tickets to make it much easier to acquire particular characters so as to build the player's preferred party.
• Squick:
  • Jake's constant flirting with Lid in Season 1 is frequently viewed this way, as Jake is 28 while Lid is 16 according to the official guidebook. And then around the Paladia arc, Lid falls for Jake, invoking No Yay from most of the fans. Not helping is the list of females Jake has hit on over the course of the two seasons: Fina once (granted, he was meeting her for the first time and didn't ask her age), Sakura once (although it's implied it's on a joking tone), Kunshira (a Cat Girl), and Leviathan (an Esper who happens to be a giant sea serpent).
  • Mid's character design is often criticized for how sexualized it is for a Dragoon, going past Stripperiffic territory. Many a player wasted no time on comparing her to Aranea Highwind, or even to other female Dragoons in Brave Exvius, such as Skaha and Reberta, noting how better geared/dressed they are against Mid's Chainmail Bikini.
• Tear Jerker:
  • One sidequest involves tracking down a lost necklace so that the owner can be buried with it.
  • The entire A Promise Beyond Time event, which involves two elves (Bran and Lunera) meeting Ruggles the dwarf. It ends in Lunera getting sick trying to save a dying Ruggles, the couple befriending him, Ruggles dedicating his life to making Gronoa more livable, and Bran sacrificing his life for him. It ends with Ruggles learning the elven language just to make the castle a monument to their love and finishing his tunnel.
  • Future Rain's demise by Ret-Gone once the main danger of Vlad is taken care of is something out of this world. Lasswell manages to catch him right on his final moments of existence, calling his master out on shouldering his entire pain alone much like Rain tried to do in the present timeline. As his pupil tells him he knows everything about him now, Future Rain tells Lasswell how he has let his master proud of him and that he's fine with vanishing from existence as at least everyone is alive in this timeline and there will still be a Rain around. The real kicker is what happens when Future Rain disappears; he and Dark Fina meet in a sort of afterlife and embrace as they leave this plane of existence.

T

• That One Achievement:
  • The gold-rank Undying Myth achievement, for 100 consecutive victories in the Player Versus Player arena, can be frustrating to get for several reasons. First and foremost, barring any refills, there are only enough orbs in a week (~160) to earn the achievement once, and arena stats (other than points earned towards monthly awards) reset every week. This includes progress towards Undying Myth, which means that a player who loses their win streak halfway through the week will have to wait until next week to try again. Second, the list of opponents only shows their leader unit and player rank, with no information as to what they might be hiding behind it. You can wind up fighting an opponent fully stocked with Game-Breaker units with all the best equipment, and if the A.I. Roulette is feeling merciless, most if not all of the player's team can be slaughtered before they even get a turn. You also can't simply reboot the app as you can with normal battles, because an anti-cheat measure counts doing so as a forfeit to prevent players from resetting to get a favorable result with the A.I. Roulette, which also means an untimely crash will scuttle your progress. Power Creep has only made this worse, making it possible to design teams that will perform a first-turn kill reliably unless you have specific units to negate it. Though you can always attempt to target weaker players (anyone below rank 40-50 is probably a pushover if you've beaten story mode), there's no guarantee you'll get such opponents. This one at least gets progressively easier as you advance in the game, but without certain units, you're always at risk of one bad roll ending your streak. Gumi adding the ability to consume all orbs at once, multiplying rewards by the number of orbs consumed, actually made this worse, because each battle only counts for a single win regardless of the number of orbs consumed. Earning the achievement means deliberately not using the feature that week.
  • The three Colosseum achievements (score, times played, victories) aren't difficult, but they are obnoxiously tedious for virtually no benefit. To complete the Colosseum and craft the Blood Sword which is rewarded at the end, you need to win 913 times, which includes repeating the last three levels several times for the crafting material. This gets you to bronze. Silver requires 1,000 and gold requires 10,000. That is roughly a year's worth of play on a game mode that at best rewards a Mega Ether every 11 matches (two a day). By comparison, winning in the Arena earns you stat pots, various kinds of magicite, and even trust moogles once a week if you rank high enough. Since the Arena also has trophies with the same conditions, it's a no brainer which is worth the time to do. This achievement has actually gotten worse over time, as the incentives for playing the Colosseum have been phased out (it would occasionally appear as a daily task, but no longer) while the incentives for playing the arena and ranking high have only increased.
