YMMV / Final Fantasy Record Keeper

A

• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Reno at the end of Countdown to Destruction FFVII event. He pales in comparison to what came before and spends more time incapacitating characters than hurting them; as long as you keep up with the Pyramids, he's a relatively easy enemy.
  • The Dark Knight, whenever it appears in an event. If you remember the original boss fight or Google it, you will quickly realize that you can opt to not fight him. Cecil dies immediately after twenty of his turns, and simply holding out against him and healing is the preferred strategy. Later versions such as the D260 version ditch the "wait and it'll die" strategy and go straight to the offensive, however.
  • In their respective realm dungeons, Zorn and Thorn can cast Meteor and Flare, but only when one of them empowers the other. Either will stop casting his spell when hit with any attack, and it's extremely easy to alternate your attacks between both of them.
    • However, in a bonus gauntlet from the "Road to the Holy Land" event, they wielded single and multi-target spells that could be used without empowering either.
  • Goldor from the 10 Million Players Celebration event. The boss description touted his attacks as all inflicting 1000 damage and his immensely high Defense and Resistance. As it turns out, his DEF and RES were 99,999,999...and his HP was 50. It's even more anticlimactic with a DEF/RES-ignoring attack.
  • Any boss that has single-target physical or magical attacks. Draw Fire/Retaliate and Reflect or Runic Blade makes not taking damage possible. It even allowed people to solo certain ++ or +++ bosses with core Samurai.
  • FFXIII's Hecatoncheir, like in his home game, uses Looming Wrath and then a barrage of attacks, but here his delay is so long that a decently-leveled party can kill him before he can land another hit. In the Defying Destiny event, however, Looming Wrath's delay was set to one second.
  • After the nightmare that was Mote Dungeon Ifrit, the next Mote Dungeon featured Dahaka, which was much, much easier. Less powerful attacks, lower durability, and a stagger-at-random mechanic that not only drops its defenses considerably but makes it weak against every element.
  • Ultimate++ Garuda, from the "Lady of the Vortex" event, mostly because of an anticlimactic gimmick: like in her home game, she summons Razor Plumes that, if not destroyed in time, damage a central pillar and boost her ultimate attack. If two or more Plumes hit the pillar, her Ultimate Aerial Blast deals a fixed 6000 damage, divided between all party members.
  • Nemesis was the first Superboss... and was completely susceptible to the Drawtaliate strategy. Run a Drawtaliate character with Cloud USB1 as your RW, a full team with Double Hit, and keep targeting your retaliator as he himself smashes the boss' HP. The coming of Awakening Soul Breaks made this even worse, as now the boss can be beaten as it barely touches your party.
  • Shadowsmith, despite being the game's Arc Villain, puts in a pitiful showing the two times you fight him in the Record Dungeons. The first match gives you Protect and Shell, the second gives you Magic Breakdown and Multi Break, so you have the tools to completely neuter his damage output. He's fond of multi-hitting attacks, which invokes Loophole Abuse for the party, because each individual hit will charge their Soul Break gauge. This means that party members will charge almost a full segment from his attacks, so after only a few rounds multiple characters will have Limit Breaks ready. And the party has good synergy in them too - Tyro has Arbiter's Tome to boost the party's critical hit rate, and Biggs and Wedge are physical attackers with good abilities equipped and follow-up attacks on their Soul Breaks. The only complication to either fight is that in the first one the boss has Mighty Guard, but Dr. Mog has Dispel.
• Arc Fatigue: By the time the game entered its fifth year on the market, Magicites and the story unfolding with them had been around for more than half of its lifetime, slowly being rolled out one element at a time a couple months at a time, across four tiers of power. Not only do Magicites take a lot of grinding to level up^note Even more when they first came out — they cost 60 Stamina, needed a Magic Stone to fight them (and you only got one a day), and they rewarded only one 3/4/5-star Magicite piece at a time., but each successive tier was a huge jump in Power Creep. When 6* Magicites were added many players protested because they were sick of Magicites already and wanted DeNA to come up with something new for the next challenge, and the story of the Magicite arc had been given a satisfactory conclusion in Dark Odin as an All Your Powers Combined Final-Exam Boss. Fortunately the boss beyond the 6*s, White Odin, really was the Final Boss of the Magicites and focus shifted to the Cardia dungeons and later the Labyrinth.
• Awesome Music: Despite what the game may imply, what with all of the recycled tracks from past games, it does get exclusive remixes.
  • Gilgamesh's event delivered a new mix of "Battle at the Big Bridge" that sounds as if Dissidia Final Fantasy and "One-Winged Angel" had a lovechild. It's so good, it was even remastered for Dissidia Final Fantasy (2015)!
  • If you thought the G-Bike theme was high intensity, Record Keeper delivers this version...
  • Their version for "Force Your Way", the Boss Fight soundtrack for Final Fantasy VIII? It's epic and deserving of the Superboss the song was designed for: Omega Weapon.
  • The Christmas 2016 Winter Holiday theme. It's a Aria De Mezzo remaster, and the added vocals are absolutely beautiful!

