"Final Fantasy 7 PC" is not an immediately intuitive combination of numbers and letters. Am I talking about the old trapezoid box version released in 1998? Or the "remaster" re-released in 2013? Or the first in the trilogy of remakes released nearly a decade later? Calling the 1998 version the "original" just makes things more confusing, since it isn't exactly the same as the PlayStation game released the year before.

When Square Enix updated Final Fantasy 7 to modern platforms in 2013 it had the chance to create something like the definitive version of the game, but instead it took some shortcuts, "improving" a few things from the original—like some of the notoriously rushed translation's grammatical mistakes—but more or less leaving the rest untouched. It's a worst of both worlds combination, where funny lines like "this guy are sick" get corrected to "this guy is sick" but the script as a whole remains confusing and frequently misrepresented in English.

Two years ago, fans released a monumental mod called the Shinra Archaeology Cut aimed at doing the script justice with a complete, top-to-bottom retranslation. It's one of a heap of FF7 mods available in the fan launcher 7th Heaven, alongside graphics overhauls, rebalances, a fan dub, and on and on. What I just learned today, though (courtesy of this ResetEra thread) is that there's a meticulously maintained spreadsheet comparing every line of dialogue from the official PC release, the Japanese original, and fan translator TurquoiseHammer's new text.

Side-by-side, it's easy to see where the original English translation cut corners, misunderstood what was happening in the original text, or went too far in adding attitude that wasn't originally there. Sometimes that can be a smart choice when it comes to localization—"accuracy" isn't the be all, end all—but as you can see in a couple of the examples below, the official English script seemingly went edgy for edgy's sake.

While I think much of FF7's charm is tied to its messy translation, it's amazing to see a version of its script that isn't bafflingly vague and convoluted in key scenes related to Sephiroth and Cloud's identity. And instead of the official release's worst of both worlds pairing of fixed grammar but untouched everything else, the Shinra Archaeology Cut offers the opposite—an improved retranslation, but with an optional "Cultural Heritage Mode" that "restores a few memorably strange lines and infamous typos from the original English script." This guy are sick, now and forever.

Take a look at some of the changes that stood out to me as I perused the script.

Final Fantasy 7: Retranslated

In a new VGC interview, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi revealed that the upcoming JRPG is looking at a 200GB install size, bigger than almost any game out there, and certainly an outlier among singleplayer RPGs.

Hamaguchi was responding to a question about Revelation's retail, physical version. It was previously disclosed that Revelation would require additional downloads alongside the two blu-ray discs that come in the box. We're not even part of that particular conversation on PC⁠—we're lucky to get a download code in a plastic box these days.

"Things are still getting worked out, but it’s probably going to be around 200GB of game," Hamaguchi said. "I understand there are a lot of opinions about this topic, but at the end of the day, the fact is we need to overcome the hardware to a certain extent."

That's one big boy. For context, FF7 Remake requires 100GB of available hard drive space on Steam, while Rebirth demands 155⁠—Revelation's full system specs are not yet up on its own page. All told, the FF7 Remake trilogy will weigh in at 455 GB of space. While the original PS1 game was quite the contender in its time, shipping on three CDs, at the end of the day it consisted of about a gig and a half of data⁠—1.3 according to TheGamer, and 1.7 according to GamingBolt.

I think the biggest install I've ever tolerated was 150GB of Destiny 2, but I'm a different person now. Call of Duty has grown infamous as a hard drive hog, but it's also relatively modular. At a time of brutal storage markups amid the RAMpocalypse, 200GB is a tough ask for one game, but Revelation might be one of the rare few with the star power to pull it off.

PAX Australia returns to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in October, and this year's Expo Floor promises to be packed with playable games.

For starters Sega will have four games to try including Total War: Warhammer 40,000 with three playable scenarios, as well as Alien: Isolation 2, Persona 4 Revival, and Yakuza's noir prequel Stranger Than Heaven. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer will also be playable ahead of its October 23 launch.

Square Enix's booth will have a hands-on opportunity for players to try Final Fantasy 14 on Switch 2, then create a bracelet and take a themed photo. FF14's localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and global community producer Toshio 'Foxclon' Murouchi will be taking part in a behind-the-scenes panel where they endure a hot sauce challenge while sharing war stories. Attendees will get an early peak at Final Fantasy 7 Revelation at a special showcase too.

The Ubisoft Community Esports stages will host Rainbow Six Siege competitions, an Assassin's Creed sea shanty singalong, the Ubisoft Cosplay Runway, and a Just Dance-Along, among other events.

PAX Australia runs from October 9–11, and badges are on sale at the official website. I'll be spending most of the weekend at the PAX Rising indie showcase trying to play as many of the more than 90 indie games on show as I can. There's plenty more worth checking out on the full schedule.

I've had a very good time with Final Fantasy 14's new Beastmaster, and I've very much enjoyed the Crucible of the Unbroken—but that doesn't mean there aren't problems. While the first few boards are a great time, problems start to pop up when you try to be competitive.

Those problems have grown so numerous, in fact, that Square Enix has postponed the first season of the Crucible of the Unbroken's ranking system, as posted on the game's official site: "Since the release of beastmaster, we've seen many players enjoying the new limited job and tackling its challenges.

"That said, we have also received considerable feedback on Beastmaster's combat balance, as well as reports of issues with certain gameplay mechanics, which we are working to address. If rankings were to begin under these conditions, it would be difficult to determine whether the results reflect the intended balance of the job and its mechanics, impacting the fairness of the ranking process."

As for what the problems are, it's a little complicated: In order to get on the leaderboards for the Crucible's ranking system, you need to beat a board on the "third degree", which is, to put it plainly, really hard. But required, if you want a Tourmaline Golem Mount, which would only be given to people who land in the top few hundred players (this varies based on region size) when the season ends.

This clashes up against the scoring system itself. In order to get more points, you need to get board bonuses.