  • By the same token, many of the item and skill-based achievements require either using or crafting things a downright excessive amount of times. Crafting items and equipment isn't so bad, especially with the introduction of equipment enhancement and craftable esper ore, and raids will regularly reward large amounts of crafting material that can be made into piles of Shop Fodder. Abilities, on the other hand, are difficult to craft in large amounts due to the materials involved. Using items is even worse, because the game actively discourages using them, though you can always purchase large amounts of Eye Drops/Antidotes and spam them on repeat trips through King Mog events. Perhaps the worst of these is summoning 10,000 espers. In any given battle, you'll typically only evoke one, if at all, and it takes exploiting specific units and/or TMRs to consistently be able to fire off a single esper every turn.
  • Getting the Ring of Dominion is the most grueling achievement of them all. To unlock it, you need to complete 70 Trophies, many of which are That One Achievement-worthy (see above) in and of themselves. The addition of 12 general trophies took some of the edge off, as you can earn 9 of the 12 through casual play. The final ring is incredibly powerful, with ATK/MAG/DEF/SPR+50% and HP/MP+30%. The ingredients are three Hero's Rings, three Koltz Stars, three Hope Diamonds, and three Flaming Bloods. The Hero's Rings are easy enough to get, but each of the other materials has a 2% chance to drop from crafting the other three Rings (Monarch's Ring, Domination Ring, and Ruler's Ring). For the Hero's Ring itself, you need 3 Silver Ores and 10 Fire and Ice Megacrysts. For the three others, you need to combine the Hero's Ring with 60 Megacrysts (each with a different combination). You will need anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 Megacrysts of each type and more than 1,000 Silver Ores just to craft it: and that's only assuming you have average luck. It is so hard to obtain that anyone who wants it has to be a whale and meticulously plan the Ring of Dominion, nearly ignoring everything else besides it to farm Megacrysts.
  • Any "defeat x with an esper" mission is especially reviled by the fans, given that espers usually deal pitiful damage and require very precise timing for the achievement to actually count. To make matters worse, some bosses with such an achievement have been time-limited bosses, meaning if you mess up it may not be easy to try again. Mercifully, this one has gotten easier to do as esper attacks have gained longer timing, but there's a notable exception that requires winning with Asura, who has one of the shortest casting times of any esper.
  • While most chaining missions are easy, ranging from chains of 2 to 10 hits, the fixed-party version of the Essence of Despair trial required you to land 65 hits. This is especially notable because the maximum natural chain you can get from the DPS units in the party is 63, that being a quadcast of their Chaos Wave Awakened skills. The challenge isn't getting a proper chain, which isn't that difficult, but fitting the extra hits into your existing chain without breaking it, which is harder than it sounds because CWA is one of the slower and wonkier chaining skills.
• That One Attack:
  • In the Arena, Stop and Charm are the bane of most players, even if it's recoverable. Most units don't innately resist either, which includes the majority of DPS units. Equippable resistance is rare and usually limited to one or the other, and doesn't always grant total immunity. The Super Ribbon from the FF TYPE-0 Pandæmonium - Exploration event is uniquely capable of granting total protection, but that was a limited-time event. Of the units that have abilities which inflict Stop and Charm, the most common ones can hit your entire party at once. There's also an obtainable ability that allows any unit to use AoE Stop, if unreliably. If the roulette goes badly, your entire team can be frozen and you'll have to wait three rounds for it to wear off, if you're lucky enough to survive it. Without units that can cure both (Neo-Vision Aerith being the most popular), you basically have to hope the attack doesn't freeze your dispeller units so you can remove it before you get wrecked. This has lessened over time with more units innately immune to such abilities, but is still quite obnoxious.
