Final Fantasy XIV / YMMV

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Accidental Aesop:
- While the fifth zone of Endwalker expands on the prevailing themes of the expansion, it also shows the importance of seeking peer review for experiments. As Emet-Selch points out, Hermes' desperately cobbled together "experiment" with the Meteia was incredibly poorly thought out right down to the question she was supposed to ask the other stars' inhabitants. In fact, the final dungeon's readable items imply that her asking that question (or even just making her existence known) changed the results on at least one occasion, something real-world sociologists go to great lengths to avoid.
- The housing system has been called an unintentionally-accurate commentary on how broken the real world's real estate market is. At first, getting a house was an exercise in frustration due to how many people would snipe lots the second they went on sale. When the housing lottery was implemented, this instead caused people with multiple accounts and Free Companies to start stuffing the lottery boxes with multiple entries, comparable to AirBnB. And finally, it's not uncommon for people who win the lots to get in passive-aggressive struggles with their new neighbors. This can include constructing architectural monstrosities to mess up screenshots, demanding their neighbours conform to the district style, getting in pissing contests about who has the best house, or just doing nothing with their lot to taunt people who could have won it.
Adorkable:
- Once Vath Deftarm is rescued by the Warrior of Light, he is immediately inspired by their heroic deeds and vows to be an adventurer like them with great excitement and ambition, even though they don't quite fully grasp the concept on what adventures do. He even comes up with the idea to build an Adventurer's Guild at their home camp so that they can trade with other people and assist them with their problems. The Storyteller tells you that Deftarm seems to light up whenever the Warrior of Light is around. Despite being a beastman, seeing him trying to be helpful and heroic like the Warrior of Light is quite endearing.
- Tataru is rather cute, and always does her best. When she tried to become an Arcanist, it backfired and she ultimately resigned, though the guildmaster praises her for being able to summon Carbuncle quicker than most, thanks to being very good with numbers. That being said, she is very good at her job, and cares deeply for her comrades.
- During more relaxed moments, Ryne gets the chance to show off her age better and has several moments of silly and child-like reactions, such as her slow walk in Dohn Mheg or her reactions to the group's more silly moments. It starts to seriously show when she tries to befriend Gaia during the Eden raid series in Shadowbringers, as Ryne shows off being very socially awkward when trying to do something as simple as ask Gaia to try coffee biscuits with her.
- At the end of patch 5.3 of Shadowbringers, the merged G'raha Tia is introduced by him asking if he can join the Scions, fidgeting and stuttering the whole time and capturing the hearts of players right off the bat. He is a good-natured and easily flustered fanboy who is clearly having the time of his life going on adventures and meeting famous people in Eorzea. And then there's the scene where he fumbles his way through convincing a suspicious crystal seller that he's a worthwhile client, then gives a relieved thumbs-up to the other Scions after he barely succeeds.
Alas, Poor Scrappy: Minfilia was disliked for being a Damsel Scrappy throughout A Realm Reborn, necessitating the Warrior of Light to go save her multiple times. This all happened without Minfilia doing much to help with the efforts of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn besides pointing the Warrior in a direction and telling them to take care of the problem. Anglophone players especially disliked Minfilia for what they felt was a spotty performance filled with Dull Surprise. However, Minfilia's brief presence in the post-Heavensward content replaced her voice actress with a new one as part of the London cast change, and her character was received with a bit more sympathy. Then Shadowbringers came around, and Minfilia ends up leaving the story for good, as the Minfilia of the Source that players met in A Realm Reborn (in her capacity as the Oracle of Light) merges with the Minfilia of the First to create Ryne, rendering the original Minfilia Killed Off for Real in a Heroic Sacrifice. It's also revealed that the Source's Minfilia used what power she had to hold back the Flood of Light in order to save what little she could of the First, giving the Warrior a chance to set things right. For her final farewell, Minfilia encourages the Warrior of Light to be the hero that she knows they can be and to save the First, fading into light and wishing them well. After that happened, a lot of players who initially disliked Minfilia admitted that they ended up feeling sorry for her.
Alternative Character Interpretation: Here.
And the Fandom Rejoiced: Owners of the XBOX Series X and S celebrated when Phil Spencer was announced at the 2023 Fan Fest, announcing the much-delayed XBOX releases. The game released in Open Beta in February 2024, releasing outright a month later, with Game Pass Ultimate subscribers being able to download the Starter Edition for free for a month after launch, meaning former subscribers and new players can get their first month of subscription completely free, as well as waiving the cost of subscribing on a new platform entirely. Toned down with XBOX One, which will never get a release.
Annoying Video Game Helper:
- The original tutorial in Legacy was very much a case of this. The tutorial locked out all functions that hadn't been introduced yet, however obvious, important, or innocuous. Further, it interrupted what was an originally smooth narrative, and when it was first introduced, the locked targeting mode function defaulting to 'Friendly' meant that the combat section of the tutorial was impossible to complete if you were using a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard.
- A Realm Reborn is vastly smoother about integrating the tutorial and the plot, although more veteran players tend to bristle under some of the level and quest gating - for example, armor dyeing, a very simple function of glamours, is unavailable until you get to level 15. Airship travel between city-states is also unavailable until level 15, quite a bit after you're likely ready to use it. More crucially, this makes it difficult to meet up with a friend who doesn't start in your city.
- The Armory system, the ability to switch between jobs by switching your main-hand equipment, is also not unlocked until level 10. That being said, the experience buffs provided with subsequent expansion releases, alongside EXP bonus items and what have you have made the leveling process drastically easier. In fact, it shouldn't take a new player longer than a couple hours to reach level 10 even at a somewhat casual pace, even less than that with extra bonuses such as the Friendship Circlet, various earrings for pre-ordering expansions, or the preferred-world bonus that grants an experience bonus up to the level at which the current expansion starts at. It's the actual story that slows down the leveling curve, as the player watches cutscenes or travels to new areas. The gating can also be a bit exasperating later on with optional dungeons and such always needing a quest (which is usually just "talk with an NPC in front of the dungeon", though some also insist on clogging up your journal by requiring you to actually beat the dungeon in question and then report back to the quest-giver). Every levemete location also requires you to complete a "trial" leve before you can choose freely (or even turn in the battle leves you might've picked up in the capital).
- In-universe with Brayflox Alltalks, the goblin landowner of Brayflox's Longstop. In the second boss fight, she shows up being chased by a drake that you need to save her from. The drake itself is only a bit less durable than the boss and has a very damaging fireball, but after you kill it Brayflox decides to "help" you fight the boss by detonating bombs (that hurt you) and taunting the boss, then running behind one of the party members so it will target them with its fire breath. A later patch fixed this so that her bombs no longer harmed the players.
- The warning notification that pops up when you get close to a zone's altitude ceiling while flying. It's overly sensitive, triggering quite a ways away from the altitude ceiling; selective yet redundant, since there's no such warning for hitting the invisible walls to the sides of a zone, nor even any penalty for hitting the altitude ceiling that would necessitate a warning; and, most of all, repetitive, as once you get within the required distance to trigger the warning it never stops popping up every couple of seconds until you descend. It's even worse in the ARR zones once flying was backported to them with 5.3 since, because they weren't built with flying in mind, there are several areas (like the northernmost exit from Central Thanalan or the camp surrounding the aetheryte in Outer La Noscea) where the regular ground you can walk to is extremely close to or even within the altitude warning distance, meaning trying to fly through those parts of the maps at all will trigger the warning constantly. Fortunately, the warning can be disabled in the options.
- If you try and use an ability before your global cooldown is finished, you'll get a warning saying that the cooldown hasn't finished yet. This will happen every time you press the key/button assigned to that action, and the repeated warnings get old very quickly, especially if you get into the right sync of hitting the button within the window to queue using the skill and it ends up popping up the cooldown warning instead because the server lagged for a microscopic fraction of a second. Thankfully, this can also be turned off in the options menu.
Anti-Climax Boss:
- Garuda was originally That One Boss on par with Titan and touted as the strongest of the primals. Since then, nerfs have made her more of a Breather Boss who even an inexperienced party can beat with ease.
- The final battle against Lahabrea at the end of 2.0, as originally designed, was pitiful. The fight was so easy that he was considered little more than a Post-Final Boss. So long as your healers were half-awake during the battle, not only is he easier than the last two fights against the Ultima Weapon, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that he's easier than the battle with Gaius on the elevator. With a party of people synced down doing their MSQ roulette, it was not uncommon for Lahabrea to hit 1% health before he can cast his Shadow Flare fifteen seconds into the fight, only not dying because he has to cast it before that last percent can drain (and particularly quick groups may even overwrite this and kill him mid-cast). As of Patch 6.1 (Newfound Adventure), the fight has been completely reworked; Lahabrea now operates as a Duel Boss between him and only one player, in a way that actually makes Lahabrea feel as dangerous as he was made out to be.
- Considering how hyped up he was, the Hard Mode version of the Leviathan fight is depressingly simple and easy, and even a poorly geared group of first timers can stumble through it with maybe a single wipe to Tidal Wave before they figure out how to avoid it. Extreme Mode, however, is another case entirely.
- Despite having interesting mechanics and some of the best visuals of any Final Fantasy final boss to date, the Heavensward final boss, the Knights of the Round primal, led by Thordan and his Knights Twelve using a millennia of prayer and both of Nidhogg's eyes, is this. The boss doesn't do nearly enough damage to pose a threat to even an at-gear-level player, and wiping on this fight requires completely ignoring mechanics that the earlier dungeons have been grooming you to counter. The devs seem to have acknowledged this and thus to the joy of many players, an EX version of the fight was released in 3.1 that is considerably harder.
- Invoked with the fight against Nidhogg in 3.0. Due to only having one eye and Estinien using the other eye to weaken him, Nidhogg goes down quite fast. Most players would naturally feel disappointed that a mighty wyrm offered no challenge, but this quickly changes after Estinien claims both of Nidhogg's eyes, allowing the dragon's rancor to consume him as a new host. By 3.3, Nidhogg is at full strength and the fight against him shows just how powerful and dangerous he has become, with a normal mode that's easily on par with some of the hardest story-required fights and an Extreme mode that is absolutely hectic.
- In 3.4 Sophia the Goddess is considered much easier than Sephirot the Fiend, with having fewer dangerous mechanics than the latter.
- Proto-Ultima, a previous fanfest exclusive boss encounter, replaced a mini-boss in Dun Scaith in lieu of being a separate instance itself. Naturally, this meant his difficulty was made substantially easier than fans anticipated.
- Stormblood as a whole has been accused of scaling down the difficulty too much. Notably examples are Susano, Lakshmi, Byakko and Alte Roite — the latter of whom is the new expansion's introduction to Savage raid difficulty. It was not uncommon to hear even casual players clearing Alte Roite within one try, some doing so in under thirty minutes.
- The final boss of the Myths of the Realm raid series, Eulogia, is a case of 'good in theory, dissapointing in execution', being all of the Twelve fused into one, they logically have access to all mechanics of all the raid bosses - however, this arises three glaring problems: lacking original mechanics of its own, with only one particular mechanic being original to Eulogia, the individual mechanics never getting as complex or interesting as the ones done by the individual Twelve, and never taking advantage of having so many mechanics by combining them together in interesting ways, preferring instead to do them one after another. All of this makes what is supposed to be one of the most powerful entities in the setting by sheer potential alone a surprisingly easy and forgettable final boss for what is considered one of the best raid series in the game.
Arc Fatigue:
- The Titan arc in "A Realm Reborn" is not very well liked, partly due to how long it takes to actually get to Titan because you have to throw a party for a bunch of thankless jerks by yourself. It takes about 10-20 hours of questing, including acquiring cheese by clearing one of the more annoying dungeons of ARR and getting wine through an overly long stretch of constantly moving back and forth between Wineport and a secluded hut that's just far enough away to make each trip annoying but not enough to make it worth the gil to just teleport back to Wineport. And after all of that, you only even get to witness twenty seconds of the party you single-handedly put together before they finally tell you where to go, and the best advice they can come up with amounts to "Try Not to Die".
- Equally, the Garuda arc that follows it is equally rough and not as liked due to the various frustrating moments that happen in it. The first half has you in Corithas trying to get the Ishgardians to help you find where the Enterprise crashed at and having to deal with their Holy War with the Dravanians superseding everything else and getting mixed up with the fake Inquisitor ruining your chances, which climaxes with an absurdly difficult boss fight. The second half has you on the Fetch Quest from the seven hells just to find a crystal needed to get to Garuda without the winds the primal made destroying the Enterprise, which ends up with you acquiring three different crystals for no other reason than your character refuses to specify what kind they need, only to find out the crystal you actually need was a stone's throw away from where you started at.
- A common complaint from newer players is the massive number of Main Scenario Quests required to unlock access to Heavensward. This is not helped by how many of those quests involve lots of "go here, talk to this person", lots of "go here, slay specific number of this monster", and/or long, exposition-heavy cutscenes. Yoshida admitted that putting Heavensward behind a gate that requires completing all 2.x MSQ content was a mistake, and was looking into making 4.0 not require similar conditions to unlock, but other than trimming some of the ARR quests with patch 5.3, no update to this was ever done, and reaching any given expansion requires you to complete all MSQs released before it. We are talking about over 100 hours of playtime, and that's if you skip all the cutscenes and all the dialogue.
- If we put the number of quests under a scope, 2.0 has 188 quests from the beginning to the Final Boss, with 100 more between ARR and Heavensward. This brings it up to a staggering 288 quests - twice as many quests as any other content cycle, which clock at around a hundred quests for an expansion's initial release and another forty on average for quests added in patches, making the 2.x quests a slog in hindsight. At the very least, Yoshida did discuss trimming back the number of quests for this when New Game Plus got implemented, as it is one of the biggest offenders of padding; they eventually did so with patch 5.3, trimming about fifty quests from the 2.x content and reducing the number of steps for quite a few more. However, only the 2.0 content noticeably benefited from the trimming, since it did nothing about several supposedly-optional sidequests to refight the primals in the postgame that you have to complete before the game will let you start 2.5's story quests. In fact, it even added another similar requirement to complete most of the quests associated with the Crystal Tower questline before you can finish the 2.55 story and actually get into Heavensward, because of the Tower's significance to Shadowbringers, which ultimately undid more than half of the 2.1 to 2.55 trimming.
- The Ala Mhigo arc, and especially its subplot of Lyse becoming the leader of the Resistance, suffers considerably in Stormblood. This is due to the decision to split the resolution on both it and Doma into the same expansion. The problem is that the events of Doma last from level 61 to 68, encompassing almost the entirety of the story for the expansion's initial release — once you return to Ala Mhigo, it's almost treated as an afterthought, and everything you do there the second time around is rushed as a result. It doesn't help that Lyse's importance during the Doma section is overshadowed by both Hien and Gosetsu, meaning Lyse's character arc never goes anywhere until the story returns to Ala Mhigo, where she very suddenly advances past the part of her character development where she never stops whining about feeling useless to the part where she's suddenly leading the Resistance for ill-defined reasons.
- For those who found Yotsuyu Unintentionally Unsympathetic, this extends to the Legend Returns arc, too. Ala Mhigo gets the short end of the stick again and finishes all its loose ends within one patch, also ending all of Fordola's character motivation. The Doma arc then comes with the next two patches, which focus almost entirely on Doma and Yotsuyu with little actually happening until the very end of the arc where Yotsuyu very suddenly regains her memories, goes off the deep end, and summons a primal. This is alleviated a bit by the fact that Fordola does actually return to play a minor role at the very end of Shadowbringers and the healer questline, but seeing as this took years, it felt as if the story was ruminating on Yotsuyu too much just like the main Stormblood story.
- A criticism of Endwalker is that any time the story focuses around the Loporrits, the story grinds to a halt and the overall pacing slows down to the point of boredom. This is largely because the Loporrits are more comical in tone, so the story uses them as a way to ease off the tension of previous dramatic moments. But because the two major times you focus on them come after several huge Wham Episodes, the pacing suffers. In particular, the second half of the Labyrinthos visit is disliked for all the padding the Loporrits cause due to being focused almost entirely on them with little of importance happening for a while, on top of being forced to do filler-like quests before the story picks back up again.
Archive Panic: True to any game that has had multiple expansion packs, this is bound to happen. What's especially notable about XIV compared to other games is that other games often remove the requirement to do endgame storylines and content once the next expansion releases. This game however does not, meaning players must go through all the storyline patches, only able to skip raids not named "Crystal Tower" and about half of any given expansion's post-patch trials and dungeons. With Endwalker finishing the first Myth Arc, there have been whisperings of the next expansion possibly adding an option to skip it and start right at the beginning of the second one, but this is as of yet unconfirmed.
Audience Awareness Advantage: The infamous scene of Alphinaud and the Warrior of Light throwing Nidhogg's eyes off the Steps of Faith had many players crying foul because the two characters should have known that the Ascians would retrieve them to further their plans. At the time, said characters haven't been heavily active in the story and no one knew what they would need the items for. Aymeric, who told the Warrior of Light and Alphinaud to throw the items off the bridge, did so in a panic because all of them had already seen what they could do, such as possessing your body and soul like they did with Estinien. Because the bottom of the bridge is violent with wind and ice aether, Aymeric, who notably is not familiar with the Ascians, thought no one would survive if they tried to go down there. The developers did acknowledge the frustrations people expressed over the scene by having Aymeric in later scenes admit that it was a bit dumb to have thrown the items off the bridge.
Award Snub: Shadowbringers was nominated for three awards at the 2019 Video Game Awards (Best Ongoing Game, Best Community Support, and Best RPG). Despite being one of the most critically acclaimed games of the year - a Twitch poll unrelated to the actual awards saw fans voting it as Best Ongoing Game - it officially won none of the categories it was nominated in, with many in the community citing that it deserved to be put into more categories (in particular René Zagger as Emet-Selch for Best Performance and Best Narrative being the chief ones).
Awesome Bosses:
- The final boss of Heavensward's main story quest, the long awaited reappearance of the Knights of the Round summon from Final Fantasy VII. The story mode version is a visual spectacle, praised as one of the most beautiful battles in the series. Its Extreme mode is praised for being one of the most challenging battles in the game as of 3.20, and still remained threatening (only becoming a bit more lenient) as the patch cycles continued and better gear came out.
- Brute Justice in the 8th floor of Alexander. It's praised for being a fun challenge, intentionally campy in concept (in the best way possible), and just an all around awesome battle and a massive improvement from the bosses from the Gordias segment of the Alexander raids. Oh and did you notice its theme song a few tropes below this? The fight actually syncs up with the music for most of his flashier (and hardest hitting) attacks. And the Brute Justice (Savage) fight ramps all of these things up to 11 with a final form transformation.
- The duel against Flame General Raubahn in the patch story quests for Heavensward. The fact that he sets the stage by incapacitating all your allies single handedly (in every literal sense of the word) before surrounding an arena with fire and engaging you one-on-one makes it all the more awesome.
- The Final Steps of Faith, aka Nidhogg, in the final climax of the Dragonsong War. The fight feels just as epic if not more so than Thordan, and the threat of wiping ramps up as the phases pass. Add in the Heavensward theme "Dragonsong" playing in the background and remixing into more and more epic versions each phase, and you have an amazingly adrenaline-pumping fight.
- The final boss of Stormblood's Main Story quest, Zenos merging with Shinryu to face teh Warrior of Light in the most climactic showdown that Zenos can think of. The fight is easily one of the greatest spectacles in the Final Fantasy franchise, and heavily mechanically intense, service as not just as a Final-Exam Boss for Stormblood, but the entire game as he re-uses mechanics from every single primal, even borrowing their ultimate attacks. And while Heavensward's final boss was a joke on story difficulty, Shinryu is exactly as mechanically intense as his legacy implies, and if you screw up, you will be murdered on the spot (many new parties being wiped within the first 10 second of the fight by Tidal Wave). Combined with incredible visuals and stunning music in both phases, he's easily the most well-received boss in the entire game (which makes it all the more impressive considering how underwhelming Stormblood as a whole is).
- The final boss of 4.3, Tsukuyomi, is widely regarded as one of the best Trials in the entire game. Not only is the sheer spectacle of the fight breathtaking, but the fight contains a stunningly beautiful and emotional intermission phase that left many players fighting back tears as they struggled to clear the adds.
- Kugane Ohashi, the trial from the tail end of the Stormblood Hildibrand questline: At first, it appears to be a simple battle with Yojimbo, a boss many will have already fought in the Kugane Castle dungeon. Then "Battle on the Big Bridge" kicks in, and Yojimbo reveals himself to be none other than Gilgamesh! From there, the battle ramps up in both difficulty and spectacle as Greg draws inspiration from Ravana and Susano'o for his strongest attacks yet!
- Following up on the list comes the final boss of Shadowbringers Emet-Selch, or as his true name is revealed, Hades. While not quite as difficult as Stormblood's (though nowhere near as easy as Heavensward's), the ante on visuals and music skyrockets. But what stands out perhaps the most is the mood and emotional torque of the fight as we see an Unbroken Ascian truly unleash his power, the two of you are fighting to effectively determine who will inherit the world; the Ascians restoring their old world at the cost of billions of lives, or the Warrior of Light fighting to maintain the shattered worlds to protect all the lives on them. Combined with fighting against who has firmly been established as a Tragic Monster. And at the final stretch of the battle, when all seems lost, Hydaelyn's light cuts through the darkness, allowing you to finish him off. And to add to everything else, an abridged version of Shadowbringers, the expansion's main theme, plays all throughout phase 1 and the preceding cutscene.
- As if to one up itself, the climax of 5.3 brings The Seat of Sacrifice with Elidibus as the Warrior of Light. The arena sets the stage on the stakes at hand, fighting for the fate of The First once more with an even more relentless fight than the final boss in 5.0. He's able to utilize powered-up versions of the player's moves, summon spectral warriors of light from other worlds against you, use Limit Breaks, and, to plenty players' shock, can No-Sell the players' own Limit Break with Hallowed Ground! Backed with the Triumphant Reprise that is "To the Edge", the fight is a perfect sendoff to Shadowbringers.
- All three Trials from Endwalker are all equally fantastic for different reasons, but the first one stands out amongst the rest: Zodiark has been hyped up for years of in-game story, and even incomplete and controlled by Fandaniel he delivers with an absolute spectacle of a fight and a setup to match. You know you're doing something right when the first Trial has the same feel as a final boss of previous expansions!
- Also from Endwalker; we have Anima, fought as the final boss at the end of the level 83 dungeon. In terms of sheer spectacle and mechanical complexity, Anima feels as though they could have been an end-of-patch Trial boss as opposed to a leveling dungeon boss.
- Myths of the Realm was met with some interest, but not quite roaring reception due to being entirely original content. When players got into Aglaia, however, the Twelve delivered a genuinely fun challenge and was a fast hit with the players. Nald'thal in particular gets the spotlight for not only having a cool design, but attacks that change depending on the twin currently in control.
- Barbariccia, the last boss of the Endwalker 6.2 content. The mechanics in the first half of the fight are decent enough, but the second half where the boss goes One-Winged Angel is the most memorable part. The boss starts attacking relentlessly, without showing a Cast Bar or attack names, one after the other, sometimes multiple at once! Not only is it a non-stop test of your knowledge of game mechanics, but the intensity and unrelenting pressure is a ton of fun to work through. The music being a remix of "Battle With the Four Fiends" from Final Fantasy IV also helps.
- The last trial of Endwalker in 6.5, which bridges the gap from that expansion to Dawntrail: the Insatiable Vessel, the dread voidsent Zeromus, the Final Boss from IV. While most of the mechanics are ones that have been seen in other fights, they're all ratcheted up to a high degree, requiring high-level teamwork and knowledge of your job in order to clear. A One-Hit Kill move and multiple debuffs stacking on each other in the middle of the fight means that you're constantly kept on your toes, without feeling like the boss is using anything cheap. Finally, the boss Turns Red when their health gets low enough, changing from a remix of "The Final Battle" from Final Fantasy IV into "The Red Wings Theme", which gives the end of the fight a Godzilla Threshold feel combined with a "Hell, Yes!" Moment.
Awesome Music: Whatever else the game may be, it's a Final Fantasy title. And it's got some pretty nice tunes, yo. And to top it off, Final Fantasy XIV formerly held the Guinness World Record for most original pieces of music in a video game.
Awesome: Video Game Levels:
- The Praetorium is generally seen as a very awesome dungeon, with good visuals, excellent music, and pretty cool bosses. And from a narrative standpoint, after being pushed back by the empire for quite some time, you're able to storm the enemy lines to fight back. How much players want to go back and redo the dungeon, however, is a mixed bag considering it's throttled by unskippable cutscenes in some places. As it is since 6.1, most players can tolerate the scenes; it used to be far worse with the required watching, and power creep trivializing some of the boss fights.
- The Ghimlyt Dark is less of a dungeon and more of an all-out warzone, backed by a triumphant mash-up of Stormblood's main theme and Garlemald's theme as you march on through the trenches. Stormblood may have had a rocky story, but this is a wonderful way to send-off the expansion.
- As a send-off to your story in the First, The Heroes' Gauntlet is aptly named for fighting your way back to The Crystarium on foot. Not only that, the people you helped along away pitch in to ensure you get there, whether it's siccing some Talos, or utilizing fae magic to cut through to Lakeland.
- Ktisis Hyperborea is beloved for not only having a beautiful landscape and music, but it's the only dungeon where you can form a Trust Party with Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus, and Venat. More often that not, players gave Trusts a shot here because the characters endeared them so strongly.