Some of these bonuses make sense—things like not failing mechanics, taking damage, and the degree bonuses themselves. Others, though, are a bit of a headscratcher: You get more points if you use only three familiars (rather than the permitted 15), don't use campsites, feed, spend coins, or get gear, and stick to a single familiar type.

If you want to place on the leaderboard to get that mount, you have to basically not engage with the systems that make the mode interesting to begin with—that is, tailor-fitting a roster to each fight. This'd be a little like, if in World of Warcraft's Mythic+ system, you got more points by not using your talent trees.

As a result, players have been trying to figure out ways to cheese stuff: Harsh conditions are known to prompt min-maxing, after all. Which, given there's a mount with a little FOMO added, is a recipe for the kind of player dissatisfaction that sinks systems. Which I think would be a great shame!

Personally, I think the Crucible could do well to take some more pages out of existing roguelike's books—like Hades's Heat system, for instance, where players get to pick and choose what modifiers they need to play under, rather than systematically mandating that players drop a bunch of interesting mechanics to chase a high score. Scrapping the reward being tied to landing on the leaderboard (something which would force players to min-max even if they don't want to) seems smart, as well.

Final Fantasy 14's latest job has just hit the proverbial shelves, and you know what that means: emergency maintenance to fix an extremely bizarre bug. On Sep. 8, the same day that the new beastmaster class dropped, Square Enix had to quickly patch out a bug where "if the player's character leaves the area due to a connection loss at the moment the pet uses a weapon skill that restores its master's HP, the server may crash."

Yes, this bug wasn't crashing the player's own game, but the server. While it's a pretty fringe set of circumstances that have to line up, it's easily replicated with a cheeky pull of one's ethernet cable, so it makes sense that Square Enix scrambled to address this before it became a catastrophe.

If you're unfamiliar with the beastmaster, it's one of the game's "limited jobs" along with the blue mage—basically, they are classes that can't be used to clear the main story quest or endgame dungeons, but they get a bunch of unconventional abilities to futz around with. They are broadly accessible side novelties, and with everyone piling in to check out the new one, it could have been a disaster had this bug been allowed to fester.

It's not the first time Square Enix has had to tackle a bizarre bug in the MMO. Just last year it won the coveted "Most Specific Bug Fix in a MMO" award from PC Gamer's Harvey Randall. With that one, players could get disconnected from the server if they listed an auction house item in a specific zone with an asking price set "between 44,442 gil and 49,087 gil."

It's the sort of bug that sounds like it was made up as an illustrative example of how bizarre bugs can be. But whether it's the funniest in recent memory is still up for debate, given the 'random buffs' incident from back in 2023.

I've had a little time to muck around with Final Fantasy 14's new Beastmaster limited job—for the uninitiated, a limited job is sort of like a minigame. Not an actual class you can take into current raids or dungeons, but a side-activity that uses the game's combat system to create something new.

The Beastmaster can tame and use creatures in combat. And for the first 30 levels, I was mostly just filling out my little book of monsters in a pleasant haze. I like the job's core combat mechanics, which involve pairing up axe strikes with specific monster abilities to form combos, but grinding in the overworld doesn't do much to show that off.

Where the Beastmaster really shines is in the Crucible of the Unbroken, the limited job's roguelike mode.

I was mostly expecting a straightforward list of bosses to push over via FF14 fun, but played-out combat mechanics, and there is some of that demand. But it's mixed with an overarching minigame of strategy and ability usage that has me watering at the mouth for whatever strange, eldritch things Evercold is cooking up.

For context, Evercold will be introducing "Evolved" jobs—a means to escape the game's rote, two-minute cooldown homogenization that's plagued it for years. During the look we've gotten at these, it seems Square Enix wants to reintroduce job identity to each of the existing jobs by giving them something weird.

For example, the Paladin gets defensive abilities they can essentially "parry" with, unlocking huge punishes if they time them moments before a powerful blow lands. The Dragoon will get an ultimate jump ability and, while it is still being deliberated, the developers have teased the idea of giving the Dragoon a 90% damage resistance buff while they're up in the air. The Dragoon is a DPS job. This'd be unprecedented.

But it's hard to tell, with any development studio, where the hype ends and the overpromising begins. Will Square Enix be brave enough to commit? The Crucible of the Unbroken tells me they very much might.

Granted, this is an isolated bit of content off the beaten path, but it's clear that Square's been using it to experiment with job design that's more reactive to the encounter at hand, rather than just hitting the same buttons every two minutes.

You get given 10 of your collected pets to bring with you into your run—while you can bring three into a battle at a time. Each of these critters have a "Trick" ability, which hits a certain elemental damage type (and enables your Axe combos), a "Tempered Release" ability, which is unique to that creature, and a "Borrow" ability, which is unique to that creature's type.

Doing well in crucible battles isn't about memorising your rotation by rote—or even by memorising mechanics, really, although the Crucible is punishing if you mess anything up, as any good roguelike should be. It's about bringing specific beasties to specific encounters and using them in specific phases.

For example, one boss I fought had a mid-fight phase in which four flames steadily advanced to the centre, slapping me with a debuff if I didn't kill them in time. They're weak to water, so I brought out my favourite crab bro, borrowed his "you can spam water attacks now" ability, and melted them down.

This extends to a lot of other mechanics, too. If you want to interrupt a cast, you need a specific critter for that. If you want to endure a massive tankbuster, you'll need to borrow a defensive ability from one of your animal friends.

You aren't just deciding which scissor, paper, or rock to use—the crucible forces you to be deliberate in a few ways. Firstly, these bosses constantly output damage. You can choose to have the boss either attack you or your pet, but health loss is permanent and can only be restored by items or campfires.

You don't want to die, because then you fail the run, but you also might want your pet to live for a future battle—or conversely, you might have a (literal) sacrificial lamb. Furthermore, swapping between pets has a long cooldown, so you're going to have a beastie out for a while. It's a little like the game's already-existing Bard job, wherein you have three songs that last for 45 minutes a pop.