B

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Ramza. He's beloved for being one of the best characters in the game, with excellent stats, versatile ability options, and several top-tier Soul Breaks such as Shout. However, he's detested as being representative of the developers' tendency to favour and overpower specific characters as well as Shout being a sign of massive Power Creep.
  • Onion Knight and Orlandeau. Some players like the fact that they're Purposefully Overpowered to match their strength in their original games, while others dislike that they're far superior to numerous other existing characters, especially when many low-tier characters haven't received any attempt to make them worthwhile.
  • Beatrix. There's a number of players out there who loathe her for the amount of attention she gets compared to other FFIX characters and her difficult boss battles as mentioned in the Creator's Favorite section but she also has many fans many of whom are generally FFIX fans that are generally excited when ever she gets a new relic and pull for her.
• Breather Boss:
  • Ralvuimago seems quite threatening, with a Life Draining counter-attack, but after each physical attack, he goes into a counter stance where he does absolutely nothing and is not triggered by magic, but his Resistance goes so far up it's better to just sit, buff and heal.
  • Gi Nattak in the Old Torment Dungeons: unlike the other Nightmare bosses, all the damage in his boss fight is magical, easily mitigated and even absorbable by Runic/Grand Cross, the Soul Fires can be silenced, Gi Nattak's Graviga and the Soul Fires' possession attacks are easily nerfed by Instant KO resistance and all of the above are weak to wind, a common element in higher-end relics.
  • FFI's Old Torment boss Astos is regarded as the easiest Old Torment boss even with the CM. Like Gi Nattak he only uses magic attacks so you can save room for other abilities. And they don't even hurt that much under Shellga and Magic Breakdown. He's not even that fast and although he can use haste, it can easily be dispelled. His most dangerous moves are his various Status effects except that his Blind and Silence attacks are only used once and can easily be removed with accessories and Enkidu Magicite and Slowga can be removed with a Hastega SB or RW. His easiness is probably justified in that FFI synergy is incredible rare even compared to FFII and FFIII.
  • Nightmare Atomos is refreshingly easy compared to the other Nightmare bosses. In theory, it should be challenging - it frequently hits your whole party with high damage attacks, and in the second phase requires you to destroy Amethyst gems lest it eat them and then start destroying you with powerful spells. Thing is, Atomos is susceptible to Slow and Interrupt, and has low speed to start with. So in reality you'll probably just get hit with a Comet in the beginning and then start wailing on him like a punching bag while stunlocking him to death. It's entirely possible to beat it without triggering phase 2 until Atomos reaches 30% health.
  • Nightmare Guardian is pretty easy too. His schtick is that he spawns with three attachments, two Launchers and the Wave Cannon, and the Wave Cannon will target party members for Wave Cannon, doing massive damage to them, and increasing the number of targets at the fight wears on, with the Guardian also regenerating its attachments at set HP points. The catch is that killing the Launchers and Wave Cannon is very easy; just bring along a strong summon (they counter physical and black damage attacks, but not summons) and it can wipe out all three of them in one or two castings, leaving the Guardian alone to be wailed on, and while it will still counter physical and black magic damage, the damage from it is pitiful.
  • Tiamat in the Wind Fortress, thanks to her lack of Petrify resistance being carried over from FFI. Just spam Break and Break Strike until it sticks for a low effort boss.
  • Among the 5* Magicites, Hecatoncheir is considered the easiest, to the extent a player may not even need a Chain Soul Break to defeat him. While he's still a Lightning Bruiser who hits hard, he doesn't hit as hard as other characters, and a well-defended party with a competent healer can keep up with him well enough. He also has the quirk that most of his attacks individually don't do much damage, but he casts them instantly and in practice this means he attacks multiple times a turn, but this is actually to his detriment since the sum damage is still low and the fact that he's dealing more hits to the party just charges their Soul Breaks faster. He doesn't buff himself either, just inflicts Blind on two specific party members (planning the party composition properly renders this irrelevant) and can debuff their ATK/MAG and dispel Haste (effects all over Soul Breaks to counteract him, including on one of the Roaming Warrior Soul Breaks offered to the party). Finally, he's the Earth Magicite that is intended for physical parties, which means that has to face the likes of Cloud, Bartz, and Zidane, all extremely powerful Wind DPS characters.
  • King Behemoth and Belias are also among the easier ones. All 5* Magicite bosses have a gimmick where every few turns they enter an "Enraged Mode" where they get some sort of passive status buff, and the only way to break them out of it is to hit them with an Overstrike attack. However, King Behemoth's and Belias' Enraged Modes lower their defense, in exchange for a boost to their damage output. But that doesn't actually mean much; the two rely primarily on physical attacks for their offense and are the magic-weak Magicites, so the player can stick their mages in the back row for a defense boost, and players will want to bring Power Break(down) to counter their ATK buffs, and together these simple preparations sap a lot of the benefits their Enraged Mode grants. The result is that, if the player can keep up with their damage output well enough, their Enraged Mode is actually a downgrade, boosting the player's damage output and causing them to just die quicker.
  • Leviathan is considered the easiest 6* Magicite. His unique gimmick is that he inflicts Doom on the party at the start of the battle and has various attacks that lower the Doom counter or set it to 5 or 10 seconds. However, the Doom timer starts at 45 seconds (which is plenty of time for a well-prepared party to beat him), and he provides a mitigation mechanic in the Air Bubbles he regularly spawns that increase the Doom timer of the character that attacks them, and he doesn't use his Doom-lowering ttacks all that much. His other gimmick is that he can inflict Stop, but he always targets the same three characters with it and his Mind stat is pathetic, so characters with even only a modest Mind stat of their own will be immune to Stop. Beyond Doom and Stop, his attacks don't hurt as much as the other 6* Magicites, his uses of Lightning Diffusion are infrequent and easy to strategize around to minimize their impact, and his only way of bolstering his defenses (other than the DEF/RES/MND buff all the 6*s share) are to cast Protect and Shell on himself one time in his second phase and raising his Lightning resistance one time in his third (other 6* Magicites raise their element resistance and/or lower the party's elemental damage more frequently). This makes Leviathan a much simpler boss than his brethren, especially in comparison to the Magicite that preceded him, Ramuh.
• Breather Level:
  • Centra Excavation Site - Final Fantasy VIII: after several dungeons in which you fought quite hard bosses (including the Black Widow and Diabolos), this dungeon is fairly straightforward, with rather simple enemies to defeat and, most of all, absolutely no boss.
  • Lenna's Event, "The Fire Crystal Awakens", was a cakewalk to complete compared to Rinoa's event "To Slay a Sorceress" which preceded it. Plus the currency system employed made it much easier to get the things you want most, including getting Lenna herself fairly quickly along with some strong equipment from the same realm.
  • This was also the case with Cecil's event. After the trouble people had with the Countdown to Destruction event, this event dialed down the difficulty by having many monsters weak to fire and holy damage, as well as being much easier to kill than the previous event. It was not unheard of for players to run through the entirety of Cecil's event, then double back and finish the last of Countdown to Destruction with the acquired gear, levels, and characters.
  • Garnet's event, "The Princess of Alexandria", turned out to be ridiculously easy after the first Tidus event, "Operation Mi'ihen", due to many of the "bosses" being more like regular enemies, and many of them being hardly or not at all resistant to One Hit Kills.
  • Like Centra Excavation Site, the event dungeons without a boss tend to be a breeze even on Elite.
  • Cecil's encore event, "Light and Darkness Returns", is absurdly easy, due to all but the last two bosses requiring no other strategy than "beat the crap out of it until it dies" (they didn't even bother writing any advice, just throwing in some of the generic loading screen hints), and half the dungeons not containing any boss at all. Its bonus battles were also one of the easier sets, having only 3 bosses (Both Scarmiglione forms and the Dark Knight) compared to the 4 or 5 that other events tend to have.
  • The "Flames of Vengeance" FFXIV event. There are only four stages with no Elite or alternate versions and the event hands out previously non-existent FFXIV stuff. The bosses themselves are a bit tough, yet manageable up until ++ Ifrit.
  • "Sworn By Steel", Meliadoul's introductory event, is one of the easiest ones in recent memory as a whole: it has no battles with annoying gimmicks beyond there being multiple opponents, every battle with dedicated boss can be ended by killing them, it's host to probably the easiest U++ battle in the entire game with the boss having _less_ HP than in the ++ battle and the A+/Jump Start battles feature a boss that only has 250k/300k HP, which is extremely low at this point of the game. The only even remotely difficult battles in this event are the U+/A+ multiplayer battles and even those are average at best.
  • The 30th Anniversary Dungeons. Each segment is a simple boss fight that costs only 1 Stamina and pays out with rare accessories. The ultimate prize, gotten from beating a boss that's just as easy as the others, is also a useful Ultra Soul Break weapon for Tyro. The Crystal Tower dungeon is a bit more difficult, but only to the level of "may actually present a challenge", and it's nothing like the brutal bonus dungeons usually seen in events.
• Broken Base:
  • Pre-patch, Vit0. Is it an extremely cheap way for weak players to kill Nintendo Hard event bosses, or is it a perfectly legitimate, if questionable, strategy that allows weaker players to acquire the gear and materials to become legitimate players? Post-patch, was the decision to patch out Vit0 a perfectly justified removal of a Game-Breaker strategy that required little effort, or did it alienate players unable to consistently keep up with the inevitable Power Creep as the result of time constraints?
  • Any Boring, but Practical strategy involving a high-powered character capable of mid-tier Combat, such as Cloud, paired with the Retaliate ability gets some of this flak as well for being overly relied on, although less so since it's almost as good as Vit0 was, albeit on a different scale, and unlike Vit0, utilizes both strategy and legal game mechanics as opposed to a programming flaw. Retaliate became a little more accepted after one of Dr. Mog's tips explained it in-game, meaning the developers were well aware of it and even encouraged it as a way to avoid enemy counters, since your own counterattacks can't be countered.
    • Even the old Retailiate strategy got phased out, as stronger and stronger superbosses get introduced, and the damage output of Retaliate, Drawtaliate (using Draw Fire to force enemies to attack the Retaliate user), and Advantaliate (combine the Advance Assist Character, which skyrockets attack power in exchange for crippling defense, with Retaliate, and even the wimpy White Mage can hit the damage cap with basic attacks by attacking the Retaliator) can't keep up; on top of that, many bosses are starting to gain skills and attacks that outright No-Sell Retaliate, making the strategy less and less useful. Amusingly enough, the introduction of new abilities, Legend Materias and Soul Breaks has actually made the Retaliate strategy useful again under specific circumstances: if you have a party consisting of characters with Legend Materias that allow them to start the battle with Haste and no cast time on their first three actions, access to a Cloud USB Roaming Warrior or have it natively and a way to buff your party's Attack and critical damage, you can combine them to do massive amounts of damage to anything that doesn't wipe out your party before you're done setting it up, which admittedly doesn't take very long thanks to the large number of instant turns.
  • Some players tend to argue between each other on which version of the game is superior to the other. While it is normal that the Japanese version is ahead of the Global version in terms of content, some players feel that it is unfair that the Global version didn't get the same events as the Japanese version (and especially certain contents, like some FFXI relics), as some of these events were skipped (the real point of contention being that several abilities which were added during those events are absent from the Global version as a result). On the other hand, Global events tend to be more generous when it comes to orbs and mythril (in an effort to reduce the gap between the two versions), and the Global version got quite a few quality of life upgrades way sooner than Japan, making the game's challenges easier as a result.
    • The difference of contents between GL and JP is fuel for many a Flame War. While GL has the six-month foresight, more leeway on mythril than JP and exclusive stuff like the Gem Item Shop, GL also has lost on stuff, namely: assorted Uniques for some characters, some abilities (that wouldn't make any difference with the current meta, actually), Kimahri's Record Dive (don't ask how this happened), Collabs in general (as many of them are for mobile games with cases of No Export for You), and finally, Tama and Enna Kros. The last one of those is even an egregious case as DeNA indeed had a chance to use the reissue of the first Collab to bring these characters to GL with World of Final Fantasy Maxima. Some other things, like FFXI's Ultras for Ayame, Zeid and Prishe, or Morrow's gang and relics, took over a year to be added^note Morrow, for example, was the first instance of an Entrust Bot in JP, but when he came to GL, Shelke was already doing this function for a good while, further fueling the flames. With this into account, just insinuating to GL players that JP has it better than them will spark a furious war. On the JP side, you can even see outright disdain for GL players among English speakers.
    • The most heated argument is about the gacha system: while odds of getting a 5★ in Japan are 13% with a rolling gacha mechanic, Global only has 10% without a rolling gacha mechanic (said mechanic was added during the Japanese version of Tellah's event, whereas it wasn't added to the global version when the same event took place). As a result, some Global players are feeling cheated and are asking to be treated the same way as Japan, whereas other players are fine with the way things are and think that this kind of reaction is players acting entitled or just whining. When some players sent De Na e-mails asking them why the Global version didn't get some abilities and the rolling gacha mechanic, the company handwaved the questions and answered that each version should be considered as different games altogether◊, only adding fuel to the fire. Thanksfully, the drop rate was increased to 12% during Terra's event, to 12.875% during the Advent Children event, and to 13% during the Soul Breakout, although the rolling gacha mechanic is still missing.
  • Boundless Nemesis. A boss that requires near-memorization of its attack patterns, has abilities that reduce party members' ATK (thus making the battle hugely biased towards mage parties), and is completely unwinnable without a specific effect only obtainable from certain Soul Breaks—and the two uses of a Roaming Warrior won't last the battle. Players are split on eagering anticipating and preparing for the challenge or being off-put by the heavily-Luck-Based Mission nature of the boss.
  • The autumn 2017 Renewal event, which made a massive number (around 80 in total) of older event dungeons available for a limited time. The catch is that if you had done the event dungeons during their original issue, you couldn't redo them now for the awards again. While newer players loved being able to get all the missed content, older players felt cheated by not being able to re-acquire the First Time and Mastery rewards, particularly the Mythril which is comparatively more valuable now than before, as there are far more and far stronger Soul Break Relics to pull from Relic Banners with much better mechanics. Then there's veteran players who point out that older players who have played long enough to have seen these events on their original runs have also had several months of Daily Dungeons and login bonuses to power up on, advantages that newer players don't have.
  • The Kingdom Hearts collaboration events. Aside from the inclusion of Kingdom Hearts characters in any Final Fantasy property always being a contentious one, the two events were released worldwide simultaneously, and at the time their characters were balanced around the Japanese metagame. This means that the Kingdom Hearts cast got Relics on-par with the top-tier Relics of the Global version, and introduced new tiers of Soul Break a few months ahead of schedule. While some players were happy to get a leg up with earlier access to these mechanics, others were unenthused since it was unlikely that additional events for Kingdom Hearts would come and the character wouldn't get synergy in any of the Cardia dungeons, making it inevitable that they would fall victim to Power Creep and become useless without hope for redemption.
  • Brave Ultras tend to be a matter of contention due to how they work, as described in Author's Saving Throw above. JP players simply ignored the new mechanic and just wished them away, with those being eventually phased out by Awakened Arcanes and the old-fashioned Ultras with EX Modes and Chases. GL players, who got an exclusive buff to the mechanic by the end of November 2018, loathed the mechanic before the buff, but now wonder why this of all upgrades was exclusive to GL for four months until DeNA decided to bring the buff to the JP server, but agree that this makes those Ultras much more useful and, in the case of Y'shtola, puts her in competition with the game's current top healers.
  • Most players hate the fact that 6* Magicites require your DPS characters to have a source of Elemental Infusion for them to be able to deal anything beyond Scratch Damage to the boss: while this might not be as big of a problem as it initially seems since Record Laboratory allows you to buy any past Relics you might've missed and get a source of En-element that way, there are still great many characters whose shiny new Awakening Soul Break gives them an Element Boost in multiple elements instead of En-element, immediately making them much less useful in any 6* Magicite fight that they would otherwise excel in. The biggest current offenders of this are Zack (no Element Boost or En-element access of any kind, yet he's custom-made to be paired up with Cloud), Firion (only has En-element for Holy which is his weakest element and the one he has by far the most competition in), Noctis (was entirely non-elemental for the longest time) and surprisingly enough, Orlandeau (his offense is based entirely on high damage multipliers, cast time reductions and automatic critical hits with no Boost or Element access), although Zack and Noctis have been confirmed as later getting a source of En-element and Orlandeau is practically guaranteed to get one by the time the respective 6* Magicite is released.