  • Berserk is hands-down the worst status effect to get hit with in the entire game. Berserk causes the unit to auto-attack every round until it wears off. Since auto-attacks are worthless, in practical terms this means your unit is not only doing practically nothing, they're wasting their turn doing it. It's the only status effect in the game that can't be cured (Zombie can't be cured in the US version of the game, but the JP version has a unit that can), only dispelled, and even if you cure it as soon as possible, it's still a wasted action.
• That One Boss: Has its own page.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • Arguably the worst mission in any given level is "No (recovery) magic". This clause pretty much obliterates the role of your healer and/or red mage. You can use items to get around it, but items are nowhere near as effective as your healer. It certainly doesn't help that the game loves to pair this with a boss level. Very few units have healing that is ability-based, most notably Tilith, who is also the only unit in the game with an ability-based 100% AoE heal. Even the ones that do have ability-based healing are often hampered either by the healing being a fixed amount or with such a low modifier that it's generally insufficient for regular use. As more units with ability-based healing have been released, this has become easier to work around.
  • In the Arena, if Multicast is restricted that week, it takes away the majority of your damage potential. This is because the majority of good Arena units are either physical units that use doublehand to beat evasion or mage units, and in either case use Multicast so they can fire off more than one attack per turn. Since Triplecast is standard among most good Arena units, damage output is reduced by two-thirds, which becomes especially problematic when you have to take out a team with a healer that's been built for extreme health as a means to survive whale teams. While it won't cost you the round most of the time, it can be obnoxiously tedious. Thankfully, it seems as if Gumi quietly eliminated it from the possible conditions.
• That One Level: The Realm of the Dragon King, an entire world consisting of eight interconnected explorations, counts as this. These explorations (if you can call the base and summit ones) are technically interconnected, but you can start at any of the six middle points if you use a Tent at the designated rest areas. It is strongly encouraged to use these checkpoints due to the difficulty of these dungeons. The monsters are stronger than any exploration in the game, having hundreds of thousands of HP and doing punishing amounts damage to your party if you don't kill them. Some even have instant KO attacks that they can use multiple times per turn. Most challenging of all is their random ability to pre-emptively strike your party. Before you can set up breaks, Provoke, or tank, these can use any attack: including instant KO. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to have access to Escape - these enemies can outright cripple your party if they kill the wrong people. Shadow Bahamut returns as a Breather Boss who is more of a pushover than the trash. You should be able to dispatch him with no problem. Beating him has a chance of dropping a Rat Tail. Waiting at the end of the quest is Bahamut, who is That One Boss level, and beating him earns you his power as an esper.
• That One Rule: The Player Versus Player Arena always has a pair of restrictions on what can be used in it (changing weekly), and those restrictions can be anything from a minor annoyance to a crippling handicap, depending on what party the player brings in to the Arena. For example, a ban on black magic will seriously crimp the strategy of someone heavily reliant on units like Dark Fina or Exdeath, while someone heavily reliant on Lightning or Luneth might not even notice. No status effects is one of the big ones, as that and chaining are on the top of the Arena meta list.
• That One Sidequest:
  • When sidequests for extra lapis and items were added to each quest and exploration, a few of the ones added were particularly cruel. Ones in particular that are prone to frustration include restrictions on party size, defeating the boss with a limit break (depending on their magic defense, defeating them with magic may be equally problematic), and a restriction against healing. Certain ones require certain skills to be used, which can also be difficult depending on who has been recruited — in at least one case, it even becomes Character Select Forcing one side mission requires use of Upgrade, only available on Lid and Black Cat Lid. For the vortex missions, this can be even worse, as the missions generally have decent if not fantastic rewards for completing the sidequests, but require willingly handicapping yourself against foes that can be extremely difficult even with an optimized team.