It's extremely compelling, and I've legitimately felt like I'm putting together custom strategies for each fight—all the while juggling my own rotation and dancing between AoE danger zones. And it gives me hope that Evercold's new evolved jobs will be super weird, too.

Maybe not just as weird. Obviously, Beastmaster's occupancy as a limited job gives it a lot more room to experiment—but the Crucible does feel like a testing ground for concepts in future raids and fights. I can easily see a world in which a specific set of jobs are able to simply skip entire mechanics because of their unique abilities.

I don't want a puzzle for every old casual dungeon boss, mind—but I do want those same eureka moments where you realise you've got the perfect answer to a mechanic on your action bar, rather than just memorised as 'this particle effect means we stack up, this one means we spread'. If "evolved" combat design is half as experimental as Beastmaster, then Final Fantasy 14 will have finally shaked off the dust.

The games industry's been in an (understandable) fuss lately about the prophesied death of physical media from Sony, which has announced it'll be going discless for the foreseeable future. Players are really angry because it's not exactly great if the one place you can buy your games also controls the entirety of the pricing—as Sony hypothetically would on its PlayStation consoles.

Things are a little easier for us over here on PC land, but this recent allergy to download-only games has had fans up in arms whenever they get a whiff of digital exclusivity. As is the case with Final Fantasy 7 Revelation which, even though it's getting a physical disc version, will require a digital download.

Speaking with IGN, director Naoki Hamaguchi claims to be with gamers on the importance of physical media: "Personally, I'm very happy that we are able to release a physical disc version of FFVII Revelation considering how the entire gaming market, or the landscape, is veering towards the disc-less direction."

Regarding the download requirement, however, Hamaguchi says it was there to avoid compromising on detail: "When we had an internal discussion with the development team about how we wanted to approach the physical discs and the physical releases of FFVII Revelation, initially there were conversations about using the same disc size as we did for, say, FFVII Rebirth.

"But if we were to do that, it would mean that we would have to make a compromise in terms of the fidelity and the quality of the game. So as a development team, we didn't want to do that. We didn't want to make any compromises for the game. So realistically, the only choice that we had was to release this physical disc, but with certain sections of the game being a digital download format through the physical disc."

Which is an interesting take on it, depending on its implementation. On the plus side, a hypothetical PC version of this sort of thing skirts around a couple of the problems folks have with gaming's disc-pocalypse: It still lets gaming stores set the price, giving folks a wider range of options for purchasing, which is healthier for the consumer on the whole.

It also, depending on implementation—like whether the game requires a code—might preserve the second-hand gaming market, though I'd be surprised if Square Enix didn't slip a sneaky set of numbers in there to drive up sales.

On the downside, it also makes them inherently perishable. I don't think Square Enix is going anywhere for a while, but over the course of decades? Sure, anything can happen. And if it does, and Square can't provide a download for the rest of the game, then the disk becomes inherently useless. Counter to an ever-evolving future, at the very least.

The reception to Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's story has been as much of a journey as the expansion itself. It was never going to be easy, being the first expansion to build a brand-new arc following a decade of excellent storytelling, and unfortunately it didn't quite land initially.

Criticisms around its core narrative have largely abated over the last few patches, though, as we near the next expansion Evercold in January. And with its final batch of quests now unleashed upon players I'm here to declare: this might be the greatest final MSQ patch we've ever received.

Spoilers ahead for Patch 7.56 of Dawntrail, if that wasn't already obvious.

Dawntrail's final quests serve as less of a light teaser for what's to come in Evercold, and instead feel like a straight-up prologue to the expansion. That's wildly different from what I've come to expect from these patch quests. Sure, we usually spend a few patches building up to what's next, dropping little hints and then using the final patch quests to introduce a new character or setting as a fun little hype-builder.

But this felt… different, somehow. Almost as if we were playing the first few quests of Evercold. The patch already goes ahead and drops us straight into the ice-clad Fourth—that's the reflection we'll be spending our time in during the expansion—and almost immediately into an encounter against foes we'll undoubtedly face in the future.

Our character introduction teaser comes in the form of Visna, an adorable young catgirl with her wits about her and a dab hand with a crossbow. Oh yeah, that's the other thing: this patch seems to be straight-up showing off the currently unrevealed physical ranged job. Creative Studio 3 still seems to be keeping its cards somewhat close to its chest with it, though. Visna doesn't have many animations, aside from one move where she cleaves clusters of enemies and calls out to her falcon.

But just being able to see it, without even knowing anything about it, is the exact sort of pre-expansion hype I'm a total sucker for. Coupled with Visna charismatically explaining what the Fourth's all about: Differently-branded folks confined to certain homes, all of which happen to be gigantic airships on account of the surface being completely frozen over for the last 500 years. Get too close to someone with a different brand? Well, according to Visna, there's a good chance one or both of you will die for it. It's a great opportunity to info dump in advance, already letting us know what we're in for.

The whole thing builds up to getting us ready to head to Evercold's first location, Naglfar, while cleverly confining us to a tiny, separate area that still gives us a glimpse of what sort of vibe we can anticipate. The real thing'll come with Evercold itself, naturally, but it felt like I was already able to dip a toe into the expansion even while restricted to a singular floating platform.

Everything ends right before we plan to set off to Naglfar, leaving Evercold in the perfect position to throw us straight into the action. Not that I mind a little new-expansion-preamble, but Creative Studio 3 slapping it in the previous expansion is a great way to get the ball rolling on the next one even quicker than it might usually be able to. It was all incredibly refreshing in a way I simply had not expected, and I could feel myself getting those new-expansion fuzzy feelings even with Evercold four entire months away.

I think it's an excellent direction for Dawntrail's final moments to take—especially in an expansion that has been largely disparaged on the narrative front—setting the stage in a way that feels a little bit different to expansions past. It's still difficult to tell what sort of expansion Evercold is going to be based on a relatively short batch of quests, but I'm incredibly excited to find out.