Base-Breaking Character:
- Minfilia. People either hate her for being captured multiple times, being too passive, and simply not doing anything to help the Scions or the player character directly or people like her for being a supportive character that uses diplomatic approaches instead of charging in head first. She certainly wouldn't get as much flak if she wasn't so passive in cutscenes. It reached the point where her "death" in Patch 3.2 was met with a sizable chunk of the fanbase rejoicing no matter how hard the game tried to play it as a tragedy. At the same time, some feel that she was still a likable character in spite of the narrative flaws, and that her final send off in Shadowbringers was a tearful but good send off.
- Hildibrand. Either he is immersion breaking with his over the top comedy styled quests or he's a breath of fresh air that lightens the mood in a game where everything is dark and serious. Unlike Minfilia, interacting with Hildibrand is almost entirely optional, which mitigates the effect significantly. Within the start of the Saint Endalim's Scholasticate questline, due to Briardien's appearance, many were worried that what could be an interesting side story (and provide some world building in Ishgard) would be wasted as being another Hilibrand questline. This was thankfully averted as a new Hildibrand questline was started separate from the Scholasticate, providing Briardien some much-needed room to grow and prove his competence on his own and a surprisingly ornate mystery.
- Alphinaud had a heavy divide for most of the A Realm Reborn scenario where people hated his jerkass attitude and sticking his nose in everyone's business while others found him endearing and someone different compared to the stuffy political figures. Heavensward kicks Character Development into high gear by making Alphinaud more proactive, more friendly, and humbled by his previous failures. Most people who hated him warmed up after the development while others still hate him and wish that he was killed off instead of dealing with him.
- With her greater story prominence in Stormblood, there's Yda. Or rather, there's Lyse, since Lyse was impersonating Yda the whole time until just before the events of the expansion start. The fandom seems divided about whether her growth over the course of the 4.0 story is believable, given her prior ditzy personality and her fairly meteoric rise from comic relief character to a key leader in the Ala Mhigan Resistance.
- Zenos has many dividing views on his character, which caused some debate among the fanbase after his major appearances in Stormblood and Endwalker as to how effective he was as a villain and how his motives tied in with the story and themes of each expansion. For specifics:
  - After his introduction in Stormblood, some people loved him for being a dreaded, nearly-unstoppable badass that goes full Large Ham in one of the best boss fights, for being different than previous villains by being unrepentant in his evil, and for being the first truly personal nemesis to the Warrior of Light and showing they have much more room to grow by handing the Warrior their first convincing defeat in a Hopeless Boss Fight. Just as many people dislike Zenos for coming off as a Generic Doomsday Villain that lacks the sympathetic and more complex motives of previous villains, or how the motivation he does have — boredom with being so powerful that he wants a fight to push him to his limits at the expense of everything else — is a little hard to swallow given the political machinations of the story thus far. This only escalated during the The Stinger in Shadowbringers, which reveals that he killed his father Varis, which robbed the player character of having a showdown with the Emperor of Garlemald, just because Zenos felt the Empire using Black Rose was cheating and he wanted to fight the Warrior of Light on equal footing without the possibility of a distraction. Some hated this and felt as though it runs into Hijacked by Ganon territory, while some felt it adds a recurring and personal antagonist to the narrative, which these players felt was lacking in the story overall. Additionally, some fans who disliked Zenos in Stormblood admit he's more interesting as a wild card in Shadowbringers.
  - His role in Endwalker didn't do much to heal the split. Zenos performs abominable acts to provoke the Warrior of Light into fighting him, including attempting genocide on Garlemald, teaming up with a nihilist who just wants to destroy the world, and personally violating the Warrior of Light by swapping bodies with them and attempting to kill the Scions. Eventually, Alisaie's "The Reason You Suck" Speech seems to have some impact on him, and Zenos decides to help the Warrior save the universe just to get all distractions out of the way, and Zenos ends up being the Post-Final Boss as the Warrior of Light finally gives him the duel he's been wanting. Many players found this satisfying, either because they enjoyed his pseudo-redemption and already liked him as a character, because they finally got to kill Zenos and/or shut him up, or because they thought that Zenos kind of had a point about why they keep pushing themselves to be better. Those who enjoy Zenos as a villain appreciated his growth as a character, options to establish a Friendly Enemy dynamic with him, and found this send-off a great way to end his story. However, the other half of the fanbase were displeased at being forced to fight Zenos, which was seen as giving him exactly what he wanted despite all of the horrific, unrepentant acts he committed during the expansion. While the Warrior of Light can insist that they won't fight Zenos, and Zenos says they can leave without battling him, it's still required to complete the story - those who disliked having to fight him felt like having the option to properly refuse him would've been a more satisfying and fitting rebuttal to his increased obsession with the Warrior of Light.
- Lord Lolorito gets quite a bit of division among fans for his actions between patch 2.5 and 3.0 where he saw Teledji's plot to assassinate Nanamo and foiled it by swapping out the poison with a sleeping potion. He also effectively restores Nanamo's and Raubahn's positions in the Syndicate and basically makes the whole fallout seem like it never happened in the first place. There's also his involvement in the Stormblood main story where he basically helps Ala Mhigo get back on their feet financially after he barters with Nanamo on a deal that would satisfy them both. Some fans find Lolorito as a very clever businessman that knows how to get what he wants through others while still being a helpful ally to the heroes while other fans feel he's just another greedy lalafell that shouldn't be trusted. In-game, many characters also don't trust him.
- In some parts of the community, Gaius is definitely one, specifically after he's revealed to be Shadowhunter and still alive. Is he The Atoner who has since done a full Heel–Face Turn, and became a more interesting character, or is he a Karma Houdini who only regrets his attempted conquering of Eorzea because the Ascians betrayed him? Opinions are VERY split.
- Fandaniel during the later patches of Shadowbringers has also divided people for similar reasons as Zenos above. Does him being an Omnicidal Maniac who wants to kill himself and all other life on the Source make him an interesting foil to his Ascian contemporaries or does it make him a Generic Doomsday Villain, especially at this late point of the story?
- Zero in the post-Endwalker MSQ turned out to be a very divisive character. Some players think her Aloof Ally personality makes her compelling, find her occasional Fish out of Water moments to be genuinely funny, and argue that she's got a compelling arc throughout the post-Endwalker MSQ of a voidsent learning to trust in other people. Some other players find Zero stealing the spotlight from other characters, argue that she's way too "edgy" for a character who's supposed to be cool, and find the aforesaid Fish out of Water gags get old quickly.
Best Level Ever:
- Dungeons:
  - The final dungeon of each expansion have a track record of being the most memorable. The Praetorium, the Aetherochemical Research Facility, Ala Mhigo, Amaurot, and The Dead Ends are the climaxes of each respective expansion, and do an incredible job of ending each respective story arc. All of them save the Praetorium are followed up by the Final Boss of the main story, and the fights are loved as well for the setup.
  - Holminster Switch, the first dungeon of Shadowbringers, is considered one of the best dungeons in the game's history. Not only is it tone wise so much more different from other first expansion dungeons, two of the three bosses have fun mechanics, and the story leading to it sets up the stakes very well. The theme for it, combined with the first experience of the new Shadowbringers boss theme, makes it stand out heavily.
  - The final dungeon of Shadowbringers is incredibly well-loved for its storytelling. Amaurot is the place where the ancient Ascians once lived in, as well as it being a peaceful realm where the Ancients are nothing but kind to you and each other, with a tinge of sadness due to all of it being a Living Memory that will be massacred in the coming Sundering, and is completely different from everything else in Shadowbringers.
- The 30-50 Dark Knight job quest line is a tightly written and powerfully told story that perfectly sets up the mood that the Dark Knight job embodies, and features fan-favorite Fray Myste as your mentor. The story also acts as an interesting look into the role that MMO protagonists take as All Loving Heroes, ruthlessly deconstructing the idea of being the only hope in a world as massive as Eorzea, as well as pointing out the hypocrisy and Ungrateful Bastard nature of the average MMO citizen. And then, in a breathtaking twist, it turns out the entire job quest is a case of Through the Eyes of Madness, and that Fray is actually a direct manifestation of the player character's own frustrations and trauma, climaxing in some serious Mind Screw that goes so far as to bleed into the quest journals. This quest line was so well written that the story writer for it, Natsuko Ishikawa, was promoted to head story writer for Shadowbringers in response to the praise that the job quest has garnered as well as her other projects. The rest of the quest line is pretty awesome too, with the 60-70 line being another standout.
- The Eden raids are commonly seen as the best Raids since the Coils of Bahamut, with the game taking the concept (reliving primal battles but with heavily remixed mechanics, designs and overall fight structure) and going positively insane with it. The fact they tie into the main story very well also helps.
- The "Sorrow of Werlyt" storyline in Shadowbringers is considered a very well-written and very fun questline by a majority of the playerbase. When it starts with the Warrior of Light getting to pilot a Humongous Mecha, you know you're in for something special. The bosses all consist of the Weapons from Final Fantasy VII as used by Ace Pilots, each of whom is portrayed as a Tragic Villain, along with a Big Bad that is so despicable and vile that players want to see them fail. The overall narrative about the horrors of war and Child Soldiers, the Catharsis Factor and Bittersweet Ending that each of the characters get, as well as some legitimately challenging and fun boss fights make it a highlight.
- In the Endwalker Alliance Raid storyline "Myths of The Realm", the first Raid, Aglaia, is widely considered one of the best in the game from both a storyline and gameplay standpoint, story-wise being the first glimpse we get at the power of the Twelve, the closest beings to True gods in the setting which made a lot of lore-readers very happy, and gameplay-wise having an amazing setpiece, surprisingly difficult bosses that can rather be rather unforgiving with their instant-kill mechanics if you don't figure them out quickly enough, and a great final boss theme in In The Balance.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- The first dungeon in Stormblood, the Sirensong Sea, comes out of nowhere in the middle of your first trip from Eorzea to Othard. Despite the name, there's not even any sirens in it, instead being a heavily haunted ship graveyard controlled by some bizarre wraith whose existence until now was never mentioned, nor even any ghost stories you hear about. There is no Garlean plot or Ascian involvement in the dungeon's existence, and it's basically shrugged off by everyone involved, with the achievement for getting it, "Incidentally Speaking", even cementing it as something that appears from nowhere and leads nowhere. It only seems to exist to provide a dungeon to break up the pace, but it stands out as one of the just weirdest and unncessary story dungeons in the games history.
- Stormblood also gives us Susano, Lord of the Revel, in his glorious entirety. No one expects that reuniting the three legendary treasures will summon the primal, including the beastmen who supposedly worship him. When he proceeds to "reward" you for his summoning by challenging you to a duel to the death, Alisaie's reaction is thorough exasperation.
Breather Boss:
- The original version of Cape Westwind is remembered for being hilariously easy even by the already-low standards of story trials. You're fighting an ordinary Garlean, and his two mechanics are pathetically easy. It was a player in-joke to pretend the fight is super-hard when queueing into it via Duty Roulette, especially if there was a first-time bonus in the party. To add insult to injury, it was an 8-man trial. And it only got sillier over time as well. Cape Westwind was accessible at level 49 but capped your level at 50. The problem is that it didn't also cap your item level. Therefore, a battle that was, at first, meant to be tackled at item level 55 at most could eventually be done — without unsyncing, mind, — at 130. For these reasons and more, it was revamped in 6.1 into a solo instance which now gives Rhitatyn a proper Last Stand and Dying Moment of Awesome against you. It also serves as a Call-Forward, since it introduces the concept of dynamis to the story way before the effect would be named in Endwalker, as Rhitatyn uses the power of dynamis to remain standing as he tries with all his might to take you with him.
- Pharos Sirius's Tyrant has few hit points for a boss even at the appropriate gear level, and does nothing more dangerous than spawn minions and use an easily dodged Area of Effect spell. While all bosses get easier as better gear is released, Tyrant stands out for the fact that even with the slightly restricted gear levels, it can be killed in as few as 10 seconds — or worse, One Hit Killed if you have a Limit Break charged. Considering his fellow bosses are still somewhat challenging even with the aforementioned power creep, though, it's not entirely unappreciated.
Broken Aesop: Considering how large the game is and how many different plots have been added between the main quest, sidequests, and quests for individual classes and jobs, this was bound to happen.
- One sidequest you can take from a member of the Conjurer's Guild involves you gathering ingredients for a ritual the guild will be soon performing, which involves killing various animals out in the forest and gathering parts from them. When you return with the ingredients, she compliments you for only taking exactly as much as you needed, and that recklessly killing random beasts will spell doom. From a purely monetary standpoint this holds up in regular gameplay, since it's rare for you to get gil from random ladybugs or living mushrooms, much less enough to offset the amount needed to repair your gear, and even defending yourself isn't strictly necessary, since not every mob in the wild is actively hostile (and even ones that are stop attacking you on-sight if you're ten or more levels above them). But on the other hand, several enemies do drop various crafting ingredients, which tend to drop at a much lower rate than whatever a sidequest is forcing them to drop (e.g. you'll only get boar skins off of one in every six or seven wild boars), and there are hunting logs for every starting class, which grant you much-needed experience bonuses by killing various animals just for the sake of killing them.^note
- On the other hand, the same moral is brought up for the Botanist and Leatherworker class quests, primarily the latter, where it's mentioned that a specific animal was almost wiped out after people overhunted them for their leather. Thing is, these two classes are, respectively, a gatherer and a crafter, which are all you can do as those classes, and whatever animal you need to hunt or tree/bush you need to hit to get crafting ingredients invariably comes back after a set period or certain actions (enemies respawn on set timers, gathering nodes whenever you hit enough in an area or leave and come back to the zone in question), so there's nothing stopping you from spending hours on end gathering crafting materials until your inventory is crowded out, then actually using them to craft things and make a very hefty profit.
- The Samurai 60-70 questline in Stormblood revolves around stopping a bloody rebellion because, regardless of whatever corruption may be present in the government, the rebels' methods would cause a much larger and even bloodier civil war that would hurt a lot of innocent people, and it's much better to work with the system to change it from within. A noble goal that would have fit with a then-ongoing trend of popular stories about rebellions against dystopias, but it's undermined entirely by the main story being all about inciting bloody civil wars against corrupt regimes, that the oppressed people of Ala Mhigo and Doma don't have any choice but to go to war against the Garlean Empire, and how they should be willing to do so at any cost. Making it worse is that when the Big Bad of the Samurai questline gives his reasoning for trying to start a civil war... everyone agrees. In turn, most of the people who say that the war would be bad are those who happen to have been born within privileged positions of Hingashi society, meaning they have all the reason in the world to not want to change the status quo because they're exactly the kind of people that are propping up what the rebellion wants to cut down.
- Yotsuyu's post-Stormblood arc is supposed to be a tragedy showing that not everyone can be redeemed, and even those who have the chance at it will choose otherwise. It falls flat primarily because prior to the Stormblood postgame, she had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and while we're supposed to feel sorry for her being treated by the citizenry as if she's an irredeemable monster who should be put to the sword even as an amnesiac with the mind of a child, her actions as soon as she regains her memories prove them right, as she immediately goes completely off the deep end and channels a primal, thus sabotaging peace talks with the Garleans.

Casual-Competitive Conflict: Due to the game catering to both casual players and hardcore players, this is a given. The developers have stated that they try to cater to both casual and competitive players in order to keep everyone happy. Of course, the very existence of this trope is about how hard it is to do that. While the community at large leans towards "there's room for everybody in XIV", that doesn't stop a few Scrubs or "Stop Having Fun" Guys from keeping the debate going.
- Conflict of playstyles is the most common occurrence, and both sides of the fence feel the game is leaning too far to one side — either it's too casual and is becoming too easy to clear all but the latest content, or all the hardcore content is locking out casual players. This tends to show up every time a patch comes out that changes the potency of attacks.
- Extreme, Savage, Unreal, and Ultimate content tends to get this the worst. Their existence provides a gradually expanding gameplay experience, albeit as one that is completely optional. The hardcore players see it as a way to add more depth and rewards to gameplay once the basics have been mastered, and argue that clearing these challenges should be the focus of every player to prove their skill. On the other side, the casual players see the existence of such Optional Bosses and Superbosses (and the focus on them by these hardcore raiding groups) as something that causes a massive gap between beginners and experts. Such content requires hours upon hours of practice to clear, which is a time investment that some people are just not willing or able to make.
- Because the Main Scenario can be done largely solo (Especially with the addition of the Duty Support/Trust system), there's somewhat of a conflict happening between the more long-term players who play every day and the casuals who only come in every time there's a content drop. While these groups rarely interact, content drop(s) often tend to force them to do so.
Catharsis Factor:
- The end of 2.5 is a Wham Episode of the first order, but it does feature some genuine catharsis in-between the Player Punches. Watching Raubahn literally slice Teledji Adeleji in half for all of his scheming and backstabbing — including at an attempt on the sultana's life — is karmic justice for all of the trouble that Teledji has caused the Scions.
- After watching Valens get away with a lot of vile things in the Sorrow of Werlyt storyline, seeing him get one-uped by Gaius then crushed to death by his own machinations makes for a satisfyingly karmic punishment.
- The Melee DPS role quests in Endwalker require you to recruit the Company of Heroes once again to slay a powerful monster, just like when you consulted them to help fight Titan... and the Warrior of Light gets the option to tell them that they will not be throwing them a banquet in order to get their help like the last time. For those who disliked the Titan Arc due to its long series of fetch quests, it was very tempting to not automatically press that dialogue option.
- For those who disliked the "Waking Sands" due to being a few minute walk away from the nearest warp point and the constant going back and forth between it and other zones, the quest when it gets invaded and the scions captured was this instead of the intended reaction.
Common Knowledge:
- Thanks to an awkwardly phrased line, it is widely believed that a side character's fate is worse off than it truly is. The spell Y'shtola uses to see through aether is thought among the playerbase to be slowly killing her. The problem comes from when Matoya spoke to Y'shtola about the spell and said it was burning up her "life force" with fans reasonably assuming one's life force is the same as their life span. In actuality, life force is infrequently but consistently used to refer to one's aether reserves. Indeed, in a later arc Y'shtola has to offer up some life force to a voidsent and explicitly states she'll be fine once she's had a chance to rest and recover her energy. Characters do express concerns that Y'shtola is driving herself to an early grave, but that's in the sense that she might develop health problems from overworking herself, where her seeing spell is certainly not helping but also far from the only factor. An easily missed sidequest has her sister Y'mhitra remark that there likely won't be any problems if the Warrior of Light is around to make sure Y'shtola takes it easy every now and again.
- Omega notably confuses a lot of players by firing "Larboard side cannons" and "Starboard side cannons" instead of simply calling out its "Left" and "Right". Plenty of people say that this is a non-issue in Japanese becuase Omega just says "Left" and "Right". While the words used in Japanese do specify left and right, it only does so if it's translated in a very literal way. The word that's used specifically calls out the side of a ship - so yes "Larboard" and "Starboard" are valid translations. What also doesn't help this misconception is that the modern nautical term for the left side of a ship is "Port" - and has been for centuries specifically because people would get confused due to how similar they sound.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- The original 1.0 release was particularly notorious for this in regards to end game content. Warriors were flat out better than Paladins, thanks to the fact that a Warrior's attacks were boosted by both the Strength and Vitality stats. Furthermore, the Warrior's Steel Cyclone ability was not only powerful, but also allowed the Warrior to AoE tank. Bards and Black Mages could safely stand back and use ranged attacks for massive amounts of damage, with Bards also doubling as back up healers since the Conjurer job was one of its original sub-classes. A lot of players began demanding that parties only consist of these classes, locking out those who preferred playing as Paladins, Monks, and Dragoons. Upon launch, it was evident that version 2.0, A Realm Reborn, took a number of steps in improving gameplay balance to avoid, or at least reduce this^note.
- Expect most players to congregate in Limsa Lominsa's Lower Decks, thanks to its Aetheryte being located within walking distance of the city's market board (as opposed to Ul'dah and Gridania, where the Aetheryte and market boards are located in seperate zones).
- DPS classes in general are played far more often than healer and tank classes, due to the fact that people feel less bored or overwhelmed by simply pumping out damage instead of having to maintain aggro or keep several other people alive. The downside here is that the wait times in the Duty Finder can get notoriously long for a DPS class, unless you sign up for a duty that's very active. Even the developers are aware of this, and added the "Adventurer in Need" bonus for the Duty Roulette, which almost never grants the bonus for DPS players outside of guildhests and alliance raids because there's so many DPS players waiting in the queue. By the same token, a tank or a healer class having a queue pop instantly after they register for it is not uncommon, and waiting longer than ten minutes for a Duty to pop when playing as these classes is almost unheard of.
- When it comes to using the group's Limit Break in a dungeon or trial, there are a few "unwritten rules" about how it's supposed to be used.
  - There's an unspoken hierarchy of who should use it. Melee DPS get first dibs because their LB does more damage against bosses. Ranged/Magic DPS will use it either if there is no Melee DPS or the fight has more than one enemy. Healers only use it when the group is nearing a Total Party Kill to try and pull a last-second save; even then, it's only to be done by a Healer if it's a Level 3 Limit Break, which revives everyone and fully restores HP and MP. Tanks are at the bottom of the list; they're never supposed to use the Limit Break unless the fight requires a Tank LB3 to just barely survive what would otherwise be a One-Hit Kill on the party.
  - In dungeons, it's to be assumed that the LB is going to be saved for the Final Boss of any dungeon, and not used before. When a Limit Break is used, the gauge completely empties, regardless of how much was in it. And trash mobs throughout the dungeon generally aren't going to need any Limit Breaks used on them at all; using one is a good way to get accused of playing the game "incorrectly", even though there's nothing stopping a player from doing it.
- When it comes to dungeons, expect any mildly-comfortable Tank to do what's called "wall-to-wall pulling". This involves the Tank running through the dungeon while using their Draw Aggro ability on all the enemies they can, only stopping when either the party can't progress any further until the enemies are defeated or just before a boss fight. This is to make the dungeon go faster, since stopping and fighting every group of enemies takes longer by comparison. Some dungeons counter this by having sections where you have to kill enemies in small groups, but you can expect pretty much any Tank you meet to start pulling multiple groups of enemies past a certain point.
- Healer-wise, the most desired healer combo is Scholar and Astrologian. This is because both have abilities that increase the amount of damage the party can do, with Scholar's Chain Strategem decreasing an enemy's critical hit resistance and Astrologian's card abilities buffing the party damage outright. White Mage and Sage, while strong, don't offer nearly the same amount of buffing potential, which can lead to them getting overlooked.
- The Warrior Tank job is favored in most content thanks to their overpowered self-healing and decent damage reduction tools. They have several tools allowing them to restore their health, the most powerful of them being Bloodwhetting, usable every 25 seconds and healing them when they deal damage. Overpower and Mythril Tempest apply this healing for every enemy hit, so against packs of monsters, it translates into two full self-heals every 25 seconds. Combine this with their invulnerability, Holmgang, having a four-minute cooldown as opposed to six minutes like the other tanks, and Warriors are virtually unkillable in dungeons once they've got most of their kit to work with. Players have been joking about it ever since the release of Endwalker, pointing out that Warriors don't need healers, since they themselves are the best healer they could ask for — indeed, if you check Party Finder, you can occasionally find a Warrior offering to lead a healer-less run of endgame dungeons, relying on their self-heal and the three DPS to melt the mobs faster than the mobs can chip down the tank.
- When it comes to raiding, expect a lot of materia meld configurations to prioritize Critical Hit above all, because it's effectively a catch-all damage-increasing stat that benefits any class/job. The only times you'll have to meld another stat is when the math shows diminishing return, or you cannot meld Critical Hit beyond your gear's upper limit.
- For chocobo racing, Head Start and Choco Dash were the most used abilities since Head Start lets you start the race at max speed and Choco Dash is basically the dash panel in your pocket that can be used at will. The combo was so effective that everyone used it to get a huge lead at the start. Patch 2.55 would counter the strategy by making the buffer from lather (time it takes for lather to start sapping your stamina quickly) extremely short.
- Role skills tend to be very set in stone. Every tank wants Rampart, Provoke, Anticipation, and Reprisal, leaving only one slot, which will be invariably filled with Shirk in any two-tank raid, and Convalescence otherwise. Every healer wants Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast, Eye for an Eye, and Largesse, and the fifth slot is usually filled with Esuna because few healers will bother to check whether this dungeon/raid actually needs it or not, with a macro to cast Protect at the beginning of the dungeon. Eventually, the devs realized that there was pretty much no point in giving an illusion of choice like that and allowed every job to have all 10 role skills active and usable, with 5.0 culling the number of skills down to 4-6 depending on the role.
- EXP grinding used to be done through FATEs endlessly while dungeons got ignored because completing a FATE with a group of people was a lot faster than running a dungeon and doing groups of FATEs over and over would net players a bigger EXP payout in the long haul. The devs eventually changed things up where EXP in dungeons were better than ones gained in a FATE while doing a FATE is still a nice quick EXP gain while one waits for their duty to pop. However, 3.0 made leveling up past 50 notoriously tedious due to how much EXP one needed to get to the level cap of 60. People then discovered that, despite the level sync, getting EXP for a FATE in Northern Thanalan was not only faster than grinding FATEs in other areas, it was also faster than gaining EXP from a FATE in the new Heavensward areas and its dungeons. Grinding FATEs in Northern Thanalan grew so popular that not only does everything die in a matter of seconds due to the sheer amount of players, but many players have even resorted to using a bot program so that a computer can do the level grinding for them in a fairly quick manner. A patch rectified the problem by boosting the amount of EXP a FATE gives in the 3.0 areas, making them more viable compared to the old ones in the 2.0 zones.
- When Heavensward launched, the new healer class Astrologian suffered from this when compared to the other healer classes. In 2.X, a combination of a White Mage and Scholar provided what was considered an optimal balance of healing and utility, with the White Mage offering tremendous burst and party-wide healing, and the Scholar providing damage, asynchronous healing from their fairy, and several utility skills. In comparison, Astrologians offered both lesser healing and lesser utility and damage, with its unique card mechanic supposed to make up for the difference by buffing teammates, but even those seemed inadequate. Patch 3.05 buffed their abilities somewhat, then patch 3.07 had several massive buffs that resolved the class' rougher edges, bringing them to a state where they're generally agreed to be as useful as the other healing classes.
- If you're new to a 24-man raid, a good rule of thumb is "look at what everyone else is doing, then do that". No sane party is going to intentionally get a newbie in trouble, since being needlessly spiteful is just going to make their own lives harder. That being said, the playerbase has collectively decided that certain roles are to be filled by certain Alliances in every raid, such as designating Alliance B as the team that gets swallowed by Cerberus in the World of Darkness raid. Also, if a raid has three branching paths, expect Alliance A to go to the left, Alliance B to go to the center, and Alliance C to go to the right. There's technically nothing stopping a team from doing something else, but it's never done.
- Deep Dungeon-related examples:
  - The Deep Dungeons themselves have become the go-to dungeon for EXP grinding since clearing every 10 floors gets you a nice chunk of EXP for your current class outside of the dungeon. It got to the point where people farm only floors 1 through 10, 51 to 60^notePalace of the Dead, or 21 to 30^noteHeaven-on-High and Eureka Orthos since these floors are faster to clear compared to the other more difficult floors.
  - Palace of the Dead's Transformation pomanders are subject to this. The Pomander of Lust transforms the user into a Succubus who can increase the amount of damage mobs can take, which leads to the party opting to save it for the Bosses unless dire circumstances are in play. The Pomander of Rage however instead turns the user into a Manticore who can One-Hit Kill mobs, but deals weak damage to the bosses, leading players to either use that on the floor after they find it to clear it faster or save it for when they get a Pomander of Fortune (which increases the chance of mobs dropping chests upon death) and use both on the same floor. The same can be said for Eureka Orthos' Protomander of Dread, which turns the user into a Dreadnaught that rolls both Rage and Lust's skills into one package.
  - Conversely, there is also the Pomander of Flight from both Deep Dungeons. The effect of this Pomander reduces the amount of mobs on the very next floor. It sounds counter-productive on paper when working your way through the floors and gaining levels, but after hitting the Level cap (60 for Palace of the Dead, 70 for Heaven-on-High, 90 for Eureka Orthos), players will see them as invaluable tools when picking fights becomes more crucial to survival.
  - Heaven-on-High lacks the Palace's transformations, but it comes with the the very powerful Pomander of Petrification and Magicite, used for similar roles. The Pomander of Petrification turns every enemy on the floor into stone for 30 seconds, allowing them to be killed in one shot. If one is at the ready, expect players to sprint the moment it drops to clear the floor as fast as possible before advancing to the next. Magicite, while rare, is essentially a magical, tactical nuke that wipes a floor clean of enemies and grants some invulnerability time on use. Players tend to keep it handy for trivializing the big 4x3 floors, or to put in a big dent in a boss's HP.
  - If you're going to take on the Dread Beasts in Eureka Orthos, more often than not, you'll need the Protomander of Storms and/or the Protomander of Lethargy. Storms is an HP to 1 item that'll trivialize all the bulk the Dread Beast has (provided you can burst damage fast enough due to HP regen), and Lethargy slows all enemies to a crawl, making mechanics a breeze to react to. The latter also lasts a good ten minutes for the floor, easing up some of the stress on exploration.
- Stormblood introduced the open-world zone Eureka as the expansion's system for obtaining level 70 relic weapons. As a throwback to older MMO games, Eureka was designed to be very grindy—players had to accrue experience to advance in an elemental level system tied solely to Eureka. Dangerous monsters also had elemental levels, and those above yours quickly become very lethal. The obvious intent of Eureka was to slowly grind through level-appropriate mobs, and explore more and more of the map as you leveled up. However, this was derailed by the Notorious Monster system: if enough of a specific type of monster were slain (usually a few dozen to a hundred), a special boss monster would spawn, and reward extra experience, loot, and crystals needed to upgrade Eureka gear. The playerbase quickly discovered that farming Notorious Monsters was the most efficient leveling method: first, grinding normal mobs with a party (or worse, parties) would quickly impose a harsh experience penalty while Notorious Monsters had fixed rewards relative to your level, and second, that the 144 players in a zone working together could easily and quickly slay mobs to spawn Notorious Monsters and in turn quickly defeat those for excellent rewards. That meant the optimal strategy for Eureka was not actively grinding level-appropriate mobs over time, but rather running around the map in a train of dozens of players, slay mobs and then a Notorious Monster in a quick spike of activity, and then wait around doing nothing until another Notorious Monster was ready to spawn. The cherry on top is that ultimate advancement of Eureka gear required you to farm Notorious Monsters anyway, making mob grinding utterly irrelevant. Patch 4.3 introduced extra exp rewards from the Challenge Log as an alternative source, but the damage had already been done, staining Eureka's initial release as a mindless and tedious grind interspersed with extreme boredom, rather than a dynamic, challenging zone to explore.
- Following the Patch 6.1 PvP rework, Frontline PvP maps became dominated by gluts of Summoners who realized that they could vaporize entire teams if they coordinated their Limit Breaks to go off all at once in the middle of hotly contested objectives. Scholars and Black Mages became similarly commonplace due to sharing the ability to deal massive amounts of Area of Effect damage and debuff the enemy teams from a relatively safe distance. It got so bad that a subsequent patch sharply reduced the damage dealt by ranged jobs in the mode... which caused team compositions to swing the other way as jobs like Ninja and Paladin became nearly invincible without concentrated fire.
Complete Monster: See the franchise's page here.
Continuity Lockout:
- Likely due to its status as an Old Shame, there is precious little information available regarding the 1.0 Legacy storyline. The player will be given enough information to understand what happened to cause the Calamity and that's about it. Some events will be explained if it becomes necessary (e.g. when the Stormblood Alchemist questline involves the deceased Niellefresne, F'lhaminn will provide a brief summary of the events leading to his death) but otherwise the events of the storyline are glossed over, if not outright ignored. For example, the aforementioned questline features an appearance by Colbernoux but he is not identified, leaving new players in the dark not just about how he's Niellefresne's brother, but who he is at all.
- Given how story focused the game is and how many expansions have been released, new players that sign up and then use level boosting/story skipping premium items are going to be missing out on a lot. Special mention will go to the revelation of the Crystal Exarch's identity as G'raha Tia towards the end of Shadowbringers. This will have significantly less impact on players that have not completed the optional Crystal Tower raid. To help avert this, the developers urged players before launch to complete the raid and made it significantly easier to unlock so that they could play it, before outright making it mandatory to complete the raid in 5.3.
- The NieR: Automata Alliance Raid, "YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse" is generally thought of as a decently challenging raid with a series of fun boss fights. But the biggest complaint about the raid is that anyone unfamiliar with the setting can't keep up with the story. Reveals like the Machine Lifeforms, the significance of the final boss of the Copied Factory, and the entire setting of the Puppets Bunker only make sense if you know enough of the story of NieR Automata to get the ideas it's presenting. The final raid, Tower at Paradigm's Edge, has been criticized the most for this. In addition to needing to know stuff from Automata, if you've never played NieR or Drakengard, the impact of the reveals and imagery from the raid will fly right over your head. The significance of the Final Boss of the raid in particular will fall flat unless you know quite a bit about the lore and history of Drakengard, including several cues in the boss music. As a consequence, this turns what should be a Wham Shot of the final boss into just one more enemy you have to fight that gets pulled out at the last minute.
Cosmic Deadline:
- While A Realm Reborn and its "Seventh Astral Era" postgame went on too long, Stormblood has the opposite problem of cramming what should be a plotline near size of A Realm Reborn into only one expansion... and still being the longest arc overall since "A Realm Reborn". Even though Doma got quite a bit of attention, it still feels squished in, and of course Ala Mhigo got it the worst, which feels almost tacked on in comparison to Doma. This especially was the case in the post-Stormblood "The Legend Returns" arc, where Ala Mhigo was wrapped up within one patch while two were devoted to Doma's lingering ills.
- Ultimately one of the reasons why the Samurai questline wasn't viewed favourably - as the player has very little time to learn why Hingashi would be "better off" without a rebellion of the likes Doma and Ala Mhigo fought for.
Creator Worship:
- It's not an overstatement to say that fans treat director/producer Naoki Yoshida (affectionately called "Yoshi-P") like a rockstar. At every Fan Festival, he ends up surrounded by screaming fans eager to catch him in the flesh. He is adorned with fanart and character creator tributes from other video games, most notably in Nioh 2 where a fan won a character creator competition and got a character creator preset based on Yoshida in the game. And whenever Yoshi-P shows up in the game itself with his most well-known character (a female Lalafell Black Mage named "Yoshi'p Sampo"), he gets mobbed by scores of appreciative players almost immediately.
- Lead composer Masayoshi Soken gets a lot of love from the community for the game's music. It's a common joke among the playerbase that Soken casts a Level 3 Limit Break on the player's ears with some of his better-known tunes. This love got even more intense when the 2021 Fan Festival had Soken admit that he was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, yet continued working on the game's music through a special arrangement in his hospital room, turning Soken into a Memetic Badass.
- Writer Natsuko Ishikawa also get a lot of the worship too. She was the lead writer for the Dark Knight questline, widely considered the best-written class quest. She was also promoted to lead writer for Shadowbringers, also considered a highlight in terms of writing. As such, the playerbase thinks very highly of her. When she was introduced during a panel at PAX West, Ishikawa got a standing ovation from the fans in attendance, prompting her to start crying Tears of Joy.
Cry for the Devil:
- The Encyclopedia Eorzea lore book states how the nation of Garlemald was mocked by the other nations and got pushed far to the harsh north many years ago before the events of the game happened. Many players showed sympathy towards The Empire because of this and those who liked the Garleans already used the lore to further their support for them, hoping that the empire will someday win or at least allow players to switch sides.
- A much stronger example in Stormblood is Yotsuyu. She was introduced as an irredeemable monster, but as the patches went on with her amnesiac, she began to eke out her identity as Tsuyu and form a bond with Gosetsu, it seemed like she might finally get a start. As she had an extremely solid Freudian Excuse (given to Abusive Parents, made a Sex Slave no less than twice, abused from nearly every moment her biological mother died) people were starting to overlook her past deeds. However, when she regained her memories because of Asahi's cruel manipulations and becomes Tsukuyomi, dying afterwards (albeit finally happy), many fans were dismayed that her fate was Redemption Equals Death. The exact moment where many people's minds changed is the phase transition of the fight, where Yotsuyu asks the phantoms of everyone who's ever abused her to strike her in hate, set to the absolutely heart-rending rendition of the Yanxia/Doman field music, only for a phantom of Gosetsu's kindness to save her and the party, making her realize how close she was to being loved... but lamenting that now it's too late as the primal possesses her again and rips away control.
- Shadowbringers has Emet-Selch, an Ascian who explains how his people's homeworld was destroyed in a war between Zodiark and Hydaelyn, how many people were sacrificed to save their world, and how more lives were lost when Hydaelyn split the world into several shards. Emet-Selch is a massive troll, but by the very end, he's filled with rage and determination to end the Warrior of Light, deeming them unworthy of carrying on the Ascian's legacy. When he is defeated, Emet-Selch doesn't throw a tantrum nor pull a This Cannot Be! Instead, he is calm and simply asks the Warrior of Light to remember him and how he once lived. People who weren't too sure of the Ascians became completely sympathetic after that scene.
- Shadowbringers also has Vauthry, the lord of Eulmore; a Fat Bastard Psychopathic Manchild who believes he's the undisputed master of all he surveys because of his ability to control the sin eaters... But it's later revealed that he's half sin eater himself, having been infused with one's light in his mother's womb, and was raised from birth to be a decadent conqueror with an ego as big as his waistline, exactly like his father and Emet-Selch planned. As a result, he's completely incapable of understanding the difference between "right" and "wrong"; In Vauthry's mind, he is justice and righteousness and it's everybody who disagrees with him that's evil, meaning he can't realize that everything he does, up to and including feeding his people ground-up sin eaters to brainwash them, is evil. After he's finally defeated, his final moments are spent crying and whimpering, unable to grasp why the Warrior of Light pities him or how everything his father taught him was a lie.
- Feelsbringers rounds out a trifecta with the Emissary Elidibus, the person who became Zodiark's heart, and who later detached himself from him in order to help his comrades, having changed into a primal in the process. Echo memories show other Amaurotines complimenting his studiousness and reminding him not to bury himself too deeply in work. It's revealed that he was appointed to guide the star upon its proper course, having made a sacred promise to someone, but his unyielding conviction and the relentless grinding of the long millennia have made him forget the reason for his actions. Lying defeated after the titanic clash between Warrior of Light and Warrior of Darkness, he is revealed to be an Amaurotine who donned the mantle of the Emissary out of love for his fellow man, which at last he finally remembers in a dying moment of clarity.
  Elidibus: The rains have ceased, and we have been graced with another beautiful day. But you are not here to see it.
- Amazingly, Endwalker manages to pull this off for Zenos of all people. Despite being complicit in starting the final days among countless other atrocities, his final moments have elicited sympathy among a signicant amount of the fanbase, helping matters is that he does come to the aid of the Warrior of Light and even undergoes character development over his desire for a fight with them, to the point of offering to let them go if they did not wish to fight. Him musing over his life and lack of meaning outside of his sole pleasure of fighting the WoL, and wondering if the WoL found meaning in their life as well as possibly using his dying moments to wish for the WoL to live and return to their friends, has shown he was capable of showing humanity. A number of players online have confessed to being moved by this moment and reevaluating their view of him as a character.