C

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In old times it wasn't uncommon to see any team meant to tackle the top-level dungeons having at least one of Tyro, Cloud, Y'shtola, Ramza, and Orlandeau. They also appeared a lot as Roaming Warriors, but their functions changed as Power Creep advanced.
    • Tyro will be there for his utility (being able to equip anything lets him be whatever the player needs him to be) and his Divine Veil Grimoire (boost the party's Defense and Resistance, gives the party Hastega, Shellga and Protectga). He may also bring his first Ultra, Warder's Apocrypha (Hastega, Autoheal 2k and Astra), or his fourth Ultra, Arbiter's Tome (Hastega, 50% Crit, Hi-Quickcast and a Support chase that increases Crit chance even more).
    • Cloud will be there for his massive DPS ability, mainly composed of his Ultra Soul Break Ultra Cross Slash, accompanied by his other Ultra, Climirage, and very probably his Glint and Arcane.
    • Y'shtola will be there for healing (her BSB Asylum is a very powerful healing Soul Break, she can use Wrath to charge her SB gauge quickly, and she has a Legend Materia to let her dualcast White Magic abilities) and Stoneskin II (does the same thing as Sentinel's Grimoire). After the Brave Buff, her second Ultra Secret of the Lily has also become valued by mage teams, as it's a mage version of Aerith's Innocent Cure Ultra with the advantage of allowing Y'sh to pull a second instance of Last Stand if she's quick enough. Alternatively, she can Wrath into her Soul Breaks, further enhancing her healing.
    • Ramza will be there for utility (wide variety of abilities including Entrust and Full Break) and Shout/Battle Cry (every party loves a Hastega, and Ramza's comes with an Attack boost and makes profit from a LMR that starts him with Instant Cast 1 and full ATB). His first Ultra also grants Instacast 1 to the party, along with a pretty stackable ATK/DEF/MAG buff. Ramza has also become a physical Holy Chainer with his Flutegrass Memories CSB, and has tools for Holy DPS (Dualcast LMR, USB2 and eventually an AOSB) if needed.
    • Cidolfus will be there for raw power (extremely powerful OSB that can easily deal cap, incredibly broken Burst, Ultra and Awakening Soul Breaks that make him an absolute powerhouse in Holy, Dark and Earth elements).
  • The Retaliate ability allows players to deal good damages (especially if the Retaliate user is under the effects of Boost and/or Advance), prevents the enemy from counterattacking (they can't counter a counterattack), and characters who ran out of ability usages can still be useful by attacking the Retaliate user, which leads him to counterattack the boss instead of his allies. This playstyle isn't flashy and often a bit tedious to set up, but it remains one of the most useful strategy of the game, effective against almost all the bosses, and you only need one good weapon to make it work.
  • This trope is actively averted with the Crystal Tower events, where a set of characters used in one fight get locked off for all the others. Along with each fight giving out different record synergy, players are encouraged/enforced to rely on a variety of characters.
  • The general party for D??? Jenova SYNTHESIS for a while was Cloud, Aerith, Zack, Cait Sith, and Shelke. Cloud is among the best characters in the game and has his first Ultra Soul Break which allows him to deal up to 99999 damage which helps a huge amount against her 2 million HP, Aerith is VII's main healer, Zack has his Chain Soul Break which boosts wind DPS and the party's ATK and Critical damage which is a boon for Cloud along with one of his Imperil Wind soul breaks, Cait Sith is used as a back up white mage to dispel Jenova's Protect and use Shellga as well as using Magicites and the RW, and Shelke acts as an entrust battery for Cloud to get his Soul Breaks going. For a long time, there was no other viable team that had as much synergy and could match the DPS of this line-up.
  • When Dreambreakers came out, their damage resistance/damage boost mechanics allowed players one off-realm character. Everyone chose Tyro, because aside from his general utility as described above, his Overstrike Soul Break boosted the party's ATK/DEF/MAG/RES, making it a perfect counter to the Full Break attacks of the Dreambreaker bosses. DeNA caught onto this pretty quickly after the first few released, because after that Dreambreaker bosses would start using Stop on off-realm when they phase changed, and they were given higher MND so Tyro would be affected for a long time due to his subpar MND. Bahamut countered this even worse by scripting him to instantly counter with a Full Break if he is damaged by an off-realm character. Players soon shifted to using Mog instead, as his second Awakening gives the same ATK/DEF/MAG/RES buffs, but unlike Tyro he has the MND to resist Stop and his second Awakening doesn't deal damage (not to mention Mog being a useful support character in general).
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Bartz. His schtick is that he specializes in quad-elemental Spell Blade attacks, but at the cost of being a Master of None with low power behind his hits and no way to easily get an elemental infusion save for Wind, which was a big deal for a long time with the metagame centering on infusions. In the Sync area and beyond, not only has this weakness been eliminated, but Bartz overcompensated — he has a Glint+, Awakening, Sync, Arcane Dyad, and Dual Awakening for all four elements, as well as some generalist tools. In total he has almost 50 Relics, more than any other character, and among them has five Awakenings and four Syncs and Arcane Dyads, totals no one save for Onion Knight (who is also a quad-elemental character) can touch. This also means that Bartz will be featured on pretty much every V banner and a lot of element-specific banners.
  • Cloud tends to get all the new toys first. For a while, this rendered him susceptible to Power Creep since all the new toys also got better when characters got them later, but he later reversed this trend by getting stuff early that also happened to remain good, such as his Ultra, which, for its time, was considered greatly overpowered, and to this day remains his big claim to fame as a DPS/burst option.
  • Tidus is the star of X, which is one of the more popular games in the series, and he's one of the best Water-elemental fighters in the game, so he tends to appear on almost every X banner in some capacity, is featured on a lot of water banners, and more generally his relics are included in a lot of special draws.

D

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Final Fantasy V dungeons are infamous for these:
    • Page 64 in the Final Fantasy V "Library of the Ancients" dungeon can cast Level 5 Death^note Inflicts Death on any party member whose level is a multiple of 5. Considering that at the time the level cap was 50, and most players will have a couple of characters (if not all characters) at level 50 when attempting that dungeon...
    • The Poltergeist enemies in the FFV dungeons, Lenna's event, and most annoyingly, the Hard mode of the EXP daily dungeon, which makes grinding low level characters an absolute nightmare. They have higher HP than any other enemy there, hit like trucks, are immune to fire, darkness, earth, and lightning and absorb ice damage, can confuse characters, and their two weaknesses, Wind and Holy, aren't easily available as abilities.
    • The Garchimacera, also from FFV, absorb all elemental damage, have enough HP to not die in one shot, and can counter physical attacks with a party-wide Berserk spell that also resets the ATB gauge of the affected characters, even when they were already berserked.
    • In a similar vein, the Crew Dust mobs in the heroic dungeons are seemingly designed to cause as much frustration as possible. It is weak enough on its own, but it has two attacks that turn it into a nightmare: Sap, which does double damage and inflicts sap on the victim, which sucks HP constantly (unlike Poison, which only drains HP in fixed intervals), and the ever-beloved Flash, which could blind your whole party if the odds aren't in your favour, ruining the rest of the run if you relied on non-magic ability users.
  • FFIV's Coeurls can counterattack with Blaster, paralysing a character at best, outright killing him at worst.
  • Platinum Dragons in the Gil Grasslands (Heroic): if they cast Gale, everyone will be reduced to single digit HP, prompting many players to simply reset the battle. That dungeon was later reworked, removing them entirely.
  • Forbidden Final Fantasy VIII. They have an Instant Death attack, and they get a few other annoying Status Effects too.
  • Most of the Final Fantasy III trash mobs have this because of the various status attachments.
  • Due to their vastly increased stats, most Old Torment dungeons had at least one enemy that qualifies as this, either because they attack you in large numbers or because they love to spam powerful attacks that hit your entire party. The worst one of these was probably Etem from the FFXII Old Torment, whose Darkra could wipe out your entire party in a single move if you have the misfortune of fighting one in the first battle and he casts it before you manage to put up any mitigation.
• Difficulty Spike: Each new tier of Magicites represents a considerable jump in power from the previous.

F

• Fan Nickname: The fan community has an elaborate dictionary of terminology to use.

G

• Game-Breaker: Enough for its own page.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The first Final Fantasy Tactics banner had a porting error that lowered drop rates. It was quickly suspected that the drop rates for some items were decreased from the Japanese version, as a lot of people were getting a lot of off-banner items. This banner starred Platinum Sword, which contained Ramza's Shout Super Soul Break, making it a game-breaking relic at the time. This was not touched, but the chances of getting consolation prizes with Soul Break were decreased. This included a 40% Medica with Protectga (the only Lifesiphonable Medica in the game for the next six months) and a 50% Attack/Magic debuff that stacked with almost everything at the time. The player base lashed back immediately, taking to Reddit and Google Play to voice their discontent over DeNA's mistake and alleging a cash grab. However, this can be easily traced back to other 9-item banners from before having the same rates as FFT. De NA likely sloppily ported it over without adjusting for the new flat progressive rates or testing.
  • DeNA had adamantly claimed that they did not change the drop rates, but the numbers didn't lie. A poll made of over 72,246 relic draws on Reddit and FFRKCentral's compilation of 17,438 relic draws showed that 3 items (Nu Khai Armband, Grand Armor, and Kaiser Shield) had an expected drop rate of 1% instead of 2%, resulting in a noticeable increase of off-banner relics. The backdraft was so massive that it led a Forbes contributor to make an article about it, along with various other sites reporting on it. It was fixed three days before the end, but further broken in a good way.
• Gateway Series: A very peculiar example; Record Keeper can act as a gateway for other Final Fantasy games, thanks to the gratuitous Continuity Porn that gets crammed into it. Several players have been known to get into Final Fantasy games they've never picked up before because of Record Keeper.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • In Final Fantasy III dungeons, Cursed Copper and Eye Fang. The former can put your characters to sleep (making you waste an action to wake them), the latter can Blind them. Since Blind's timer is 60 seconds and resets every time a new battle begin, fights against them can be particularly annoying. They also have a rather big HP pool in Elite, so you better hope you have a couple of weapons with FFIII synergy. And there are also the Lilliputians, which tend to show up in large numbers and while they have low HP and don't hit hard enough to actually put the party at risk of dying, have an attack pattern consisting almost entirely of spamming low-damage party-wide spells. This makes them a major nuisance since one bad round with them can quickly result in lost medals for damage taken.
  • In Final Fantasy VI dungeons, Onion Knights. They can counterattack with the Self-Destruct move, inflicting damage proportional to their remaining HP. They are among the first enemies of the game whose role is to stop the player from simply toggling auto-combat and forget their device. Though it can also work in your favor if you didn't quite kill them in one hit, dealing pitiful damage and saving you from having to use another action to finish them off.
  • In Final Fantasy VI Magitek Facility Infiltration (Event), there is the Proto Armor. While they don't kill you, they counterattack with an insanely accurate Flash attack, which is likely to blind at least one character, and might blind your entire party. If you're not geared to cure blindness, or take them out in a single hit, they can ruin the rest of your run.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • NORG from Squall's first event comes to mind immediately. Imagine a Damage-Sponge Boss with un-Dispellable (at the time) defense buffs. Now imagine invincible add-ons that constantly spam attacks. Bard's RM 2 was essential to this fight.
  • Ifrit from FFXIV's dungeons. Not overly hard, until you realize Vulcan Burst is a thing. This is an AoE Stun attack which can essentially be spammed to prevent you from acting.
    • The one from the D180 and D260 in the "Vanquish The Primals" event gets a lot of hate. The problem with him is that the mechanics from the fight in the original was too faithfully implemented. The idea is the same, Ifrit summons pillars in specific phases you have to destroy before pushing Ifrit into the next phase or it's an automatic wipe if any pillars are left before the next phase change. Problem is though is that Ifrit has really low HP each phase, especially on D180 difficulty, which makes getting a game over too easy for veterans. The easiest way to beat him is targeting each pillar individually, not using any Dualcast Legend Materia, AOE attacks, and soulbreaks with chase effects. This just makes Ifrit just a long and tedious boss fight.
  • Baigan on higher difficulty dungeons, thanks to a rather simple trap; if you kill the two arms, the body regenerates them on short notice. If you kill the main body with its arms around, the arms will immediately Self-Destruct and probably kill a party member. Beating him without anyone dying requires carefully weakening the arms without killing them, then killing the arms and main body in rapid succession or even together, and this turns an otherwise dirt simple and weak boss into an exercise in patience.
  • Wrexsoul, especially the Elite version in the Realm Dungeons. This boss can possess your characters, making it untargetable until you hit it. And spams it. Thank God the Neo Torment version dismisses the possession mechanic.
  • All incarnations of Yunalesca, for using a regular attack with innate Dispel, Mana Burn, and essentially requiring you to be Sapped past the second stage of the fight. If you're not? One-Hit Kill that ignores instant KO resistance. Even more pronounced in the Ultimate versions. Even worse in the Neo Torment version, where her Mega Death is actually made to unquestionably kill a party member unless you Magic-Blink it.
  • Ultimate Barthandelus, from Fang's event. He had a one-in-three chance of countering any physical attack with Ultimate Dispel, which dispelled all of your buffs and positive status effects. This would not be a problem if you weren't essentially forced to use two certain characters to master.
  • The first Ultimate+ boss, Hojo. A plethora of Status Effects and powerful counters with a high hit rate make him rather annoying to face.
  • Ultimate Guard Spider from the Crisis Core "In the Footsteps of Greatness" event. It uses an ability that inflicts an unavoidable Stop on everyone in the party at two scripted points in the battle, artificially dragging on what would otherwise be a fairly mundane fight.
  • Ultimate++ Zidane. Has paper-thin defenses. How does he make up for it? Spamming status effects, debuffing your DEF and ATK, and boosting his own. Among these moves is Slow, a self-Haste, and a 40% stacking ATK/DEF reduction, an AoE Slow and Sap that's scripted at 80% health, a 4-hit random target attack with auto-Stun, an attack that has a good chance to Confuse. The first Slow move and Stun also hit through Affliction Break. Yeah.
  • Out of all the 6* Magicites, Ifrit is widely agreed to be the most annoying one. He begins the fight by summoning four Pillars of Flame, and he'll re-summon them whenever he phase changes. When he reaches certain HP thresholds, he'll use Peredition Hellfire, which deals massive damage to the party and debuffs the healing they receive for a few seconds. Peredition Hellfire grows stronger the more Pillars of Flame there are, and if there are four it deals a Total Party Kill, so you have to kill at least one of them. The Pillars counter any non-AoE or Soul Break attack with Counter Flare, dealing a fixed 2000 damage to the character that hurt it, and when KO'd they use Painflare, dealing a fixed 4000 damage and inflicting Pain status, increasing the damage that character takes. And if you try to use a Magicite or Historia Crystal to kill the Pillars, they'll use Painflare on the entire party, dealing 3000 damage and inflicting Pain on them. Additionally, Ifrit's HP threshold between summoning the Pillars of Flame and using Perdition Hellfire is not that significant (15%), so the player is actively penalized for being too hasty in attacking him and dealing enough damage that he'll perform these actions in succession and wipe out the party. All of these mechanics also mean that any stray Magicite attack, dualcast, or chase effect, could result in a character attacking multiple Pillars of Flame or doing too much damage to Ifrit too soon, and likely getting themselves killed (if not everyone else, too).
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • S/L. Any closure of the app leads to a second chance to start the battle from its beginning. Meant to be a failsafe against game crashes, but is used to save-scum. Became an ascended mechanic with the addition of a "fight reset" button in the pause menu.
  • Retaliate probably wasn't expected to be used the way it is now by many players. While the skill's usage may have originally been unintentional, it has been acknowledged by the team; the official strategy site even recommends and explains this Retaliate trick as a solution to one of the bosses!
  • The exploit commonly known as Vit0 is a bug which basically nulls your enemy's defense. To activate it, you need to cast Protect or Shell on the boss, then use an ability which lowers your enemy's physical or magical defense (such as Armor Break), then cast Protect/Shell again on the boss. The resulting effect will be an enemy with absolutley no defense for the whole duration of the armor/resistance debuff, allowing your characters to deal 9999 easily. This exploit is best used with Vanille's second Soul Break Deprotega, which lasts longer than the usual Breaks or even Status Reels. Said bug was patched out in late July 2015 in the international version, with mixed reactions from the playerbase, especially from those who abused it often to cut down top-tier bosses.
  • The concept of "The Forbidden Treasures" event has Dr. Mog giving the player 2 tablets every time the dungeon of the event changes, until the player has 10 tablets at the end of the event. However, the game accidentally gave all 10 tablets at the beginning of the event, and rather than fix it, the people behind the game decided to let it be - while still giving tablets, giving the players a total of 18 instead of 10.
  • The Valiant Knife Bug was the result of a presumable fix to the Final Fantasy Tactics banner's drop rates. While it did fix the drop rates to normal levels, it added a 1% across-the-board chance of acquiring an off-banner Valiant Knife - which is a Super Soul Break relic for Locke. To make things more insane, this Soul Break was as powerful as your average single target SSB, but scaled higher with lower HP. Unlike most other off-banner relics, this relic became the predominant off-banner pull, with rates that are as high as Platinum Sword or Ichigeki itself. This meant that those drawing for Ramza or Agrias's weapons, or the Super Soul Breaks on Relm's banner, left a chance of acquiring a very potent damage Super Soul Break - and with RS for the current event to boot. Drawing on Relm's first banner gave you a great Medica with Heavy Regen and the two best DPS Soul Breaks in the entire game by that time.
  • Dragoon abilities' air time continues to deplete during attack animations. This means that high-level Dragoon abilities that have high power but long air times have their delay shortened considerably by having your other heroes use their attacks while the Dragoon is airborne. Or even by setting the game speed to 5 before an ability animation plays. This was eventually patched out, along with the fixes to Dragoon dualcast that finally allowed the class to properly cast Dragoon abilities twice.
  • The Doom effect on Memento Mori is designed not to overwrite Doom effects inflicted by bosses. However, Doom effects cast by enemies will overwrite the Doom from Memento Mori, which almost always results in the user being granted much more time before they drop dead. This is another bug that got patched out.
  • The SOLDIER Breastplate is hilariously overpowered for Light Armor due to a misprint. When it was released, its Level 30 stats were accidentally given as its Level 20 stats. Japanese law prevents them from fixing this because this was advertised on the relevant banner, so they wound up keeping the broken stats and made them scale accordingly, making it one of the best non-Soul Break Armors in the entire game. Surprisingly, its modified stats were retained in the Global version.
  • Although it's fairly situational, pausing the game and changing the ATB speed mid-battle can give you anywhere from a minor to a significant advantage due to how the system works. One situation where this works greatly to your advantage is any battle where the enemy has extremely high (600+) speed with attacks that have little or no casting time: if you increase the battle speed to 5 while the enemy is in the middle of an attack, their ATB will naturally empty out after their attack as expected, but if your characters are in the middle of casting their attacks, it's more than likely that they'll finish casting them before the boss gets its next turn, allowing them to use their turns before the boss since player actions outprioritize enemy actions if they happen at the same time. This effect is even more pronounced when you have a damage-reflecting effect or Last Stand active: when either of those is triggered, ATB/cast bars continue to fill to some degree, but neither you or the enemy can take any actions until they finish, allowing you to squeeze in extra turns before the enemy gets theirs. The simplest variant of this exploit is when you use an elemental Chain Soul Break: the rate at which it drains at isn't consistent between the various ATB speeds and thus you get up to an effective 8 extra seconds to keep the chain active at speed 5, which can easily results in massive amounts of extra damage.
  • After the maintenance on July 20th 2017, the Keeper's Choice 2 banner was guaranteed to have every relic in an 11x pull be a 5* (or, very rarely, an off-banner 6* Ragnarok-VII) since for whatever reason every single 3* and 4* relic in the pool had been removed, making 5* items the only possible result. The banner was removed from the game later in the day.
  • The November 2017 balance update changed the attack graphics for Thief's Revenge to a flurry of slash attacks, where before it was five individual charge attacks that executed rather slowly. Fans later discovered only the five-hit version of the ability had the new animation, the four-hit and three-hit versions used the old, much slower animation. But this wasn't minded and many said it was appropriate for thieves too slow to get five hits off of it to have to use the slower animation.