Final Fantasy 7's remake trilogy has, at the very least, given us a trio of pretty solid RPGs—I had a great time with the first, and I'm soon to buckle up and finally give Rebirth a go. But I can't help but wonder, quietly, whether or not Final Fantasy has fallen into the same 'fear of new IP trap' as other games.

That's not to say that the FF series isn't getting new games. Final Fantasy 16 came out in 2023 and snagged a solid 79 from us in our Final Fantasy 16 review. And yet, a small part of me wonders what new and exciting games we might've gotten if Square Enix had devoted the Remake team to making new final fantasies, rather than spending three entire big-budget titles and over half a decade rehashing a classic.

And yet, Square seems reluctant to release its grip over the FF7 cast. That's per a PAX West panel (thanks, GamesRadar+) wherein director Naoki Hamaguchi said (via translator): "We want to make this a work that creates new fans 20 or even 30 years from now," a game that can "move beyond being a classic of the past and shape it into an IP with an ever-evolving future."

And listen, I don't want to be a grumpy old git about this, but… that's just what Final Fantasy is in general, surely?

It does seem weirdly backwards that Square Enix has invented a franchise that allows for the best of both worlds—a recognisable, strong brand with recognisable mainstays and iconography that, nonetheless, allows the developer to make a new world with a new cast of characters with every entry.

In other words, Final Fantasy is… already meant to have an ever-evolving future. Will there be other ever-evolving futures within that ever-evolving future? Like a constantly ever-evolving matryoshka doll?

That's not to say Square Enix isn't going to stop trying or making new FF games, obviously. But after three full-length remakes following Cloud, I can't help but feel bone-tired at the idea that we'll be hearing more out of him in the immediate future. Let the blonde twink rest, for heaven's sake.

If there's one thing that's become daunting about the modern RPG, it's the ballooning time investment. There's no better example than the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, a reimagining of a classic that has stretched itself out between three entire fully-fledged games.

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation just had its release date dropped alongside a 10-minute gameplay deep dive during PlayStation's State of Play. In it, we got to see a closer look at the airship overworld.

It's pretty dang impressive. Your airship'll let you zip around the open world in record time, showing you a charming mini-model of each zone—it's not one hundred percent seamless (there's a cutscene between choosing a landing spot and parachuting down that's doubtless there to disguise some loading) but the ability to parachute down anywhere is neat, and it feels like a modern-day realisation of what the classic airship overworld of older RPGs were trying to do.

We saw this in practice in a couple of locations, including Wutai—wherein Yuffie was able to grapple hook to a nearby roof and have a roam around. And yet, despite how impressive this all looks, I can't help but feel a certain dread set in.

I haven't played FF7 Rebirth yet, just Remake—owing partially to a lack of spare hours to pour into it on my part, but also a resistance to the idea of playing what my co-workers have told me is a great big stonking open world. To settle down and follow that shot up with the chaser of yet another massive, expansive open world just to round out a trilogy is enough to make me want to sleep for a thousand years.

Assuming a similar playtime to completion as its past two games, and assuming you don't do everything these games have to offer, that'll be a stonking 150-odd hours to round out the entire trilogy—quite literally tripling the game it was originally remaking. Are we sure, strictly speaking, that all that's necessary?

Then again, I'm not one to judge. I'm an evangelist for Final Fantasy 14, a game that takes an unreasonable amount of time to complete, and the prospect of another FF game with a great huge world to explore is bound to match somebody's freak. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation releases April 8, 2027.

Picture this: I am emerging from a pile of paper, red string, and thumbtacks, hair (I have hair in this scenario) dishevelled, breathless, yelling like I've well and truly lost it: I knew it! I knew we were getting a crossbow in Final Fantasy 14! I am then carted away by people in white coats and dispensed in an abandoned warehouse, where Naoki Yoshida emerges with a loaded pistol. I know too much.

Alright, I'm probably not that conspiratorially out of lockstep with the FF14 community about the new job, especially given this latest piece of evidence, but I do feel vindicated. Back during the latest fanfest, some more details emerged about the as-yet-unannounced physical ranged job. Namely, a couple of soundbytes and some trailer snippets.

You can read my full conspiracy board I just linked, which also includes trying to analyse the shape of a catgirl's wand to prove that it was, in fact, a crossbow bolt. And here I am, completely vindicated, because the patch 7.5 site's just been updated with a new image.

Look at what's on her back. That's a crossbow. She's using a crossbow! I knew it! (I proceed to collapse into maniacal, unsettling laughter).

In my mind, this pretty much clinches it: It's almost certain that the physical ranged job in FF14 will be some kind of crossbow-wielding falconer. Square Enix wouldn't just create a new crossbow model (and presumably a ton of bespoke animations) for a job that doesn't exist in-game. Creative Studio 3's a frugal one, sometimes to its own detriment.

Couple this piece of evidence with the soundbytes shared by sound director Masayoshi Soken, the actual Evercold trailer, the job symbol we were shown, the fact we know it's a physical ranged job, that weird lalafell animation glitch—and I admit this is a stretch, but the fact it's a norse themed expansion, and norse mythology loves its birds? I am vindicated. Now and forever.

Last month, Final Fantasy 10 turned 25 years old—a fact that has utterly shaken my perception of the passage of time, leaving me to slowly decay into a pile of dust. It remains one of my favourite JRPGs of all time, even if PC only has the significantly weirder-looking, plastic-faced HD remaster. The romance! The belts! The turn-based battling! The cutscenes! Things that all still very much hold up two-and-a-half decades later, in my humble and not at all biased opinion.

But one aspect that has endured above all others is the game's soundtrack. It's this immaculate blend of genres, something we'd see happen more in future games like Final Fantasy 13-2. From the all-out rock of Otherworld that blasts your ears during the introduction of Blitzball rockstar Tidus, to the wonderfully ethereal Besaid. Or even the game's overarching theme, To Zanarkand, which is the perfect musical embodiment of its melancholic narrative.