D-F

Damsel Scrappy:
- Minfilia gets captured multiple times throughout A Realm Reborn, and never fights back against her captors/enemies. This is despite carrying a custom knife and having the power of the Echo at her disposal.
- Momozigo of the Samurai questline. After a certain point, the player is almost always coming to his rescue while he's standing there cowering. Granted, Momozigo admits he's nowhere near as capable in a fight as the samurai are, but he seems to keep constantly putting himself in situations where he could be easily captured, and never so much as attempts to use his head.
Diagnosed by the Audience: Urianger’s outdated manner of speech, tendency to explain topics of interest in lavish detail, history of childhood bullying, and his general lack of conventional social skills all contribute to him being frequently interpreted as autistic.
Difficulty Spike:
- The Non Player Characters you race against in the chocobo races gradually become more difficult as you rise in the ranks, which is to be expected. But at some point, it becomes a full-fledged case of The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. The difficulty increase isn't too bad, but by the time you start racing in the R-80 races or higher, the AI becomes more aggressive by instantly using abilities to counter any debuffs you inflict on them, their own chocobos can outperform yours, and you won't be spared any mercy when it comes to the items being used against you.
- Two notable spikes are the dungeons Brayflox's Longstop and the Stone Vigil. The earlier dungeons tend to be fairly straightforward, with mechanics generally limited to avoiding telegraphed attacks and killing newly-spawned monsters; their focus is getting players used to their role in the party and working as a group. The aforementioned dungeons begin to kick things up a notch, introducing fundamental mechanics to begin preparing players for endgame content. The former has a boss fight that forces the tank to kite the boss out of puddles that would heal them, while the latter makes players juggle side mechanics to keep certain attacks in check. Wipes are not uncommon among new players.
- The Steps of Faith trial is a huge wake-up call to players who got used to the simple mechanics that the story quests threw their way. The trial calls for several mechanics to be used all at once and winning the fight requires more than just poking the boss to death or avoiding AOE tells. The trial leaves very little room for error to boot, so one too many screw ups means you've basically lost and a single player who isn't paying attention or isn't doing the mechanics correctly can also cost the party.
- The gathering nodes in Heavensward are a severe spike up in difficulty from A Realm Reborn. Even the artifact tools acquired from completing the job storylines aren't able to get a high-quality result on their own. This also means a similar spike in difficulty for the Disciple of the Hand jobs as well, with even the lowest leveled new equipment in Ishgard completely blowing the best crafting gear in A Realm Reborn out of the water. This sudden jump in difficulty makes getting from Level 50-53 one of the toughest tasks in your gathering or crafting career.
- The Heavensward expansion ups the difficulty across the board, although you are most likely to notice it when you face off against the first new primal, Ravana. He summons butterflies that, when left alone, summons a sword that powers up his phase-changing ultimate attack, forcing players to split their efforts to killing the butterflies quickly. On the second half of his fight, the walls start breaking down, and he has an attack that will blow players into the walls, potentially for an instant-kill if you're thrown out of the arena.
- For those that had grown reliant on the tell-tale signs of the area-of-effect attack markers for just about every major attack in the game so far, including those in the alliance raids, the Heavensward story quest, "Sounding Out The Amphitheatre", suddenly throws a Wake-Up Call Boss at you that is purely animation-based and has no markers whatsoever. While this fight is lenient by having Alphinaud on healing duty and the boss has particularly telegraphed attacks, it straight up breaks the established rules of the game's combat up to that point and is there to forcefully teach you that the game's training wheels are coming off.
- Black Mage has a fairly straightforward rotation for the first 59 levels: you cast Fire I, cast Fire III whenever it procs, then cast ice spells to regenerate mana, and throw in Thunder whenever needed. Maintaining Enochian isn’t important because it doesn’t do anything special yet, and most of your spells will renew it anyway with the exception of Blizzard IV. All this changes when you learn Fire IV at level 60, as you now have to balance casting it as often as possible with throwing out another spell to keep Enochian going. If you mess up the timing and your Enochian skill is on cooldown when it happens, your damage output will be neutered for a while. The difficulty has relaxed a little when Enochian got reworked into a Trait instead of an Ability you have to manually cast, but losing Enochian still results in not generating Polyglot for Foul and Xenoglossy.
- This happens again in Stormblood, where mechanics introduced in raids are thrown in the mix. By a lot of accounts, the level 69 dungeon is a lot more difficult than the dungeon after it. The reason being that the 2nd boss has a mechanic where if you do not get it right, your party will end up killing itself. And on initial release, the only way to get it right was to look at the flavor text of the boss's buffs (who does that?). The 3rd boss lays down a gauntlet of AOE attacks, some of which you may have to prioritize which one's worth avoiding and which one's worth taking the hit.
- The Final Boss for Stormblood is considered to be a massive difficulty spike for many due to the sheer amount of mechanics to deal with and having very little room for mistakes.
- The new job quests for Stormblood's Red Mage and Samurai also suffer from this early on. You don't actually have to be at Stormblood to unlock them, able to start playing as them as soon as you reach level 50 and talk to the relevant NPC, and they give gear that is sufficient for the starting level 50 and the level 52 quests for them. Problem is, while they don't require you to be at Stormblood to unlock them, their quests are still designed as if they do - once you hit the level 54 quest, the amount of damage the enemies do skyrockets, without a player stuck in the pre-Heavensward section of the game being able to do much about being killed in four hits beyond gradually grinding out tomestones for augmented Ironworks gear — which is itself only barely an improvement despite being bar none the best gear available at that point in the game.
- After Deltascape and Sigmascape were considered to be relatively easy on normal difficulty, Alphascape kicked up the difficulty a lot. V1 is not too hard and V2 is not terrible, but V3 and V4 are very intense. V3 is particularly hard as the boss has 2 attacks that require you to know where its larboard and starboard sides are at any given moment (or even what "larboard" means^note), and then figure out where they are in the opposite direction moments later, with the attack coming out rather fast and with floor markers that essentially just exist to tell you whether you made it to the right position or not before damage hits.
Disappointing Last Level: In the Myths of the Realm raid storyline, the final Raid Thaleia is widely considered the weakest out of the three from a gameplay standpoint - while it shares some strengths with the previous two raids, such as the amazing boss designs and setpieces, and has some strength of its own like a unique secret easter egg in one of the boss fights, it's also been criticized primarily for three reasons: Being by far the easiest of the three raids, with none of the bosses' mechanics being particularly difficult, a lack of a unique lyrical song themed after one of the Twelve like In The Balance and Dedicated To Moonlight for the final boss - a final boss that, despite being all Twelve fused into one entity, is VERY easy and not particularly interesting to fight, which felt very anti-climactic for what is largely considered one of the best Alliance Raid series in the game.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- The Hildibrand questline has produced quite a few.
  - Hildibrand Helidor Maximillian Manderville was originally conceived as a minor comic relief character, being a Small Name, Big Ego Gentleman Detective character that completely contrasts against the rather grim main background story. However, he was so popular in the game's first incarnation that he was "resurrected" for the A Realm Reborn version of the game and given his own dedicated quest series, where he remains popular for those quests and frequent facial expressions that dip just far enough into the Uncanny Valley to be hilarious rather than creepy.
  - A Realm Reborn also introduced Hildibrand's father, Godbert Manderville, a master goldsmith and powerful businessman, who likes to spend his time running around in his skivvies, performing acts of Memetic Badassery which put even Sabin's train suplexing to shame, including slaying a horde of zombies with nothing more than a goldsmith's hammer, briefly turning a Mechanical Lifeform into a real living being, and killing multiple yeti with a snowball (by accident). Him being a very rare Reasonable Authority Figure among the corrupt Syndicate got him a lot of favor, showing his seat is very much well-deserved.
  - And even he pales in comparison to his wife, Julyan Manderville, and her Frying Pan of Doom. She may be a Culinarian by trade, but she's the only person that makes Godbert tremble in fear, and rightfully so; one smack of her frying pan is enough to put him in his place, and makes the Warrior of Light fear for their life.
- HAMON HOLYFIST, introduced in A Realm Reborn, is easily one of the most popular (and hilarious, and lovable) of the class guild-masters, due to his hammy, larger-than-life vigor.
- Fray, the initial Dark Knight job trainer, for being the most memorable job trainer ever and for providing an insight into the Warrior of Light outside how the player themselves define them and for his Big Damn Heroes moment at the level 70 Dark Knight job quest. It's not uncommon to hear about people who leveled the Dark Knight job just for Fray.
- Among the job quest characters, Sidurgu is by far one of the most popular characters in the game. Not only is he one of the first Au Ra introduced, but he also is a Dark Knight, which combined with his importance in the Dark Knight job quests, his almost Parental Substitute status to Rielle, and his great design, have lead him to be one of the main reasons a number of players have picked up the class and fallen in love with the questline. His popularity is enough that many are hoping he becomes an Ascended Extra like Estinien ended up becoming, and hope he becomes a member of the Scion's, especially because players want him as a Trust due to the lack of tank options besides Thancred and G'raha Tia.
- Papashan, the Ul'danian rail-yard overseer and semi-but-not-really-retired Master Sultansworn is also fairly popular with both fans of Ul'dah and of Lalafells, due to his status as a Reasonable Authority Figure, the surrogate-fatherly way he helps and treats Lady Lilira (AKA Sultana Nanamo), and for being the baddest-assed lalafell Paladin in canon, and perhaps baddest lala period, who isn't a player. The only people who even come close are Papalymo and Krile.
- Edda Pureheart started off as a simple Flat Character in an early story quest where the player sees a band of adventurers break up due to Edda's incompetent healing costing her the life of her fiance, who was also the party's tank. In patch 2.3, Edda returns after having gone completely insane and broken over the grief she endured since her fiance's death. Even after she falls to her death by slipping off a ledge, she briefly returns as a creepy ghost for one memorable scene. Many fans instantly liked Edda's return and hope that she comes back in a future update. Even Yoshida hoped to bring her back in some form. Later, Edda made a brief cameo in the anniversary event by an artist drawing her and her fiance monster looking happy together (in a very creepy way), and she became the final boss of the 50th floor of the Palace of the Dead. Clearing that floor and doing the subsequent quest finally allows the Warrior of Light to put her soul to rest.
- Moenbryda gained quite a bit of popularity when she was introduced in patch 2.4. Fans instantly warmed up to her for having an outgoing personality to shake up the dynamic that the Scions have, being very book smart, and wielding a giant axe. Sadly, Moenbryda was killed off in patch 2.5 after performing a Heroic Sacrifice to help the player character kill one of the Ascians. While her death boosted her popularity further, many thought that she was discarded way too early, and that with only two patches and a couple cutscenes she had little room to develop as a character. The fact that she was the by-far strongest female non-player character of the Scions (especially compared to Minfilia) and her implied close relationship to Urianger left many people wishing she stayed longer.
- Lord Haurchefant of House Fortemps quickly grew very popular with the fanbase. Not only is he one of the first Ishgardians who isn't completely hostile to you just for being an outsider, he ends up nearly worshipping the ground you walk on and helps soften the city-state towards opening their gates to outsiders. And of course, in the wake of a horrific Wham Episode that left Alphinaud, Tataru, and potentially the PC in a Heroic BSoD, he offers you shelter and to turn away anyone hunting you, offering encouragement to help you cheer up and stating he fully intends to be by your side when you take retribution. Plus he brings you cocoa! And then he dies in your character's arms at the end of The Vault... Needless to say, many a tear was shed. In a 2020 popularity poll he secured an amazing 12th place, not only beating out every XIV character besides fan-favourite Emet-Selch, but even FF protagonists like Terra, Squall, and Noctis. Especially notable since said poll was held five years after his last storyline appearance, which gives him some very good staying power.
- The Vath Deftarm grew quite popular with many players due to him trying to perform good deeds like the player character, learning lessons along the way, and actually making an effort to stick by his noble goals so he can help everyone. The fact that he's an Adorkable bug person only helped to boost his popularity further.
- Arenvald started out as a nearly generic member of the Scions since A Realm Reborn that aspired to do great deeds like the Warrior of Light. By the time of Stormblood, he changes his clothes for a full suit of armor, assists in the liberation of Ala Mhigo, suggests that he and the Warrior of Light go raid a sunken dungeon for the heck of it (plus the treasures hidden within), directly assists with fighting Lakshmi in Ala Mhigo and protects the innocents, and goes toe-to-toe with Ifrit offscreen when the Warrior of Light has their hands tied elsewhere. Arenvald gained quite a following with many fans wanting to see him develop further. With the introduction of the Trust system in Shadowbringers, a number of fans have begged for Arenvald to be added to it as a Tank due to the system having only two during its run (Thancred and G'raha Tia).
- Sadu Dotharl took the playerbase by storm following her debut in Stormblood. The combination of her proud, Blood Knight personality along with being equally beautiful and powerful led to loads of fanart involving her. Players were delighted when she appeared in later expansions, with her many admirers from both sexes being given a nod in the sheer number of linkpearls she recieves from her admirers in the Ilsabardian Contingent.
- The Great Serpent of Ronka, a little worm that serves as the center piece for one of the side quest chains in Shadowbringers. While it's dubious whether it is truly divine, the priest that believes it to be true is so earnest about it, players couldn't help but play along. It helps that the serpent is strangely cute in its own unique way, is rewarded as a minion at the end of the questline, and has multiple incarnations in the Qitari Beast Tribe story that all get made into a minion.
  Tremble, child of man, for a creature of purest divinity wiggleth before thee.
- Despite only appearing sporadically and having a relatively minor role in the story and being brutally killed midway through the expansion, Ahewann endeared himself to a portion of the fanbase, helped by the fact that he’s basically the Au Ra equivalent of a Silver Fox with a voice to match.
- The Duty Support NPCs that were introduced in patch 6.1 for A Realm Reborn dungeons quickly endeared themselves to players due to them going through their own character arcs over the course of the game. Initially they begin as new adventurers not unlike the Warrior of Light, eventually they also become Scions and eventually Grand Company members, with each of their dialogue in each dungeon subtly changing as they become stronger and become more confident in themselves. Some players like them so much that they wish the NPCs would be given official names.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: A sizeable percentage of the playerbase doesn't really care about the "Side content" and just treat the game as a largely solo experience with Drop In Multiplayer. This has caused some Casual-Competitive Conflict between those who like that content and those who don't.
Epileptic Trees:
- Has to be mentioned here because the end of the core story in A Realm Reborn is very deliberately set up to invoke a ton of this, as it drops a ton of amazing reveals late in the plot and after the credits roll. Namely, the possibility that the Ascian lords are The Twelve Scions of Light from the Ivalice setting, and they're trying to bring Zodiark into the world. And the fact the Ascian Igeyorhm has the same haircut as Lightning of all people. The end-quest for Summoners pours fuel on the fire, too - Belias is an elder primal. Exactly what all this means has been driving people into fits of mass guessing.
- Between 2.55 and Heavensward; Tataru working for Lolorito or the Crystal Braves was a popular fan theory due to the oddly worded conversation she gives you in Costa del Sol as well as the rather suspicious grin she gives the WoL once she leaves.
- Heavensward gets in on this action, too: anyone paying the least bit of attention will begin to have some serious suspicions about the origins and nature of the player character, and then of course there's that bit with Elidibus and the "Warrior of Darkness" on the moon, which is basically just Square shaking a tree in your face.
- Near the end of Shadowbringers, there's a cute little Easter Egg of a shoebill popping up in the background of main quests. Then it starts showing up at the bottom of the ocean. Its tendency to appear in places inappropriate for birds and how it drops as a minion from Amaurot, of all places, has caused people to theorize that it's Emet-Selch. The description of it says "An unflappable bird possessed of a regal air...or perhaps simply a condescending one," which would describe the character in question. It does not help that Natsuko Ishikawa teased that there might be a significance.
- The "Warrior of Light is a primal" theory suggests that the player character is actually a primal summoned by people desperate for a hero to save them. Evidence that supports this is that you suddenly appeared in Eorzea with no background history, your aetherial manipulation is quite advanced for a mere adventurer and you become stronger as more people learn of your exploits, suggesting their faith in the player is powering them. This has been all Jossed in 5.0 but an interesting twist happens in 5.3: (Major Spoilers) Elidibus gathers the faith of Norvrandt in their desire for a hero and turns into a primal version of the first Warrior of Light based off of their legends. In a way, this theory has been validated but not in the way it was expected to be.
- After the big reveal in 5.3 that the Warrior of Light was part of the Convocation of Fourteen as Azem and the implications that Azeyma and Azim may have been based on Azem. In particular fans have noticed that the symbolism surrounding Nald'thal namely the twins, the underworld and sort of commerce can also apply to Emet-Selch/Hades. Though there are some who think Thaliak is Emet-Selch/Hades for the sake of shipping with him with Azim. Which further leads to the more questions about just who the Twelve actually are and how they're connected to the Ascians.
Even Better Sequel:
- Heavensward is commonly seen as this for A Realm Reborn. More interesting zones, a deeper story, a change in English voice cast (which, save for losing Gideon Emery as Urianger, is often met with high praise), flying mounts, a suite of new mechanics for each class as well as the introduction of class-specific meters, the introduction of Dark Knight and Astrologian, and some of the best Trials and Dungeons in the game, all coming with a much more consistent level of polish than before.
- Shadowbringers is somehow this to Heavensward and Stormblood, featuring a bunch of class rebalancing, a fantastic new world to explore in The First, and a truly epic story that finally reveals some of the darkest secrets of the FFXIV universe. Also helping is the new Trust system, allowing for a nearly total single-player experience and the near-elimination of story-based Duty Queues (you still have to queue up for Trials, but there are only three trials in the entire MSQ, four if you include the Seat of Sacrifice in 5.3), one of the biggest flaws the game has had since launch.
- And just in general, by the time Shadowbringers rolled around, XIV became this to a number of previous FF titles of its generation and genre, Final Fantasy XI in particular. XI was good, it was a surprisingly competent and engaging MMO for its era and for a company that previously had possessed almost no institutional knowledge of online gaming, but it began showing its age very quickly and its overall contribution to the progression of the genre and the medium was fairly minimal (aside, perhaps, from demonstrating that a story-heavy MMO was something feasible and accomplishable, which was actually a point of debate during its prime years). XIV, meanwhile, essentially became the defining MMO of The New '10s and the early New Twenties, a Cinderella story for the ages that firmly established the careers of dozens if not hundreds of people, established whole new baselines for expectations concerning multiplayer cooperative content (especially for "bosses"), for the use of music in such games, for presentation in general in the genre, and it built upon XI's work in such a way that "a good/solid storyline" went from an afterthought for an MMO or online game to a virtual requirement and bar against which other titles were measured. It went to such lengths that even longtime rival World of Warcraft had clear influence from XIV in its Shadowlands expansion in 2020.
- Suggesting Endwalker is this to Shadowbringers is an incredibly effective way to stroke the flames of fandom argument, but the general consensus is that the two expansions and the arc they portray as a wrap up to the Hydaelyn and Zodiark story are the peak of FFXIV’s storytelling so far.
Event-Obscuring Camera:
- Especially if you're playing on console, the camera in Leviathan Extreme is easily mistaken for a Sahagin sympathizer. Leviathan's dives and bodyslams onto the arena (which are effectively instadeath/permadeath mechanics in the second half of the fight) are telegraphed for dodging by a plume of water signaling where he'll charge from. However, the camera doesn't pan back far enough to show every possible position, so you have to attempt to locate and then dodge the plume while wildly spinning the camera as fast as you can. Eventually a DPS check and ground based AoEs during these dives and slams are added to make this more... "fun."
- For a while, boss fights inside dungeons would have nasty cases of camera issues when the barrier blocking your escape got in the way of the camera since it was treated as a solid wall. This made some fights more difficult than it should have been if the fights required you to take the battle near the barrier. A patch rectified the problem by allowing the camera to pass through the barrier. Nevertheless, some fights still retain camera issues because of other objects around the arena that block sight, such as the overly-tall fence preventing you from falling out of the arena for the first half of the fight against Ravana.
Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: A popular fan interpretation of Zenos, especially in Endwalker, is that he was meant to be something of a meta-Deconstructed Character Archetype of players who Play the Game, Skip the Story, something the developers have never really commented on. Zenos is a Blood Knight and Challenge Seeker who only wants to experience the thrill of fighting the Warrior of Light, and does as many terrible things as he can in order to rile them up so they can bring themselves to fight him, not at all caring about the world or anyone else. This is much like how some players skip as much of the story as they can just to do the hardest fights, yet critique the game's setting and/or narrative in spite of actively avoiding it, with some complaining about the end game because they skipped to it. Zenos' character arc in Endwalker is realizing he will never get what he wants by being a pure Blood Knight, and in order to get his battle to the death, he has to pull an Enemy Mine and give a care about the end of the world, if only for the sake of his rival. Through this interpretation, Zenos represents players who actively ignore the story, and will never feel satisfied with the game unless they give the story some amount of focus.
Evil Is Cool:
- Many of the higher ranking members of the magitek-using Garlean Empire can give off this feeling. Zenos in Stormblood in particular seemed particularly designed with this in mind. An unrepentant Tin Tyrant that justifies his status as The Dreaded multiple times throughout the story, including forcing the Warrior Of Light into a Hopeless Boss Fight twice. There is also the fact that he hijacks Shinryu during the final confrontation, leading to what many fans agree is one of the best fights in the game.
- Emet-Selch is far and away the most popular villain in all of Final Fantasy XIV, to the point that he placed #6 in a popularity poll with over 450,000 votes, outranking even iconic villains like Sephiroth and Kefka. His sympathetic motives, stellar voice performance by René Zagger, amazing boss fight and just generally amusing and personable demeanor make him an immensely memorable character worthy of being included among the series' greatest villains.
Fandom Rivalry: With World of Warcraft. Being the two most prominent MMORPGs in the genre, it was only natural that this would happen. But the rivalry really intensified after Shadowbringers released. About a year prior, WoW released the Battle For Azeroth expansion, which, while it initially reviewed well, began to frustrate the players with the endgame experience. Then, Shadowbringers was released and was a massive smash-hit, becoming beloved by both fans and critics alike. As the good press continued to pour in about Shadowbringers, quite a few WoW players decided to check it out, and a lot of them elected to switch games and make XIV their new "main" MMO.
- This one reached new heights during WoW's Shadowlands expansion when a nine-month content drought, a disappointing first content patch, and a controversy with the State of California suing Activision Blizzard combined to cause a mass exodus of WoW players to other games, most notably FFXIV.
Fan Nickname: Has its own page here.
Fanon:
- The Warrior of Light stand-in used in trailers and promotional art is often called Meteor by the fanbase, but he has always simply been referred to as "The Meteor Survivor", and was never given a proper canon name.
- If you're reading a fanfic that ships a female Warrior of Light and Emet-Selch, you can expect her Ancient name to have been Persephone, to match his.
- Due to their height difference, general lore and how effeminate the males are, female Vieras are often depicted in fanwork as the dominant ones in relationships, sexually or otherwise.
Foe Yay Shipping:
- Zenos/Warrior of Light has a following, due to it being easy to read sexual undertones into his lines about fighting them. Namely, "let this moment last forever", "how glorious the violence within you", and "like a moth to a flame...but why else would you come if not for this?".
- Magnai/Sadu. He hates her for her impertinence, she mocks his arrogance and loves riling him up. The fandom quickly became enamored of the idea of Sadu being Magnai's destined wife, partially because of Magnai's inevitable reaction and partially because their dynamic is genuinely that good.
- Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light has become one of the most famous examples in the game. It helps that the Warrior of Light used to be Emet-Selch's dearest friend before the sundering of the world. The romantic subtext is very much present, and even stronger in the Japanese version, with Emet-Selch joining the ranks of the few NPCs whose relationship with the protagonist is kept purposely ambiguous on that end.
- Cid/Nero get this treatment as well, with Nero's obsession with besting Cid often being interpreted as a crush. Cid also puts up with a lot from Nero post-ARR despite their ongoing animosity. Nero joining the Ironworks and their rivalry softening into a Vitriolic Best Buds dynamic only adds fuel to the fire, especially as they still bicker back and forth Like an Old Married Couple.