  • Limited-edition event trials are a thing — the most noteworthy being the True Titan, who was That One Boss level, and the Skeleton King, who was so difficult that he had to be nerfed due to him being able to randomly kill your party with no way to stop or recovery. Finally, the Youkai Lantern had a powerful pre-emptive AoE physical attack that did damage over time, requiring certain gear and high stats to survive. The Chamber of the Vengeful's version of the fight actually saw the pre-emptive get nerfed.
  • The very first part of the exploration in Realm of the Dragon God has a sidequest to "clear" (which can be pulled off, thankfully, by making it to one of the base camp areas and choosing to exit) that section without any deaths among the player's party. As detailed in the main page entry for Brutal Bonus Level, the enemies are powerful enough that they can take out at least one party member per turn, even if the enemy in question doesn't have a One-Hit KO move and even if the party is loaded up with the best TMR gear, if they get an action. And since it's the one place on the world map where enemies can get a preemptive strike, sooner or later, the monsters will have that chance. It's practically a Luck-Based Mission - can the player get to one of the base camps to get out of the area while only facing preemptive strikes from enemy parties that don't focus their strikes enough to take out a party member? The reward for pulling this off (20 light megacrysts), while useful, can be much more easily farmed from countless exploration maps that are much easier to clear, edging this into Bonus Feature Failure.
  • Asura's Realm takes Character Select Forcing to new heights by requiring Pyro Glacial Lasswell. Unlike most other missions requiring a character, Lasswell's Season 2 form is a 5-star base in the paid gacha, and no guaranteed companion unit is provided like most story events. This wouldn't have been so bad if the event had been timed with his release, but by that point Pyro Glacial Lasswell had been out for some time and since eclipsed by more powerful DPS, leaving you to hope you either pulled one or one of your friends has one set. Thankfully PG Lasswell's Neo Vision Awakening made him into a much more powerful unit and a more sought-out option for players.
  • Increasingly, any mission that requires the player to defeat an enemy with magic is becoming one of these. The problem is simple - while new moves that do damage based on magic are still being added, they're being classified as abilities in-game and not magic, so they won't trigger for purposes of the mission. In several cases, like Ibara and Neo Vision Terra, powerful magic-based units don't know any spells at all. The game hasn't added new spells to the game since early in season 2, so they're hit hard by Power Creep - your best-case scenario for a single round of magic damage is Ultima with an effective 4.2x modifier outside of niche cases with elemental damage, whereas even the basic non-awakenable abilities of 7-star units are using 10x modifiers or better. Timing a single hit of magic can be tricky - initiate too early, and it won't count as a killing blow, but wait too long and the game won't register the hit. The best ways around this are to either use a multi-hit attack spell like Tornado and hope one of the subsequent hits comes after the foe loses its hit points, or have a caster use one of the two extra-slow spells (if they happen to have said spells). That said, Alim took profit off of Melo's release to perform a full revamp of Black and Green Magic (which Melo as an unit bases himself on), changing -ga spells to chain with CWA (with the White Magic Banishga following soon after) and making -ja spells into powerful finishers, as well as increasing the damage on Tornado and Flood.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: See Ass Pull above. Sakura during her story event was shown to deeply regret being immortal and wants to be depowered so that she can grow out of her childlike body. A cure for immortality is forced upon the other Sworn Six, but not even offered to Sakura before it disappears.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Some players were not happy with the sequential Player Punch in Season 2's Visectrum continent. In the span of two chapters and six updates, you get thrown four different parties (only one of which is at Raegen's side of the story), who all die in some manner or another: Pris and Atole are killed by Delmodoa almost by surprise, the same Orders member also kills the Magus Sisters when they decide to stall for time so Lid and Jake could be taken to safety, and Krowa and Regina are Buried Alive on a trap set up by Aldore, meant for Lasswell's team. On Raegen's side, there's Mombert and the Kin of Hess, which you watch performing what essentially is a suicide ritual one by one in order to take down Emperor Quadis' paling, and Mombert follows them soon when trying to take the Emperor on personally. The worst part is how all of these causes were for nothing: Pris and Atole had no chance from the start and they could have let it to Rain and Lasswell as they intended to do the same thing (this is made worse by Lasswell deciding to let them try despite knowing they had no chance and despite Akstar's own objection to it); the Magus' parents are already dead as told by a prisoner to Raegen on his side; Regina's quest for her emotions is rendered completely moot if she's buried underground; and the paling being taken down not only did nothing to stop Quadis when he fought all of the Sworn Six and won, Mombert dies on quite an undignified manner before that, which renders his case a Senseless Sacrifice despite him knowing he would die at the attempt. Needless to say, players were infuriated and pointed out deaths happening as early as Crystallis as Alim making characters who are there just to die, and as a consequence of this, they see no point on caring for whatever company Lasswell or Raegen get for the current arc.