When I think about Final Fantasy 10, though, one song always comes to mind: Suteki Da Ne. It's the song that plays during a hugely pivotal moment in the game. Yuna has become increasingly conflicted over her role as a summoner—one which is destined to end in her death—but her desire to quit is outweighed by her commitment to her duty.

The scene culminates in her and Tidus together in the springs at Macalania Woods, a gorgeous glittering landscape painted in shades of blue, while the two descend under the water and share a kiss. It's the first display of romantic intimacy between the two, capped off by the delicate Japanese vocals and sweet orchestra of Suteki Da Ne.

It wasn't the series' first attempt at a vocal track. Final Fantasy 6 had pseudo-vocals during the famous opera scene. Final Fantasy 7, of course, had One Winged Angel, and Final Fantasy 8 was the first time I recall a vocal song in the series going more pop-focused with Eyes on Me.

But Final Fantasy 10, being the first to release on PlayStation 2, felt like a huge step up in terms of how hard composer Nobuo Uematsu could cook. It's a song that's needed little-to-no rearrangement in the years since, because it remains so dang good from its initial conception.

It's the first vocal track I remember really resonating with in a Final Fantasy game, one that brought me to tears the way no other videogame had up until that point. It feels beautiful and tragic at the same time, and it's a track I don't think a game in the series has ever come close to matching since—though Final Fantasy 14's Flow is probably the closest contender.

I'm not sure we'll ever get another soundtrack quite like Final Fantasy 10, and 25 years later I still find myself going back to its music time and time again. And while Suteki Da Ne might not be my most listened to of the bunch, I maintain it's one of the best composed pieces—a diamond in a huge stinkin' pile of gold. And one that still brings a little tear to my eye every time I listen to it.

I roleplay in MMORPGs because I am a big, stinking nerd—I've written about the joy of such activities on this website before. But in case you're uninitiated, here's how it works: You and a group of your mates spend time "in character", roleplaying as one might at your average D&D table. Just swap out a defined ruleset for the background dressing of an MMO, and you get the general jist.

In Final Fantasy 14, I've easily spent several hundred of my 5,000 hours (don't look at me) milling about and telling stories with my friends—as do many others. This is a game bumping at all points with activity, everything from high-stakes plots to cosy cafes and… yes, nightclubs. But that's like its own subculture.

It's been a creative joy. A joy that I will now get to measurably feel self-conscious about, because one curious player has assembled a census specifically for giga-nerd writers like myself. The Crystal RP Census, put together by Reddit user CevicheLemon, is genuinely really fascinating.

It collects the information of over 10,000 roleplayers, painstakingly collated over the period of two months, and then scrambled for anonymity, and the findings are legitimately interesting—but before I put my analysis hat on, here's how basic I am.

My character, a male hyur born in Ul'dah that identifies with Limsa Lominsa more these days due to backstory reasons, is approximately the 2nd (most common) in terms of gender, 4th in terms of race, 11th in terms of origin, and 8th in terms of current faction association. Hey, not bad! I'm sorta kinda unique, maybe!

The most popular backstory for Warriors of Light is, if we smush all this data together, a female miqo'te from Ishgard who hasn't really gone elsewhere. The least popular Warrior of Light is a non-binary lalafell from the long-extinct magical empire of Mhach that's now slumming it with the Omicrons (I omitted the Omicron planet because it would've been impossible for a lalafell to get there).

These pictures aren't actually likely to bare out, though. Behold, my lore knowledge: miqo'te aren't all that common in Ishgard. They do, however, have tribes located all around the place. I'd take a guess that the 21.8% of miqo'te players are scattered all over the place in terms of origin, whereas Ishgard is instead over-represented by the elezen and hyur population.

This is in direct contrast to the Azim Steppe, which, lore-wise, would have to be the origin almost entirely taken up by the next-most popular race, Au Ra.

I'm genuinely fascinated that two people are just roleplaying Omicrons, a basically-extinct robot race from another planet—and that ten characters seem to be invested in them. I have basically never seen anyone doing this and I would like to know who they are so I can needle them with questions about their creations.

Hayden Panettiere, an actress with a huge body of work spanning TV, film, and videogames, has died at the age of 36.

Her death was announced by her father Alan "Skip" Panettiere in a statement released to ABC News which read: "It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her—and to the millions who watched her onscreen."

Panettiere appeared in television shows and movies for almost her entire life, but shot to fame in the 2000s for her role in Heroes as Claire Bennet. Her character was the driving force of much of the show's plot, and where the phrase "Save the cheerleader, save the world" originates.

While most of her major roles lied in TV and film–such as her role in Nashville, Bring It On: All of Nothing, and Scream 4—she had a small but impactful career in videogames, too.

She lent her voice to Kairi in Kingdom Hearts, a role which she would reprise in its first sequel and Birth By Sleep, along with voicing Xion in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. While she hasn't voiced Kairi since 2010—Alyson Stoner replaced her in all subsequent games—her original work is still highly regarded by the community. Hayley Joel Osment, the voice of main character Sora, shared an image of Panettiere to his Instagram story with the caption "Rest in Peace".

She also provided both her voice and likeness to Sam Giddings in Supermassive Games' excellent interactive horror Until Dawn. She was perhaps one of the most recognisable names in the cast when the game originally released, and her performance easily remains one of my favourite parts of that game. She came back to the role for a post-credits scene in the 2024 remake, making it her final credited role in a videogame.

I've long held that no RPG is quite as spectacular as Kingdom Hearts, and I'm careful to specifically use the word "spectacular." For every ounce it is great, it's specifically great to gawk at, ideally with a mixture of awe and bewilderment. This is a game series where, if you die at a climactic moment, Mickey Mouse can emerge from your Christian soul and start killing people with a giant stick. It's incredible.