H-J

• Heartwarming Moments: Some of the Soulbreak animations can be quite touching.
  • Galuf's and Krile's BSB. Galuf's references his solo fight against Exdeath and his death which qualifies as a Tear Jerker, but Krile's BSB is a continuation of Galuf's BSB which has him supporting her while she blasts the enemies with fireballs.
  • Agrias' USB1 animation is a Ship Tease between her and Ramza as they perform a dual attack against the target.
  • Golbez's "Master of Baron" USB has the Archfiends lend their power to him, harkening back to the fact that he saw them as genuine friends rather than disposable minions even through his own brainwashing at Zemus's hands.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Masamune, which appears as a katana in almost every FF game, was made into a standard sword for Firion's Super Soul Break since he couldn't equip katanas. The next FFII event not only gave him access to katanas but also full access to Samurai abilities.
  • The dungeons that were known in Japan as "Abyss Dungeons" were renamed "Nightmare Dungeons" in Global. Later, Japan released a new type of dungeon called... "Nightmare Dungeons" (which were renamed to "Torment Dungeons" for Global).
  • The Excalibur II from Final Fantasy IX is notoriously hard to find, and powerful. In-game, it is far from the strongest of swords, holding the power to one of the worst Ultra Soul Breaks in the game.
  • In times past, "Kingdom Hearts collab" was always thrown around half-jokingly and was a minor meme among the FFRK playerbase. This made players all the more shocked when a Kingdom Hearts collab actually happened.
• Junk Rare:
  • Notoriously, Tiny Bee. A Burst Soul Break Relic for Yuna that has no business being on a White Mage/Summoner type character, has poor damage output, and a BSB and Burst Mode that are just straight-up weak.
  • Kingdom Key. Not that it's an inherently bad weapon in and of itself, and you get three free copies to upgrade it, but only two characters in the entirety of the game can use Keyblade weapons (not even Tyro can use them), and chances are, if you wanted to put Sora and Riku in your team, you would have already pulled on their banner to get better Keyblades for them. All in all, while it's not terrible, it just eats inventory space in the end.
    • The Wishing Star keyblade from the second collab may be even worse. It's a single 6* Keyblade given to players in celebration of the event, and it boosts Fire, Lightning and Ice damage. The thing? It gives nothing aside from these boosts, only Sora sees real use from it, and its stats are pitiful for a 6* weapon. Some players felt this weapon would better serve its purpose as "rainbow poop" for Artifact Weapons rather than proper use.