Game-Breaker:
- The Briar item for the chocobo races creates an AoE attack where any player who gets caught in it will suffer a massive stamina drop the longer they are in it. On a narrow path with no way to slow down or speed up to avoid the attack? You're boned. To make matters worse, multiple players using the item at the same time and in close proximity with one another makes the effect stack and if you get ganged up like this, you might as well go AFK until the race is over because it will become impossible to recover. The only way to completely avoid the attack is to use the Sprint Shoes, Stamina Tablet, or Hero Tonic, but that's assuming that RNG was good enough to you so that you have any of those items in the first place. Choco Meteor is also a huge game breaker due to how powerful it is and only the Hero Tonic can block it, which is rare in itself. The item basically gives a massive stamina drop to every player in front of the user and prevents them from accelerating. It's also entirely possible to have multiple Choco Meteors be used back to back, basically screwing everyone caught in the crossfire.
- With the release of Blue Mage, the devs set Chocobo experience gain with it so chocobos would earn the full amount of experience rather than the small fraction it used to gain. However, this turned out to be horribly overtuned as even at levels over 10 you could gain an entire level in an hour or less when it used to take days or weeks to gain a single level. It became possible to reach level 20 extremely fast (as long as you were either rich or already carrying a large stock of Thavanarian Onions needed for every level after 10, as naturally their price on the marketboard skyrocketed). A week later the experience gain was toned down heavily for Blue Mage, but it was buffed for other classes.
Gameplay Derailment:
- The Hunts, prior to patch 2.4. To make a long story short, their rewards were good enough and easily accessible enough that most players simply camped out waiting for them to spawn instead of running dungeons as the dev team intended. The patch decreased the rewards significantly, bringing the frenzy around hunts down to reasonable levels.
- The Triple Triad tournament, which gives players prizes if they come in the top 20 by winning against NPCs and players to rack up points. People quickly discovered that there's no rule or limit on how you earn the tourney points, so players began to cheat the system by playing against their friends to boost themselves endlessly. Patch 3.5 finally addresses the issue by having participants play in the card battle hall and the game picking opponents for them.
- PVP has devolved into this due to a general lack of interest from the community, resulting in enormously long queues. Upwards of an hour is actually considered common for many. Thus, players have taken to "win-trading" by grouping into two teams of three/four, setting the party finder to only search for French/German and slaughtering each other while naked, so they can stockpile Wolf Marks - PVP's unique currency, used to purchase the exclusive PVP gear.
- Chocobo Racing had players intentionally lose by going AFK since the amount of EXP and MGP gained for coming in last wasn't much lower than simply playing normally. Throwing races was the preferred method of raising chocobos and farming for MGP. The devs responded by making 1st place give more MGP and EXP while coming in last got you nothing at all.
- Palace of the Dead had already gone off the rails a day after the patch went live. In order to get the new weapons associated with the palace, you have to grind both your armor and your weapon to a stat of +30 and the only way to strengthen the gear is to open silver coffers. The stronger the gear gets, the further down the dungeon you have to go just to be able to get a shot at further increasing your gear's strength. Because beating the final boss on floor 50 means starting over at floor 1 next time you play, people have either purposely got the party killed in the final boss fight, leave the dungeon, or ask to be kicked out since your gear's progression isn't tied to your character's progression in the dungeon. Ergo, people can keep resetting to floor 41 over and over to try for a run with better luck at the silver coffers without starting over. Naturally, this is not sitting well for people who just want to play through the dungeon and are being paired up with others trying to exploit the system. A patch later on guaranteed a +1 to arm and armor when completing floor 50 and another patch boosted the frequency of silver coffers while also increasing the odds of them boosting your gear.
- The Binding Coil of Bahamut Raid Series has been subject to this to some extent. Because the Raid is much harder than the other normal-mode 8-man Raid Content, it doesn't show up on the Raid Roulette. Due to this, it's much harder to get into it if you don't have a group of players willing to get into it. As a result, many players are of the opinion that it's just easier and less frustrating to massively overlevel the content and then go in Unsynced and solo the entire raid series.
- The Alliance Raid Duty option is supposed to work like the other Duty Finder queues, and allow players a random Alliance Raid from what the player has unlocked, and can queue for. However, it is very easy for a single player to derail the system by simply wearing as low level gear as possible, and queue for it to get the Crystal Tower raid set from ARR, letting them get the benefits of having run it daily without the "tedium" of harder content. Naturally, this is frowned upon by the wider community, since it results in players rarely getting harder Alliance Raid's due to how the system was designed.
Genius Bonus:
- In the English localization, the Alchemy level achievements are named "Tis True Without Lying", which is the Sir Isaac Newton translation of the beginning of an ancient alchemical treatise called The Emerald Tablet.
- The Disciplines of the Land, Hand and Magic and War bear a certain resemblance to the Japanese adaptation of the Confucian philosophy of ideal social hierarchies.
- The quest to unlock the Savage mode for Alexander's Creator sector is titled "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Retells Your Story." Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story is the song that is performed in the final scenes of the Broadway musical Hamilton, which tells the story of relatively unknown United States Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. It goes even deeper than that; one of the themes of the song is about running out of or not having enough time to do what needs to be done, and Alexander's main mechanic revolves around its ability to manipulate time.
- The Gunblade worked around an Orphaned Etymology by stating the weapon was named after Gunnhildr's Blades, a Hrothgar organization that protects their queen, all of whom inherit the name Gunnhildr upon taking the throne. The real world etymology of the word gun came from a ballista type weapon called a Domina Gunhilde named after Gunnhildr, a female Norse name themed around battle.
- A very round about example that requires knowledge of astrological signs, other Final Fantasy games, and a dive into the game's very text files. Each Ascian has a title that came from the Occuria from Final Fantasy XII, and each title has an astrological sign attached to it. During patch 5.3, the Warrior of Light comes across multiple stones with astrological signs on them, each one belonging to a member of the Convocation of 14, recording their memories. A little bit before this, the Warrior of Light experiences a memory of Elidibus, leader of the Ascians, in which he is talked to by two of his fellow members who tell him he needs to slow down. In the scene, they are simply called "convocation members", but the text file for their dialogue reveals their actual names. After defeating him, in his final moments the Warrior of Light places all the stones they found before him, and he dies clutching two specific stones. If you read the text file and know which zodiac signs go with which Ascian titles, you will realize that his final thoughts were of Lahabrea and Igeyorhm, the two unnamed people from his memory.
- According to Encyclopedia Eorzea, scholars believe the behemoths are spawned from Bahamut. In the real world, Bahamut and Behemoth have the same etymological origin.
- The final area of Shadowbringers, Amaurot, takes heavy influence from Thomas More's Utopia, a 1516 philosophical satire. In More's book, the titular Utopia's capital is named Amaurot, it rests on the river Anyder, and is viewed from the perspective of a traveller named Raphael Hythlodaeus.
Goddamned Bats:
- Invoked for certain levequests. Your target enemies will always spawn near naturally spawning enemies, but there can also be enemies that spawn during your quest specifically to slow you down by forcing you to either dispatch them or deal with their attacks (or run away to cause them to deaggro) and they don't appear outside of the quests.
- Same deal with normal mobs near a FATE; not only do they not count towards your FATE contribution, you'll probably be level-synced down to their level, making them aggressive if they weren't before, and more dangerous besides. These kinds of mobs will just annoy you and force you to dispatch them so that you don't rack up unnecessary damage, though they'll just respawn. This is even worse with some FATEs which spawn in enemies that are identical in all but name to the existing mobs in that area, like "Staying Dead" in Western Thanalan spawning Dune Bogies in the middle of an area otherwise already occupied by Bloated Bogies, or "Thunderstruck" in the East Shroud where the Tempered Sylphs you actually need to fight are surrounded on both sides of a bridge by Sylvan Groans, Screams and Soughs; these existing enemies will be labeled as FATE targets, thus unable to be attacked unless you level-sync yourself to the FATE, but do not actually contribute towards completing it, annoying both those trying to complete the FATE and those who need to kill the normal mobs for whatever reason.
- Any giant toad monster. They aren't terribly dangerous, but they have a nasty Sticky Tongue ability that lets them drag you towards them so you are in their melee range, and they'll always use it immediately if you aggro them outside of melee range before following up with a large area-of-effect jump. This gets more annoying when you're just passing through an area and you get yanked towards the monster, particularly for parts of the story that have you taking several trips back and forth through Raincatcher Gully in eastern La Noscea or Fogfens in Mor Dhona. On the plus side, with the introduction of Blue Mage, they can copy the ability, which lets you give the toads a taste of their own medicine and stuns your target for a couple of seconds once they're dragged in, an ability the toads (thankfully) don't get.
- Any enemy that has the Stoneskin spell, which blocks up to 10% of damage to the user equal to their maximum HP. Due to Health/Damage Asymmetry, this buff which was merely kinda okay in the hands of players (before being removed) is a pain in the hands of mobs - depending on the enemy and what class you're playing as, you can even end up simply not dealing actual damage to the enemy in question until you've hit them enough to dispel it. Seeing Stoneskin on a boss enemy is very rare, but deeply annoying when it does happen.
- Skeletons, they're pretty standard and usually have low HP, but they have an attack called Hell Slash that always does a flat percentage of your max HP, meaning that even an overgeared tank will take a good chunk of their HP in damage. And in story quests they tend to get paired with other enemies who can do more genuine damage.
- Bees. Dear gods, bees. They have a notorious reputation in FFXI and it's no different here — many of the bee types in dungeons will, if not killed fast enough, use Final Sting, a suicide attack that deals 80% of the target's maximum HP in damage, meaning a tank won't necessarily deal with it better than anyone else unless they have a very attentive healer or they apply their defensive cooldown that makes them temporarily immune to death. It can be stunlocked, thankfully, but all it takes is one bee that nobody's watching...
- Mimics in the Deep Dungeons. They usually aren't terribly difficult to kill (although they can be if they spawn early on a set of floors, since their level is determined by the set of floors rather than the specific floor you are on), but they can spawn randomly from any coffer you try to open and they have a hefty amount of HP. What makes them annoying is Infatuate, which targets a random player and inflicts the Pox status. Pox prevents auto regeneration, lowers damage dealt, and constantly causes poison-like damage over time for 10 minutes. Not even dying will remove the status. The only way to remove Pox is with a specific item only found in the dungeon. Thankfully, Infatuate is an interruptible spell... provided, of course, that your job has an interrupt move. Failing that, you can inflict Stun to interrupt it instead. Failing that, you can one-shot them with the Pomander of Rage, or transform them with the Pomander of Witching... again provided, of course, that you have one.
- Palace Skatenes in the Palace of the Dead are annoying for their Chirp ability, which is a massive AoE Sleep. While they can be stunned or pushed back to interrupt the ability, you may not always have party members who will have those specific abilities. On their own Skatenes are a minor annoyance. If they come in pairs or other monsters join in, you're going to be in a world of hurt.
- Continuing the trend of annoying enemies in the Palace of the Dead are the Palace Slimes. They are pretty easy to kill and aren't terribly strong, but if you take too long to kill one, they will explode with no warning and kill any player that were unlucky enough to be caught in the blast radius. If all four players or all remaining players get hit, it's a Total Party Kill. If you encounter the slimes while playing solo, you either better stun them quickly or burn them down as fast as possible before they explode. In the much deeper parts of the dungeon, there are red slimes that also explode like their green cousins, but their auto-attack lowers your physical defense each time and the effect can stack.
- Nightmare Dragons are yet another annoying monster to deal with in the Palace of the Dead. While they are not terribly strong, their Chaos Breath attack covers a wide area in front of it, making it a pain to fight if there's other monsters attacking or if the dragon is in a narrow hallway.
- Also in the Palace of the Dead are certain monsters that can attack the closest player to them without them even having aggro on that player. Said attack is usually a large AoE that is easy enough to avoid on its own, but if you're already engaged with other enemies, random attacks from monsters taking potshots at you only makes things worse. To make things even more worse, the monsters doing the potshots can launch these attacks through the damn walls without you seeing them!
Goddamned Boss: See here.
Good Bad Bugs:
- At 3.0's launch, there was a massive cluster of level 58 monsters in The Dravanian Hinterlands near the zone border leading to The Dravanian Forelands. Many players had their share of fun trying to see how long they could survive the onslaught, though Square fixed it in a matter of a day.
- Players employ a number of minor glitches in the housing editor to produce otherwise-impossible furniture arrangements such as raised platforms and staircases. Square Enix seemed to have tried to subtly lower the viability of this glitch by introducing lofts, along with the appropriate beams and stairs, but due to their less than ideal implementation they're merely used as other means to an end for this bug.
- It was discovered that minions that don't normally perch on your shoulder can be made to using a simple glitch. See the details here. Many are hoping it doesn't become patched as the results can range from awesome to cute to hilarious.
- Some minions are made to interact with one another, but an unintentional one was Ultros, as he would dance with the Calca and Brina dolls in such a natural way that it looked like it was intended. Unfortunately, this was patched and he no longer interacts with them.
- When squadrons were introduced, people quickly discovered that hitting the Engage command would reset your party's cooldowns instantly. This lead to crazy things like archers spamming their AoE skill and tanks spamming their defensive skills. This was eventually patched out.
- Squadrons also had a glitch with the squadron Limit Break where it could be used outside of the intended content. This led to people using the squadron limit break in other dungeons and raids when they were not supposed to, which also led to raiders doing savage content using it too. Because the limit break gives everyone a 50% boost to attack power, it could be used to clear content much more easily than intended. Astrologians were also able to extend the duration of the damage buff, making it even more ridiculous. The exploit would eventually be patched out. Incidentally, Yoshi-P confirmed that the majority of players who used the bug were clearly just confirming that it really existed (with about 10% actually repeatedly exploiting it), and the handful that used it in the Unending Coil of Bahamut still didn't manage to clear it.
- While rare, there have been times where a boss would suddenly stop attacking the party, allowing players to wail on it for an easy kill. Not only do these get patched out fairly quickly, but people that are caught abusing such exploits get suspended from the game.
- Heaven on High, a sequel of sorts to Palace of the Dead, has an otter trap. If someone goes into /gpose, the transformed party member will appear as gigantic◊.
- When the NieR: Automata raid was first introduced, the final boss had a glitch where a dying red dragon NPC rarely spawned, crying out for her love. While this came from the pre-existing Dark Knight job questline (and indeed, the reason the bug was so rare was that it only happened to players who were at a particular point in this questline), plenty of people thought that it was a reference to Drakengard and assumed it was a Mythology Gag or a piece of Drakennier lore until the devs corrected it.
- The cutscene where Zero and Golbez clash in patch 6.5 can sometimes bug and cause Zero to repeat her hunching over animation, making it look like she's taunting Golbez. As the cutscene still continues without issue despite that, some consider it to be funny instead of annoying.
Growing the Beard: Many fans, despite enjoying the game as a whole, claim that A Realm Reborn has a few weaknesses that held back its potential, which include the voice acting, lack of challenge in dungeons, leveling a class taking too long, etc. When Heavensward was released, most of the issues were resolved; voice acting improved, character relationships and dynamics were made more apparent, dungeons and raids were made more reasonably difficult save at the extreme top end, and the plot improved substantially. Many people that didn't like how 2.0 was made were pleasantly surprised at how 3.0 improved on many things. 3.0's only real stumbling blocks were the Savage mode of Alexander maybe being tuned a little too tightly in its later stages, even for most hardcore raiders, and for the first patch taking five months to arrive (mostly because after 3.0's release, the team desperately needed a vacation).