A good Kingdom Hearts game is such a delight to watch in action that it's also kind of great television, so it makes perfect sense to me that an anime is on the way to the Disney Channel and Disney+. The news was announced last week at D23, Disney's big biennial fan festival. Notably, Disney+ has been named as a priority boycott target by the BDS movement protesting the role of various corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

As for what to expect, Kingdom Hearts famously has a long-winded plot that's impenetrable unless you're willing to play about a hundred spinoffs, many of which are on different archaic consoles. Given that, you might be wondering—will a season of TV explain this gargantuan story to me? Will I finally get it? While we don't have much to go off just yet, the answer is easily guessed: No.

While Disney has said the show "reimagines the iconic adventure with a brand-new story," series creator Tetsuya Nomura is involved, and you have to remember this is the guy who was hesitant to let Sora show up in Smash Bros. because it might not get on with KH canon. I'd be amazed if this series didn't pull from or at least reference the decades of convolution that have come to define Kingdom Hearts, and I don't even strictly think that's a bad thing. Picking through the endless sea of details is half the fun.

Will it be better than Seth Kearsley's abortive 2003 TV series would have been? We can only guess—but it's still Kingdom Hearts, so at the very least it will almost certainly be interesting.

Four long years after it was announced, we finally have some idea when we'll be able to play Kingdom Hearts 4. At Disney's D23 fan event, Square Enix revealed that the sequel will arrive sometime in late 2027.

That isn't everything new that Square Enix had in store for fans either. The reveal was accompanied by a new trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 that showed off a new world the sequel will take players to—Coco's colourful land of the dead. The trailer shows Sora fighting enemies in the crowd of a concert and riding sky rails, as Mickey, Goofy and Hades strive to reunite with the series' errant hero after he disappeared at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3.

Obviously, it would have been nice if Square Enix had committed to a specific date. But even having some idea of when the game will be released is a big deal after years of near-total radio silence from Square Enix. It was only in June that we received our first glimpse of the game since the sequel was announced in 2022, so going from that to knowing roughly when we'll be able to play it in the space of two months is quite the surprise.

Despite the dearth of information about the game over the years, we do have a rough idea of what Kingdom Hearts 4 will involve. The sequel will commence a new story arc which Square Enix is calling the Lost Master Arc, and will be primarily set in Quadratum—Kingdom Heart's Equivalent of Tokyo. As the latest trailer demonstrates, however, it will still involve the usual jaunt through various Disney worlds

While Square Enix has kept the lid on Kingdom Hearts 4 over the years, series director Tetsuya Nomora has repeatedly reassured fans that the game is on track. And both Square Enix and Disney have plenty of reasons to continue supporting it, since Disney recently revealed that Kingdom Hearts ranks among the company's "billion-dollar franchises". Turns out players really love it when you combine Disney characters and Final Fantasy-style JRPG action. Who knew?

Given the current state of the industry elsewhere—it's, uh, dire—I'm pleased to report that Square Enix, creator of the Final Fantasy series among other games, is doing pretty alright, all things considered. The news comes as a result of a financial results report, shared here by Gamebiz.jp (and translated by Automaton).

In the fiscal year ending 2027, ol' Square saw a major 88.6% operating profit increase year-on-year, mostly thanks to its videogame business—which itself saw its operating profit increase by 91.8% and its revenue by 51.8%. That's mainly due to Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, which is finally meeting some expectations, one would surmise.

What's interesting to me is the footnote that Final Fantasy 14—a game whose popularity had been struggling with the somewhat-stagnant formula of Dawntrail, with an unofficial (but consistent and long-standing) census reporting a significant downturn back in June 2025— experienced an uptick in players in that same census earlier this year.

As a player of the game myself, I'm willing to call the shots on a few reasons why this is happening—first up, the actual content that Creative Studio 3's putting out has been markedly improved, with lessons learnt from the disaster of Forked Tower.

The developer has shifted from an outdated casual/hardcore divide to a more modern, scaling approach to difficulty—with the deep dungeon Pilgrim's Traverse having a scalable endgame fight, the expansion's one (and only) variant dungeon having a midcore "advanced" version, and the North Horn's version of the Forked Tower being more accessible, with an extreme version to boot.

Basically, Square's using more of the buffalo, which leads to far fewer perceived dips in patch cadence, even if the amount of stuff to do is still the same by volume. Then there's the Evercold announcements—revamped "evolved" jobs, a similarly midcore difficulty for its raid series, a complete rethinking of the tomestone system for a more seasonal structure.

Whether or not that all sounds appealing to you, change is vital for keeping an old girl like FF14 chugging along. Square Enix seems to think so, too—as the report mentions that, despite this uptick in players, FF14 actually only saw a slight profit increase because of the money the developer's actually spending on it to get Evercold ready for 2027.

Which makes me genuinely hopeful, given the sensation I've felt that FF14's development team has been on a shoestring budget for years—despite being Square's very own cash generator. It's understandable to siphon off a little bit of money from the consistent projects so you can experiment, don't get me wrong, but I couldn't help feeling a little miserly in recent years when "cost" was cited as a factor in certain missteps.

Final Fantasy 14 isn't any stranger to crossovers—but Evercold will be a first for the MMO, wherein both the raid series and the alliance raid series (8-man and 24-man raids, respectively) will be crossovers. With the latter being a whackadoodle Evangelion crossover, and the former being a far more reasonable FF7 one.

This won't be the first time FF14 has had crossovers with other Final Fantasy games, mind. There have been seasonal events with Final Fantasy 15, for instance, and the Omega raid series in Stormblood was chocka with FF game references—although that was justified by way of a computer simulation. Still, we got to kick Kefka's butt.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, current FF7 remake director Naoki Hamaguchi (who will be involved in the crossover) tells the site his team was really pumped to "come up with all these ideas", but at "the same time we have to be really careful that it's not impacting the FF14 patch release schedule, because then that would be putting the cart before the horse".

As a matter of fact, both Hamaguchi AND producer of FF14 Naoki Yoshida had to tell their team to "calm down" and "be reasonable", with Hamaguchi in particular instructing his team to "look at our bandwidth to see what's realistic and to make sure that they can do their best work".