M-P

• Memetic Badass:
  • Bartz and Sora. When their Awakenings dropped in 2019, they broke the metagame over their knees, as together they cover six of the game's main eight elements and can bring ridiculous DPS in them. Even in the third-tier Torments, which heavily penalize the player by buffing the boss for bringing in an off-realm character (and this was before the 2020 nerf to Torments), Bartz and Sora were strong enough that they could still pull their weight and even carry a team to a sub-30 win. As for Magicites, the 5* rank is plain screwed, because even in their off-elements the two can still break the damage cap and again carry teams to sub-30 wins. As the 6* fights rolled out they struggled due to their heavy damage resistance against characters without an elemental infusion, but Bartz and Sora were still formidable in on-element fights.
  • Cloud. With the right team behind him it's possible for him to beat anything. That's not a meme, it's proven fact.
  • Rem in the Dreambreaker era. Dreambreaker bosses like to inflict Full Break on the party at phase changes, but Rem's primary attacking stat is MND, which they don't debuff. This allows her to power through their Full Breaks that cripple most other characters, and with her Ultra, Awakening, and Sync combined, she can dish out multi-casting Holy attacks every turn that can go up to 29,999 a hit. She's so powerful that with the right support, she can be your sole DPS character and still carry off-realm teams to sub 30 wins.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Generally, any character the ends up Out of Focus and falls victim to Power Creep will become the subject of mockery until the developers give them new toys. This was especially prominent in the game's earlier years when new character additions were common; as events of course tended to focus on the new character in the Relic Banner, it was more likely that pre-existing characters would slip further and further behind the more competition they had to fight against for notice.
  • Dr. Mog is widely mocked for how his strategy tips for bosses tend to be useless. Several verge into Captain Obvious territory, like "bring healing to survive its powerful attacks" or "use Break skills to lower the enemy's stats".^note For extra humor, he often notes that the boss is resistant to Break effects but then advises you use them anyway; while Breaks do still have at least a partial effect in these cases, the way Dr. Mog phrases it makes it sound like a Violation of Common Sense. Event-exclusive bosses are particularly bad about this, either because their gimmicks are supposed to be a surprise, or there's no gimmick to worry about, the boss just has high stats and is very powerful; for these bosses, Dr. Mog will claim he has no idea what to expect from the fight, and/or will basically say "this boss is super-dangerous, so go all out with everything you have to defeat them". Some event bosses set Dr. Mog as the Roaming Warrior using "Record of the Water Crystal", which is basically shorthand for "the Roaming Warrior button does whatever the developers want it to do to make this fight's gimmick work", and universally its effects are never explained to players before the fight. With Dr. Mog becoming playable, players have a chance to exact revenge by making him fight the bosses he's been clueless about for years.
  • Basch is also quite infamous among players. He's not that ignored in terms of getting relics regularly, but some are convinced DeNA hates him because his later Relics are considered bad to mediocre at best. Then there's his Hero Ability Ruin Impendent, which deals 4 hits and gives him 2000 HP of auto-healing; except that Healing Smite, a Knight ability long in the game before, deals 5 hits and heals any ally for 2000 HP. In other words, Basch's Hero Ability (which are almost universally superior to generic abilities) is worse than Healing Smite.^note At least DeNA realized this and later gave him a second Hero Ability that deals 5 hits, each of which is stronger than Healing Smite; but it does still lacking Healing Smite's healing and the standard by this point was for Hero Abilities to deal 6 hits, so...
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Truly the darkest age."^note From a Japanese player before a variety of content additions and enhancements, like the Roaming Warrior system and revised Daily Dungeons.
  • Any boss vulnerable to Lightning attacks is suggested to be even more vulnerable to Lightning.
  • "No one said the future would be easy."^note A line from Vanille that was quoted for the "Pulse fal'Cie" event. Around this time, the game became a lot easier and more accessible thanks to the Roaming Warrior system, and the event's Memory Crystal reward cutoffs were halved for Global. The line is used sarcastically for events deemed too easy, new weekly rewards or particularly good events like the Festival of Gold.
  • "Your X against mine!"^note Said when you face one of your own party members as a boss, like Kain or Amarant. It's a spin on Isaaru's "Your aeons against mine!" line before his Sequential Boss battle in FFX, which is featured in Record Keeper and shows up in a lot of FFX events.
  • Lightning is a 5★ Celebrity.^note From a misspelling of "Celerity" on the FFRK subreddit, and a reference to her Louis Vuitton cross-promotion.
  • "Tyro master race".^note Tyro's Jack of All Stats status combined with several buffing Soul Breaks and Realm Synergy in Core dungeons (which includes many Event dungeons) means he tends to be a highly used character in events despite his terrible stats. His utility grew even further in the Dreambreaker era; all Dreambreaker bosses inflict Full Break when they change phases, and Tyro happens to have an Overstrike Soul Break that buffs ATK/DEF/MAG/RES and thus can overwrite the debuff, which makes him a strong choice to bring to a Dreambreaker fight
  • Beating a Magicite dungeon for the first time nets you various amounts ^note Depending on how fast you beat the boss of Magicite, which helps you beat the next Magicite boss in clockwise order, has already drawn comparisons to Mega Man.
  • Joking about pulling Tiny Bee. ^note Tiny Bee, a BSB for Yuna, is widely seen as the worst relic in the game, even while it showed up on many FFX event banners.
  • Mocking the game's terminology with phrases like "slightly more", "significantly more", "much more", etc.^note Effects that concern damage output, like raising a certain damage type, boosting a stat, and so forth, tend to have vague quantifiers like "raises ATK a small/moderate/large amount" or "deal slightly/significantly/much more Fire damage". While the fanbase has "decoded" the meaning behind these phrases to understand their definitive values, the in-game phrasing is vague and confusing and of no help in figuring out what these effects actually do.
  • Apology Mythril.^note Glitches, oversights, misstated help or announcement info, etc., often prompt the company to give players a Mythril as an apology for the problem. Major issues sometimes get as many as five Mythril.
  • "Better than a Bard Mote."^note To celebrate the release of the game's soundtrack, all players were given a special reward of one Bard Mote. You need at least five Bard Motes to actually unlock the first stage of a sphere; one is completely useless. The "reward" has been called the worst giveaway ever and other pitiful rewards since are favorably compared to it as a joke.
  • ©Disney^note Every single Kingdom Hearts-related image in the game and the official site has a Disney copyright notice on it; the Walt Disney Company is infamously zealous about its copyright protection. This is also the reason KH characters and their relics are not available outside their events, unlike other collabs.
  • "lolbio"^ExplanationThe Poison element is regarded as the worst and least covered element in the game. It took until well into the game's sixth year for Poison to finally get thrown a bone in the form of Chain Soul Breaks, a 6-star Magicite, and better Poison abilities and Soul Breaks. Even then though, it naturally is the game's least available element, so outside of Odin fights there's little reason to make good use of poison.
  • Washing Machine. ^ExplanationA combo consisting of two Ninja abilities, Reflecting Pool and Raging Waters, known for dishing fourteen hits a turn when properly primed up. Edge and Yuffie, revelling in the Water element those abilities are linked to, are notoriously known users. The meme has its name due to Raging Waters' animation of the user spining around to make a whirlpool.
  • DeNA intern.^note Minor errors such as typos and the like are blamed on anonymous, faceless interns of the company that did a slipshod job. The subreddit for the game even has it as a flair.
  • The reveal of "Synchro" as a new type of Soul Break after Awakenings invited a deluge of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds jokes.
  • "The enemy is upon you!"^note When Labyrinths were added, players noted that Corridors are almost always fights with a powerful enemies, which is announced/revealed with this phrase. And since Corridors are also a way to find more treasure and get more Labyrinth points, they are one of your best options to take to proceed, and thus you'll see this phrase a lot.
• Narm: Each of the 17 historia Crystals has it's own theme from each corresponding realm. While some are battle themes and important event themes. Some of them are completely unfitting for battle. Notable the FFI and FFII Historia Crystal themes respectively which is the Cornelia Castle theme and the Wild Rose theme respectively.
• Never Live It Down: For many players, Josef is stuck under the shadow of Noble Sacrifice, a Soul Break that KO's him to provide a buff many characters (including the top-tier Ramza) can provide without any downside and often with added benefits. Since he's been buffed and received new tools that are much better, he's started to cast off his reputation. This culminated in the Ice Fat Black Chocobo event, which finally turned Josef into real DPS material with a new USB, Glint, and Dualcast LMR.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Initially played straight, as there wasn't much of a plot in the first place, but triumphantly averted by the Magicite and Record Dungeons - plenty of praise has been given to the Record Dungeons and its cutscenes for the charming dialogue, fun character interactions, detailed spritework, and great animations.

R

• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Core characters may have awful stats, but if you're willing to grind them, they get excellent Record Materia: the Black Mage, White Mage and Summoner have RMs that restore one use to an ability of their respective types upon the start of a battle. All their Memory Crystals are also found in regular Elite Realm Dungeons, while most named characters only get their from timed events. It also helps that some of those Cores have very useful RM 99 Materias, such as Warrior's, which is basically a copy of Cloud's Truthseeker.
  • Summons were widely seen as not worth the investment for the longest time, requiring an investment of some of the hardest resources to acquire for what was essentially black magic that hit all enemies but had half as many uses. While they DID do more damage, most equivalent Black Magic hit the damage cap anyways. Eventually Summons were buffed to have multiple hits, drastically increasing their usefulness.
    • Additionally, various high-level Summon abilities have a higher minimum damage compared to Black Magic and other similar damage spells, which compensates if them even if they have fewer hits than comparable abilities. While Summons might have less potential damage when your party is fully buffed, they are far more consistent in maxing out their damage per hit, even if the enemy has a powerful damage-resist buff.
  • With a few exceptions, the initial wave of 6* abilities from Nightmare Dungeons and Empowered Spheres had mostly been Power Creeped into uselessness. A fifth year update buffed many of them, giving many of them elemental properties, stat buffs, or other benefits. While not all of them are viable for end-game content now, they're far more useful than they were before. Ultima in particular got a huge benefit, becoming Omni-elemental and opening a lot of possibilities for Black Mages by giving them a 6* Holy, Dark, and Poison spell at once. The update also saw Penalty Snipe and Quadruple Foul become Poison and Non-elemental, making "lolbio" less of a joke now that it has 6* attacks.
  • The entire FFII cast (save for Leon) was viewed by many as the weakest of the series, not helped by how the low frequency of FFII events meant the cast were often lacking in new relics and Soul Breaks. Then came an FFII event that gave four members Burst Soul Breaks (Firion, Maria, Leon, and Minwu) and excellent Super Soul Breaks to the rest (save for Ricard) along with sorely needed stat buffs (particularly Minwu's Mind and Leila's Speed) and ability improvements. While Leila and Ricard fell behind onto the Power Creep, they eventually got new Ultras that bumped them back into utility status.
  • Gordon started off as a Master of None Red Mage-type character who was too limited magically (limited to 3✩ White and Black, and couldn't even equip rods to use the latter effectively) and too squishy for a physical attacker. He received a major buff to his Attack and durability, a solid AoE debuff Soul Break, and later received 4✩ White Magic and a stacking buff SSB to further increase his versatility. The FFII event that came with its respective Mirage fight also gave the Realm's Chain Soul Break to him, plus a Glint and an Haste+Instacast 1 LMR.
  • Firion's Soul Breaks all lend him towards a Holy-elemental build, except he has no access to Knight abilities, the sole ability school with any physical Holy commands. In order to maximize his damage potential, Firion would have to combine one of his Infuse Holy Soul Breaks with his Burst Soul Break, which has no Infuse Holy effect of its own but is the only way he can access Holy attacks. The developers retooled him to focus on Samurai abilities in the Fire and Ice elements, which he can work with, and then later just gave him 5★ Knight so he can put his Holy affinity to work too.
  • While Shadow managed to keep up with the game's rhythym, it became obvious that he was falling behind as Edge and Yuffie got better tools for the class, while he didn't. The 4th Anniversary saw that problem fixed by giving Shadow a new USB that gives him the same buffs as Yuffie's USB2, Chase included, and a much-needed Relic Materia to help him accumulate Physical Blinks for his Ninja Meta, as well as his own Arcane Soul Break, which bounces him back into competition... While leaving Edge behind.
    • Although Edge himself has always been an useful support option thanks to his USB-tier Super Soul Break, his damage output has been lagging behind for a good while, especially since Yuffie is a far better source of water damage which is Edge's main element, his Awakening lacks elemental infusion and because the generic fire- and lightning-elemental ninja abilities are still stuck in the 4* era and have no physical equivalents. This was thankfully remedied with his Sync Soul Break and Glint+ which give him fire and lightning infusion, but more importantly, his new Unique Ability is fire-, water-, and lightning-elemental and works similarly to the existing 6* ninja abilities by dealing up to 6 hits with 2 stacked Physical Blinks as well as refreshing said Blinks. It also deals hybrid damage depending on whether his Attack or Magic is higher, letting him work either as a physical or a magical ninja in 3 different elements, with the only downfall being the fact that his Unique Ability deals 1 less hit on average than the dedicated water, darkness and earth ninja abilities.
  • On release, Mog was unfavorably compared to Core characters because his skill set was limited to 3★ White and Black Magic, he couldn't equip rods or staffs to boost his Magic, and despite having 5★ Dancer access, there were no Dance abilities in the global client upon his release. A later update, however, buffed him into a good support mage with access to 4★ White Magic plus rods and staves, and a BSB that boosts Magic and Mind on entry. Come the Mirage Bait FFVI event, and Mog becomes the Chain holder for his Realm, with a Quickcast 3 LMR to help starting the fight.
  • Gau was long overlooked, because most of his Soul Breaks revolve around the Rage mechanic from his home game, which means that he'll become uncontrolable for a set number of turns and use a random ability from a pool of abilities, making him extremely unreliable. Then in 2018 he got his Ultra Soul Break "Dried Meat Boost", which grants him 100% critical hit rate, lets him dualcast Combat and Celerity abilities, and doesn't involve Rage in any way. Sudden Gau became an extremely effective DPS machine, with jokes being cracked he was T.G. Cid's long-lost son.
  • Cloud, who was considered a Crutch Character for a very long time due to having a mediocre skillset and getting the first relics of any type (which meant he would inevitably be Power-Creeped by future relics), eventually received access to 5✩ Samurai abilities and a new BSB that surpassed his long-obsolete original BSB. The June fest went the extra mile and gave him numerous tools to allow him to play with his main element, making Cloud basically the best Wind physical DPS in the game. The Fourth Anniversary (The second Kingdom Hearts collab brought part of this a month earlier to GL) went the extra mile and strengthened his Dark abilities, as well as his Heavy Physical play, making Cloud extremely proficent in that element.
    • It also took three months for him to get an Awakening Soul Break of his own, but when it came in the fest following the 4th Anniversary, it paid off, allowing Cloud to become even more powerful. That said, he was also one of the first characters to get a Glint+/Superglint relic, which is a zero-cost copy of his Mako Power normal Glint.
  • Irvine was considered one of the worst Supports in the game, mainly to due limited weapon selection and poor SBs. However this perception started to change when he got the first Hyper Break SB (Full break but with a mind debuff) in the game which stacks with Full Break and Breakdowns. And then he got his BSB, considered to be one of the best debuff BSBs at the time, very close in power to Vaan's. While Breakers fell behind in the Power Creep due to resistant Torment and Magicite bosses, the Fourth Anniversary found new things to do with Irvine by giving him Bygone Days, one of the first Realm Chains.
  • Wol was considered one of the worst characters in the game for being a Master of None who performed poorly in all of his skillsets because he was capped at 4★ for most of them, with his soul breaks being bad or mediocre at best. The "Prophecy of Hope" event that came with the Final Fantasy I Neo Torment buffed him considerably by giving him a decent DPS Ultra Soul Break, and buffing his Support to 5★ plus giving him a Haste + IC3 Legend Materia, making him another valuable Entrust Bot in the game. He also gets a second Burst Soul Break that works much like Ramza's Battle Cry while boosting his Heavy Physical game, and a better Earth/Holy elemental Brave Ultra.
  • Snow and Josef are considered bad DPSes as Monks with focus on the Ice element, which only has a single 5★ ability with real bad damage potential at that. While none of them are outright bad (Josef and Snow having good buffing Soul Breaks and a Chain and Radiant Shield in Snow's case), their ability pool outside that makes them poor choices for the elements they're relegated to, forcing them to off-element roles for DPS or just outright support for Snow. Fortunately the 6★ Monk ability Ironfist Ice got added, giving them an all-around much better option to play to their elemental focus as Monks.
    • Snow eventually got a XIII event dedicated to him that brought his Awakening, Diamond Geyser, his Arcane Crushing Ice Fist, and his Superglint Icicle Guard, which made Snow finally suitable for DPS and a competition against Eight. Meanwhile Josef took a little more time, but the Ice Fat Black Chocobo event rescued him for good by giving him an Ultra that gives Ice Infusion, Ice Radiant Shield and Imperil Ice all at the same time, a Glint that also grants him a Chase move, and a Dualcast LMR, which finally puts Josef on the map and makes him a decent character after years of suffering under the Memetic Mutation his death in Final Fantasy II caused in Record Keeper.
  • Noctis was heavily overlooked because of the insistent focus DeNA gave for him on Non-Elemental attacks, in a game that favors elemental attacks over anything else; JP's 2018 year-end fest saw that problem come to an end with Noctis' Awakening Soul Break, which fixes his lack of elements by giving him three elements, the same ones used by Gladiolus, Prompto and Ignis. To complement this, Noctis also got access to 5★ Samurai and Heavy, which allows him to play with Fire and Earth, as Lightning was already available via his 5★ Celerity and Dragoon. Noctis also got a new Arcane Soul Break that also uses those elements, and both these tools make good use of his second Glint released in the 2018 Summer Fest in GL. All these finally put Noctis on the competition as a DPS.
  • Kimahri is hampered by Master of None stats, a very bad weapon selection (Daggers and Spears only) and a lackluster ability selection (5★ Dragoon, 4★ Combat, 4★ Support, 3★ Black Magic). The one place he could shine is as a Dragoon, but his affinity is Water and there are no Water abilities for the class, and Kimahri isn't any better at being an off-element Dragoon than anyone else. Then a 4th year X event gave him an Awakened Arcane Soul Break that gives him No Air Time and the usual AASB buffs, a Glint that infuses him with Water and gives him three turns of No Air Time, and most importantly of all, adds a Water-elemental Jump ability to the game. At last Kimahri achieved proper utility as the game's first and only Water-elemental Dragoon, and he has the tools to be good at it.
  • The Daily Draw used to be a pathetic joke of a feature that only gave out useless 1★ and 2★ equipment with the possibility of getting 5★ or 6★ equipment from it being a ridiculously nonexistent 1/10000 and 1/100000 chance respectively, but the September 28 2018 update gave it a much needed update and the chance to get 5★ and 6★ equipment from it is now 11% and 3% respectively, which is about equal to a single pull from any other banner and infinitely more useful since it also includes all the newest relics from past banners and is free.
  • The Poison Element of all things. In April 2021, the element was revived with a banner which includes a chain, new poison abilities in the Ruby shop and Heroic Abilities, and magicite for the element as well.