H-L

Harsher in Hindsight:
- Momodi's statment to the adventurer deciding to seek out the Scions: “I swear, if I painted 'CERTAIN DEATH' on one door and 'LIMITLESS WEALTH' on another, nine out of ten adventurers would go through the first, and the other bloke wouldn’t be able to choose, on account of bein’ Ul'dahn.” The 1st and 3rd Unit of the Crystal Braves, being from Ul'dah and the Immortal Flames, are the ones who are bought out by the Monetarists and betray the Scions.
- Ilberd's statement towards Eline Roaille that he would rather cut off his arm than raise a hand against a friend becomes this as come Patch 2.55 not only does he betray Raubahn by admitting his role in Nanamo's death, but cuts off his left arm to protect Lolorito.
- Yda's annoyance with Rowena's insistence of replacing her mask becomes this when you realize that the mask once belong to her sister, the real Yda.
- Moenbryda makes a throwaway comment to the player character about how she would give her life if it meant making the light blade to kill the Ascians. Turns out she was 100% serious about it and follows through on it to kill Nabriales.
- The boss theme for the Warrior of Light or more specifically Elidibus, the final unsundered Ancient, "To The Edge", about a man struggling against the end of his people and civilization hits a lot harder with the real life revelation that the composer Masayoshi Soken wrote the song while in the hospital fighting cancer. He stated during the 2021 fanfest that the community's reaction to the song gave him strength to fight the cancer, and currently it is in remission.
- Done deliberately with a small moment in 5.2 when Urianger attempts to walk on water only to stumble and sink, necessitating an annoyed Thancred saving him from drowning while the others jeer him for it. Next patch it's made clear this was the start of Urianger's soul starting to lose its link to his body and closing in on dying, and before long the other Scions begin having these same stumbles and fainting spells.
- Even the game's official cookbook has one instance of this, with the recipe for Knight's Bread. Mogria talks about how she met Haurchefant in Ishgard, who shared this bread with her, and how she would love to meet him again to try Gyohan's version of the recipe, not knowing that Haurchefant is already dead.
Heartwarming in Hindsight: The fact that Patch 3.4 introduced a character named Khloe Aliapoh as well as there have been other Keeper of the Moon Miqo'tes with the Aliapoh surname is possibly this for those who have played the Archer questline.
He's Just Hiding:
- One character's death towards the end of Heavensward has been speculated on basically since it happened. A lot of fans who loved Lahabrea believe that his death in the end of 3.0 isn't true and is just trapped inside Nidhogg's eye used by King Thordan. Despite the fact that Elidibus confirmed that Lahabrea was slain and the fact that Thordan used Lahabrea's soul as fuel for his aether, fans believe that he will be freed from Nidhogg's grip and will be released to fight the Warrior of Light again.^note
- Fans of Gaius believe that he is still alive because they Never Found the Body when he was killed off in 2.0. This is while ignoring the fact that the guy was in the dead center of an explosion while in a weakened state. Fueling this speculation was the fact that Gaius cannot be fought in Palace of the Dead when other slain antagonists can. It ended up being true anyway, with Shadowhunter, who was introduced at the end of 4.3, revealing later on that he is Gaius.
- The same theory was also presented for Papalymo after his Heroic Sacrifice in 3.5, though 3.56 reveals that his magicked tattoo on Yda/Lyse faded away after Shinryu broke free of the cocoon, which signifies that Papalymo is gone for good. He also shows up as a ghost in the end credit sequence for Stormblood, further signifying that he's really dead.
- After Shadowbringers' main story ended, Ran'jit has been added to this list, mostly due to Never Found the Body^note and the character's tendency towards being an Implacable Man and Super-Persistent Predator. A lot of people also consider it a waste that it was the Warrior of Light that finally did him in, instead of Thancred (who had made a personal nemesis of him as Ryne's Parental Substitute) or Ryne (who Ran'jit never even saw after she stopped being "Minfilia" and became her own person to see his reaction) and hope he's alive to die later to either of the two for much better closure to his character arc.
- Similarly from Shadowbringers, while the actual death scene is agreed to be beautiful, many people who love Emet-Selch theorize he didn't actually die or will be able to come back, untempered and ready for a redemption arc. This is thanks to the rather suspicious way he goes out compared to other Ascians, his as-yet unused clone bodies on the Source, and the fact that the white auracite was shattered before he was struck with the Light-axe. Natsuko Ishikawa's coy statement that he's "believed" to have been completely destroyed only adds fuel to the fire. As of 5.3 after the transition phase of the Seat of Sacrifice trial, an Ascian helps out the Warriors of Dark by helping them escape the alternate dimension. What tips off who this Ascian might be is, as they disappear to let the Warriors of Dark resume the fight, they do Emet-Selch's trademark handwave. In Endwalker near the end of the storyline, Azem's magic allows him and Hythlodeus in their prime to briefly come back to life as 'half-dead shades' and help the Warrior of Light, though they, as Hythlodeus puts it, play a bit role and ultimately go back to being dead.
- After the end of the MSQ of Endwalker some people still hold onto the hope that Zenos will survive and come back as a full ally of the Warrior of Light. This is because despite the fact that the camera lingers on his dead, lifeless body for several seconds, he was left in a place filled with dynamis fueled by the emotions of hope the desire to live that could potentially heal him after coming close to death. Additionally, theorists also note that assuming he did heal after the fight, he has teleportation powers granted by the resonant that would allow him an escape from the edge of the universe. It got to the point where the writers, after initially teasing the idea, had to flat out say that for all intents and purpose, Zenos is gone and his role in the story is over, regardless of if he really was alive or dead.
High-Tier Scrappy:
- On the PvE side of things, ever since Endwalker released, some players complained that Warrior was simply too good of a Tank — mainly due to its insane and frequent HP regeneration, its easy to learn skill rotation, and having the best Invulnerability action in the form of Holmgang, which has the shortest cooldown of all Invulnerability actions and virtually none of the downsides. Pretty much the only thing that keeps Warrior from being too busted is that their DPS tends to be fairly low compared to the other Tanks — but even then, it's a minimal difference. Some mains of other Tanks like Paladins and Dark Knights also feel a non-insignificant dislike of Warrior due to the sensation that the developers are trying to make all other Tanks play more like Warrior in their rotation rather than letting the tanking Jobs have their own playstyle.
- On the Crystalline Conflict side of things there's a couple of classes that are a thorn to many players' side.
  - The Warrior is a force of nature in the battle field thanks to packing tons of damage and HP. They also have it a little too easy when getting into the fray, with Primal Rend essentially giving them a nigh-guaranteed safe entry by inflicting Stun to their target and anyone unfortunate to get caught. Since they're also not taking damage for the two seconds given, they're getting free shots on the competition with their abilities scaling from their HP. If you think you can just outrun them, then joke's on you if they dare to use "Blota" to drag you back in, giving you Heavy for good measure. It takes a lot to make them fall, and by the time you're done ganging up on one, you're running dry on abilities to keep fighting. Bloodwhetting, the class's key ability, ended up getting a nerf to reel in some of the Warrior's extreme bulk. Their presence has evened out over time due to players refining counter-strategies, but a good Warrior can still be a pain to deal with.
  - The White Mage, while on the fragile side, brings much-wanted survival to a group if you leave them alone. Their powerful burst heal and damage playstyle carries over, and effectively have a third healing charge, thanks to Seraph Strike granting them Cure III. They also have the extremely powerful Miracle of Nature, which is the only status that can't be cured by anything; it can only be blocked with Guard. They can effectively shut down any person they please because of that. The most damning ability of the kit, however, is their Limit Break, Afflatus Purgation, a 30-yalm laser that inflicts a ton of damage and a 3-second Stun. With good timing, it can easily stop the team's momentum cold and lead to a Total Party Kill that can't be prevented. The class got hit with some nerfs in 6.11, reducing the stun down to 2 seconds and a potency drop for Afflatus Misery, and later a nerf to Miracle of Nature by lowering its range, forcing the White Mage to get in the thick of combat to use it. Much like Warrior, its presence has waned over time, but its power is not to be underestimated.
  - Paladin is a menace to deal with not because of damage, but for the utilities that make them indestructible. Confiteor marks affected enemies with a debuff that heals the user when attacked, and Guardian allows them to jump in and Cover an ally, allowing them to save a critical party member from death. Capping off the kit is their Limit Break "Phalanx" which grants them Hallowed Ground's invulnerability and a powerful defensive buff to their party members, making them harder to kill. What little damage they do is made up for being next to impossible to kill without dogpiling them, and they can share that bulk with their allies, suddenly stopping an all-out assault cold.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- When it was revealed that the Alliance Raid for Shadowbringers would be based on NieR: Automata, people began suspecting that Yoko Taro, being the Mind Screw Trolling Creator he is, would include some kind of strange twist or even possibly Bait-and-Switch the players somehow. When the raid came out, several players experienced a strange situation where a Red Dragon appeared during the raids final boss, causing massive amounts of confusion and Epileptic Trees to begin forming about it being Yoko Taro sneaking in a Drakengard reference. A few days later, it was revealed to be a bug caused by specific circumstances in the teams production of the raid, meaning that Yoko Taro, a man infamous for being a Trolling Creator, didn't create a Mind Screw twist like people thought, but instead the developers managed to accidentally create an even bigger surprise. It's even more Hilarious in Hindsight now with the final raid as it brought back several plot elements from the first Drakengard.
- On a similar note, Yoko Taro stated that his original idea for the Nier raid was to have the final raid delete the players server or character at the end, which was naturally rejected by the developers. When the final Nier raid came out, a glitch/bug afflicted many players where during certain runs, the raid would actually cause the server to crash, meaning that like with the above, the developers managed to accidentally do the very thing Yoko Taro was wanting to do, except by complete accident.
- So remember all those times Magnai looked down on everyone and boasted because he believed he was Azim the Sun Father? It's quite hard not to laugh considering he was telling this to the closest thing to a reincarnation of his god.
- A 2019 April Fools comic shows a High School alternate universe where Alphinaud and Alisaie go to Ishgard Academy wearing appropriate uniforms. In 2020, it was announced that they will make those uniforms available in the game complete with Ishgard emblem.
- When the Reaper class was first revealed, a number of players joked that to get access to it, you needed to level Botanist because both classes use scythes. During the release of the Endwalker benchmark trailer, it was revealed that the first Reapers were Garlean farmers who took up the job in the years before the Garlean Empire to defend themselves, meaning that in lore, this was technically accurate.
- The quest in ARR where your character has to go to some trouble to find some rare grapes became funnier after one of the 'Tales From the Shadows' stories had Azem, the Ancient Amaurotine incarnation of our player character go to some trouble to save an island, at least ostensibly because they liked the grapes there.
- As detailed in Good Bad Bugs, there was a glitch in the first iteration of the Nier: Automata raids that was so specific that people assumed that it was a deliberate Drakengard reference. All later parts of the raid series would end up having completely intended Drakengard references, from a flower machine attacking with something called Life's Last Song to the final boss being a Grotesquerie Queen in the image of One.
- When the game came out, it was so filled with bad bugs and lack of content that Square Enix pulled the game from being sold, completely redoing it and rereleased it. The game has been a steady success over the years, and as of December 2021, the game became so popular, Square Enix once again pulled it from being sold online, because of their servers being overwhelmed with players. Making Final Fantasy XIV possibly the first game to be temporarily removed from sale both for being very bad and for being very good within its active lifespan.
Ho Yay:
- The above mentioned entertainers in Ul'dah don't mind offering their services to female player characters. Also, almost all of said performers happen to be Miqo'te.
- ARR introduced a few more moments like this, such as a Mi'qote (again) who lets players of both genders know she doesn't mind if you look in on her bathing every now and then, and even comments about it if your character is female.
- There's another Mi'qote in Ala Ghiri who says both men and women of the Resistance are welcome to make use of her services.
- Stormblood adds even more yay in general. Of particular note, a Princess whose dedication to her cursed handmaiden draws more than a few parallels to Sleeping Beauty, and a fashion mogul's assistant come from afar who takes a distinct interest in aforementioned Ul'dahn entertainers.
- Shadowbringers has this pop up in its postgame content between Ryne and Gaia during the Eden raid questline, such that Ryne essentially asks Gaia out on a date to sample a treat in the Crystarium's cafe. By the end of the questline, Gaia even begins to reciprocate. Their relationship continues to be developed and plays a key part through the final stages of the raid. The final raid battle even involves a segment delving into Gaia's most precious memories, all of which involves Gaia's time spent with Ryne. The raid epilogue also intentionally recreates several shots from the ending of Final Fantasy VIII, with Gaia and Ryne standing in for Squall and Rinoa respectively. It really doesn't help that the giant crystal in the Empty turns a rainbow color for the final part of the raid series, as the rainbow is closely associated with the LGBT community.
- If the player character is male, there's also the Crystal Exarch. While he explains it as Hero Worship, there are times in the story he appears to come just short of an Anguished Declaration of Love for the Warrior of Light, and his heart's desire is just to battle at their side. During the 5.3 finale, his surrogate daughter even tells you to let him know she wants him to "no longer hide who he truly is, and live his own life to the fullest," which for LGBT+ players sounds suspiciously similar to easing him out of the closet while giving her blessing for him to pursue the player.
- Endwalker gives a considerable amount to Sadu Dotharl. She talks of finding Cirina better company than any of the 'oafish men' of the Steppe, boasts to Magnai that any female warrior they find will bask in her flame instead of his, and, if talked to at a certain point in the story, comments that many female adventurers have given her their linkpearls (the setting's equivalent of phone numbers) during the Garlean expedition, though she doesn't know how they work.
I Knew It!:
- Many people figured that Yugiri's race, and thus the new playable race to be introduced, would be reptilian or draconian peoples. Word of God is that despite their draconic appearance, they're actually more demonic.
- Given the nature of how Achievements are named, you just knew that there were at least more than a few people who expected a "Let it go" reference in patch 2.4 (Dreams of Ice).
- Ilberd being a traitor was guessed by players since the first part of "Before the Fall", even after he called out Eline Roaille for being one.
- When Lucia was introduced, people who manipulated the camera in a certain angle were able to see through her circlet and discovered that she had a third eye underneath, which would make her a Garlean. People quickly assumed that she was and when Heavensward released, Lucia reveals that she is one.
- When Square started to release previews of Heavensward in March 2015, they showed off a dragon mount that could be obtained in the game. Lots of people believed that the dragon in question was Midgardsormr, who had stated in 2.5 that he would be using the Warrior of Light's blessing to strengthen himself. At the end of 3.0, Midgardsormr transforms and gains an adult dragon's body, allowing the Warrior of Light to ride him.
- After patch 3.3, Nidhogg's defeat in 3.3 has the Warrior of Light and Alphinaud throw the wyrm's eyes into the abyss below the Steps of Faith so that no one can get them and would be out of harm's way. After the Warriors of Darkness watched the eyes take the plunge, people speculated that the eyes would be retrieved and used for something awful. Fast forward to patch 3.4 and the ending shows an Ascian giving an Ala Mhigo rebel leader both of Nidhogg's eyes frozen in a shard of ice.
- During The Rising in 2015, players were taken to the 18th Floor (a Mythology Gag to Final Fantasy IV) and got the chance to converse with Naoki Yoshida, who noted that the next expansion was already in the planning stages and could potentially include a swimming mechanic and the long-awaited Red Mage job, leading fans to speculate that Yoshida was speaking the truth, before Tokyo Fan Fest 2016 confirmed both to be true.
- The identity of the masked rebel leader "The Griffin" was long thought to be Ilberd, Flame General Raubahn's Evil Former Friend. Come 3.5, and the Griffin was revealed to be... Ilberd. To the surprise of no one besides Alphinaud.
- The female monk in the Stormblood trailer was long thought to be either Yda, or her unseen-but-alluded-to sister. Come Patch 3.56 and both camps turned out to be correct, with the woman indeed turning out to be "Yda", but combined with the revelation that the Yda players had come to know was in fact her sister Lyse pulling a Dead Person Impersonation. A few fans even managed to predict that twist, too!
- In the trailer for 4.1, Pipin is heard saying to Raubahn "Is this what you really want, father?" Many people speculated that Raubahn was going to leave Ul'dah and return home to Ala Mhigo. In the main story, people were correct about Raubahn leaving, but it wasn't by his own will. It was Nanamo who relieved him from his role in the Syndicate and the Immortal Flames and convinced him to return home like he always wanted.
- When the full Shadowbringers trailer came out, it showed a figure in the Crystal Tower, watching the Warrior of Light fight. Many people guessed that it must be G'raha Tia, and were revealed to be correct late in the 5.0 main story.
- A common theory post-Omegascape was that Omega had survived by uploading his brain into the toy Omega that Wedge made that Alpha takes with him on his journeys. The Tales from the Shadow entry "A World Forsaken" makes this explicit right in its opening lines, being framed as the observation of a Heel Face Turned Omega.
- Themis' identity as Elidibus. Aside from Venat, he's the only ancient with white robes, he outright mentions remembering seeing the Warrior of Light in Elpis briefly, and in The Stinger of Endwalker, he has a speaking role despite his face being obscured by camera angles. His voice is distinct enough for sharp-eared players to connect the dots before his identity got revealed.
- Many players predicted that the post-Endwalker story would have Azdaja turning into Golbez's Shadow Dragon, since she has a similar body style and shape to this dragon's initial design. This played out pretty much as expected in the 6.4 MSQ.
- Deryk's identity turns out to be as Oschon, the Wanderer. This was of little surprise, as he partakes in the wanderer's lifestyle, and there was a noticeable loophole in that the Twelve just needs to keep their true forms hidden. While the Twelve prefers animal guises, they never said it has to be animal forms. Oschon opted for a human form that resembles an in-universe depiction◊ of himself. The developers knew the players caught on quickly; just before the final raid in the "Myths of the Realm" arc, the player can choose a dialogue option making it clear that the Warrior of Light correctly deduced Deryk's identity from the start.
- A lot of people thought that the mysterious visitor from the New World in The Stinger of 6.5 part 1 would be the long-awaited female Hrothgar due to the way that the camerawork was trying very hard to not actually show her figure above the waistline, especially when dataminers got a sly finger wag from the dev team by making it so that she was literally just the pair of legs with no modelled upper body. The 2024 Japanese fanfest would confirm this by showing her at the end of the full Dawntrail cinematic and confirming that she was the character that we saw in the stinger.
Informed Wrongness:
- The whole incident with Emmanellain in 3.2 can come across this way. Emmanellain accidentally orders an unarmed woman shot, but it's undermined completely by the fact that the 'unarmed' woman had poisoned a dozen people including the Warrior of Light, was trying to restart a war, and was obviously not going to stand down any other way. It can be very hard to believe he was acting out of line in light of that. Also, as Emmanellain points out, he ordered his guards to "stop" the protestor, not "shoot" the protestor. While this is supposed to come off as splitting hairs, he kind of has a point that it's not what he meant. Notably, the Warrior of Light and Thancred take more issue with Emmanellain refusing to admit responsibility for how the incident played out, but even this can be a bit difficult to accept since Emmanellain wasn't the cause of things escalating that quickly, everything that happened was the result of people doing things he couldn't prevent. It doesn't help that Emmanellain, for all his seeming cowardness, makes it clear he did not want to be involved but was forced to.
- During the main quest "A Guilty Conscience", Hien is portrayed as being in the wrong for making a judgment call about a hanging plot thread from the Stormblood 4.0 chapter. He wants to kill Yotsuyu after she is discovered alive but with amnesia, with characters treating it like this would be killing an innocent person. The issue is that she has the blood of untold numbers of his people on her hands, and Hien has no reason to believe her memory loss is actually real and not a ploy. (Her amnesia is real, but nobody could have been sure of that at the time.) Furthermore, his approach to resolving it shows he isn't being a heartless monster, but worried that Yotsuyu being left alive would be worse for his people, and he ends up being proven right when Asahi manipulates events to have her regain her memories and become a primal of her own free will. While characters in-universe do admit that the situation is rather morally hazy no matter what they do, Hien being portrayed as incorrect for wanting Yotsuyu dead regardless of if she has amnesia or not can come across as sticking to morality a little too closely.
- At several points across the story someone from the Garlean Empire will challenge the heroes on why, if they claim to want peace, that they insist on waging war against the Empire instead of submitting to Garlean rule. This is apparently supposed to be a solid critic, as the heroes invariably fail to provide a rebuttal and tend to agree the other person has a point, but refuse to side with the Empire because of the morally dubious things they do. Yet the Garlean Empire is horrifically oppressive, as is shown many times throughout the game, with there only being one or two moderately reasonable leaders. And there being a significant gap between wanting peace and being willing to accept being conquered and enslaved by a tyrannical opposing force. Similarly, a Sharlayan official calls out Alphinaud and Alisaie on how they violated their homeland's principles of neutrality by fighting in the war, and asking what could be worth the blood they shed. The twins have no answer, and Alphinaud later remarks he's been struggling with the question for some time. The obvious answer of "I'm protecting the innocent, freeing slaves, and ending oppression" seemingly avoids him for the longest time.
In Memoriam: The English VA for Master Matoya, Sheila Steafel, passed away during the time period between the end of the Stormblood patches and patch 5.4 of Shadowbringers. As a dedication to her, Y'shtola's first line mentioning Matoya has a subtle shout out in her memory.
Y'shtola: Yet there is an authority on familiars to whom we may grudgingly turn. She's stubborn, haughty, eccentric, irrascible, laconic, annoying—and her name is Master Matoya. The real one.
It's Easy, So It Sucks!:
- Many veterans of Final Fantasy XI and legacy players from 1.0 see Final Fantasy XIV as too easy and that a lack of punishment for failure is unappealing. People also see the hard mode dungeons as pathetically easy, despite the fact that said dungeons were designed for people who just finished the main story line and weren't made for people who have the best gear. Old content that have their difficulty reduced to allow new or struggling players to catch up are also seen as promoting bad players in the eyes of the more hardcore players. During the 2014 fan fest, Word of God stated that 2.0 was made easy on purpose since they were catering towards people who never played an MMORPG before. They also stated that with the level cap being raised to 60 when 3.0 launched, there will be increased danger and difficulty since the training wheels are now off.
- The way to progress the Manderville Weapons, the Relics in Endwalker, became contentious among the hardcore raid scene because of how easy it was. A player first needs to complete the Hildibrand questline to get to the point they can obtain the relic; this leads to a few unique raids, but none of them are particularly challenging save maybe the last one. Once you've got that done, you only need to spend the second-highest-level Tomestones of any given moment to get the items needed to create or upgrade the weapons. Players of the hardcore mindset were by-and-large upset that grinding Tomestones was far easier to do than anything of the previous Relic grinds, since a player only needs six thousand such Tomestones to fully upgrade the Relic, which can be done easily over the course of a few days. As such, these Relic weapons became relatively commonplace at the end of the Endwalker life cycle, which was argued by these hardcore players to make them less special. However, this belief is far from universal, as just as many players argued that the grind for these Relics was much better, arguing that it was much more straightforward and easy to do on their own time instead of being locked behind content that they didn't have the skill or time to do.
It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
- While the balance of endgame content is generally pretty good, this issue nearly killed the competitive raiding scene in Heavensward with the first wing of the Alexander Savage raids. The developers overestimated the player base's preparedness for the first four Savage raids, and were still feeling out how they wanted to handle the difficulty of Savage compared to Normal. The result was a brutal, unforgiving, slip-up-and-die, mechanically-intense mess of boss fights that made hundreds of prospective hardcore raiders just outright stop. Yoshi-P and the dev team actually had to apologize after they realized how difficult that the third and fourth Savage raids were, and made sure to test the balance and look closer at the mechanics for Savage raids much more closely. From then on out, the balance and mechanics of Savage raids have generally been much better, but the early Alexander Savage raids remain some of the game's hardest, despite being some of the earliest ones.
- This also did some damage in 6.3 with Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage). While the fight's mechanics were perfectly sensible once you got the Puzzle Boss elements down, the team's internal raid testers were too good at doing Savage content, and heavily misread how much damage your average Savage party would be doing. This resulted in the Savage-only second phase of this fight being such a tight DPS check that there were some group compositions that legitimately could not clear it, because some classes literally could not damage the boss enough before its Total Party Kill move. This was a very bad thing to have in a game that generally thrives in having every class be competitive enough to be taken along for high-end content. This led to another apology from Yoshi-P and the team, as well as a massive HP nerf to the final boss, with a promise they'd be a little better about properly gauging the outgoing damage of a party while progressing.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
- People accused the Heavensward expansion pack of being this, claiming that the routines from 2.0 (gear acquisition, farming methods, etc) are the same in 3.0. 3.15 didn't help matters with the new relic weapons by making their acquisition exactly the same as the Atma relics by having players farm FATEs to obtain items with low drop rates. The same pattern repeated itself up to 3.4, leaving many players who hoped for a substantial change rather disappointed, with many wondering if the next expansion will be more of the same formula over and over again, or if the development team will somehow change the usual routine. Stormblood gained similar reactions.
- Eureka, which was already heavily divided amongst the players in the Anemos chapter, was declared to be this in the Pagos chapter for literally just doing the same thing as Anemos.
Jerkass Woobie:
- Liavinne, an Elezen Archer you meet during the starting dungeons of the three regions. When you first meet her, she has a bottle in her hand laughing her ass off at Avere berating Edda for not being able to obtain enough potions before going into Sastasha. Then after completing Tam-Tara Deepcroft, you see Liavinne's party have a Breaking the Fellowship moment where Avere has died and she places the blame solely on Edda for the latter's incompetent healing, going as far as saying that she never liked her and only tolerated for her healing abilities. After running into her in the Waking Sands, you then realize why she never liked Edda and how Avere's death has affected her.^note She then gets killed when the Garleans attack the Waking Sands, and her corpse is later dug up and reanimated by Edda to serve as the first boss of The Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard).
- A good number of Tragic Villains fall under this such as Foulques of the Mist and Eline Roaille.
- The Garleans themselves fall under this trope too - they were subjected to Fantastic Racism due to their inability to use magic, and they pushed into a land that's very inhospitable. As a result, they were forced to make due with Magitech or even make pacts with Voidsent (in the case of Reapers) in order to survive. And that's before the events of Shadowbringers and Endwalker...
Launcher of a Thousand Ships: From Heavensward on, it becomes more and more blatant that the Warrior of Light has a tendency to gain the admiration of those around them, regardless of gender. If there's an important ally, it's very likely that they show signs of having a crush on the WoL.
Like You Would Really Do It:
- The ending cinematic of A Realm Reborn depicts the Scions of the Seventh Dawn being labeled criminals and suspected of assassination. As they escape from Ul'dah, all the Scions perform a Bolivian Army Ending so that the Warrior of Light could escape Heavensward with Alphinaud and Tataru. Of course, surprising absolutely nobody, none of them actually die, even the Sultana or Raubahn. This actually made the post-patch storylines of Heavensward surprising, because Minfilia and Papalymo actually do die, albeit for different reasons.
- The climax of A Realm Reborn also adds one from a gameplaly purposes - It ends with the Warrior of Light and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn being framed for regicide, and thus they are considered wanted criminals in-universe. This obviously doesn't hinder the characters' ability to travel around Thalanan or even anywhere else in Eorzea. It is however acknowledged that this wouldn't be very fair. Parodied in Final Fantasy In A Nutshell.
- Played much more straight in Endwalker. Where, in Ultima Thule, all the Scions perform a Heroic Sacrifice in groups of one or two so that the Warrior of Light can progress, eventually culminating in the Warrior of Light being alone. All while pretending like they were Killed Off for Real. While intended to be sad, some players found this unintentionally funny, simply because they knew that there was no way the narrative would build up all of these characters for that long, just to kill them off in such an anti-climax.
Loot Drama:
- Surprisingly, there's very little drama over loot thanks to how loot is handled. All loot found in dungeons and trials are determined by a Need VS Greed system via dice rolling. Players rolling Need get higher priority over those that roll Greed (unless no one rolls for Need, then it's about who rolled better for Greed), but you can only roll Need for miscellaneous items or gear that your current class can actually use. (It can however cause drama) However, patch 2.1 added an extremely rare mount from primal Extreme fights; it's a black unicorn called Nightmare, which is pretty much a Palette Swap of the normal Unicorn players can unlock. The Nightmare mount has caused quite a bit of drama due to its rarity and the fact that it can only be found by fighting really difficult bosses.
- The Atma items needed to create a player's Atma weapons have also caused heavy drama between those who got the items quickly and those who haven't been as lucky.
- 3.2 introduced music scrolls that could be obtained in a variety of ways and one of them involves clearing the old Crystal Tower raid series. Since the scrolls drop from coffers, they have to be rolled on and there has been much drama over who should get the rare scrolls. This is also the same case for the Echidna card in the Void Ark, which used to be a random drop before 3.2 changed it by having the card appear in a coffer that must also be rolled for and there's nothing stopping players from rolling on the card if they had already claimed one for their deck. 3.3 changed the Echidna card to once again drop straight into your inventory to avoid the drama.
- And then 5.1 gave us the Copied Factory, which as offers as its final reward a Coffer Chest which awards of a full set of glamour gear letting a character dress up like 2B. Unfortunately, it's a loot roll like any other, that the entire raid rolls for, and only three of them are up for drop at a time. Cue people running the raid nonstop in an attempt to get the set, and even after days of running the raid coming up with nothing. Worse, while the coffer is a unique item, preventing players from rolling on it if they already have one, until 6.0 this check only looked for the coffer, not the items inside it, allowing players to go for multiple copies and making the odds worse for everyone.
Love to Hate: The true Big Bad of the Pandaemonium Raid series, Athena ended up widely beloved after they debuted in full during the final tier, Anabaseios, entirely because of their utterly irredeemable actions, insane goals, and sinister portrayal, with many considering it strangely enough a breath of fresh air to have a completely classically evil antagonist after the rest of the expansion's lifetime largely focused on tragic ones, especially when it comes to their completely heartless relationships with their own family and colleagues.
Low-Tier Letdown: Dark Knight, at least on the PvE side of things, has the misfortune of being viewed as the worst tank class/job, and the reasons for this are threefold:
- Dark Knight is a Glass Cannon when compared to fellow tanks, with the highest burst damage among them and putting out numbers comparable to melee DPS. However, with that power comes MP management. This means the Dark Knight has to rely on only two/three actions to get MP back, something the other tanks either don't have to worry about or just flat-out ignore — the Paladin gets a good amount of skills that alleviate the MP burden, which the Dark Knight doesn't have the luxury of, while the other two classes rely on their own resource (the Warrior's Fury and the Gunbreaker's Cartridges) without using MP at all.
- Dark Knight has an invulnerability that, in an almost ironic twist, straight up kills the user if they aren't healed back to full HP (though 6.1 would at least improve it). The Dark Knight also has two Anti-Magic mitigation buffs that are hard to figure out the best opportunities for, since the game doesn't clarify which attacks count as magic damage. Patch 6.3 changed it so that attacks show if they're physical or magical, but this only comes after the damage has already been done (literally). What's worse, the Dark Knight has only two skills that restore their HP, one of which has a 60-second cooldown and shares a recast timer with a different ability, meaning that it's often unavailable, while the other is the third hit of their basic 1-2-3 combo, which makes it hard to use and doesn't even restore much HP when it lands. All of this means that Dark Knights are far squishier than they should be for a tank, and thus have to be especially focused on by healers in order to stay alive.
- Endwalker especially had these issues on display when it came to new toolkits; Warrior became the go-to tank because of its absurdly good self-healing, Gunbreaker's damage and support abilities made it a good off-tank, and Paladin got more offensive tools and support for its magic. The Dark Knight got practically nothing in comparison, furthering its status as the worst tank job in the eyes of many players.

M-N

Magnificent Bastard:
- Gaius van Baelsar is the Legatus of the XIVth Legion of the Garlean Empire and their main military commander during their campaign to conquer Eorzea. Although he champions the right of the strong to rule the weak, he does not approve of reckless genocide and opposes Project Meteor, and discretely aids the Adventurer in sabotaging it. In the wake of the Seventh Umbral Calamity, he recovers the Ultima Weapon and uses it to absorb the primals of the beast tribes, giving him a seemingly unstoppable weapon to subjugate the Eorzean Alliance. When the Ultima Weapon is destroyed, Gaius abandons his rank and armor and becomes a mercenary hunting the Ascians, trying to determine their influence over the Empire and root it out. To this end he even works alongside the Adventurer and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn to thwart the Empire's increasingly amoral weapons of war, disgusted that they would stoop to chemical weapons and human experimentation. Though he remains loyal to Garlemald as a nation, Gaius holds to his philosophies and morals rather than be blind to what they've become.
- Alexander, "the Creator", is the mighty primal of the Goblin Illuminati and a powerful time-traveling fortress, driven by a desire to create a perfect world. Knowing that his very nature means that a "perfect world" can't be as long as he exists, Alexander orchestrates a Stable Time Loop that ensures that the tragedy leading to both his summoning and eventual end comes to pass, while minimizing his own impact on Eorzea and the flow of time as a whole. With his calculations failing him in regards to the Warrior of Light's future, Alexander judges them worthy of inheriting his dream for a perfect world during a battle with them, sending them back in time to save their past self from a deathtrap. With the defeat of the goblins, Alexander locks himself into stasis to prevent himself from causing further harm, eventually sending Mide and her lover back to the distant past to ensure all events play out as intended while giving them the happy ending they deserve.
- Emet-Selch is one of the Ascians, dedicated to resurrecting their god Zodiark by initiating Rejoinings between the Source and its shards. As one of their most cunning members, Emet-Selch carefully manipulates events to cause Rejoinings through mass destruction and chaos, and will spend decades or even centuries overseeing the execution of his plans. When the Warrior of Light and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn prove themselves a repeated thorn in his side, Emet-Selch tells them he thinks they should be his allies and explains that the Ascians are trying to restore the world to the paradise they knew in ancient times. Though he is slain by the Warrior of Light, Emet-Selch's spirit returns to help them on several occasions, and he ultimately comes to accept that the civilization he lost is truly gone. When his spirit finally fades away for good, he does so with a smile, entrusting the legacy of the world to the Warrior of Light and their comrades.
- Fandaniel was once known as the Ancient Hermes, and his experiences in their society and in his reincarnated life as Amon drove him to believe there is no purpose to living but to die. As a member of the Ascians, Fandaniel does not share their vision of resurrecting Zodiark, but instead seeks to destroy the world and himself with it. He works alongside Zenos with promises to help him free Zodiark so he can possess it, and then betrays him and takes control of Zodiark himself to battle the Warrior of Light. Though he is defeated, he reveals this is what he wanted, as he got the death he desired and believes he has ensured the destruction of the world without Zodiark to protect it. Between them, Fandaniel and his incarnations run the gamut from hammy Omnicidal Maniac to pitiable Tragic Villain, and he dies for the last time being both at once.
Memetic Badass: Godbert Manderville, owner of the infamous Manderville Gold Saucer. Even in his introduction, when he's shown as having felled a full grown chimera naked with nothing but a goldsmith's hammer, people began talking up his other incredible feats of strength, theorizing he's anything from an incarnation of Byregot (the god of craft) to an elder primal. The fanbase's reaction may have been why he was granted a role in the main story as one of the leaders of the syndicate, and later Hildibrand story quests have him topping himself with even more ridiculous feats like using a limit break by himself that makes his hammer grow as big as a small house, and using it to call down the equivalent of an orbital laser.
Memetic Loser:
- In spite of the game's attempts to portray them as intimidating, machiavellian schemers and powerful sorcerers manipulating the affairs of the world from the shadows, many of the Ascians have... less than flattering depictions by the fanbase for one reason or another.
  - Despite being one of the main antagonists for A Realm Reborn and being the acknowledged leader of the Ascians, Lahabrea gets treated as the biggest loser in the game by the fandom due to the fact that his boss fight at the end of the main ARR content is an absolute joke, his rather stock and one-note Smug Snake characterization, as well the fact that even his fellow Ascians show him no respect whatsoever. Has become something of an Ascended Meme, as even after his death, whenever he gets brought up by one of his colleagues it's usually just to point out how incompetent he was. To add some meta salt in the wound, he doesn't even have a unique boss theme, unlike his other unsundered brethren! It's to the point that not even Yoshi-P and translator/lore developer Michael Christopher Koji Fox can remember his name during the announcement of his return in the 8-man raid series Pandæmonium for 6.x!
  - His fellow Ascian Elidibus has begun to attain this status around the end of Stormblood, due to having multiple plans blow up in his face and getting beaten down by two separate characters in rapid succession, one of them offscreen. At the end of Shadowbringers, he even acknowledges that his status as a manipulative schemer has fallen to pieces and that he's basically winging it now. Fortunately, he rebounded hard with patches 5.2 and 5.3, turning around into being a very popular villain through his very sympathetic background and rather awesome final battle.
  - Fandaniel became one of these in his debut cutscene. His claim to "fame" is giving a hammy evil monologue... to an utterly bored-looking Zenos who doesn't even remember his name. Even his greenlighting of Fandaniel's plan sounds more like he just wants the guy to shut up and leave already. It also doesn't help that he possesses Asahi, one of the most punchable characters in the story.
- Gaius, specifically in his appearance in the Praetorium, is very memed on in the community. On top of his very hammy dialogue, some very impatient players managed to find exploits that allowed them to kill Gaius while he's monologuing during an unskippable cutscene, causing players to joke that by his lengthy monologue ends, the dungeon is already over.
- Rhitahtyn (and to an extent the Cape Westwind Trial) deserves special mention for being hilariously easy and subsequently mocked by the playerbase as that funny guy that gets his ass kicked by everyone even underleveled sprouts. It's been a tradition by the playerbase to deliberately hype up his boss fights, calling them one of the hardest boss in ARR endgame, even making "guides" on how to properly defeat him, usually to troll newcomers into overly preparing, only to met with disappointment. When Cape Westwind got reworked back in 6.1 (and subsequently making Rhitahtyn a threatening boss), fans mourned it's loss.
- Not just for a specific characters, but for an entire gendered species as a whole, the Male Roegadyn is this compared to their female counterparts, likely due to the goofy expression and awkward body proportions that's trying too hard to look badass and/or intimidating. Because of this, players who want to play the game seriously while still looks rugged and badass would rather pick Hrothgar or Highlander Hyur over picking Male Roes, and those who still pick Male Roes are either memeing, roleplaying as Shrek, homosexual or some combination of those.
- The Hrothgar race is this just behind Male Roes. While they're not as goofy-looking as the male Roes (in fact they're look pretty badass), they get the short end of the stick for not being able to put on most hats (besides glasses and full helmets) onto them, which limits their cosmetic potential by a large margin. The Vieras also receives this treatment to a lesser extent since they also can't wear most hats, but they still have much less restriction with other cosmetics compared to Hrothgar, not to mention the release of male Vieras boosts the race's popularity even further. Needless to say, expect to see Hrothgar players to tirelessly beg the devs to give them hats praying for it to finally come, or just follow the temptation and install the illegal mods that allows Hrothgars to wear hats.
Memetic Mutation: But of course.
Misaimed Fandom:
- Zenos Yae Galvus of Stormblood and Endwalker is meant to be wholly unsympathetic, an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight whose perverse pursuit of the Warrior of Light is a hindrance at best, and world-ending at worst. And yet, some finds find that Zenos claiming that the Warrior is his "best friend" is completely sincere, and wish they could reciprocate, which is not at all what was intended by the narrative.
  - Zenos drops one line at the very end of 4.0, which clues into his character and why he is the way he is. Many people actually end up feeling quite a lot of sympathy for him, despite the fact that Zenos was prolonging the wars in Doma and Ala Mhigo basically because he was bored, and was said to have oppressed and killed thousands of people. Just before he kills himself, Zenos says "Farewell, my first friend. My enemy." This caused a few people to look at Zenos more sympathetically as a Lonely Rich Kid who just wanted a friend, when it's meant to make him come across as even more insane.
  - His appearance in Endwalker got much the same treatment. In this expansion, he's doggedly pursuing the Warrior of Light, and even committing various atrocities just to goad the Warrior into fighting him. Zenos makes it clear the whole time that this is all he wants, which makes him come off as an obsessed stalker. But it's the very end of the 6.0 expansion that really alters his character in the eyes of many. Right before the Post-Final Boss fight with him, Zenos asks the Warrior of Light if they're just as much of a Blood Knight as he is. It's possible to agree with him, with the Warrior of Light even giving a Grin of Audacity as they do, to which Zenos is positively delighted. But the other two responses of three are dismissive, the last one in particular being outright hostile in an I'll Kill You! kind of way. The idea that the Warrior of Light is his best friend is also undermined by a speech right before fighting the Endsinger, where the Warrior can either reject Zenos offering to help or just insist that they're not going to save him. In short, the narrative makes it clear that the idea of the Warrior of Light and Zenos being anywhere close to Friendly Enemy terms is laughable, yet some people take it completely at face value and insist that Zenos really is the Warrior's closest friend.
- Thanks to Shadowbringers, there are a number of people who claim that the Ascians are right, and that the heroes are dumb for not helping them, or at least, that the heroes are wrong for stopping them. The game repeatedly has the heroes acknowledge that the Ascians' goal of restoring their people after the doom that befell them is an understandable motive, but that their past doesn't justify all the innocent lives ruined by them. It gets to the point that even though, by patch 5.3, it gets acknowledged that even if they succeed, things cannot be as they once were before, some players still think the Ascians are justified, no matter how much the game points out their plans are doomed.
Misblamed: When Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 was first released in 2010, it was panned heavily from critics and players alike for being full of glitches, having illogical gameplay mechanics, and having a lot of Cut and Paste Environments. Hiromichi Tanaka was originally the director, and despite also directing the successful Final Fantasy XI at the time, he got all of the blame for the failure that Final Fantasy XIV went through (In contrast to his replacement, Naoki Yoshida, where he is praised for every good thing that happened to the game), both by angry fans and the higher-ups, which resulted with him being forced out of the project, before leaving Square Enix in 2012 due to health issues (with a note that he had been one of Square's founders in the 1980s). Although he was rather famously awkward with the news media in general and made some specific gaffes during the initial press cycle for XIV, the more forgiving fans feel Tanaka was made to take the fall for a disaster that had a lot of responsible parties by the higher-ups.
Narm: Has its own page.
Narm Charm: During the battle with Fandaniel in Endwalker, he triumphantly declares "all of existence, bent to my will!" as he dramatically...rotates the arena 90 degrees. It's kind of silly for such a grandiose boast to be said for what is a rather mundane show of power when you think about it. However, the tactic makes for an effective Interface Screw that can catch players off-guard and probably means they'll be taking massive damage in short order, so it's still legitimately intimidating and cool.
Never Live It Down:
- Alphinaud is a Base-Breaking Character character among the fandom. Those who dislike him tend to cite his cocky attitude throughout the A Realm Reborn storyline and still bring it up as a reason to hate him, even though Heavensward and Stormblood gave him major Character Development that made him mature and grow from his mistakes. Likewise, Minfilia is still seen as a useless character that "never does anything and is always kidnapped", even though she is only kidnapped twice and everything she does do in the story is more focused politics and negotiation instead of combat.
- A cutscene in 2.5 with the WoL and Tataru at Costa Del Sol ends with Tataru pulling a rather suspicious smirk after the WoL leaves. Even long after the whole Monetarists arc is done and dusted people still use it as evidence she will eventually betray the Scions. That being said, the Monetarists arc does come off somewhat as having ended because the devs simply forgot about it rather than because it came to a proper conclusion, so who knows.
- Thanks to events of Stormblood (wherein Lyse leaves the Scions of the Seventh Dawn), she's only known as a character who was "annoying".

Obvious Beta: Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 was released lacking so many features, and with so many known serious game design problems, that it was more of an obvious alpha. Unusually, the developers actually apologized for it and canceled subscription fees until it was deemed to be up to snuff — essentially, putting it right back into beta. The game was eventually rereleased in a much more complete form as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.
Older Than They Think:
- While the series using different names for races similar to each other (for example, Elvaan and Elezen) is nothing new, the twist of the protagonist entering a familiar world using different race names from what they are used to was used in Final Fantasy: Lost Stranger, which was published in 2017, two years before Shadowbringers.
- Some people consider this game to be the first 'true' story and cutscene focused MMORPG; however, the abundance of in-engine cutscenes and dialogue-heavy quests instead of quest boxes was already present all the way back in Final Fantasy XI in 2002.
- The idea of a "Shield healer/Proactive healer" (ie, Sage and Scholar) who focuses more on shielding allies&damage mitigation is thought of as being invented by this game. It wasn't - this actually dates back to games such as EverQuest.
- The "Meta" of one healer & one shielder has also thought of as been invented by this game. It actually dates back to Guild Wars. Because its maximum party size was eight, the Player Character Calculus allowed for more specialised role(s) such as a healer specialising in shields to protect characters to ease the healer. In fact, the idea of more than one tank was also a thing in MMORPGs at the time.
Once Original, Now Common: A Realm Reborn singlehandledly saved Final Fantasy XIV and played a major role in pulling Square Enix out of a rut it had been in for years. Its advanced but still simple-to-grasp combat, a unique story focused on making the player an actual character compared to MMORPG titles, and the overall improvements made to it compared to the original launch helped elevate the game into a strong contender in the genre, ultimately becoming perhaps the only subscription-based MMO to ever seriously threaten World of Warcraft's spot at the top. But as time went on, the original ARR has come to be seen as less of a base game and more of a barrier to the much more polished expansions that have since come to define the game's popularity. It's not uncommon to have people who joined after any of the expansions released to say that the ARR section of the story is the biggest hurdle in enjoying the game. Common complaints are the very black-and-white story (especially compared to much more complex villains down the road), one-dimensional characters, and simplistic mechanics all-around. And yet, were it not for this part of the game, XIV would not have become the MMO juggernaut that it's known as.