  • Another problem the Visectrum arc brings is how the writers wanted to get the game's plot as dark as it could humanly be by performing an enormous Shoo Out the Clowns instance by removing Lid and Jake, two of the least serious characters in Lasswell's team, from the party. Combined with Regina and Krowa's deaths not long after, this caused players to just get fed up on the story, and things didn't get better due to the Tear of Provenance subplot, where Lid faced a death risk in order to save Jake. Also not helping is the revelation of what happened to Rain in between seasons, which is clearly shown in the Story Event "The Day The Spark Was Lit", which was met with criticism due to how the entire tragedy hinged on Idiot Ball coming from both sides of a conflict. By the end of the Operations Map arc, it was obvious that many players were just done with the writers, with another seeming instance of senseless death coming for Domino and Shatal having to be turned into an actual Win Back the Crowd moment by not just having the duo survive, but bringing Lid and Jake back to Lasswell's party.
  • What makes it worse is how the writers seem to insist on its effects, implying constantly that these deaths were important for Lasswell's progress as a character. This has come to a head on Hess King Lasswell's Story Event, "A Prayer for Hess", where he visits the places where the people he met died, which irritated some players to no end, causing them to again point their fingers at Alim for refusing to stop twisting the knife on the Visectrum arc and making it look like Lasswell had to step over multiple corpses to proceed in his quest on Paladia. For some players, this marked the point where they just couldn't stand the story anymore and the plan now was to just autopilot through the story for the Lapis.

U - V

• Unexpected Character:
  • Generally, any time they do a non-JRPG collaboration, it's surprising. Most collabs have been exclusively RPGs, like NieR: Automata and Secret of Mana, but there have been a few for other video games and even musical collabs.
    • As noted, Ariana Grande of all people has been added to the game as a playable unit. She even got a second version in August of 2017, and a third and fourth version were released in November.
    • Lara Croft was added into the game on December 8th as a free unit, along with reskinned versions of Aileen (as Lara), Soleil (as an Egyptian goddess), and Abel (as a pharaoh). Lara being free was a more pleasant surprise, considering how iconic of a character she was.
    • Gumi would later one-up themselves with a shocking non-JRPG collaboration in June. That collab turned out to be Just Cause III. Just Cause is a sandbox-style action game that focuses more on open world gameplay, as opposed to a structured story.
    • When Gumi announced another collaboration with a "Pop Singer" during 2nd day of Fan Festa 2018, many expected another Ariana unit to arrive... only for Katy Perry to appear onstage.
  • Zargabaath gets a special mention, especially considering the merits of his release. Despite being a relatively minor NPC in-game, he was plugged as a new, Global-exclusive 5-star base to hype Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, despite being a relatively obscure NPC in the game. Even more surprising was that he displaced Balthier, one of the more popular playable characters in XII, on his banner, instead of splitting the 5-star rate.
    • Zargabaath's displacement of Balthier led to him being bumped to January of 2018. People were expecting Gumi to create another Global-exclusive event, but they opted to displace Gabranth and release Basch's event 2 months early. This is particularly surprising because Basch is an all-purpose cover tank who generally snapped the game in half. Usually, game-breaking units of this caliber (like Warrior of Light's 6-star form, Orlandeau, and Ramza's enhancements) get delayed, not pushed up the schedule.