S

• The Scrappy:
  • Dr. Mog, who forces the player to go through the worst instances of the game UI to trade mythril to him.
  • Most of the Core characters that aren't named fall into this: their stats are mediocre and anything they can do, a named character can do better. Only a few Core characters (Viking, Sage and Magus) are even viable in combat, with the others being too much of a liability in battle without a benefit to their weaknesses. Their only saving grace can be their record materias which can grant very useful bonuses, but it requires the player to level them up.
  • Beatrix is loathed by a number of players for being a blatant Creator's Pet as a playable character, her status as an immensely cheap and unfair That One Boss, and (much like her original game) every battle against her being a Heads I Win, Tails You Lose affair.
  • Global players have a particular dislike of Braska as well. The trio of Jecht, Auron, and Braska are significantly more popular in Japan, while many Global players see Braska as a pointless addition to a realm that already gets enough attention and events. It doesn't help that Braska's ability options are exactly the same as Hope's, making him seem even more pointless.
  • Machina is already divisive as one of the main characters of Final Fantasy Type-0, but he gets it worse in Record Keeper, being considered a very subpar Earth Spellblade. Not helping matters is his Ultra, Awakening, which gives the dreaded Assault Mode to him. It's a good buff overall, with a Chase and Quickcast, but the problem lies that it fades as soon as anything touches Machina. In the current endgame where bosses now find ways to bypass the Dual Blink this Ultra also gives, it makes every utility this USB would have had moot. And you thought Noctis had it bad with his Armiger.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The menu interface is very slow, often requiring a second or two to load when going between different menus, and when viewing lists of things like characters, equipment, and materials, it also takes a moment when scrolling down the page. This also means collection events and orb trade-ins are tedious, because every time you complete a transaction, you're sent back to the top of the menu and need to scroll back down.
    • Kite's Shop is infamous in this regard, being very slow and laggy to do anything in it, sometimes taking more than a minute to load, and all just to trade in some useless support items for better ones. Further, there's an arbitrary cap on how many you can trade in a week. Many players just don't even bother with Kite's Shop because it's too much hassle to wait for the shop to load just to acquire a meagre amount of support items each week.
  • The "Optimize" button in the party menu is a joke. It'll assign abilities, Record Materia and Legend Materia almost at random, equip a character with their highest level Soul Breaks even if they don't synergize with each other, and it'll equip equipment based on stat boosts ignoring resistances and boosts to elemental damage and status effects. It's easier to just equip each party member manually one at a time, because you'll probably have to do that anyway. Optimize was later retooled to be better, but is still inferior to just taking the time to equip the party manually.
  • The Valia Pira bloodstone mechanic in FFRK is adapted as each non-IX character counting for one bloodstone (and thus making Valia Pira stronger, giving it access to more dangerous attacks, and making it immune to all elements if all five party members are non-IX characters). Whereas using characters in their home realms gives a relatively minor advantage, Valia Pira is the only boss that actively punishes players for using whatever characters they want. It was even worse when Valia Pira appeared as a ++ boss, since this mechanic made it completely impossible to master without having a decently-levelled IX character.^*Two of the requirements are to not let Zidane be KO'ed (meaning he actually has to be a part of the party) and to exploit Valia Pira's weakness to Wind (which it is instead immune to if you have no IX characters). Good thing Zidane is both a IX character, and a Wind-elemental DPS at that.
  • Weapons like gun-arms or dolls, which are limited to only a very small handful of characters, often merely Tyro and their original wielder. Many are considered an Undesirable Prize due to being nearly-worthless as synergy equipment for other characters. Blitzballs are a particularly despised weapon type, as since all blitzball users can equip normal thrown weapons, blitzballs amounts to thrown weapons that are arbitrarily exclusive to one realm's characters. Keyblades are even worse, as they are so exclusive to Kingdom Hearts characters that not even Tyro can equip it. The 6★ Shooting Star players received with the second collab? Most players just used it for upgrading another weapon or improving Rainbow Shards, because the only character who would want to use it anyway (Sora) has much better weapons than it.
  • "Armiger"-type Soul Breaks. Noctis introduced the idea with his Ultra and Overstrike, which grant him a damage-absorbing barrier, and Machina got a variant that grants him a shield that absorbs two hits of any damage. The gimmick is they grant the user a nice buff of some sort while the barrier or shield up, but only while it's up — when it falls, the buffs are lost. Against high level content, even the damage-absorbing barriers will fall in a couple turns with the damage output of bosses, or it could be overwriten by another Soul Break that grants damage barriers, and the shield will only absorb two hits of any damage type before falling. The buffs that Armiger-type Soul Breaks grant are typically just on-par with other Soul Breaks anyway, making it seem like their users are being given the short end of the stick.
  • Several high-tier commands and all Soul Breaks remove the HUD during their animation. This unfortunately means that if you try to input a command to a character just as one of these animations begins, not only will your command likely not go through, but your input will be delayed because you have to tap the icon again once the HUD reappears. This can also happen multiple times to the same character if the rest of the party happens to attack in sequence. High level bosses can wipe the party out in one attack and have precisely scripted attack patterns, and Super Modes from Soul Breaks are timed and you want to maximize how many actions the character takes before it runs out, so a momentary delay of an action's input can entirely change the flow of the fight and cost you dearly. Magicites are even worse about this, because they appear every few seconds without warning and can really screw up your rhythm.
  • It became increasingly common over the game's lifespan to have enemies that can increase their resistance to elemental damage, first in 5* Magicite battles and carrying over to higher tiers, and Dreambreaker bosses can do the same. The major problem is that "Imperil" effects to lower elemental resistance to counteract this tactic are not always easy to use. Water, Holy and Dark can get by fine with Aquatic Weakness, De'Diaja and Touched by Darkess, but Fire, Ice, and Lightning have to utilize the "Offering" abilities, which don't have the best damage output and only have a chance to Imperil their elements, turning the battle into a Luck-Based Mission.^note Typically enemies have a 20% weakness to an element, so 2 levels of resistance (which is standard) means they take neutral damage from that element; hitting an enemy's elemental weakness causes abilities to charge the Soul Break gauge more than usual, so those 2 levels of resistance actually really hurt your party's functionality. As for Earth and Wind, there is flat no ability that lowers those resistances. Also, this assumes you have a character capable of utilizing those abilities and being able to carry their weight in battle otherwise, which will not always be the case. This finally got alleviated when Hero Abilties were added, several of which include very guaranteed Imperil effects but at a shorter duration.
  • Magicite grinding was for a long time the most tedious, frustrating, time-consuming mechanic in the game. Getting a Magicite to Level 99 requires 4 copies of it to break the level cap three times, so you'll have to fight a Magicite boss at bare minimum twelve times to get four copies of each Magicite stone it drops, but that's only a best case scenario because the drops are random, so you'll have to refight the boss over and over to get the Magicite you want. And when Magicites first came out, fighting them required A: 60 Stamina, and B: use of a Magic Stone, of which you only get one a day and can hold no more than 15. This resulted in players having to waste Stamina they could have spent doing other things to fight Magicite bosses over and over hoping they drop the random Magicite they want before they run out of Magic Stones. Over time, the removal of Magic Stones, Stamina reduction to 20, and increasing the number of Magicites the bosses drop, made Magicite grinding much more manageable.
  • The Magia Upgrade system is cool in its conception, giving you a system to "level" your charavters further when they hit Level 99, but its execution is flawed. Grinding Magia takes a long time, and once you hit 50 it starts taking five or more fights to get one point — for the maximum level of 2,400, a character would have to do over thirty thousand battles. Further, the boost Magia gives isn't really worth it — one point into HP just gives you 5 HP, so even at a max of 100 Magia into the HP stat, it's only 500 more HP. For other stats and elemental damage, buffing Soul Breaks and Magicite tend to boost them already, and with the game making stacked buffs come at decreasing returns as you keep stacking, it's often just not worth it. The result of this is a system that demands a ton of Level Grinding for very little benefit. Most players either ignore Magia or use macro programs to run the Fabul Castle dungeon over and over without having to do it manually.
  • Trying to do multiplayer fights with other people is an exercise in frustration. There's no way to communicate with them beyond stamps, and individual player lag means they may not see it until its too late. This means that even when you have three competent teammates with good characters, they probably won't be able to cooperate very well and will step over each other's toes in casting things like healing, buffing, and so forth. On the upside most multiplayer battles are fairly easy, but the Superboss 350 battles pretty much require players to plan and communicate outside the game.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Giant's Gloves, a weapon for Josef, kills him to grant a large attack buff to the rest of the party. Even before attack boosting soul breaks became more prevalent, it wasn't regarded as very useful since its use would tank the medal score (since most missions have "avoid being KO'd" as an objective), the player would have to waste time reviving him, and he himself wouldn't benefit from it.
  • Tiny Bee has an infamous reputation for being useless and showing up in relic draws a lot. It's a gun weapon... for Yuna, a White Mage, so its damage is below-average in her hands. Its initial burst use does little damage and its burst skills are just as underwhelming.
• Shrug of God: DeNA's response to Global not receiving certain things, like various collaboration events and their rewards, removing certain Memory Crystals from the Vale of Memories, or rolling gacha. When the community shows backlash, they simply say that things are "working as intended" and that "Global and Japan are two different games". This tends to cause lots of drama in the FFRK community whenever it happens - especially during the Final Fantasy Tactics controversy and the Orb Fest controversy.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: To All the Bravest, Square's previous FF freemium mobile outing that similarly had the player forming a party of past characters to fight. ATB is pretty much considered the worst game in the franchise by fans and critics alike, with critics openly calling it a lazy attempt to cash in on nostalgia with no gameplay beyond mindlessly tapping the screen. Record Keeper, on the other hand, has a lot of depth to gameplay, a massive cast of characters, endless ways to customize them, is a legitimate RPG recognizable as something from the main series, and there's no need at all to spend real money on it. Not only has it got a far warmer reception than ATB, but it considered one of the better freemium games on the market.