P-R

Padding:
- Invoked with the Seventh Astral Era, which takes place between A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. One of the reasons it's so long is because Square Enix was stalling for time, as Heavensward wasn't ready yet and had to keep making players wait a little longer until it was good to go. While patch 5.3 cut some of the filler, it's still eighty quests long even after trimming, which includes things such as trying to play hide and seek with Doman refugees.
- A criticism of Endwalker is that any time the story focuses around the Loporrits, the overall narrative grinds to a halt. The Loporrits are more comical in tone compared to everything else in the expansion, so they're used as a way to take the edge off. But because the two major times you focus on the Loporrits come after Wham Episodes, it feels as if the Loporrits are just there to stall for time. In particular, the second half of the Labyrinthos visit is disliked for being forced to do filler quests before the story proper picks back up. While the Loporrits do factor into the narrative, the excessive amounts of quests focusing on them and the tomfoolery within can be a bit of a slog.
Pandering to the Base:
- According to the artbook, the art directors had cosplayers in mind when designing the Miqo'te knowing they would be a favorite among them.
- What made and broke the Red Mage job during the Stormblood era. Fans begged for Red Mage to be added since the game began. Creative liberties had to be taken to make it a believable magic DPS, and it started out too strong. Fans complained it was overshadowing other pure damage DPS jobs, so the job got nerfed hard. After a few quality of life quirks, it was pretty good as a mid tier DPS but was always in the shadow of other magic DPS jobs. As of Shadowbringers, Red Mage once again feels satisfying to play, but it took a whole expansion of ironing out the job to match its identity while being worth playing in the highest level of play.
Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: The relationship between Thancred and Minfilia has been misconstrued as having romantic overtones for a large portion of the playerbase. It helps that in-universe, Krile even asks Thancred if he's romantically interested in her. That said, he clearly shuts her down on that notion. And indeed, his relationship to her is a mixture of father and older brother. It helps that the origins of their relationship are depicted in 1.0, and for players starting in 2.0, their relationship isn't expanded beyond Thancred really cares for her until Shadowbringers. Because of this, many felt his desires to save her were romantic in nature, when Word of God explicitly states that they aren't.
Play-Along Meme: The battle against the Endsinger in Endwalker has a moment where one of the tanks need to Limit Break in order to protect the party against a One-Hit Kill. The boss then repeats the attack immediately after, and the party seemingly wipes before it's revealed to be a fake-out. It's not uncommon for veterans of the fight to play along with the game's intent, and pretend to newcomers that they've forgotten a mechanic and will need to reset the fight as the second attack goes off.
Player Punch:
- So you've finally made it to Stormblood. You finally get to see just how bad things are in Ala Mhigo for yourself, so much so that they drove Ilberd to sacrifice his own life and that of countless other Ala Mhigans to summon a primal to try to liberate it, and it is pretty bad: there's a strong sense of powerlessness while you watch the Imperials (almost literally) grinding the citizenry into the dirt, the people barely manage to scrape by, and the Resistance, though far from ready to give in completely, is still jaded and tired, barely able to get their countrymen to even support their actions, much less join them. That being said, you're the Warrior of Light! The one who beat Ultima Weapon, ended the Dragonsong War, and slew countless Ascians and primals alike! So you just run around, doing a few errands and helping out, rebuilding the peoples' broken wills and even bolstering the ranks of the Resistance a bit, and you're about to make your first major play by taking an Imperial Fortress, and you...oops, turns out the Imperials didn't like you doing all that, and they just personally massacred a goodly number of the Resistance and citizenry alike...and nearly killed Y'shtola in the process. Now the people are even more broken and hopeless. You didn't think it was going to be that easy to free an entire country from decades of occupation and oppression, did you?
- Shadowbringers's endgame has a double (or triple depending on your perspective) whammy: so you've slain all but one of the Lightwardens and restored night to most of Norvrandt; all that remains is Innocence/Vauthry in Mt. Gulg. It's known at this point that you're straining under the corrupted aether of the Lightwardens you've absorbed so far, but with no other choice, you make your final move and strike Innocence down, restoring the final night's sky and absorbing the last of the aether. Unfortunately, it proves too much to bear at last, and the fact becomes clear that if allowed, you'll become the final Lightwarden, dooming Norvrandt. All seems lost...and then the Exarch reveals his true plan. He will absorb the corrupted aether from you, take it into the rift, and die there, allowing it to dissipate harmlessly. He says his goodbyes...then he's mortally wounded from behind mid-sacrifice by Emet-Selch, who reveals that he knew about the Exarch's plan, and that his "long game" was to thwart it at the last minute. He abducts the Exarch and flees, and invites you to join him in the abyss for your final, unavoidable transformation that will end both the First and the Source and bring about his ultimate victory. Thankfully, this ends up ultimately averted, but things get very dire for a time, and there's a definite sense of "all is lost" up until you resolve to storm Emet-Selch's domain at Amaurot to rescue the Exarch.
- In Endwalker, you go to Garlemald at last to try and save their people from a Fate Worse than Death. Unfortunately, not only are they wary for a completely understandable reason, but there's one part where you discover injured people who managed to avoid Tempering. One of which is a girl who is implied to be a teenager and the only one not elderly or injured. You find out that she has an injured sister but they take the medicine you leave and flee, because they are afraid of you. Unfortunately, the next time you find them is when they're dead.
Play the Game, Skip the Story:
- Despite the game having an incredibly rich lore on even the most minor things, some people simply don't care about the story and will skip every cutscene or dialogue box just to be able to advance or get their gear without being slowed down by the text. While this is not a problem normally, the people who don't care about the story tend to get lumped with the people who do care (or at least first timers to the content and wish to experience it), leading to some rather unpleasant experiences all around. Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium are the worst offenders, having significantly more mid-dungeon cutscenes and simultaneously many more players who've already run it dozens of times (as these two dungeons have a daily roulette all to themselves). It was primarily for this reason that all cutscenes in dungeons and trials released since 3.0 take place at the beginning or the end.
- Taken another step further with the Story Skip potions where using it allows the player to flag all the story content as cleared so they can reach the end without having to slog through all the quests.
Popular with Furries: The Miqo'te were already this, but once the Hrothgar were added in, the furry fandom virtually exploded.
Purposely Overpowered: Logos Actions. As mentioned above, they let players unlock abilities that can not only change jobs into different roles, but make certain ones hilariously overpowered. One noteworthy standout are Warrior. Due to how Inner Release works, (guarantees every weapon action you take will be a Critical and Direct Hit) they can achieve absolutely insane numbers if running Materialist and Double Edge—to the point they output more damage than even Black Mage or Samurai, the highest damaging DPS jobs in the game under normal circumstance, regardless of their own Logo Actions. Fortunately, this is Eureka exclusive.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
- Alphinaud was widely disliked by the fan base for being a Glory Hound and for being stuck up on morals and doing the right thing. After the events of 2.5, he gets a major wake up call and the Heavensward scenario has him being more proactive and treating the Warrior of Light as an equal and a friend. Several expansions later, Alphinaud's role as The Lancer to the Player Character is welcome and beloved.
- Urianger was not very well liked among the community during most of the games story, owing to him being used less like a character and more so a Deus ex Machina whose only role was to spout exposition, before vanishing for long periods of time. Shadowbringers having him be directly involved in the story turned people around on his character, with him getting a huge amount of Hidden Depths, and moments of light heartedness to show him being more relatable. Many now see him as being one of the best written characters, owing to the character now being more then just a writing tool.
- Machinist had a bad history of being a Low-Tier Letdown since its introduction, being attached to the frustrating "mage bard" mechanics that forced cast times on all their skills in Heavensward with Gauss Barrel, and an unworkably overly complicated overheating system in Stormblood that required players to punish themselves with a pacification for 10 seconds of buffed damage, all of this with randomness on their procs that were weighed by how many limited-supply bullets they had, and their biggest burst skill in Wildfire required mashing out as many skills as possible. Shadowbringers finally ditched bullets and overheating entirely in favor of meters that caused three different burst phases that compliment each other, reworked Wildfire to be nowhere near as frustrating, fixed their rotation and upped their damage to effectively be the Ranged DPS counterpart to Black Mage and Samurai. All of these changes combined with new skills that are a Mythology Gag to Edgar made Machinist go from a rarely-seen job in endgame to a frequent sight in all forms of content.
- White Mage was heavily shafted in its Stormblood run with its early iteration of lilies and focus on being the "pure healer". On paper, lilies would reduce the cooldown of other healing abilities, allowing the White Mage to rapidly churn out healing spells. In practice, lilies went completely unused, due to how you gain them: casting Cure I or II, forcing the job to rely on using the global cooldown to utilize lilies and discouraging use of other spells if they wanted to generate the max amount of 3. Even worse, the very first iteration didn't always guarantee a lily; it used to be generated by chance. As the cherry on top, the "Secret of the Lily II" trait, which reduced cooldown by five seconds, was often forgotten, because it was a 20% chance to proc on Critical Heal, which is already a low chance as it is. The lilies were counter-productive to the job's philosophy of "powerful heals and powerful spells", and the return for using them had next to no impact. At the very least, it didn't fail at its job by any stretch of the imagination, but its other healer brethren did theirs just as effectively with extra utility that made them more desirable. Come Shadowbringers, their lilies were given a much-welcome rework, generating one lily every 30 seconds of combat and is used to cast two instant-cast healing spells, then rewarding usage of those lilies with an extremely powerful spell. These changes made White Mages a proper parallel to Black Mage, making its raw power a major selling point.
- For quite a while in the fandom, Hydaelyn was disliked or seen as boring for being a God Is Good archetype, with several people desiring her to become the true villain of the story. Some even believed that Zodiark and his followers were superior, especially around the time Shadowbringers revealed the true colors of the Ascians. This changed in Endwalker, where she was made into a VERY solidly God Is Flawed character instead, her detailed and ultimately successful reasoning for her actions were revealed, and her crowning moment being facing off against the Scions to test whether or not they had become strong enough to face Meteion. Her original self Venat's characterization was outright lauded all across the fanbase, with her becoming many people's favorite character due to her charming personality, tragic nature, emotional battle and relationship with Azem/the Warrior of Light. She's widely seen as the crowning representation of Endwalker's themes regarding surviving depression and refusing to give into hopelessness in the face of depression and tragedy.
- The Company of Heroes were redeemed in some peoples' eyes by their role in the Role Quest for Physical DPS. You even get to call them out on how they constantly sent you on fetch quests and insisted you throw them a small party before they would help you get to a freaking primal.
- While Dark Knight has a mixed reception, the job's invulnerability skill Living Dead was widely considered to be the worst one compared to the other three tanks, due to the mechanics missing the mark on being, well, invulnerable. It requires a healer to do double time on healing (barring a quick patch-up from a White Mage's Benediction) to ensure they don't die in the next ten seconds when under the Walking Dead status. It was eventually given a massive buff by giving a massive Life Drain trait while under Walking Dead, allowing the Dark Knight to self-sustain themselves. Additionally, if Walking Dead is successfully healed off, it turns into Undead Rebirth, which relieves the healing stress requirement. What used to be a terrible skill became a powerful Heroic Second Wind that rivals the Warrior's Holmgang, allowing Dark knights to face death with impunity and live through it.
Retroactive Recognition: In Shadowbringers you can hear Jonathan Bailey as the Crystal Exarch/G'raha Tia who would go on to have his mainstream breakout in Bridgerton as Anthony Bridgerton.
Ron the Death Eater: Hydaelyn started getting hit with this during Shadowbringers with the reveal that that She is in fact not a true divinity but one of the first primals, and that She was created solely to seal Zodiark away. This reveal that She wasn't exactly truthful about who She really was caused many players to begin to assume the worst about her (and even speculate that she might become the Big Bad of the story). However, it needed to be remembered that the people that we received these revelations from were all mortal enemies of Hydaelyn who naturally were rather biased against Her. With the release of Endwalker, this eased up some as we finally got to see Her side of the story which gives a lot more context to what She did. Specifically that she shattered the planet into fragments not just to seal Zodiark but to also avert a potential future apocalypse created from passive weakness but also to arm future generations with a power needed to stop the true cause of the Final Days that their aether rich predecessors were naturally unable to harness. And it's made clear that despite the fact that She subjected the planet and all its people to unimaginable suffering, She physically suffered along with them throughout the millennia she spent as Hydaelyn. Of course, as with any major reveal, much of what was presented still created debate in the fanbase with some feeling she had been hit even harder with the Ron the Death Eater bat.
Rooting for the Empire:
- Ishgard did not give players a good first impression in A Realm Reborn, coming off as Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
  - The city's obsession with exterminating dragons - and zeal for executing "heretics" who don't share this enthusiasm - was a bad foot to start on. Then, Ishgard proved to have a complete unwillingness to assist the Eorzean Grand Companies, only to come begging for help when their hatred of the concept of compromise inevitably bit them in the butt. The only people who come out of A Realm Reborn from Ishgard with any sympathy are Haurchefant, a Knight in Shining Armor who becomes a dear friend to the Warrior, and Aymeric, because he openly admitted that Ishgard's stance was complete nonsense and found ways around his proverbial hands being tied. Even so, there was a sizable group of people hoping that Heavensward would give the option to side with the dragons and burn Ishgard to the ground. And admittedly, you do sort of do that, albeit in a roundabout way. You start a revolution by removing the ruling caste of the Holy See and the Temple Knights, who were the ones that were really responsible for most of the xenophobia and hostility, all while making sure that innocent civilians don't suffer.
  - Dark knights in particular agree with the anti-Ishgard sentiment when you learn how the city-state treated Auri refugees fleeing the Empire; the Ishgardians turned them away from the city, believing them to be Dravanian. And then, once the Au Ra were far away enough from the city, the Temple Knights opened fire with cannons, killing untold innocent people who were just trying to flee from Garlemald. Lastly, it's revealed that the Dragonsong War started when the Ishgardians killed the dragon Ratatoskr just to obtain her eye and get the power held within it, starting a war that would last for a thousand years. Indeed, a major part of Heavensward is the heroes learning how the Dragonsong War really started, and coming to the conclusion that the dragons may be justified in their rage, but their untold slaughter of people for what may as well be eternity still needs to be stopped. With all of that in mind, there's still a group of fans who wish they could have told the Ishgardians where to stick it and thrown their lot in with the dragons.
- For the longest time, there was a non-dismissable amount of the fanbase who felt like the Garlean Empire had both a valid reason for their conquests (between the nation's backstory and having a good point about the issue of primal summonings endangering the world) that they justified or even excused all the terrible stuff they did in the name of it, ignoring the systemic racism, genocidal policy toward beast tribes, and frequent mentions of mass rapes by Garlean occupiers. Stormblood really amped up the Garlean cruelties in Doma and Ala Mhigo at every step to try and kill off this sentiment, to arguable effectiveness.
- The Samurai questline for levels 60-70 involves trying to stop a rebellion from embroiling Hingashi in a bloody war. The problem with this is that the Shogunate is shown to be horrendously corrupt, top-heavy, and prone to such monstrous levels of Disproportionate Retribution that it clearly needs reform of some kind, which is why said rebellion even began. A lot of players noted the questline's message of "bloody rebellions are bad when you can reform a horribly corrupt empire from the inside" rang hollow when the main plot of Stormblood was spent supporting a bloody rebellion against a horribly corrupt empire. This created a moral disconnect between how the developers wanted players to view the Shogunate versus how they wanted them to view the Garleans, despite both factions doing basically the same thing. A large amount of players left the Samurai questline wishing it was about aiding the rebellion instead.
- Shadowbringers casts the Ascians in a surprisingly sympathetic light following the reveal that their ultimate goal was to restore the planet to how it once was and reclaim their people and their home. Coupled with the expansion's focus on Emet-Selch, a sizable portion of the playerbase wishes that they could join the Ascians' cause even though it would result in the complete and utter annihilation of everything that the Warrior and the Scions have fought for up to this point. These feelings only intensified with Endwalker's revelations that Venat withheld her knowledge of the future and what Hermes did out of fear that he'll fall into despair again and refuse to help avert the Final Days. For these players, Venat's actions were not justifiable and denied the ancient mankind a proper chance to save themselves from their fate. There are many who argue that Venat's choice to sunder the star was an act of genocide, and Venat herself takes no pleasure in what she did and acknowledges that her millennia-long gambit led to an enormous amount of pain and suffering.

Sacred Cow:
- Not only is this game considered to be the best Final Fantasy of its generation, but it's also in the conversation for the best MMORPG of all time, beating World of Warcraft for that spot in many players' eyes. The game is also lead by a director that's well-loved for communicating and listening to the fanbase, and managing to turn around a game that was initially slammed as dead in the water into a beloved, well-regarded money-printing machine for the game's parent company. You'd be wise to not to say anything bad about this game post-1.0 or its director, Naoki Yoshida, aka Yoshi-P.
- In terms of expansions, Shadowbringers is the undisputed king compared to all of the others (including Heavensward).
The Scrappy: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise here.
Scrappy Mechanic: See here.
Seasonal Rot:
- Newcomers can feel this towards the Seventh Astral Era, owing mostly to its massive length with the abridged version, now requiring completion of most of the Crystal Tower quests, still being more than ninety quests long. Square Enix was stalling for time before the release of Heavensward, and it shows. This unfortunately means that it is full of what feels like an extended Filler arc, with the player being forced to arbitrarily stop for no visible reason. The post-Heavensward and Stormblood periods had no such need to stall, therefore they feel much better paced - for comparison, each post-expansion content cycle consists of around forty main story quests, less than half that of 2.1 to 2.55.
- Many players consider Stormblood to be the low point of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark Arc. Many find the Ala Mhigans and Domans Unintentionally Unsympathetic,^note the copious amount of Plot Armor used,^note and what many feel is a weak Character Development storyline.^note Likewise, the relic weapons were met with bad reception due to, aside from the massive grind, them not being tied to any story and are just there for the sake of it, while the actual story behind Eureka is composed of mostly Fetch Quests.
- The Hildibrand side story was met with positive reception in A Realm Reborn, but most fans agree that Hildibrand's story in Heavensward is incredibly lacking due to the story having fewer wacky moments, an Expy of Briardien who wasn't received as well, and no trials for players to tackle. Stormblood addresses the criticisms by having a better story, funnier scenes, and a trial battle against Yojimbo, who then reveals himself to be Gilgamesh shortly after the fight starts.
- Most of the class/job quests are thought to range from passable to good in terms of writing, with a scant few (like the Dark Knight's questline) considered highlights of the entire game. But there's also a few class/job questlines that are considered a chore to get through.
  - The Paladin questlines for A Realm Reborn and Heavensward are considered by many to be the nadir of the class quests. This is due to the plot relying heavily on idiocy (Jenylns is somehow unable to grasp the idea that the Monetarists may have agents in the Sultansworn, despite them having agents in literally every other station in Ul'dah, to the point some organizations like the Brass Blades don't even bother with the pretense of not being corrupt to the core). Also, many find the Paladin mentor Unintentionally Unsympathetic since the only way Solkzagyl's gambits could feasibly work, especially in Heavensward, if he was actively assisting the Death's Embrace, meaning he's at least partly responsible for the murders they commit. And even if that's not the case, he still forsook his oaths to the Sultansworn in order to deal with the conflict his own way, which makes his constant speeches about "true" honor ring more than a little hollow for many. Finally, many find it wasted potential that the Paladins in-universe are little more than glorified bodyguards rather than an order of holy knights, especially since Ishgard — a city full of knights and the Holy See — is right there, yet goes entirely unmentioned throughout the entire Paladin questline. Tellingly, the Paladin quests for Stormblood exclusively involve the Gladiator Guild cast while barely mentioning the Paladin characters.
  - Stormblood's Warrior questline is held in low regard due to how repetitive its story beats are. For the majority of the questline, the main scenes alternate between Curious Gorge sulking over how he lost control of his rage at the end of A Realm Reborn, fawning over Dorgono, and nearly losing control over his rage again. These beats are repeated many times throughout the questline, and the only major events of the arc happen at the very end. What's worse, a romance arc comes out of nowhere for such a class, and does it in such a way that it feels like the lessons that Curious Gorge spent all that time learning about controlling his anger never seemed to stick. The Warrior questline carries a very heavy "Anger Is Healthy" Aesop, yet never being able to stick the landing really sours the whole experience.
  - The Stormblood questline for the Samurai is a contender for the least-liked character quest series, only facing the Paladin quests from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward as competition. You have to help put down a rebellion that tries to fight the Sekiseigumi in Kugane. But upon hearing the Motive Rant of the rebel leader, nobody disagrees with their end goal of wanting to reform a corrupt city-state, just their methods might start a bloody war. This comes after the entirety of the main quest of Stormblood is about helping a rebellion succeed during a bloody war, so a questline about stopping a rebellion came across as a little broken in its intention. A lot of people sided more with the rebel leader than the Sekiseigumi or their samurai master, with some players even openly wishing that they had a choice to side with the rebels instead.
Self-Imposed Challenge: Due to Party Finder allowing you to make any composition, players have found strategies to clear content in unconventional ways.
- One popular challenge is clearing an Alliance Raid with nothing but Healers.
- Conversely, there's the solo healer challenge, where a party attempts to fight a boss with just one healer doing double time with healing duty. Some parties opt to clear without a healer at all. Oddly enough, this is also a viable strategy for speedrunning certain types of content - dropping one healer means you can add another DPS to increase the party's damage output significantly.
- Another challenge is attempting to clear raids solo, which are usually designed for eight players.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Among the Deep Dungeons, Eureka Orthos makes Palace of the Dead and Heaven-on-High look like child's play, featuring loads of mobs that can One-Hit Kill you if you're not paying attention, roaming enemies that discourages camping out in a room, and Dread Beasts that can eat a Tank's bulk for breakfast.
Shocking Moments:
- The infamous bloody banquet scene at the tail end of A Realm Reborn where Nanamo seemingly dies from poisoning and the Warrior of Light and Scions get framed for her murder. After Teledji mocks the Sultana's death right in front of Rauhban, the latter goes into near animalistic fury and bisects the lalafell in half. This is followed by Ilberd admitting he was the one who killed Nanamo, after he slices Raubahn's arm off when the already very angry man tried to kill Lolorito next. The Warrior of Light and the Scions escape with the Brass Blades and traitorous Crystal Braves hot on their trail, causing the Scions to stay behind to hold them off so the Warrior of Light can escape.
- The fight against Lahabrea in A Realm Reborn was pitfully easy and fans made jokes about him for years. After the developers revamped the fight to be a solo battle, the Ascian gains a ton of new mechanics to keep the player on their toes. The absolute shocker comes from the moment where Lahabrea charges up an attack and no matter what the player does, it can't be stopped. This leads to Lahabrea killing the Warrior of Light. Thankfully, it doesn't stick thanks to Hydaelyn's intervention.
- The scene after The Vault in Heavensward is well-known for its shock value, as it leads to the death of Haurchefant Greystone, as he's impaled through the chest with a spear of light by one of the Knights Twelve as Haurchefant protects the Warrior of Light from the attack. Even as late as Endwalker, the events of this cutscene and the fallout from it are still being brought up, namely for how it personally affected the Warrior of Light. Suffice to say, many players were not far behind, declaring that they now had a personal motive to take down the Big Bad.
- The're a scene early in Shadowbringers during Alisaie's questline which sets the tone of the expansion and establishes some facts about the setting, albeit with a combination of shock and Nightmare Fuel. Tesleen getting turned into a Sin Eater is shown graphically on-screen, complete with depicting how much pain she's in, as well as the Body Horror that comes with such a transformation. And all of this to one of the sweetest, most uplifting characters in the entire setting. The fanbase has sometimes referred to this moment as "Welcome to Shadowbringers" because of how impactful it is.
Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer:
- Just like in Final Fantasy VII, you can say "screw it" when it comes to saving the world and waste your time at this game's incarnation of the famous Gold Saucer.
- Remember how addicting Triple Triad was? It's baaaaaack! You can now play with other players from around the world while you're at it. It even has its own tourney system!
- The Palace of the Dead has proven to be very addicting to many players for how helpful it is towards leveling Classes and Jobs.
- Dotted around the world are jump puzzles, usually marked by seemingly random wood pegs. Many of these often lead to nice vantage points, though actually getting up there requires some platforming skills. Kugane, for example, has a nice lookout point of the city and another with some hot tubs. More often than not, you can find a player or two making their way up, and it's quite easy to sink time doing this yourself.
- The Island Sanctuary encourages players to log on just to water their crops and tend to their animals, often without touching the rest of the game at all.
Slow-Paced Beginning: Most of the content in the 2.1 through 2.5 phase of the game is generally considered to be mediocre at best. Tons of slow paced fetch quests, a meandering story with tons of filler, and a lot of boring dungeons can turn many players off. This is compounded by the fact that this is the longest stretch of patch-released quests in the entire game, with a whopping 100 quests needed to be completed, after the almost 200 from 2.0 itself. And since they give out pitifully low EXP (due to originally being released at the level 50 cap), the players won't be gaining any new Actions and Traits as they complete the post-game material. But by the time of the 2.3 patch, things begin to pick up as more interesting Dungeons and Trials are dished out to the player and the story gaining steam with the introduction of major players like Aymeric and Ishgard as a whole. Then the 2.5 Wham Episode hits and Heavensward begins afterwards. Quests suddenly become much better paced as most of the fetch quest elements are phased out, the Dungeons become much more complex and engaging, and the story kicks into overdrive as it starts delivering on some pronounced Player Punches. This continues on with Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. Even this very trope had been mitigated a bit thanks to the 5.3 patch.
Special Effect Failure:
- Many otherwise-dramatic scenes have the potential to become Narm due to the lack of blood or wounds for character models. While blood, maiming, and death are all employed in the story, it's either not shown at all or very minimal compared to the damage done.
- The climax of the 2.55 patch story of A Realm Reborn has some rough bits. First off, much like in the Edda storyline, the animators run up badly against some of the limitations of what their animation engine and character models are capable of, and a few characters who are meant to look smarmy or enraged - Teledji, Raubahn and Ilberd, specifically - all just end up looking ridiculous. Also, Raubahn seems to be either a vampire or a robot, since he doesn't bleed when his arm gets cut off. Teledji also gets literally bisected by Raubahn, and there's not one single drop of blood anywhere.
- In one of the Heavensward patches, Aymeric is stabbed. The knife clips his clothes and he just clutches the wound, which shows no sign of bleeding.
- Late in Heavensward, Y'shtola sees someone stumbling in and apparently is wounded. Yet she just looks tired because there are no wounds on her at all. It makes the characters look like they're freaking out over nothing.
- It rears its ugly head again in the 4.0 finale when Zenos slits his neck and yet falls down with no apparent sign of injury to him. It also happens again in 4.3 when Asahi is impaled... and doesn't even suffer any Clothing Damage.
- The Ceremony of Eternal Bonding has a major goof involving gloves. If either partner wears any kind of gloves, the game won't render their rings, assuming them to be covered up and out of sight anyway. But the Ceremony of Eternal Bonding naturally has a ring exchange cutscene, which looks utterly absurd if the ring isn't being rendered. Because of this quirk, the game now actively tells future couples not to wear gloves so that the rings will appear in the cutscene. Which doesn't stop it from giving male players a pair of dress gloves as part of the quest...
- The animation engine once again manages to not keep up in the 4.0 Stormblood finale. The assembled cast gathers on the roof of the Ala Mhigo palace to join the populace in singing a version of the Garlean anthem modified to be about Ala Mhigo's liberation... except that it's clear that nobody is lip synced to the lyrics. This is especially baffling as otherwise the game's lip sync is very good, even across languages. It's incredibly distracting (since so many of these characters and their weird lip movements are dead center of the camera frame) and really detracts from an otherwise neat scene.
- The Final Fantasy XV crossover event ventures into this if Party Effects are turned off. Many players will often switch off the special effects of players not in their party and then leave them off, so that mass-player events such as FATEs or Alliance Raids will not constantly bombard them with flashing lights and noises from twenty-or-so different sources. Unfortunately, Noctis is flagged as an entity not in your party, so leaving Party Effects off basically leaves him flailing wildly at the air until things suddenly happen to the enemy. This also extends to the crossover's solo instances, even in the Coup de Grâce Cutscene!
- Many pieces of armor are not designed to go with certain hairstyles or equipment, meaning you can have hair clipping into a chest piece, or weapons going through certain pieces of clothing. Weapons also suffer from this issue, meaning there are times during cutscenes where your characters armor clips through hair or gear, or where the characters weapon looks just off. This is especially relevent during certain crafter questlines, where the item you made is displayed lovingly for you to see... unless it's being displayed on a fully dressed character, in which case 100% of the time it ends up clipping into the tail of their coat or the tassets of their armor, so you get a good look at about half the item with the rest hidden by a plate of iron or leather.
- At the end of 5.3, the crystallization of the Crystal Exarch is jarringly pixellated and looks much less detailed than it was meant to be. Heck, the loaves of bread made during the patch look noticeably better detailed than it!
- Precipitation is always rendered in the background... as a two-dimensional effect. Meaning that you rarely see rain or snow in front of your characters yet it's clearly pouring buckets in the background. Sometimes this can easily be explained by standing under cover - in fact, while you can see the raindrops on the ground, you can see that they aren't in places that would be covered. Unfortunately, if the camera angle changes, it ends up showing your characters standing right in the rain. The characters also don't acknowledge rain in any way - which can lead to some unintentional humour, or smiles at how goofy it is.
- Due to the way Eorzean Time works, sunrises and sunsets can go by very fast. This is an acceptable break from reality given that gathering often relies off of you waiting for Eorzea time for certain special spawns. Unfortunately, if you time it just right, sometimes you'll see the shadows moving at a pace that just does not look right
Spoiled by the Format: Towards the end of Endwalker, it's hard to believe that the Heroic Sacrifices of the Scions in Ultima Thule will stick, since the established formula of expansion content still calls for another dungeon at level 90 before the game ends, and unlike in Elpis you haven't been provided with any other NPC allies to bring in as Trusts. Sure enough, it doesn't; as hinted by Y'shtola, you end up summoning them all back with Azem's memory crystal.
"Stop Having Fun" Guys: This comes with being an MMO, though some examples have since been rendered moot due to major changes in the game's design:
- Back in the day, you couldn't hope to walk around town with any gear with an Optimal rank that's 10+ ranks above above your own. Yes, simply walking around town; don't even think about fighting or looking for a party.
- If you were a Thaumaturge above rank 25, everyone expected you to have the Protect and Shell spells... two Conjurer abilities. Granted, getting to rank 16 Conjurer wasn't a hard task even back then, but naturally not everyone will always spend time leveling other classes until much later. Even in A Realm Reborn, this was expected until cross-class spells were made into Role Skills, doing away with compulsory cross-classing.
- Conversely, Conjurers and their Job upgrade, White Mages, are firmly expected to have Swiftcast... a level 26 Thaumaturge ability. This holds true even today, and applies to Arcanists of all stripes too. Granted, Swiftcast is part of one of the most important skill combinations for healers - the combat raise, where Swiftcast is used to negate Raise/Resurrection's significant (eight seconds, not accounting for Spell Speed) cast time in order to get another party member back into the fight without tying up the healer for several seconds. This was later nullified with the introduction of role actions, of which Swiftcast was made one for all spellcasters, so any Conjurer/White Mage that's at the appropriate level to have Raise will also have Swiftcast.
- For the longest time in Legacy, even playing as a Paladin. Until they got buffed quite late in the Legacy content cycle, Paladins had excellent defense and not much else, meaning that their primary contribution to harder battles was their ability to tank hits and heal. Warriors, who combined good defense with the ability to clear dungeons by simply sneezing, were the preferred Prestige Class by most veterans, and as such were typically far more in demand than Paladins. Ironically, this was inverted during A Realm Reborn's launch period, as Paladins became the popular ones due to Warriors needing a good buff in the eyes of fans. Patch 2.1 finally made the playing field more or less equal, making Warriors pretty formidable in terms of maximum health and damage output, but as far as damage mitigation and aggro management are concerned it is hard to beat the Paladin. After Shadowbringers came around, aggro management became a non-issue, and Paladins are considered better as "off-Tanks", as they have one less mitigation cooldown compared to other tank jobs and are better at helping other tanks surviving, thanks to the "Intervention" skill (reduces target party member's damage taken by 10%, further enhanced if the Paladin player is using Rampart or Sentinel).
- Arcanists using Topaz Carbuncle or Summoners using Titan-Egi in dungeons. These pets are optimized to tank rather than deal damage, and you'll already have a tank in most cases. Even as Summoners have been reworked over the years and the role of each summon has been adjusted, using Titan-Egi often results in negative reactions even if the player makes sure not to mess with aggro. This has become a nonissue in Endwalker, having been drastically reworked to encourage summoning all three summons.
- For level 46-49, FATE events are the best way to level due to being fairly starved of quests (even the main story quests completely skip levels 47 and 48), which leads to a crowd of people who will adamantly refuse to complete the actual objective in favor of grinding XP on the mobs that respawn quickly when said FATE is occurring. This leads them to harass and try to chase off anyone who doesn't want or know you can farm like that and tries to complete the objective anyway.
- Being a Conjurer/White Mage will also invoke people telling you that you don't know how to be a proper healer if you don't constantly spam Cure spells on them or buff them every single time with Protect, Stoneskin, or Regen. Heaven forbid that any of your allies get KO'd in your presence. The problems just get amplified when there's a ton of things going on that causes the party to be heavily damaged and hit with status debuffs at once. If you're knocked out as a healer, you can also expect someone to complain that it's your fault that you went down and made the team suffer for it (nevermind that the healer isn't even supposed to take damage outside of bosses when under ideal conditions).
- The final two dungeons for the main storyline in 2.0 were, at launch, played by people constantly in order to grind for Allagan tomestones, that couldn't be earned in such volume as quickly elsewhere, to exchange them for powerful gear. People who were grinding the dungeons skipping every cutscene (and there are a lot of cutscenes in those two dungeons, something which the devs eventually realized to be a mistake and made sure not to repeat in the future) and rushing ahead through the dungeon while newbies to the dungeon got left in the dust while also being yelled at for not knowing how to tackle the dungeons was a depressingly common sight - especially depressing due to how cool the dungeons were when done "right". Patch 2.1 took a number of steps to address this (one major one being that the two dungeons are no longer the only easy way to get the tomestones), but it still crops up. 4.2 finally found a mostly-acceptable balance, by making the cutscenes unskippable (meaning new players aren't left in the dust trying to enjoy the story) and giving the rewards for completing them a significant boost in return for the noticeably larger time investment required to watch those cutscenes (letting them stay an attractive option for grinding out tomestones and, by that point in the game's life, leveling classes further). 6.1 eventually overhauled the two Main Scenario dungeons into more digestible instances, though the rewards are adjusted to match the new length.
- The use of a Limit Break in a dungeon that is not against a boss will usually get you scorned or yelled at for "wasting" it, and even those that don't see it like this still feel the need to tell you if and when it's okay to use it. Casters and ranged DPS have limit breaks that can hit multiple targets at once, which some people elect to use on the Mooks between boss fights so that greater total damage is dealt. Yet this is sometimes frowned upon since those who swear by using limit breaks on bosses only claim that boss fights will go slower without a limit break, despite the fact that the overall dungeon run is roughly the same speed whether you use limit breaks on trash mobs or save it for a boss. It's worth noting that using a limit break earlier may potentially get you another opportunity to use one later that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten, because of how building the gauge for it works.^note
Strangled by the Red String: In the Stormblood Warrior quests, Dorgono goes from openly detesting Curious Gorge to being furiously in love with him in the back half of a single quest. While this transition is a Played for Laughs Call-Back to Gorge's own infatuation from the beginning of the questline, it can come across as rather jarring for players who saw no interest from Dorgono and expected the final punchline to be seeing his hopes dashed completely.
Strawman Has a Point: In the "Samurai" questline, the Warrior of Light is eventually tasked with pushing back a rebellion led by Ugetsu, a sibling pupil to their master Musosai, whose actions have resulted in the deaths of dozens of people and threaten to plunge Hingashi back into another Age of Blood. However, as demonstrated within the same questline, the government of Hingashi is immensely corrupt and practices a rigid caste system which almost none of the heroic characters would have thrived in if allowed to stay in place. When the rebel leader gives his Motive Rant to explain why he's turning against the government, no one actually has any disagreement with his end goal—only that it would cause a war to do so. The rebel leader is fine with this, as he considers an oppressive peace to be no real "peace" at all—and when you compare what he's saying to not just historical oppression, but what's going on in Ala Mhigo or just one border away in Doma (who are instigating civil wars against oppressors in which they would rather die than live under the empire for one more day), it's impossible not to notice a bit of an inconsistent message. Makoto states that she and Musosai advocate for slow change that may take several generations to enact, but the two of them were both born in privilege. One member of the Sekiseigumi states that he joined because he watched his parents be unjustly burned alive; Makoto's method basically means telling those people suffering such injustices "Sorry you have to die today, but I promise, we'll fix things soon." Again, when compared to the other stories of rebellion within the very same game, it makes the questline come across as pro-Shogunate Japan propaganda, as it suffered the same problem throughout its many centuries of relative peace.
Subbing vs. Dubbing: Was bound to happen. Fans who prefer playing the game in Japanese audio with English text say the voice acting is much better and trash the English dub for having bad voice acting and direction. While most dub fans agree that the voice acting in 2.0 was very sketchy, the improvements in later patches and Heavensward really show what the voice actors are capable of (with Heavensward actually having a significant cast replacement due to voiceover production moving entirely to London).
Superlative Dubbing:
- By patch 2.5. The game's dub may have started rough, but not only was 2.5 well done in general, the patch finally, finally gave Gideon Emery the chance to really flex his acting chops for Urianger's soliloquy for Moenbryda. Which is even more impressive - taken by itself, the event actually could've been sort of lame, a character introduced just a patch ago killed off for cheap drama, but Emery, all by himself, manages to completely and totally sell the anguish Urianger and all the Scions felt about what happened, sold the idea that Moenbryda had been a big part of these characters' lives in the past and that this was a big loss, and enormously humanized a character who'd previously been known for being deliberately stiff - that now being revealed as a mask which hides the man's insecurities. The scene was a triumph for the English version and was a million miles removed from the often-embarrassing voicework of 1.0 or even release 2.0, and even led to some salt come Heavensward, as people actually got upset that voiceover had been moved to London - which meant Emery, an LA-based actor, was no longer playing Urianger.
- Funnily enough, though, despite the salt over losing Emery, in general the London cast was very well-received, with a number of the actors (Colin Ryan as Alphinaud, Carina Reeves as Tataru, Bethan Walker as Alisaie in the HW patches, Robyn Addison as Y'shtola, Blake Ritson as Aymeric and Nigel Pilkington as his somewhat One-Scene Wonder appearance as Papalymo) all being praised for excellent performances, and in the case of recastings for often giving better performances than their LA counterparts.
- This trend continued in Stormblood, with Bethan Walker now really stealing the show as Alisaie. Eleanor Matsuura as Yugiri is also considered to be excellent and, tragedy around Sian Blake aside, probably the best performance the Yugiri role has gotten in English to date. The general quality of the voicework is also considered to have taken a further major step forward, with the only quibble being over the pronunciation of "Far Eastern" terms (which appears to be more a directing issue than an acting one). The otherwise uncredited actor for Susano has also been noted for his excellence in capturing the essence of the character, helping Susano become a fan-favorite Ppimal.
- And once again Shadowbringers offered excellent vocal performances, both from the returning voice actors and from newcomers like Jonathon Bailey (the Crystal Exarch) and Edward Dogliani as Vauthry. In particular, Joe Dempsie gave an excellent performance for Ardbert, demonstrating his acting chops with a much bigger role for the character than what he had back in the Heavensward post-story patches. The stand-out performance, however, probably has to go to René Zagger’s turn as Emet-Selch, managing to imbue the character with deep, authentic emotion when recounting the fall of Amaurot and during his final moments, contributing greatly to his character being regarded as one of the best Final Fantasy villains ever.
- Patch 5.2 and 5.3 sees Matt Stokoe recast as Elidibus after a five-year absence from Heavensward. What's noteworthy is that we begin to hear Eldibus's voice slowly transition from the dull monotone from Heavensward to a bombastic Large Ham, especially as The Warrior of Light, as we begin to explore his character. His performance during the "Seat of Sacrifice" trial in particular is praised as one of the most memorable in the game, rivaling that of René Zagger's.
Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While Stormblood wasn't exactly bad, it wasn't too well-received by fans. General points of contention were the story having a split focus between Ala Mhigo and Doma, rushed characterization (especially for Lyse), and the theme of War Is Hell having worn out its welcome due to being focused on so heavily in both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, which came directly before Stormblood. Upon release, Shadowbringers addressed all the above issues by having a more focused (thus stronger) story, characters that have more plot significance, and a plot that's both different and engaging. Many fans consider Shadowbringers to be the best expansion yet with some even saying it dethrones Heavensward.
Suspiciously Similar Song:
- "Good King Moggle Mog" is "This is Halloween" in all but name, lyrics, and the third verse.
- The song from the second phase of Sephirot's fight sounds very similar to "When Worlds Collide" by Powerman 5000, to the point that the band accused composer Masayoshi Soken of ripping off their song. However, Yoshida and Soken have stated that this was not meant to be the case, and the similarities are just a coincidence.