  • The NieR: Automata banner being released months early was a strong surprise, but more surprising was the news that nothing would be nerfed. This included 9S, a game-breaking unit with an even more game-breaking TMR, and Cruel Oath, a craftable katana earned through raid rewards close to Genji Blade. However, Gumi found another way to weaken the event with the addition of a certain Global Original unit.
  • Loren, a character meant as a reward for whales in Japan, was released in Global in the normal gacha. However, how she was released was unexpected, displacing Roy, an incredibly powerful bard who was ostensibly delayed for Power Creep reasons. Due to Gumi's proclivity for delaying 5-star awakenings or 6-star forms until an equivalent 5-star base unit is released, this also threw Ramza's highly-anticipated enhancements back into limbo until Roy was announced for early December.
  • The launch of the first Dragon Quest XI crossover event took the Global community by surprise due to the two previous Dragon Quest events being Japan-exclusive. It had long been assumed that, even though the assets for the Dragon Quest characters and related items were in the Global version for over a year, they would simply remain exclusive to Japan because the Dragon Quest mobile game was only available in Japan and Southeast Asia.
  • The FFBE team teased a "hyped return collaboration" in June that was supposed to catch everyone by surprise. Some people were expecting NieR: Automata (their most successful collab) or Secret of Mana (which had Randi, who becomes game-breaking at 7-star). Datamines from Brave Frontier showed the FFBE collab was returning, which meant people were expecting another Grand Gaia Chronicles rerun. The returning collab event turned out to be the King's Knight raid. The first version was a fairly recent event that didn't generate much interest. Unlike NieR or Mana, it was based off of a fairly unpopular mobile game that was created from an easter egg in Final Fantasy XV, as a remake of a fairly mediocre pre-FF title. Its main 5-star base was Ray Jack, who was so bad that he became a meme. Most surprising of all was that King's Knight itself was about to die in 3 weeks. King's Knight wasn't even that popular, and if anything was on its last breath.
  • The launch of the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided event was a surprise, as the event launched almost exactly two years after the game in question was released, and there had been wide speculation that Square Enix more or less was abandoning the Deus Ex franchise.
  • When the Kingdom Hearts collaboration was announced, the Global presentation from Fan Festa got an exclusive tease that it would feature more than Sora. Most people expected an original unit, like Riku or Kairi. Instead, they got the Kingdom Hearts version of Cloud, who had not made an appearance since 2011 and would only make a small cameo in Kingdom Hearts III. Even though it was Cloud and he saw a release in Final Fantasy Record Keeper before other main characters, most people were surprised they went with a reskinned Final Fantasy character over the wide variety of originals.
    • The second Kingdom Hearts collaboration had Kingdom Hearts Sephiroth splitting the banner with Riku. While they have usually released Kingdom Hearts Cloud in other Final Fantasy mobile games to go with Sora, Sephiroth had yet to see a release, and had not appeared in the franchise since Kingdom Hearts II.
  • After a delay for one month, one of the most hyped banners of the first half of 2019, Akstar's banner, finally arrived on May 10th. Unlike Japan's banner, the Global version added Zeno Of The Beta Star, the first global-exclusive story unit and Akstar's true identity.
  • While bringing some of Global Original units to Japanese version is nothing new, Alim announced out of the blue that JP version would also receive Katy Perry collaboration during a Tokyo Game Show Stream on September 14th 2019.
  • While JP players were already counting on a Final Fantasy V banner to come for the Neo Visions era, no one expected that Faris of all people would get a Base NV unit, let alone with a CG.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Folka, otherwise known as the Veritas of the Waters. The audience is supposed to feel sympathy for her being emotionally broken after 700 years and finally brainwashing herself into a Card-Carrying Villain in order to keep going with her friends' plans. However, the acts she commits under said brainwashing include flooding a city, brainwashing a peaceful esper into mindless violence, and killing Elle, one of the main characters' brothers. Most fans took the brainwashing as a weak excuse seeing as she did it to herself knowing full well there would likely be consequences. While Nichol pursues her to get revenge, the rest of the party talks him out of it. Compared to Citra, who feels she must atone for her villainous actions even well into season 2, Folka felt much too Easily Forgiven. In season 2 she also falls in love with Nichol, brother of the man she killed and her own descendant. Fans were Squicked, finding the prospect of such a relationship uncomfortable.