T

• That One Achievement:
  • Finding a shimmering painting in Labyrinth dungeons. They're incredibly rare to find and may take days to even find one. And you can only spot a shimmering painting in the front batch of paintings. Fortunately it's easy to tell there's a shimmering painting as there's a spinning rainbow surrounding it, but only if you're not using the standard display and it's a mission that isn't time limited as well, so there's lots of time of completing it.
• That One Attack:
  • U+ Bartz's Monk Kick, an AoE Physical move that, unmitigated, inflicts about 3000 to 4000 damage to the whole party, and Bartz is set to use this attack at least twice at the start of the fight nearly all the time^*There's a tiny chance of about 5-10% of Bartz simply opening with a normal Attack. Many players have either Rage Quit or simply not bothered because of how Monk Kick makes even starting the fight a brain-melting uphill battle against the RNG.
  • Mote Ifrit's Meteor. It's a very powerful AoE attack that can kill most of the party (about 3000 damage with Shellga and Magic Breakdown), and Ifrit has a 20% chance of using it every turn. It's not fun.
  • U++ Daedalus's Pulsar Wave, which has a fairly high chance to inflict Stop which, due to Daedalus's stats, can last over twenty seconds on a non-White Mage. If he landed Stop on your healer or Support, time to S/L.
  • The ultimate attacks of Gaston and Helgenish for the Octopath Traveler collab were broken, both of them missing a damage-reducing 0.5 exponent multiplier from their damage formulas that all other defense-piercing enemy attacks have so they'd hit the 9999 damage cap fairly easy, even with sufficient breaks. The worst part was that they were listed as D180, but hit harder than some magicites.
  • Essentially any attack that inflicts Dispel on the party. Losing Hastega/Protectga/Shellga in the middle of a fight will cripple your party, so unless you know it's coming from the AI script and can get at least Haste back up quickly, getting hit with a party-wide Dispel is often a prelude to a party wipe.
  • Any attack that inflicts Sap. Sap overwrites Regenga, a very useful and game-defining status that many White Mages rely on, and it also pretty much negates Last Stand, as characters who survive a fatal blow thanks to Last Stand will not retain enough HP to survive the Sap damage when it hits. Unsurprisingly, the developers know this and have done this on purpose, since many top-tier bosses have attacks that inflict Sap even if they otherwise don't use status ailments very much.
  • Syldra's High Stakes has ended many runs against her and is the biggest reason who she's considered the hardest 5* magicite. It buffs her Defense, Resistance, and Mind & it gives her haste. And she uses it almost immidiately once she enters phase 3. Until Fran's Awakening, there was no person associated with Ice who had a Soul Break to reverse the buff.
  • Ark's Eternal Darkness inflicts a MAG and MND debuff on the party of 99% for three seconds, and the upgraded Savage Eternal Darkness debuffs DEF as well. The DEF debuff is no concern, as Ark will always use EnDark after Savage Eternal Darkness and thus by the time it actually attacks you the debuff will have worn off. But the debuff to MAG and MND will cripple your party's offense for at least one round, possibly two, dragging the fight out longer, wasting valuable time on your party's Burst Modes, EX Modes, Awakenings, etc, and making sub 30 wins more challenging to achieve.
• That One Boss: There's such a long list that it has earned its own page.
• That One Level:
  • Heroic difficulty daily dungeons, which were meant for characters who broke the level 50 limit, something that wasn't introduced in the English version of the game at their release. They are still doable with a full level 50 team, but expect some hard encounters. As for the Exp Dungeon, it is very difficult to master it with low level characters, characters already at 50 won't gain any exp, and it is the only dungeon of the game where you can't benefit from synergy. The introduction of Memory Crystals, allowing characters to break the level 50 limit, made those dungeons more manageable.
  • The "To slay a sorceress" Final Fantasy VIII Event. While the Classic version of the event is manageable, the Elite version gets very quickly insanely hard, with bosses with insane defense and tons of HP (the Archaeosaur alone has around 150'000 HP), and the final battle pits you against 3 boss battles in a row (Iguions, Seifer and Edea). The event was released in the west way sooner than in Japan, without its difficulty being scaled down, resulting in a challenge that most players found absolutely impossible to beat since there was next to no Final Fantasy VIII equipment to exploit for synergy, not to mention the Friend and Materia system weren't implemented yet.
  • Every dungeon with two bosses (or more) can be one in terms of getting a Master rank. On one boss, you can usually afford missing the Champion rank because of a bonus objective. But not on two. Plus you need to conserve your resources more instead of going all out on the one boss encounter elsewhere.
  • Starting from Thamasa, the last dungeons of the elite version of the Legendary Plunder FFVI event. The basic mooks begin getting absurdly powerful and toward the end, they're very capable of one-shotting party members on top of high defense. Each boss becomes That One Boss by being a Marathon Boss with lots of HP; Airship is bad in this regard, as you effectively fight three bosses in that stage, and it's very likely that your skills would be used up on the first two. What's especially glaring is that to master two of the boss battles, you have to not take advatage of their ice weakness. Finally, it all ends with Red Dragon, who not only has lots of HP but can spam powerful fire magic that practically requires Celes' Magic Shield or Tyro's Sentinel Grimoire just to survive. The only saving grace is that the rare Phoenix summon as the grand prize is a first-time reward instead of a mastery reward.
  • Even outside of Jenova-Birth, a lot of the Elite VII Dungeons are absolutely nightmarish. Let's begin:
    • Under Junon: The boss, Bottomswell, is outside of melee range, which outright No Sells melee weapons of any kind like Swords and Katanas, and locks you down to ranged gear like Guns, Bows, and Blitzballs, alongside Magic. If you intend on running this fight with as much Record Synergy as physically possible, the number of ranged VII weapons is extremely low, and the mobs before the boss hit like trucks, forcing the player to stagger through these battles with inferior weapons and weaker characters, as only a few Final Fantasy VII characters can use long-ranged weapons, none of which were available globally in June 2015, when the dungeon released. Getting Champion on all three levels can be very difficult. To make things worse, Bottomswell has an attack which traps a random character inside a bubble. If all of your characters are trapped, you automatically lose the fight. The only way to free them is to cast damage-dealing magic on them, magic you may desperately need to kill the boss. Finally, unless he is under the effect of Sleep, Bottomswell will always use his Tsunami attack when he dies, possibly costing you medals for Damage taken (or, worse, outright killing your characters).
    • Wutai: The dungeon tosses two bosses at you, which is bad enough. The mobs are ridiculously beefy, which is worse. The kicker is that Palmer, who was a joke boss in the original game, is now a tank who just will not die, meaning your Actions Taken score tanks, since tossing everything at him to end the battle leaves you wide open for Rapps, the other boss of the level. And, while not powerful in the strictest sense, he does hit hard enough to take your Damage Taken score down a notch as well.
    • The Temple of the Ancients: Same deal as above: beefy enemies and two ridiculously strong bosses with total party attacks. If you don't bring Protectga and/or Sentinel's Grimoire, winning may not happen.
  • If you've been mowing your way down Classic dungeons with sheer brute force and Curaga, Macalania Woods would like to say hello. It packs two mean bosses: Spherimorph and Crawler. While Spherimorph isn't a Damage-Sponge Boss in the slightest, it's a Barrier Change Boss that shifts elemental weaknesses, which can make it a pain in the ass to deal with if you didn't come properly loaded. It also knows Press, or if you wanna call it something else, Gravija. Then you move onto Crawler, who has its Attack Drone, Negator. Negator stops all of your Magic and Magic-based Soul Breaks as long as it's around, so if you got Pressed and forgot to heal in Stage 4, good luck. Crawler also likes to spam Gatling Gun, a high-powered AoE Physical attack, and it knows Mana Beam, a high-powered AoE Magic attack. It also counters your attacks with Mad Rush, which will absolutely tear through your mages and whatnot, and after so many turns, it respawns the Negator. Come prepared.
• That One Sidequest: The "Spiraling Depths" in the 2021 Summer Fest (2020 News Years Fest for Japan). Intended to tie into the Labyrinth that released at the time same, it's 100 floors divided into groups of five; players can skip to the 5th fight in each tier to unlock the next, but getting the Mission rewards requires a player to do all five. The early flights consumed a large amount of Stamina but weren't very difficult, but by the time you got to the 51st floor, you were fighting bosses as strong as Rank 6 Magicites, and they only kept getting harder from there, so much so that Auto Battle teams probably could not handle things on their own unless the team was stacked. To make the fights dull as well as difficult, each group of five floors were the same boss, each slightly more powerful than the last, and the second batch of 50 floors were the same bosses as the first 50, just with higher stats. This meant players were going to fight the same enemy over and over without much noticeable difference, and the second batch of 50 didn't have their AI scripts changed, meaning they had no gimmicks or strategy to worry about; they just had ridiculously high stats and hit extremely hard. Finally, to add insult to injury, the rewards for completing each set of five were good (Lv 2 Anima Lenses, the rarest kind), but the individual rewards for each dungeon were a joke, and the reward for completing all 100 scrolls was a single Honing Scroll.^note It's speculated the reward was meagre to discourage players from feeling they had to complete all 100 floors, but that's a small consolation The Spiraling Depths quickly became known as the worst Fest Dungeon the game has ever had.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • With the game over five years old as of the end of 2020, new character additions have slowed to a trickle, even though several prominent characters from the franchise are still nowhere to be seen.
    • Aside from Ceodore and Ursula, the entire cast of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is missing. While that game had a large cast, Ceodore and Ursula still made it in, and many of the others could make cases for their additions to Record Keeper in terms of what utility they could offer the IV realm. Zemus is also pretty assuredly never getting in, since Golbez has long eclipsed him as the iconic Big Bad of the game, and the Mysterious Girl/Maenad is probably not going to make the cut either.
    • From Final Fantasy VI, Banon and Gestahl are absent. While Gestahl's exclusion is understandable given his limited screentime and story role, Banon played a major role in the story of VI and was playable for a span of time. His inclusion here could provide the VI realm a second dedicated healer instead of Relm.
    • Final Fantasy VII has lots of characters missing, though this is inevitably given that the Compilation has a lot of major players. Still, the exclusion of Tseng when Rufus and the other three Turks are here is noticeable, same with any of the Tsviets other than Shelke.
    • Final Fantasy XI as a whole gets little attention, since the game was already winding down to its final content additions when Record Keeper was just coming out, and XI has always been the odd-one-out of the series. As a result the realm has very few representatives, particularly no villains. XIV is slightly better off with more characters than XI, but it still missing several prominent characters (including members of the Scions) and has no villains, and its events are infrequent. Its overlooked status became more heightened in the early 2020s when XIV's popularity exploded, yet Record Keeper continued to give XIV little regard.
    • XII lacks Vossler and Reddas for its roster, who were both Guest characters and played important story roles, and Filo, Kytes and Llyud, who were party members in the Real-Time Strategy sequel, Revenant Wings.
    • XIII has only Cid Raines and Jihl Nabaat for its representative villains, with the three main villains of the trilogy (Dysley, Caius, and Lumina) forgotten. While one could argue that Dysley's inclusion may be awkward given he only ever fights in his true form Barthandelus, and Lumina is never shown fighting directly, Caius would be very easy to design a Record Keeper ability set for.
    • Since Tactics, Tactics Advance, Type-0, and even World of Final Fantasy and Dimensions II, have reps in this game, that opens the door for other prominent spin-offs to be included, but they have not been. There have been several Dissidia-themed events, and the PS4 Dissidia was still getting character releases for much of Record Keeper's lifespan and Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia is still thriving, but Cosmos, Chaos, Materia, and Spiritus have not been added.
  • A lot of characters are added to the game, get a handful of Soul Breaks to go with their inclusion, and are then forgotten about for years. When they do get more Soul Breaks, it often feels like obligation more than anything else, as though the developers only gave them Soul Breaks because they'd run out of characters in the realm and these guys were saved for last. By the game's fifth year most characters had an Awakening Soul Break at last, but they got them after Synchro Soul Breaks had been the next tier of Power Creep for months, and Awakenings for other characters (who are probably better supported in general) had been out so long that most players probably wouldn't want or need the new tech for these guys.
  • The end of the Record Dungeons heavily hinted that the Shadowsmith would undergo a Heel–Face Turn and be Promoted to Playable, and actually is playable for the last few levels of the Record Dungeons. Years after the Record Dungeons closed, it still hadn't happened.
  • With regards to bosses, while the Magicite bosses are mostly prominent creatures of their elements if not necessarily summons, the bosses of the Realm-focused dungeons (the original Torments, "Neo Torments", Dreams, and Dreambreakers) seem to be chosen largely at random. For example, the Final Fantasy VI original Torment boss was Hidon, the Neo Torment boss is Wrexsoul, the Dream boss is Siegfried, and the Dreambreaker boss is the Ice Dragon. Some choices make sense (Garland as the Final Fantasy Neo Torment, the Ultimate Weapon as the Final Fantasy VII Dreambreaker), but as a whole there's no rhyme or reason to the choices and the bosses aren't always significant or memorable ones from their original games, and in some cases they're actually normal enemies in their original games. Even if final bosses and superbosses were ruled out for whatever design reason, there are much better options all-around than what the developers went with.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A 4th year update overhauled many of the Nightmare bosses — all had the complexity of their unique mechanics simplified in some manner, to the point that some are so trivial as to be ignored, while others had their unique mechanics removed entirely. Considering that Nightmare bosses had already been Power Creeped into irrelevancy, most players are confused why the developers felt the need to outright Nerf the bosses, and mourn the loss of some of the most interesting and well-designed fights in the game, not to mention one of its longest-running features.
• Took a Level in Badass: Gordon, throughout the game's development. Now, he is one of the few to have an AoE stacking debuff and an AoE stacking buff. Originally, he was seen as a Red Mage/support hybrid. However, his highest stat was Magic, he couldn't equip Rods, and other supports were better at attacking than him. With enough buffs and useful Soul Breaks, however, he became very useful very quickly.