Which I'm glad for, to be honest. While I've grown fonder of Dawntrail's host of content as the expansion has gone on, I can't help but feel as though Creative Studio 3 was spread a little thin between making Final Fantasy 16 and its MMO, working on limited resources that, for instance, caused Occult Crescent's first Forked Tower raid to only have one difficulty setting.

As a matter of fact, criticism of Dawntrail has been so firm that it's finally gotten Yoshida and co. to start making big changes to the game with Evercold, which is a reassuring sign that things are on track. I'm glad that the directors of both games, then, are being purposefully reasonable about how much their teams can handle—which is good, because the prospect of getting to fight Sephiroth in my favourite MMO does fill me with glee.

Modder Elevna on the Nier Replicant Nexus has made my day with the full release of Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139…, a project that replaces the young protagonist of the cult classic's 2022 remaster with his grizzled, older counterpart from the 2010 original.

Let's back up: In Yoko Taro's vision for Nier, the titular protagonist (whose name you're allowed to change for some reason) was a waifish anime twink who kinda looks like Raiden from Metal Gear. This was during peak Xbox 360, the piss filter era, so Square Enix executives wanted a hero with a little more Unreal Engine 3 beefy masculinity to appeal to the west.

The compromise: Japan got two versions of Nier. Replicant on the PS3 boasted Yoko Taro's preferred "Brother" Nier, so named because he's siblings with fellow main character Yonah. The Xbox 360's Nier Gestalt featured "Father" Nier, who was aged up to his 40s, put on a powerlifting program, and made to be Yonah's dad. In the west, we basically only got Nier Gestalt no matter the console version.

Fast forward to 2022, and Nier gets a remaster because everybody took another look after the explosive success of Nier Automata and realized the original was always good⁠—I liked Nier before it was cool, and I'm not bitter about all those 6/10s it got. The cheekily named Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… brought Brother Nier to the west for the first time, giving us oldheads something to get excited about (aside from finally having a PC version).

Here's the thing, though: Yoko Taro, I love you and your eccentric auteur purity, but just this once, the shadowy cabal of risk-averse, art-hating, shareholder-worshipping executives was right. Father Nier is the man. Grizzled dads protecting their kids in the post apocalypse is played out, sure, but Father Nier is one of the high water marks of the form⁠—not the least because he's kind of an asshole who sucks and makes everything worse.

Nier shows a world well past its sell-by date, and while both Brother and Father Nier are men possessed by ungovernable rage, Papa Nier cuts it with this sense of mournful weariness that just ties a nice bow on the tragedy of it all. It's mostly sold by a career-best performance from prolific voice actor Jamieson Price, who I only just realized was also part of one of my favorite dialogue exchanges in any RPG.

There were rumblings Square Enix might do an official Father Nier DLC, but it never panned out. Cue Elevna's Gestalt mod, which offers a full, luxury Papa Nier experience in 2026. The original model is back and touched up, great, but Elevna also dug all of the audio files for Price's voiceover out of the original and ported them here, making the mod essential.

That would have been enough for me, but Elevna's attention to detail is truly impressive. Nier's alternate skins have also gotten Papa versions, and ver.1.22…'s bonus chapter now has repurposed voice lines from Price to smooth things over⁠—rewatching the chapter's cutscenes, Nier mostly makes small comments and combat barks that can easily be fudged. Elevna even ported back in relevant dialogue from other characters referencing Nier's age.

My favorite small detail: Nier's OG DLC (now just part of the game) features a dream arena where you fight as the other version of Nier⁠—Brother back in 2010, Papa in Replicant. Elevna's Gestalt mod swaps Brother Nier back in for the dream fights.

Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139… is a perfect mod by my reckoning, acting on a supremely niche demand (my supremely niche demand) at an almost absurd level of craft and care. It makes me happy. It's how I'll do my next replay.

Final Fantasy 7: Revelation is on the horizon, but there's a looming shadow—Sony's recent mandate that there'll be no disks in the publisher and console developer's future, a move that's been controversial, to say the least. It had multiple developers, including the minds behind Clair Obscur Expedition 33, mourning the loss of physical copies.

For FF7 remake director Naoki Hamaguchi, the shift away from physical editions in general means that Revelation's own existence in meatspace is up in the air, speaking to our friends over at Gamesradar+: "I can't say anything particularly definitive at this point in time. But I am working to make the arrangements to allow us to have some kind of physical edition."

He's absolutely noticed the way the wind is blowing, though even if discs are fading into the rear-view, he'd like a lot about the culture of real-world videogame enthusiasm to remain: "I do feel, as a developer and as a fan, that the general trend is for things to shift away from physical towards downloadable games.

"But that's obviously talking about the trend. Personally, here at something like Fan Fest or at community events for games that I've worked on, I really think that people bringing up things, asking for autographs—I think that's lovely. I think it's a wonderful culture and it would be a shame to lose that. I want that to remain."

Even if disks are done, however, Hamaguchi says there could always be a physical edition with a code in it: "Maybe you'll have a box with the code inside it, or maybe key cards like Nintendo's doing, or a boot disc or something. I feel like there'll always be something, and I hope there will be."

Personally-speaking, it'd be a great shame—yes, I'm mostly on Steam nowadays, something I'm becoming increasingly-aware isn't the greatest idea. But I still think the option to physically own things you buy, rather than tying them to inherently temporary servers that can go down and revoke your license at any point, is vital to the hobby not becoming a complete nightmare.

Especially in the case of Final Fantasy, where as I feel having games so massive they need to span multiple discs is a massive part of their charm—I still remember the prospect of the old PlayStation 1 versions coming with multi-part discs really hammering home how vast they were. Now all we get are chunky download sizes and SSD jenga. Ah, the good old days.

Final Fantasy 14's latest patch has dropped, and it's introduced the North Horn—the next and final step in this expansion's "exploration zone", which has been a much-needed boon to the feeling of jolly cooperation I'm trying to get out of an MMO. This expansion is an entirely new map, filled with new Phantom Jobs to level up, critical engagements to grind, and carrots to discover.