  • Most of the Veritas, really. As more of their backstories is revealed, we're clearly supposed to empathize with them, as the characters themselves do, even as it becomes clear that at least half of members of the group, including Ignacio/Fire, Sieghard/Earth and Folka/Waters are not actually emotionally invested in their revenge plot, which was going to unleash apocalypse on the entirety of Lapis. Veritas of the Waters is covered above, while the former two just wanted a challenge to dispel their boredom, but are good people nonetheless. Meanwhile, Citra/Lightlord, the chief instigator of said plot, seemingly started the whole thing at first because she's mad at Raegen for choosing another women over her. Unlike Folka, however, most of the Veritas did get better characterization in Season 2, with Sieghard in particular becoming a fan favorite.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The season two unit versions for the Story characters get CG Limit Burst animations. and needless to say they're very impressive looking.

W - Z

• Win Back the Crowd: As the playerbase rioted over the Unit of Choice debacle, Gumi looked to offer new deals to tempt them into spending again. In their monthly update video, they announced Hyoh, one of the most hyped units in the game, with an extra, Global-exclusive 25,000 Lapis step-up for Hyoh and Awakened Rain. To sweeten the pot, they also released Awakened Rain's powerful 7-star form four months early. It didn't outright guarantee Hyoh, but Awakened Rain was a powerful consolation prize. After it still didn't blunt the Unit of Choice controversy, they released specific dates on when the missing Select Tickets would come. Then, they revealed that they would give out another Select ticket during the first stage of Hyoh's story event, finally placating everyone.
  • After fans' outrage over the diluted 5-star pool on limited-time unit banners (and outright nerfs to the Valkyrie Profile banner), Gumi decided to make two separate banners and step-ups for the 2018 Christmas event, which consisted of old 5-star units in the first one and new 5-star units in the second one. While the newer banner still contained non-limited rainbow units (as well as the old limited rainbow units available as off-banners), they made sure that the old one will only consist of Kryla, Christine, and White Knight Noel. Fans are legitimately happy after hearing this news.
  • After the backlash of how they handled the Halloween units' release, Gumi and Square Enix made the Fan Festa Select Summon the highlight of their player rewards. These tickets allowed a player to select any Global Original non-collaboration unit in the game. For example, players could get Zargabaath or Barbariccia, but not A2 or Rico Rodriguez. What set this Select Ticket apart was that it included limited-time holiday units like Demon Rain, White Knight Noel, or Chow. Some theorize that this was a move to appease those who failed to pull the Halloween units.
  • After many disappointments Gumi did during 3rd Anniversary celebration like some players being unable to log in to the game and their handling of anniversary reward, it looks like they are trying to redeem themselves with the Global Original Unit upgrade. The first batch that includes 5 Fan Festa units in July 2019 is received very well because the changes not only upgrade existing abilities, they also add new abilities and improves TMR and STMR which are badly needed for those units. While some people are really happy with this and are eagerly looking forward to the second batch, some others believe Gumi is going to mess things up badly again in the future considering how the company operates.