Tainted by the Preview:
- A Realm Reborn's preview period and launch being plagued by errors and server queues had a whole new batch of players throwing up their arms in frustration. Happily, this ended a little better for the game.
- Stormblood early access nearly mirrors how badly A Realm Reborn launched for very similar reasons. This was later determined to be the result of a DDoS attack, but the damage was already done.
- The announcement of Blue Mage in 2018, a moment that generated a massive amount of hype for introducing one of the game's most requested jobs, was twisted around the following day at the Live Letter for 4.5 when they discussed what a "limited job" meant - namely that because they'll either be extremely weak or way too strong, they cap at level 50 until more patches come out, can only do old content and only in premade groups and otherwise are a job focused almost entirely on world content and solo play, while their own unique content wasn't discussed in more than vague overtures, putting doubts as to whether Blue Mage will live up to the hype fans have been wanting for so long.
That One Achievement:
- "WTFungah", which involves clearing the GATE "Any Way the Wind Blows". The game is simple, but a Luck-Based Mission that you'll survive all five rounds without getting blown off. Clearing it once for WTFungah I is reasonable enough, five times for WTFungah II is pushing it a bit, but ten times for WTFungah III and unlocking "the Fungah" title is going to need a lot of patience and luck.
- If you thought "WTFungah" required a lot of luck on your side, "The Deeper End" is even more rigged in favor of the house. It requires getting to the seventh and final floor of the Hidden Canals of Uznair, which takes joy in kicking your party out on the first floor, denying you all the sweet rewards it's supposed to have. "The Deeper End I" is realistically possible since it calls for just one clear, but it gets even more ludicrous when "The Deeper End II" requires five, III wanting ten, and IV requiring twenty. It's far easier to ask who doesn't have the "Luckiest of Lords/Ladies" title; that's how rare it is.
- "Pal-less Palace III" requires clearing all 200 floors of Palace of the Undead solo. Class choice is one defining factor to make it possible, but what makes this maddening to achieve is that you have no safety net to fall back to if the randomness decides to spite you, and if you die it's game over for that save file, forcing you to start over from Floor 1. You get the "Necromancer" title for your trouble, and it's one of the rarest ones in the game for this reason alone.
- "True Blue", which is achieved by unlocking "Blue Unchained" and "Masked Conqueror". Now, how do you get those? For the former, completion of the final tiers in the Binding Coils of Bahamut in a full Blue Mage-only party with no Echo and no Undersized Party. The latter is the same thing, but for the Savage-difficulty level of Alexander. Considering both have their own respective infamous boss fights detailed in That One Boss (with the latter's case being the normal version), compounded with the weird balancing act Blue Mage has, you're not going to get that Morbol mount for a while.
- "No River Wide Enough" is the Holy Grail of achievements for aspiring fishers. To earn it and the coveted title of "Big Fish", the fisher has to catch all 204 varieties of big fish in A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, and Stormblood along with all 45 varieties of big fish in Shadowbringers. The incredibly specific requirements of certain fish can mean days, weeks, or even an entire month can pass between windows (with one only as long as 90 seconds) to catch them, often at ungodly hours in the morning or night. Some of these fish, like Lancetfish, require you to catch one or more other big fish just to have the opportunity to catch them within a designated time frame. This is on top of their general rarity among the fishing pool and how every big fish has a set chance to simply get away even if you hit the reel button in time. Good luck. You're going to need it.
  - This is then topped by with "Fish Fear Me", which requires all of the above fish AND all of the big fish in Endwalker. This includes Furucauda, which has the same 90-second window length as the dreaded Ealad Skaan, and Snowy Parexus, which has a terribly short 35-second intuition window. Unless the Random Number God is on your side, this achievement is trying one.
- "I Hope Mentor Will Notice Me VI" is one of the biggest timesinks for achievements in the entire game, even if you're doing everything right. Completing this achievement unlocks The Astrope◊, which is a two-seater Winged Unicorn mount, and it's designed to look suitably majestic. To get this achievement and this mount, you have to go through three steps, each of which is going to take ages to do. First, you have to become a Battle Mentor. You do that by getting thousands of commendations from players, getting at least one DPS, Tank, and Healer class to the maximum level each, and complete one thousand dungeons and raids. Once you do that, you have to unlock the Mentor Roulette, which requires clearing all of the normal and Extreme-level content up to the beginning of the current expansion at least once. Finally, you have to successfully complete a duty in the Mentor Roulette two thousand times. Queueing up for this roulette pairs you with people who have been waiting the longest to queue into something, and it could be anything from an entry-level guildhest to a synced Extreme raid. And if a new expansion comes out while this is happening, the requirements for being a Mentor and opening their Roulette will change; you only keep the number of times you've done the Mentor Roulette. You've got to re-apply to be a Mentor and clear all the now-previous expansion's content to open the Mentor Roulette once more, meaning you've essentially got to start all over again. It could literally take years of playing the game before you finally unlock the Astrope, it doesn't do anything that any other two-seater mount can't do, and you could earn other multi-seater mounts with much less of a time investment. But if you do manage to get the Astrope, you have definitely earned it.
- "It's a Blunderful Life IV", which requires winning at the Fall Guys Blunderville event one hundred times. First of all, the Fall Guys event only shows up every so often, and only for a limited amount of time each time, thus giving you a small window to even work towards this achievement. But even when it's up, winning the show just once is hard enough. The event starts with as many as 24 people, and there's only one winner. You have to survive three rotating events of various difficulty, then somehow manage to be first to cross the finish line in the final event for it to count as a win towards this achievement. And even if you somehow manage to get it, doing so only earns you the "King/Queen Bean" title, which is a Cosmetic Award that does nothing at all. Some players did manage to get this title when the event first came up, but either by doing nothing but running Blunderville over and over again or using bots to help them cheat to win at the event. While this achievement does at least partly come down to skill, there are so many factors that work against you that it may as well be a Luck-Based Mission.
That One Attack: Of course there would be.
That One Boss: Par for the course.
That One Level: Plenty of them.
That One Sidequest: As you would expect.
That One Puzzle: The Kugane Tower jumping puzzle in Stormblood. Calling it a "puzzle" is something of a misnomer — it's just a tower where you have to jump across a series of platforms in order to reach the top. But it's a ton of extremely tight, tricky, and precise jumps where you have to be damn near perfect, in a game that was absolutely not designed for platforming. You need to have flawless execution, or risk falling off the tower completely. Due to semi-realistic Jump Physics that means no mid-air adjustments, and the collision boxes on the platforms and walls being very wonky, you can find yourself overshooting your jumps and falling down, or hitting a wall as you leap forward. And the aforesaid lack of mid-air movement means that if you fall at the wrong angle, you're doing the entire thing all over again as you watch your progress plummet as fast as your Warrior down to the ground. The reward for making it to the very top? A cool bit of scenery to take /gpose pics in, and a vista for your sightseeing log to prove you did it. There's not even an in-game achievement or a Cosmetic Award for it.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Fans cried foul when they saw that patch 2.2 enabled the Echo buff in certain late- and post-game dungeons/trials. The buff in question boosts the party's HP, strength, and healing potency after suffering a wipe and the effects can stack if the party keeps getting defeated. The more hardened players claim that people don't need their hands being held and that they should learn how to play normally.^note
- Changes to the Hunt system were met with disappointment and disdain. B marks were changed to allow only players who have the bill matching the mark to claim the rewards behind them, meaning farming B marks for rewards is no longer possible (although if you're feeling particularly driven/bored, you can still do this for the achievements tied to killing B marks). On top of this, the spawn rate for A marks were lengthened to be around 2 hours to further discourage farming for seals.
- Spiritbonding for materia was also changed and met with complaints. Before the change, spiritbonding came a flat rate; the higher the monster's level (or the general item level for a dungeon), the faster the bonding would be. Patch 2.35 changed the bonding mechanics to allow only binding on gear if the target's level matched the item's level or was in the general range. If the item's level was too high or too low, the bond rate would be reduced and any further discrepancies would cause bonding to stop completely. On top of this, the probability of producing a tier 4 materia for bonding a high level item was reduced, requiring players to bond gear beyond item level 70 (higher item levels generally take longer to reach 100% spiritbond). The whole change was brought about in order to discourage people from using extremely poor gear in high level raids. People that farmed materia complained that the process of bonding was needlessly difficult now while people working on their Novus weapons feared the difficulty of getting materia would cause prices on the market board to skyrocket.
- An important cutscene involving the Warrior of Light and Midgardsormr raised quite a number of complaints due to how the scene was different in the English version compared to the Japanese version; the Japanese version of the scene has the character flat out tell you what happened and why he did what he did to the Warrior of Light while the English version has the character express himself in a more vague and condescending tone. One of the people in charge of the lore and localization explained that the changes in the English version was necessary since the character was "very chatty" in the Japanese version and needed to be changed into something that would be more suiting to him for who he was as well as being more appealing to English-speaking/reading players.
- Most of the entire cast of characters had their voice actors changed for 3.0, causing people who liked the vocal direction and evolution that the previous voice actors were going through to now hate the sudden change. The biggest complaint was the change of voice actors for Urianger, who was voiced by the popular Gideon Emery in the 2.x content before he got replaced with Timothy Watson, who sounded nothing like Gideon at all.
- The devs made a change to the Triple Triad tournaments by reducing the amount of points a player could earn from battling an NPC while also raising the threshold required for earning platinum card packs and lowering the amount of MGP earned if the player's overall score wasn't good enough. The idea behind the change was to encourage players to battle each other instead of NPCs, but the change was met with an outcry due to how difficult it was to earn enough points to rank high enough thanks to everyone else exploiting the system to always win the tournaments by rigging the game in their favor.
- Regardless of class, regardless of whether the jobs were buffed or nerfed, there are plenty of folks upset that all of a sudden, they need to learn a new skill rotation. The only folks whose lives haven't been made more difficult are the Disciples of the Land and Hand, and even they're likely to get into the action before long. This is especially bad for classes that get reworks for expansions; the Summoner rework from Stormblood to Shadowbringers was such a drastic change that some players swore off leveling it because of how overwhelming the changes were.
- Among many of the changes in Patch 4.2, one of the more annoying choices was making Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium's cutscenes unskippable. The two dungeons were already long, but it was a source of major headaches for anybody running them for the first time because of older players forcing the newer players to skip cutscenes or risk getting left behind. The devs changed the dungeons cutscenes to make it so the cutscenes couldn't be skipped, period, making the dungeons longer. Making things worse is that players aren't compensated well by this; the patch also doubled the gil, EXP, and Poetics tomes awarded for the associated roulette, but the unskippable cutscenes more than double the runtime. It was a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't", as cutscenes being skippable was ruining the experience for new players. When cutscenes were skippable, new players had to choose between seeing the plot and actually playing the battles, as the cutscenes are about equal in length to the actual fights, especially once players became massively over-geared. And they would certainly want to see it, as it's The Very Definitely Final Dungeon for the first part of the main story. Even though making the cutscenes unskippale was generally agreed to be the only plausible solution, it still makes running the dungeons rather annyoing. Square Enix wisely stopped putting plot-related things in the middle of instances, and now dungeons like Castrum and Praetoruim end with a plot exposition afterwards, then a trial for the final boss.
- While many were happy that the extraneous quests in post-ARR is getting cut, others aren't happy that the scenes that they do like also ended up getting the axe as well.
- While job changes will always be contentious to a degree, ever since Shadowbringers reworked some of the mechanical outliers rotation-wise there's been a steadily growing part of the playerbase who fear that the jobs are becoming homogenized to the point where they're worried they'll start to feel like they all play the same with only weaponry and spell effects separating them. Tank players are especially vocal about this one, since Endwalker ended up reworking a lot of their combos and culling buttons the devs felt they didn't need, giving them an identical flow^note compared to most DPS jobs' unique capstones, gauges, and abilities.
- Starting with Stormblood, the amount of dungeons added to the Expert roulette was reduced. Normally, it had three dungeons, but it was cut down to two due to the devs wanting to add more unique content in each patch. Fans were not happy that there would be less variety of dungeons to run in. Variant and Criterion Dungeons seemed to be a way to path that up, but not everyone's particularly happy with those either.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Out of all the Grand Company leaders, Kan-E-Senna has the least amount of screentime and development. There's a healthy amount of screentime for Nanamo that sets the events of Ul'dah in motion, and Merlwyb has an arc dedicated to her mending relations with the Kobolds. What does the Elder Seedseer get? Outside from a few scenes that lead up to your next conflict and maybe a lost arc in 1.0, not much else. The Tank role quests in Endwalker does give her spotlight, but it still leaves players wanting for a whole arc for her as well as extra storytelling for Gridania in general.
- The nameless Doman soldier of Garlemald who the Warrior of Light and Alisaie come across during a patrol. He says that Yotsuyu deserves every bit of her revenge against Doma, and the WoL has an echo flashback of the soldier to years ago when he recruited Yotsuyu's brother into the Garland military, but saw how cruelly Yotsuyu was treated by the family. The soldier could have been expanded on to see his relationship with Yotsuyu since he clearly was sympathetic towards her, but he gets cut down by Alisaie when he tries to jump the WoL while they are stuck in the Echo flashback, and is never mentioned again.
- Despite being the catalyst for the Stormblood expansion, Shinryu appears only once in the expansion as the Final Boss before being killed with no difficulty. There's no story line about the heroes trying to find it except for Estinien, who only appears sparingly and never gets to confront it, very little discussion about it or what to do should they encounter it again, and despite being one of the most powerful foes faced lore wise, Shinryu gets taken over by Zenos and gets beaten without any issues. Those who are fans of the series and the recurring boss felt that Shinryu was wasted story wise by the Stormblood writers and think it would have been better if Shinryu had been something like the final boss of the entire Stormblood expansion and not the main launch storyline, especially after the final main story patch fight for Stormblood leading into Shadowbringers was a fairly easy Duel Boss.
- Koryu is the entire crux of the Four Lords quest line, being a corrupted Auspice that was sealed away by the titular lords and their former master, Tenzan. You get much about the hero's backstories — and next to nothing about Koryu beyond it having been so corrupted that it became a nigh-mindless force of destruction. Despite the entire rest of the story focusing around defeating the Lords to cleanse their own corruption, Koryu is swiftly sealed away again without much of a fight beyond another character's Heroic Sacrifice (sorta), and entirely in a cutscene. The Kamaitachi nearby pulls a Lampshade Hanging about the anti-climax, which only makes it more blatant.
- Koh Rabntah has merged her mind with Noah, a famous Allagan. This would mean that they are the last person on Hydaelyn who could give insights on Allagan society and technology, which a person like Cid could find very useful. Sadly, this character is nothing but a repeatable fetch quest and she is not even present when you discuss with Rammbroes, her senior, about the possiblity of transferring memories between bodies, a subject she and Noah are very familiar with.
- There are quite a few people who feel as though Gaius was horribly wasted in Endwalker. He makes one extremely brief appearance early on in the game and then proceeds to have no real presence in the story whatsoever after that. Even Cid, who had a similarly brief appearance, feels better utilized in the story because he actually does something when he finally shows up towards the end.
- From the Reaper questline, the voidsent that the WoL enters into a pact with is almost a complete non-entity despite being central to the job's lore. The closest thing it gets to any screentime is its avatar (a physical manifestation of the bond between a Reaper and their voidsent) briefly appearing when the WoL first takes up the soul crystal. Outside of that, the story focuses entirely on Drusilla and her fellow Garlean expatriates, as well as her vendetta against another voidsent.
- Nerva yae Galvus is a major participant in the Garlean civil war following Varis’s assassination, where he tries to take control of the Garlean Empire as the legal heir to the throne despite resistance from Varis’s loyalists. He is brought up several times over the course of 5.xx by characters observing the state of Garlemald from afar, and by Fandaniel who uses his connections to stoke the fires between Nerva’s followers and Varis’s as they wage war in the capital. Despite his connection to the Empire and the Galvus family (with each member playing a major role in the MSQ), he’s never actually seen when you finally reach Garlemald and there is hardly any mention of his whereabouts. In 6.1, this is addressed in the final role quest where it is revealed that he transformed into a blasphemy because of his despair over Garlemald’s destruction as well as his deep-seated desire to rule. However, unlike every other blasphemy case in the role quests (aside from Gleipnir, although you do see his original self at an earlier time), you never get a flashback cutscene of Nerva before he succumbs to despair, so even here his potential is lost as you never get an idea as to what kind of person he was, whether he was fit for the Garlean throne, or even what he looked like.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- At the tail end of A Realm Reborn, the tension between Ilberd and Raubahn goes through the roof after Ilberd cuts off Raubahn's arm at the end of 2.55 due to working with the Crystal Braves that were also working with Teledji Adeledji to overthrow the Sultana. Ilberd also attacked Raubahn out of anger because Raubahn, who came from the war-torn city state of Ala Mhigo, "abandoned" his homeland to start a new life in Ul'dah. The conflict comes to a head in Heavensward where Ilberd demands for Raubahn to be executed for his crimes. You kick Ilberd's ass, but he goes on about Raubahn's betrayal before fleeing. The conflict is seemingly resolved off screen where you're later told that Lolorito is no longer working with Ilberd or the Crystal Braves and the rest of Eorzea won't take them in either, forcing them to wander aimlessly for the rest of their lives. Square Enix missed the chance to develop Raubahn and Ilberd's characters and also missed the chance to have the side plot more developed before it closed. Patch 3.5 rectified it somewhat by bringing Ilberd back as a boss fight and having him summon a primal, although it doesn't have much of anything to do with Raubahn at all, much less their shared history.
- This is one complaint about Stormblood in general, especially when it comes to Ala Mhigo. While Doma suffered from a squish, it still had far more room to breathe than Ala Mhigo - to give an idea, you start the expansion at level 60, leave for the Far East at level 61 and don't come back until level 68. For comparison, Ala Mhigo's loose ends were all tied up in one patch, whereas Doma's took two. This results in Ala Mhigo having less time to have the plot points it established earlier be given resolutions like the Doma section, often highlighted by Lyse going from marginally important in Doma, to suddenly becoming the leader of the Ala Mhigan people without naturally building it up.
- The 60-70 Samurai Questline has some of this as well. In contrast to Doma and Ala Mhigo, a rebellion in Hingashi would be seen as a bad thing and thus gradual change from within would be better. Because of how compressed the plot is to fit within five quests, the viewer never gets to hear why an all out rebellion would be a bad thing - hence its feeling of Broken Aesop and Seasonal Rot.
- After being absent for the duration of Shadowbringers, Hildibrand finally returns in Endwalker and starts out being stuck in Norvrandt. Much to the disappointment of some fans, he doesn't get to stay and be part of a story where he is thrown in an unfamiliar world, and instead gets sent back to the Source as soon as possible.
- Fourchenault publicly disowning Alisaie and Alphinaud in patch 5.55 is treated as a big deal for the two, affecting Alphinaud heavily in said patch, and being setup for things in Endwalker when the group goes to Sharlayan. In Endwalker itself though, them being disowned is off-handedly referenced a few times, but has no impact on any of the characters involved in the story; neither the twins nor Fourchenault deal with any consequences as a result of it, and it gets quietly resolved when Fourchenault apologizes near the end of the story. Making this stranger is that the two being part of the Scions is given more focus by comparison, making some feel that the own "disowning" mini-plot had no real purpose except to further Alphinaud's development during the 5.55 patch.
- When Endwalker concluded on the Scions disbanding, at least on paper, players who either disliked the Scions or simply felt they were hogging a bit too much of the limelight felt that was a good jumping off plot point for the story to move into focusing on side characters or even new ones. Instead, the Patch 6.1 storyline began with the Warrior of Light rounding up a group of Scions to go tomb raiding and spending the remainder of the patch series working closely with Estinien and Y'shtola. A new character Zero did get a healthy amount of attention (enough that she has detractors who think she got too much), but proved too contenious to really win many over and in any case was written out of the plot at the end of the patch storyline. The cinematic trailer for Dawntrail again focusing heavily on the Scions largely killed any hopes of the Scions disbanding point amounting to much.
- With Endwalker's patch storyline covering the Void in earnest, it's more than a bit strange to find that everything involving the Warring Triad and Shadowkeeper storylines with crucial backstory ties to the shard have nothing to do with the entire plot, not even a mention beyond the cast loosely retreading tidbits of the lore necessary to contextualize what everyone already knows. This gets especially bad since if you did the former questline, Y'shtola was there the whole way through, but has nary a comment to make in the present. The most you get is the Warrior mentioning Unukalhai and Cylva as survivors of the Thirteenth's fall to Zero in the aftermath of everything resolved which is quickly brushed aside, and Cylva mentioning she and Unukalhai having plans to enact for the Void themselves soon if you go speak to her. For an idea of how strange the focus of attention goes, completing the Eden raids before finishing the 6.5 MSQ gets a voiced cameo scene from Gaia by comparison; this is the only content that Yoshida himself recommended people complete beforehand. Given how much of the previous expansions slowly built up plot points and characters about the Void, without signs of a Void themed expansion, it makes it feel like the setup wasn't given the resolution it needed.
Tough Act to Follow:
- The Binding Coil of Bahamut is still considered to be the best and most memorable 8-man raid among the fanbase since it wraps up the 1.0 story involving Bahamut and Louisoix, has immersive atmosphere, and memorable music. The Alexander raids, while good on their own merits, are usually looked down upon because some fans think the use of the goblins as the antagonists is too silly and how Alexander itself isn't all that threatening compared to Bahamut. The Omega raids in Stormblood are considered better than the Alexander raids, but lack the same appealing story that the Binding Coils had due to feeling less intertwined with the main story. It wouldn't be until the Eden raids in Shadowbringers that an 8-man raid questline managed to be considered better than the Coils, in part of having interesting boss fights and an engaging story that ties up the loose ends with The First.
- Heavensward was absolutely beloved for its much more involved story compared to ARR and interesting characters with a variety of twists and turns. Stormblood, while not hated, was considered a pretty big let down due to having a less focused storyline that was split into two fronts, with the Ala Mhigo side being considered generally underwhelming despite being arguably the more important side of the two. However, Shadowbringers has been universally considered a return to form, due to having a very involved storyline with lots of tragic moments, great characters, a brand new and unknown world, and what is considered the best Final Fantasy villain in years, if not in general. Many would say it even dethrones Heavensward as the best story arc of XIV.
- The Labyrinth of the Ancients raid set the bar rather high for the 24-man Alliance Raids due to the aesthetics, the music, and the mechanics used in the boss fights. Syrcus Tower and the World of Darkness, while considered to be good, are generally not seen as highly as the Labyrinth was. Likewise, the Shadow of Mhach raids (Void Ark, The Weeping City of Mhach, and Dun Scaith) were seen as being too simple and straightforward while having bland scenery, and relying on a lot of annoying fight mechanics that either dragged them out too long, or were nearly a Total Party Kill. However, the Return to Ivalice raids has been very well received by fans and some consider it to be on par with the Labyrinth of the Ancients or even surpassing it, especially the final raid, the Orbonne Monastery in particular being seen as the best raid by many because of the complex but fun mechanics.