U

• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • One of the first new types of Soul Break introduced was Shared Soul Breaks, which were tied to a specific equipment piece and couldn't be mastered; this meant characters only had access to the Soul Break while using the equipment piece, but in exchange anyone who could use that equipment piece could use its associated Soul Break. Up until the addision of Labyrinths and Hero Equipment, equipment served as Stat Sticks anyway one their associated Soul Break was mastered, so Shared Soul Breaks — or at least, Soul Breaks that couldn't be permanently mastered — could have served as a trade-off mechanic, giving a character a unique and useful Soul Break in exchange for a sub-par weapon. Instead, Shared Soul Breaks were phased out of the game by the time Ultras rolled out, save for one festival that gave out a Shared Soul Break that was an Arcane Overstrike, and neither the weapon nor the Soul Break were any good and were just novelties. Equipment with Shared Soul Breaks weren't even made available in the Record Lab for trade.
  • Several weapon classes are limited to only a couple of characters, like Red XIII's hairpins, Barret's Gun-arms, Lulu's dolls, or Setzer's Gamblers. The last one was even quietly set aside later; after his first Relic was a Gambler, Setzer's later Relics were classified as Throwing weapons, leaving his first Gambler Relic as the only one of its kind in the entire game. Similarly, Iris' weapons are classified as Throwing, despite them being dolls like Lulu's. Blitzballs are also this, although at least more than one character can actually equip them (Tidus, Wakka, Rikku and Jecht - who can also all equip Throwing weapons).
  • The Witch ability class was introduced around the same time as, and designed to synergize with, Chain Soul Breaks, as they have low power but deal multiple hits to increase the chain count quickly. Then for months afterward they were forgotten, with only two 4✩ and two 5✩ abilities in two elements each, and when they eventually got new abilities, they were just stronger versions of the four they already had before so Witch specialists could avoid Power Creep. Given that the only other dedicated magic schools are Black Magic and Summon, there's plenty of room for a third magic school to offer strategic variance, but it wasn't capitalized on for Witches. While they eventually got other elements, they were straightforward attacking skills with a casting time reduction bonus, making them just a different flavor of Black Magic.
  • Ability charge-restoring effects, nicknamed "Ether" by the playerbase. In a game where abilities can only be used so many times, you'd think effects to restore ability charges would be very valuable. However, the game's meta-stragegies evolved in such a way that Ether effects aren't very useful — many types of Soul Breaks give characters infinite ability uses, follow-up attacks, linked attacks, and so forth, that they're unlikely to run out of ability charges before the boss dies, and if they do, that's a sign more that your party simply isn't strong enough than a need for more charges. The only characters who would really want or need Ether effects are Summoners, since Summon abilities have fewer charges than others, but most top-tier Summoners do have access to Ether effects in some way, so there you go.
  • Magicites have stats for how long it takes for them to charge in battle, how long they last once summoned, and how many times they can be used. These stats were the same for all Magicites until the 6* rank came out, and any potential to use variance in these stats to affect Magicite balance and strategy were ignored. And then even with the 6* Magicites, they charge instantly at the downside of lasting a shorter amount of time, but their effects so good that they're just flat better than 5* Magicites in most battles, so this trade-off in functionality only affects in how you use the Magicite, not in offering strategic diversity between 5* and 6*.
  • Marcus and Eiko have a unique mechanic where Marcus' Record Spheres award the player "Eiko Motes", which can be used to unlock a unique sphere in Eiko's Record Spheres that give her small stat buffs. This is a reference to a glitch in Final Fantasy IX where if the player power-levelled Marcus before recruiting Eiko, she'd inherit his stat growth. They are the only two characters in Record Keeper to have this relationship, but there are many others characters who could have use such a mechanic themselves and have a logical connection to explain why they would have it (Cecil's Dark Knight and Paladin forms, Cloud and Zack, Squall and Laguna), but it never appeared again.
• Unexpected Character:
  • IV has the Archfiends Rubicante and Barbariccia, who, while Ensemble Darkhorses in IV, are still minor antagonists and got into this game over prominent characters in other titles, and even before several characters from The After Years.
  • V has Bartz's late father Dorgann Klauser and his comrades Xezat and Kelger. Superboss Famed Mimic Gogo also got to be made playable, particularly surprising because he was added before the other Gogo that is much more prominent than him.
  • Minor, X Posthumous Character High Summoner Braska beat Seymour and Paine to the roster.
  • From XII, Vaan's brother Reks, a Decoy Protagonist who only features in the prologue, beat Guest Star Party Members Vossler and Reddas into the game.
  • From XIII, Cid Raines and Jihl Nabaat got in before any other villain from the XIII trilogy. Raines was also only the second Cid (after Highwind from VII) to be added, before several prominent Cids who were playable in their home games (which Raines was not).
  • Did anyone really expect Reynn and Lann to show up before characters from Type-0 or The After Years?
  • Sora and Riku, from Kingdom Hearts, got a special event in February 2018, which was simultaneous with Global.
    • On that note, Tyro got his first Wardrobe Record on that event—an Organization XIII robe.
  • Over in Japan, DeNA took a most-wanted villain survey. There were the usual suspects - Caius Ballad, the Cloud of Darkness, the Emperor... and in second place, FFV Superboss Omega.
  • Soul Break example. The 3rd anniversary Fest naturally introduced two new types of Soul Breaks (Glints and Arcane Overstrike Soul Breaks). Often it's a main hero or villain from a realm to be the first to get a new Soul Break type; this event for instance gave these Soul Breaks to Luneth, Terra, Squall, and Lightning. Who was the VII character to get them first? Not Cloud, not Sephiroth, but Yuffie.
  • As for abilities, the 6* Celerity Abyss ability is Northern Cross, an obscure yet powerful enemy attack that only appeared in VI and VII, and the 6* Combat ability Omega Drive was only in the GBA port of VI.
  • When the second Kingdom Hearts events were announced, top picks for new characters were the likes of Kairi, Roxas, one of the Birth By Sleep trio (likely Aqua), or even Xehanort. The new additions from the event were Roxas and Axel.
  • With the Episode Ardyn DLC fast approaching for the end of Final Fantasy XV's run, many expected that the next FFXV event would bring Ardyn to Record Keeper. The March 2019 Report for JP caught players completely off-guard when it announced that it was Cor Leonis who would make his way into the game instead.
  • The monthly report the Japanese version gets would confirm that Rain, Laswell, and Fina would be playable characters on February 14th 2020, which came as an absolute surprise.

V-W

• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The sprite work is fantastic. Even games up to the PlayStation 3 era, their enemies are recreated in SNES-type graphics as 2D sprites with 16-color palettes. The result is some of the most detailed and defined sprite work of the entire franchise.
  • The Soul Break animations get increasingly over-the-top and flashy with introduction of new types, creating some stunning visuals.
• Win Back the Crowd: Many players complained about how weak almost the entire Final Fantasy II cast were, and with how little FFII content came around, most felt that DeNA didn't care about fans of the game. Then Guy's event brought many excellent Soul Break relics and gave the entire cast balance improvements, rescuing most of them from the Scrappy Heap, particularly with bringing Firion on-par with the other series main characters.
  • DeNA's month-early announcement to inform the players that there would be an Orb Fest and a Dissidia event reeks of this.
    • The Dissidia event doesn't just reek of it, it pretty much IS a Win Back the Crowd maneuver; Literally none of the collaboration events were released before the Dissidia event. It is no coincidence the Dissidia event came out right after customers were voicing their discontent over the game and were clearly losing their patience over DeNA's actions.
  • During the beginning of 2018, a lot of players in Global grew frustrated at DeNA for a number of things^note  The lack of Christmas and New Years gifts, no daily missions, the overall lack of communication. Then on February 10th 2018, it was announced that the game was having a collaboration event with Kingdom Hearts χ. An event schedule to happen on February 22nd 2018 for both Global and JP which meant that Global was getting a current JP model banner early with Riku being the first character to get an AOSB for Global(and possibly Glint too). There's a mini game campaign happening as well which includes 10 mythril, and several motes. It brought back a lot of trust of DeNA but not all of it.
  • April 2018 saw, for the first time, DeNA released their fan newsletter publicly (it's typically just sent to MVP players who spent a lot of money on the game), where they directly addressed numerous fan complaints that had been building up and subsequently put action behind their words. Several overdue Japanese-only events came out in rapid succession, Daily Missions were added to the game permanently, they announced plans to make the Relic Draw mechanics more transparent, and mostly just for the heck of it, they gave all players 50 Mythril over a 10 day login bonus. A lot of fans were happy to see their complaints being addressed and fixed.
• The Woobie: Poor Ricard Highwind. An Ensemble Dark Horse and Memetic Badass in his home game and a major character in the series's history (being the first Dragoon)...and he has an utterly nonsensical ability set, inferior stats, and is the last character to receive a Super Soul Break. To make things worse, he's the last to receive a Soul Break at all in Global.
  • Averted with his Burst Soul Break, which is arguably the best dragoon Burst in the game.