  • The Global version's 3rd Anniversary celebration represents a more polarizing attempt at this trope. At first glance, they seemingly tried not to give away rank and login-based anniversary tickets like the Japanese version did. When the debated anniversary ticket was announced, it came in the form of a different Anniversary Follow-Up ticket. Unit of Choice tickets were replaced with Super Trust Moogle tickets, but most people bemoaned the replacements of esper ores, supercites, and regular stat pots with weaker versions of them (Mini Stat Pots, Megacites, and regular magicites) and the addition of Minituars and Gil Snappers. The problem was that the drop rates were severely nerfed compared to the original Anniversary tickets. The regular summons were weighted towards the aforementioned weaker rewards (with almost total nerfs to premium items' drop rates), the Gold summons were weighted towards paltry amounts of Lapis, and the Platinum summons had a 90% chance to pull 5 STMR Tickets or a 5-star EX ticket. It was nearly impossible to pull a Prism Moogle or UoC ticket, and the generous 5-star EX ticket rates were stripped to the bone. In effect, it saw a lot of backlash once players figured out how bad the rewards were, but some were at least grateful for the free rewards.
    • The 40 Million Downloads Celebration could be seen as Follow-Up Ticket fiasco. While they never gave out loads of supercites or esper ores, they did give many free pulls (including four free 5-stars) and offered some of the best bundles in the history of the game. The centerpiece to this was the Four Rainbows bundle, which allowed you to summon on a banner guaranteeing four 5-star base units - all of which were curated to be from 2019. The 40 Million Download Celebration was considered to be better than the 3rd Anniversary after Part 1.
  • The Fountain of Tickets bundle is widely seen as an attempt to do this in response to how poorly received several other paid bundles (in particular, the infamous Cash Summon debacle mentioned above). When added together, the bundle is effectively 31 off-banner pulls - one a guaranteed five-star unit - with the caveat that you get one 3-star EX ticket per day (and a five-star EX ticket upon purchase). Due to the general devaluation of EX tickets in general and the fact that the items are received gradually, it only costs $12, compared to the $45+ that other such bundles have cost. Some players are worried that the popular Fountain of Lapis bundle is no longer going to be offered in favor of this, but it overall is seen as a much more worthwhile "pay for tickets" bundle than any previous one.
  • Gumi was aware of how players dreaded the Summon Festival from the Japanese version of the game, so they removed the system and implemented several adjustments to all banners on November 7th, 2019. Several features remained unchanged like increased rainbow rates ^note although with lower on-banner rates compared to Japanese version (1.5% compared with Japan's 2.5% rates) and older units being removed from the pool, but they made the Fest units obtainable from EX summons. While units released from November 7th onward wouldn't be included in the UoC pool, their prisms would be obtainable on the respective units' release at the cost of 8 UoC tickets. They also added prisms of previously released units. The changes encouraged people to pull and provided a safety net while preventing people from skipping banners in favor of UoCing the units they wanted. The majority of people agreed that the changes were much better than what JP had and were satisfied despite several downsides.
  • While the hero box summon system in Dragon Quest XI collab event was still widely disliked, Gumi added several things to incentivize people to pull. They gave 5 free silver keys obtainable from raid point rewards, they increased on-banner rates for villain step-up banner from 1,5% to 3%, no limit was given to the step-up banner, and made the gold keys to be UoC instead of getting randomized hero unit. Many were satisfied enough with the chance to the point that some players got baited into doing the step-up despite knowing 5*-base version of fan-favorite units (Xon, Aiden, and Zyrus) were going to be released the following week.
  • After the controversy from the nerfed first Valkyrie Profile banner, they decided to institute a safety net for the second. Instead of splitting the Lenneth/Freya/Arngrim re-issue and the Lezard/Mystina banner, they issued a 5-unit banner with minimal off-banners. However, they reworked the step-ups to still include the usual UoC-per-lap safety net - something which the Japanese version of the banner did not have. In addition, they gave an 11-pull with a guaranteed Valkyrie Profile 5-star and a guaranteed ticket for Lenneth, Freya, or Arngrim. Most people gladly took the trade-off without complaining, especially considering they kept the 12,000 Lapis prism guarantee as well.
• The Woobie: Hayate, at the end of the Way of the Warrior event. Fresh after watching his sister and father die, which he blames himself for, his mother not only commits seppuku, but demands he help her kill herself. Shortly after, his kingdom is destroyed, and he flees with Lady Kaede to Sian.