U-V

Ugly Cute:
- The coblyns, which look like something straight out of Spore.
- Gilgamesh looks more like an Oni in this game, complete with the Face of a Thug, but his elated smile when Nashu cheers him on after he saves her from some zombies makes him look Adorkable.
Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Paladin's warlion mount is full of uncanny valley due to how it's textured and modeled. The lion's mane looks like a massive lump of clay with the hair details almost non existent while the face itself looks like a lion you would see from a statue rather than a live animal. This is probably because the lion shares the model with Chimera monsters with the heads cut off, resulting in a shoddy copy/paste/cut job.
Underused Game Mechanic:
- The Chocobo companion allows for you to have your Chocobo mount fight alongside you in normal gameplay, providing a useful ally for classes that are harder to level (such as a healer). The chocobo caps off at level 10. Any higher than that, and you need a Thavnairian Onion, which increases the level cap, one level at a time, to a maximum of level 20. The onions are very expensive and time-consuming to get, and your chocobo will need several million EXP to gain each level past level 10, when the strongest of opponents might give around five thousand XP each. On top of that, you can only use your chocobo to fight alongside you during overworld exploration quests and FATE challenges, since your bird can't come with you into a dungeon or a raid. This means the majority of players will get their chocobo to level 10 and then stop, since there's no incentive to make your bird any stronger. The expansions have done very little to make the chocobo any more useful, making it underused despite it being something the game actively encourages you to take the time to unlock.
- The Armoire got pushed to the wayside once the Glamour Dresser superseded its functionality. The armoire also stores gear and glamour items, but what it stores is a very specific list: Artifact gear, event glamours, Veteran Rewards, pre-order bonuses, and the occasional digital item bonus from merchandise. While the Armoire has infinite space, its functions pale in comparison because of the heavy limits on what you're even allowed to place inside of it. While storing something in the Dresser costs one Glamour Prism, it can hold eight hundred gear items of any variety — more than enough space for anything you might need — and lets you glamour their appearance over what you're wearing without having to spend any more Prisms. Patch 6.4 finally gave some reason to put things in the Armoire, by allowing you to glamour anything you're currently wearing into any compatible item in the armoire while in an inn room and 6.5 breathed new life into it by being able to store clothes purchased from the Online Store, and having the same glamouring capabilities as the Dresser.
- ARR had four Trial bosses (Ifrit, Titan, Garuda and the Ultima Weapon) balanced around a normal difficulty meant for a normal leveling sized party (4 people). No other Trial boss has ever been done this way again despite being generally seen as a useful way of making the fights not too hard for players, while still teaching them valuable mechanics. Instead, the expansions set the difficulty of all Trials after to Hard, and require full parties of eight people.
- Guildhests were introduced in ARR as mini-dungeons that players could do to get a bit more experience. It also served as a way of teaching players mechanics and generally useful things about fights. Despite this, only 14 were ever made, and they cap off at level 40 with weak rewards compared to something like running a normal dungeon, with the only appreciable reward acquired by way of a challenge for doing ten of them in one week.
- Crowd control abilities and other utility skills like Interject (which can interrupt some enemy casts) are severely underused in pretty much all content: stuns are only useful with trash mobs in dungeons, and even then they gain immunity to it after a few times no matter how spaced-out each stun is (which it invariably is, since only Paladins get an ability that stuns and isn't on a half-minute cooldown), and most dungeons, raids and trials have exactly zero use for interrupts - Endwalker has exactly one dungeon boss with an interruptable spell, and even then it's a negligible self-buff to damage. Repose (Sleep) gets the shortest end of the stick, as it has zero utility in any group content despite being a universal role action for all Casters and Healers and putting the enemy out of action for far longer than any stun, because its cast time is equivalent to the slowest such abilities enemies ever use - which means that, if you're casting Repose to react to an enemy using an interruptible ability rather than casting at random and hoping for the best, by the time you actually put the enemy to sleep they've already used whatever skill or ability you were trying to prevent.
- Chocobo porters are found in various places throughout the adventure, which allow you to ride a chocobo to a fixed location without being attacked. While this takes longer than teleporting, it costs less gil and allows you to get to places that don't have an aetheryte. The trouble is, once you unlock your own mounts early on in A Realm Reborn, chocobo porters become irrelevant. Riding your own mount takes almost as long to get to any one location, you get EXP for just exploring the map, and your mounts make you fast enough that any enemy you run into will stop chasing you after just a few seconds. Plus, once you unlock flying for your mounts in any area, you can go in a straight line to any spot on the map you need to go. Also, even as early as Heavensward, the game expects that you're just going to teleport to a nearby aetheryte of wherever it sends you. Several questlines have you zipping all over the world, spending several thousand gil on teleportation fees, and the game (probably correctly) assumes that you can cover the cost without batting an eye. Even then, you can also do weekly hunts that can get you Aetheryte Tickets as potential rewards, which lets you teleport to any location for free. Yet despite all of the above, locations as late as Endwalker still have chocobo porters showing up, long after hunting for wind currents to enable flying in the area has become a far better use of a player's time. You'll probably hire a chocobo porter a few times at the beginning of the game, and then never use them again.
- The game has potions, ethers, elixirs, antidotes, phoenix downs — the usual pantheon of support and healing items the series is known for. But unless you absolutely need the cap-off or treatment such an item can provide, the entirety of the content can be played without even so much as touching a single one of them, and their sizeable cooldowns to prevent abuse further de-incentivize them. Phoenix Downs essentially exist as the only way a class without a Raise spell can get someone back up in Deep Dungeons or on the field, while Antidotes see use for the Red Mage Job Quests, and stat-boosting potions see some use in the most high-level content for optimal play. But good luck trying to convince the average player to even have these items in their inventory; for any party content, their effects are easily outmatched by a Healer's curatives and Esuna equivalents, and most DPS classes have their own panic methods of restoring health or mana anyway.
- One of the reasons that the Level 89 trial in Endwalker is considered to be one of the highlights of the expansion was because it's the only 8-player trial to have duty support available for it. On top of that, it also allows players to die three times when everything else treats one player death as a wipe. There are reasons why it wasn't available for other trials, though this hasn't stopped some players from wishing it was expanded to such, since mandatory trials often involve queues. Especially in off periods.
- Tenacity materia and weapon buffs don't tend to see much use. The Tenacity stat is just for Tanks, and it increases their damage, defense, and healing all at once. On paper, Tenacity does everything a Tank could ever want a stat to do. But in practice, it's a Dump Stat. As this video explains, Tenacity scales far worse than every other stat, and doesn't synergize with them the way other stats would. It's largely unnecessary because of how Tanks won't tend to need it in dungeons if a Healer knows what they're doing and the Tank uses their defensive cooldowns at the right time. It's even worse in the context of the Superboss high-end raids, where messing up a mechanic tends to spell instant death, no matter how much Tenacity you have. Finally, the damage boost obtained from Tenacity can be done better by boosting Critical Hit or Direct Hit instead. So it's a stat that increases a Tank's power across the board, but any effect Tenacity might have can be obtained another way from boosting other stats, and almost always with better results. For this reason, Tanks who prioritize their Tenacity tend to be pretty rare.
- The Sunken Temple of Qarn has a mechanic where players must pick up certain items and use them to tip scales in a room right before the dungeon's boss room. However, most parties simply don't bother with the puzzle at all. The reason is that getting this puzzle right opens a secret chamber filled with treasure coffers, but it's all level-appropriate gear for players that are level 35. And after multiple expansions of Power Creep, the gear you'd find in these treasure coffers is basically worthless unless everyone is doing the dungeon for the first time. Plus there's no real punishment for getting it wrong (or just outright not doing it), as this only sics three weak enemies on you before opening the boss room anyway. As a result, finding a party that actually opens the secret chamber is rare indeed. Of course, that's the last thing you have to worry about in this dungeon.
Unexpected Character:
- Heavensward introduced brand new primals, such as Ravana, on top of Alexander who became the new end-game dungeon. However, another primal was actually added, one which many hadn't seen since Final Fantasy VII: The Knights of the Round, as the final bosses of Heavensward.
- Bismarck was an unremarkable Water elemental esper in Final Fantasy VI that had minimal usage due to the weak spells it taught. Here, he's a Primal. Lakshmi also debuted there and is a primal as well despite not having many other appearances in the series.
- While a lot of people anticipated Viera, almost nobody called the introduction of the Hrothgar/Ronso race for a variety of reasons (mostly related to fears the devs wouldn't be up to do an entirely anthropomorphic race, or that a race like that wouldn't look good in XIV, the idea of gender-locked races was and still is contentious so people thought male Viera would be coming). The only hints at all were related to leaks that were so outlandish they were dismissed as exaggerated, and a small text error on the French client shortly after the release of Hydratos that could easily have been passed off as simple text bugs.
- Shadowbringers has another addition from Final Fantasy VII, the Weapons, starting with Ruby, as trials. Then halfway through the first trial against the Ruby Weapon, Nael van Darnus arises from its back, complete with another Shout-Out to Legacy, in the form of Dalamud itself.
Unfortunate Character Design: Yda's pre-Stormblood appearance. Thigh high boots, short-shorts that don't even reach said boots, notable parts that make her shorts look like they should be flapping around and flashing everyone, and of course a hat that absolutely covers her eyes. Makes one not even care about her Impossibly-Low Neckline.
Unintentionally Sympathetic: Yoshi-P and crew wanted Zenos yae Galvus to be a completely unsympathetic monster, but they didn't quite manage it, simply because of one thing that comes up at the very end of the Stormblood main quest that turns Zenos into not quite a Woobie, but still someone worthy of sympathy.
Zenos: Farewell, my first friend. My enemy. (cuts throat)
Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
- Due to their Jerkass behavior as well as how they were before the Garleans invaded, there are some who view the Ala Mhigans as this. Many hoped that a future patch or expansion centered around them would allow the player to side with the Garleans, or at least refuse to help the Ala Mhigans. Even people who didn't feel this strongly about the idea note that Stormblood has to work really hard to make absolutely sure the Ala Mhigans come across as sympathetic - and doesn't do that good of a job until the end.
- While Ilberd is meant to be viewed with contempt because he's a bad guy, his planning and characterization between Heavensward and Stormblood tries to paint Ilberd as The Chessmaster — or at least a man with fierce determination — because of how far he's willing to go to save his homeland of Ala Mhigo. The trouble is that his plans not only don't paint him this way, but make him look like he didn't think through any of his planning. Part of Ilberd's plan was a Thanatos Gambit where he died in order to summon Shinryu. This caused enough trouble as it is, requiring Papalymo to make a Heroic Sacrifice with a spell that bound Shinryu just to buy everyone time. Plus, the resulting loss of the Resistance's reputation, deaths of its best fighters, and lowered morale from the failed False Flag Operation at Baelsar's Wall ends up weakening Ala Mhigo's ability to fight back. Ilberd believed that Ala Mhigans weren't working hard enough for their freedom, but even if Ilberd had lived to see Ala Mhigo liberated, he didn't have a plan for what to do once that happened. What was left of Ala Mhigo was ruined by the Empire, and he never showed that he had any idea as to how he'd rebuild it. Ilberd wanted to chastise Eorzea for being "lazy" in not rushing to Ala Mhigo's side, but why they would do that when they just got done beating back Garlemald in A Realm Reborn never seems to cross Ilberd's mind. It's likely that the Eorzean Alliance was going to deal with Ala Mhigo sooner or later; they just wanted a moment to breathe before rushing back into the war. Ilberd forced the issue because he didn't want to wait, costing more lives and resources than if he'd shown even the slightest bit of patience. And on top of all of that, Shinryu was summoned by Ilberd to destroy the Empire, but it ends up falling into Imperial hands and fuses with Zenos to become the final boss of Stormblood, meaning Ilberd handed Garlemald a powerful primal that only didn't cause any more destruction because of Papalymo's sacrifice, the Warrior of Light's power, and sheer dumb luck. All in all, while Ilberd technically got what he wanted, the liberation of Ala Mhigo came in spite of Ilberd, not because of him. He's viewed by large portions of the fanbase as an impulsive moron that caused way more problems for his homeland than he solved.
- Lyse can come off as this during Stormblood. Her character arc for the expansion is being belligerent and callous towards her countrymen for not being willing to resist the Garlean occupation because she spent most of her life in either Sharlayan or the unconquered portions of Eorzea and doesn't appreciate what her people have gone through. Then she journeys to Doma and, through aiding in the Doman revolution, experiences what Garlean oppression really is, how the people's spirits can be broken, and how to best bring hope to the downtrodden. She then returns to Ala Mhigo wiser and with a new perspective and rises to lead her people to freedom. The problem is that the Ala Mhigan portions of the storyline are rushed and Lyse spends most of the Doman storyline present but in the background with little attention paid to her, much less attention where she visibly learns and grows from her experiences in Doma, making her main character moments jump from her being, at best, Innocently Insensitive to her oppressed people, to her being hailed as a hero and leader of those same people almost at the flip of a switch. Unsurprisingly, many found the game's glowing treatment of her in the post-Doma Ala Mhigan section to be unearned and undeserved, not helped by the rushed pacing giving her no real chance to actually show the fruits of her supposed Character Development.
- The Sekiseigumi come off this way in the 60-70 questline for Samurai. While intended to showcase some nuance to the idea of rebelling, instead it fell flat for most players. Upon hearing the Motive Rant of the rebel leader, nobody disagrees with their end goal at all. The Sekiseigumi is made up of mostly privileged people for whom the current system benefitted, which made some feel it was easier for them to say that the peace must be kept even if it was oppressive. Plus, the entirety of the main quest of Stormblood is about helping a rebellion succeed, so a questline about stopping a rebellion came across as a little broken in its intention. For these reasons, a lot of people sided more with the rebel leader than the Sekiseigumi or their samurai master.
- Livia. Cid pities how she died whining and reliving the trauma of being a war orphan, but after her exceedingly callous and brutal purge of the Waking Sands, many fans think dying in fear and despair was just what she deserved.
The Un-Twist: Shadowbringers contains a few plot points that are so straightforward, it looks like they're going to be set up for a twist, only to play them totally straight.
- The motives of the Big Bad are spelled out pretty plainly, without said Big Bad going back on it at any point. Emet-Selch makes it clear in his first scene that he is really pissed off that the Scions have managed to avert the rejoining, if only briefly. However, he then offers to co-operate with them on their mission to destroy the rest of the Light Wardens. Despite this, the Scions are clearly wary of Emet-Selch's intentions for the entirety of the storyline. And for good reason too — Emet-Selch betrays them the moment that they're no longer useful to what he wants. One would have to be foolish to think an Ascian would seriously try to stop the rejoining; he simply put his plans on hold to see if the Warrior of Light's soul was strong enough to join him as a fellow Ascian, and he was genuinely curious to see what the mortals of the time would do.
- The identity of the Crystal Exarch turns out to be one of these if you've been paying attention. It turns out that the mysterious guy you meet in the same place you last saw G'raha Tia, who controls the Crystal Tower that only G'raha Tia is supposed to be able to control, who drops hints at a personal connection to the Warrior of Light despite supposedly having never met them before, and who claims G'raha Tia inexplicably disappeared when pressed on the issue... is G'raha Tia.
Values Dissonance:
- While each of the city-states face some sort of internal conflict, the most infamous of the trio falls on Ul'dah. It becomes hard for a lot of players to sympathize with the nation when the Monetarists enforce a status quo of small handfuls of rich and wealthy at the expense of the majority, complete with paying off the Brass Blades and being willing to bankroll assassinations, enforced race riots, and other such crimes. Virtually every major character that voices an opinion hates the Monetarists, as does practically every refugee and citizen on the benevolent and/or poor ends of things. Once Teledji Adeledji is out of the picture in his failed aftermath of trying to assassinate the Sultanate, the game then turns around, offers a weak Hand Wave that the others aren't that bad and have the nation's best interests in mind, and moves on. It only becomes more bitter once Ul'dah got most of the plot spotlight and generally shrugs off everything with the Monetarists as a necessary evil afterwards; even an Ensemble Dark Horse like Godbert, the sole Token Good Teammate of the group, becomes a Base-Breaking Character for some when he espouses their viewpoints and shuts down the Sultana completely as well; it's a major Character Development moment that Nanamo learns to work with the Monetarists and for the profit of Ul'dah via giving Ala Mhigan refugees work to funnel into the economy, instead of wanting to do hand-outs like before. It's such a strange and stark dissonance with its own set up narrative that quite a few players theorize that the Ul'dah subplot was subject to some sort of Executive Meddling, though that is entirely unconfirmed. This becomes even odder in contrast to Limsa Lominsa, whose biggest problematic political action (taking away land from the Kobolds and not keeping word on their pacts) actually is resolved rather well, with the game making it very clear that the Lominsans were in the wrong and owe the Kobolds reparations, and pretty much the only reason Merlwyb didn't do it sooner was because the Kobolds were too tempered by Titan to have diplomatic discussions with prior to the discovery of the cure to tempering.
- Ultimately one of the reasons, if not the main reason, why the Samurai questline in Stormblood left a bitter taste in peoples' mouths, at least outside of Japan. It comes off as very mixed message compared to the arcs of Doma and Ala Mhigo, but part of this is the fact that the player has very little insight as to why the people of Hingashi would prefer gradual change from the inside as opposed to a war that would (in theory) enact quicker changes. When viewed from the perspective of Shogunate Era Japan, a regime that maintained peace under an iron fist, this viewpoint makes more sense.
- Some of the female NPCs are subject to sexist antics that are treated with levity. For instance, Serendipity the goldsmithing guild master is considered very attractive and has to constantly deal with men ogling and getting handsy with her, and it's Played for Laughs.

WTH, Costuming Department?: While the game has no shortage of eye-catching designs, there's some that raises the playerbase's eyebrows.
- The Evenstar set of armor obtained with Allied Seals for Magic DPS classes. Up until that point, Black Mages have been wearing a variety of Badass Longrobes appropriate for a fantasy magic user. The Evenstar set is a very tight set of Stage Magician-style clothing with a top hat with an ace of spades on it. The male version features tight pants and heeled shoes while the female version adds a popped out frilly skirt, thigh high boots, fishnets, and short shorts, and a top that features a Cleavage Window. On races with tails, their tails are also covered and propped into an upward curve. That said, it's not a complete eyesore, as there are fans of the Evenstar set, especially the hat, which is a popular pick for glamour.
- The Astrum set for Dragoons features mismatched gauntlets, a bowl-shaped helmet with mismatched golden wings (one being over a foot tall) and a breastplate with a long white skirt, giving it the feeling that the dragoon is going to sing The Ring of the Nibelung rather than kill gods.
- The Coliseum equipment gained from Dzemael Darkhold. Let's just say for female Disciples of Magic players, we hope you enjoy wearing a bikini with a hood until you get your class's Artifact Armor. The men don't have it better, as it's an equally skimpy top that leaves little to the imagination.
- The Sentinel's set also from Dzemael Darkhold is a full set of armor... with leopard print patterns. Players looking for a decent set of heavy armor more often than not will pass on this for the tacky pattern alone.
- The dungeon Shisui of Violet Tides has an armor set for every class that is basically a revealing swimsuit. Some variants either come with stockings or detached sleeves, all of which expose the wearer's midriff. Tellingly, a dyable version of the Scouting set was released two months into Stormblood as a reward for the 2017 Moonfire Faire summer event.
- The Hellfire Armor of Fending and Striking has a Cleavage Window, which is silly enough, but it also applies to male characters and makes the window look even sillier.
- Yda wears a visor that literally covers her eyes. And that's not getting into her thigh-high boots or her strange mini-shorts with a split seam at the sides.
- Alisae's clothing from the Dragonsong War to the end of Stormblood makes her look like she's wearing Ice Skates, making one wonder how she walks around so casually.
- The various mitt gauntlets look more like oven mitts than actual armour.
Win Back the Crowd: The A Realm Reborn version is definitely this for Square Enix. Before ARR's release, it was not uncommon to see some critics declare any kind of "rebuilt" FFXIV would be basically dead on arrival and that Square shouldn't bother bringing it back from the grave. Since the relaunch, some of the very same game review websites and magazines have had their opinions changed completely, and widely praise its changes. Game Informer for example went from saying "scrap it" before ARR, to now declaring it 2013's MMORPG of the Year by both the Readers and the Editors. Some of the reviewers, like Mike Fahey of Kotaku, even copped to and admitted their 180 of opinion on playing it.
The Woobie:
- Raubahn by the end of Patch 2.55. Even if you get past losing his homeland of Ala Mihgo and being the only member of the Syndicate loyal to the Sultana against the Monetarists who are trying to undermine (if not outright remove) any little authority she has left, his life seems to get worse and worse. His 2nd in command was revealed to be The Mole for the Garlean Empire (and possibly to the Monetarists as well). Then Nanamo is assassinated, with the Warrior of Light (and by association the Scions) being held responsible, enraging him to kill Teledji Adeledji. Then he's betrayed by his friend Ilberd (already staging a Monetarist-backed coup of the Crystal Braves), who cuts off his left arm defending Lolorito before taunting him saying that serving the Sultana has made him weak, then stating he was responsible for Nanamo's death, enraging him even further into a fight. Not to mention Kan-E-Senna and Merlwyb, his allies in the Eorzean Alliance, seemingly abandon him through all of this (fortunately, you later learn they had no choice in this matter, Merlwyb in particular being very frustrated at the turn of events). At the end of it all he is imprisoned and is disgraced as a traitor. Thankfully, Heavensward starts to make things better for him again by revealing that Nanamo was Not Quite Dead, only comatose, and that she can still be saved, and then further on in Stormblood you get the chance to take him home and let him help liberate Ala Mhigo.
- The Crystal Exarch in Shadowbringers aka a G'raha Tia from an alternate Bad Future where civilization in the Source was essentially destroyed, forcing him to bond himself with the Crystal Tower, denying him the ability to adventure like the heroes he looked up to. And when he does finally get to be able to summon and meet the heroes he so wanted to see, he has to desperately stop himself from revealing his true identity and intention to pull a Heroic Sacrifice for the heroes at the end of their journey. And when he does finally get the chance, he is near-mortally wounded by Emet-Selch, who takes him hostage with the intention of using his knowledge to undo everything the heroes have done. After they defeat Emet-Selch, he can barely compose himself when the Scions are thankful to him and ends up crying in happiness should the player call him by name.
- Also in Shadowbringers, Cylva, the Betrayer. Let's count the ways: She attempts to save her home world, the thirteenth, from falling to Darkness, and fails. She is convinced that her failure will doom the First to becoming a Void of Light, so the Ascians convince her to help them rejoin it. She does so, and grooms a new set of friends, the Warriors of Light of the First, and tip the scales just enough so that the First is primed for a rejoining. She then fails when she cannot bring herself to kill her new-found companions, nor can they bring themselves to kill her. After that, the Warriors of Light kill the Ascians who tricked her, and they bring about the Flood of Light she was trying to prevent. After all of that? They kill themselves after they're convinced by the Ascians to travel to the Source to rejoin the First to the Source, just as she was convinced that the same was a worthy goal. She is caught in a vicious cycle of trauma and failure, and her reward is an unending life of pain and sorrow.
Woobie Species: Shadowbringers gives us the Ancient Amaurotines - who would become the Ascians, a race of gentle and idealistic people who suffered the worst lost possible. From what we see of (admittedly, Emet-Selch's romanticized view of) them, they were a race of near-immortal giants who never knew premature death or disease, a truly Utopian society of people with no wants for shelter, food or happiness with magics so powerful they could create life just by thinking. They never knew war, and any disagreement was settled in a forum of debate where people civilly argued over their differences. The only negative shown is still a subjective one in their only allowed physical individuality being their masks, but besides that their freedom of thought and artistic pursuits were encouraged. When their world was facing an apocalyptic threat that had already wiped out an untold number of their people, they sacrificed half of the surviving numbers of their race three times to summon Zodiark, revive the world, then summon Hydaelyn as a result of the only division their people had ever known. The biggest takeway, which all of the characters agree with is that Amaurot and that ancient world deserved none of what happened to it, and it was an unmitigated tragedy what happened and the measures they had to take to save it, and understand why the Ascians seek to bring it back even though they still can't sympathize with the lengths they go to for it. While Endwalker would go on to show several glaring issues with Ancient society; issues that would lead to their destruction even, they still hardly deserved to have their world destroyed, much less in a fashion as horrific as the Final Days.
Woolseyism: While old Ted may not be working for Square anymore, his legacy lives on: the Japanese-language version of A Realm Reborn lacks much of the humor present in the English-language localization, let alone the panoply of Shout-Outs.
- Haurchefant's interactions pre Heavensward were filled with Double Entendre, with him essentially trying to get the Warrior of Light to sleep with him. While this was seen as amusing in Japan, the localization team felt it would potentially come across as uncomfortable to players and made the decision to have him be more of him becoming a huge fan of the Warrior of Light and trying to be a friend to them. His flirting was maintained but adjusted to be more playful rather than the borederline obsessive tone his original lines had. This change helped him become one of the game's biggest Ensemble Darkhorses as a result, and when Heavensward came out, his character became solidified as being closer to what he was in the western script.
- Late in the Stormblood endgame MSQ, Magnai becomes infatuated with Y'shtola and propositions her after a pitched battle, only for Y'shtola to turn him down. In most languages, Y'shtola calls Magnai "boy" or "child", while in English, she calls him "little sun". This burn hits harder in English, since Magnai is a large man who carries himself as though he was the living embodiment of the Xaela Au Ra's creation deity, the Dawn Father Azim: to be called "little sun" is a devastating blow to him.

YMMV / Final Fantasy XIV

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