It's also got a horrifying milk dimension tucked under it. You know. A normal thing that FF14 zones usually have.

Tucked away in the center of the map, and only accessible through a series of winding, sloped tunnels guarded by high-level mobs (I had to use my Ninja's sneak ability to get in), the aptly-named "dark territory" is flush with enemies I'm nowhere near enough of a grinding freak to solo yet.

I was, however, able to get a few screenshots before I forgot I didn't have sneak on and was subsequently merked—and in the murky depths we can clearly see horrifying, arm-swarmed structures reaching out into the inky blackness.

The actual lore of the zone, shared here courtesy of ffxivcollect, is neat as heck, too: "Far beneath the unhallowed hamlet lies a space steeped in Darkness. Claimed as a domain by vicious voidsent, the area suffers from the corrupting influence of another realm, its structures and even the very ground eroded into an unknown substance.

"It should be noted that, for voidsent, the term 'domain' holds two meanings: either a tract of existing land treated as territory, or—in the case of more powerful entities—a dimension entirely of their own making. The latter is believed to share fundamental characteristics with magical barriers, yet despite years of extensive research, their inner workings remain a mystery."

As some on the game's subreddit have noted, the zone bares a striking resemblance to Promyvion, a zone from Final Fantasy 11 that has a similar aesthetic of inky-black nothingness grounded only by ruined, dilapidated structures clinging to a lonely few rocks in the void.

It's a strikingly creepy little secret, and something I'd love to see more of from Square Enix going forward—while Dawntrail's improved outdoor zones' sense of scope and scale, especially thanks to the shiny new graphical update, Square hasn't always done the best job encouraging people to go out and explore it. But if there are cool little secrets like this tucked away, I might be more inclined to hoof it and see what's out there.

I'm surprised it's taken 13 years to happen, but Final Fantasy 14 is finally bringing Final Fantasy 7 to the MMO in a big way. Upcoming expansion Evercold is getting an entire raid series dedicated to the remake trilogy—that's 12 whole fights spread across three tiers which will trickle in over the course of Evercold's two-to-three year lifespan.

It's been a long wait, but as Rebirth and Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi tells me, the stars finally aligned to make the crossover happen. "I was speaking to [FF14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida] about the fact that Evercold and Revelation release dates were actually going to end up being fairly close together," he said. "And so, instead of having them as two separate things … let's do something that can really energise the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole."

As for what we can expect when the raid series lands? Well, that's all very mysterious right now. Hamaguchi kept tight-lipped on what sort of fights we'll see, though he did hint towards efforts being made to make a Final Fantasy 7 boss more suitable for Final Fantasy 14's raids.

"We're working with both teams to talk about lore and to make sure it's well established," Hamaguchi said. "At the same time, Final Fantasy 14 raids have their own way of working. For example, you've got to have quite big bosses for that to be able to work.

"So, I'm not confirming or denying whether Sephiroth will be making an appearance—but say, for example, you can't just have human Sephiroth be absolutely massive. So how would he appear? What would go on there? These are the kinds of things that we have to think about when we're thinking about how we can get the world of Final Fantasy 7 into 14 in a way that works."

I mean, hey, I certainly wouldn't say no to a giant Sephiroth. But I also can't help but think about when he made an appearance in Kingdom Hearts 2 and how, despite very much being normal human-sized, he was by far the most foreboding fight in that entire game. Of course, when you've got eight players of varying stature surrounding a regular dude, that might just feel like unfairly beating on a guy.

It seems that the ultimate goal, though, is making sure designs and lore are compatible for both worlds. "You really have to make sure that things make sense to the fans," he said. "If Cloud just appeared in FF14 like 'Hey, I'm Cloud,' without any consistent rules, people are going to be like 'Well, that doesn't make sense.' So we really have to think about how and why these worlds are going to be connected. And that's why we have [OG FF7 writer Kazushige Nojima] on board as well to make sure that things are all looking good from our side. If we don't have that all in palace, then players are just going to look at that and go 'This feels fake.'"

But everything has to go through the father of Final Fantasy 7's cast of characters himself: Tetsuya Nomura. The longtime belt-loving Square Enix artist is also assisting with the raid series—seriously, I'm kind of shocked to see just how many big names are working on this.

"I won't mention specifics, but when [Creative Studio 3] were saying 'We'd like to have this character as a raid boss,' we had a discussion on how we can make them big. I'll use an example that it is definitely not. So say Cloud is the boss. Nobody wants to go in there and just see Cloud looking like Cloud, but massive.

"The lore is really important in establishing why. Like [you need] a good in-game reason why the character would be big and be able to have people fight them at that kind of scale. So yes, we spent a lot of time discussing that. And then you can come up with an idea and be like 'Well, we could do this.' And then Tetsuya Nomura will say 'No, you cannot do that to that character. You cannot show them like that.' So these are the parameters that we're working with, and we're always coming up with new ideas to try and see what we can do."

I am so curious to know exactly who or what Hamaguchi is referring to here, and I'm already doing my best to dive deep into my brain and remember which formidable foes are particularly small. My first thought was maybe a tonberry—a 10-minute savage fight with a slow lil guy could be very funny—but I think scaling him up without any other changes makes a lot of sense.

Whatever it is, I'm already giddy at the thought of the raid series in Evercold. Part of me is a tiny bit sad that both the alliance raid and eight-player raids are crossovers next expansion—with the alliance raid being all about Evangelion—but since Hamaguchi seems positive about intertwining the lore in a way that feels right, I'm ready to trust his vision.

Final Fantasy 14 may be an MMO, but it's certainly never sacrificed the series' talent for excellent storytelling. It's stuffed with incredible worldbuilding, a cherished cast of characters, and heart-wrenching story beats that'll get players shedding a tear from just hearing a few notes from a song that played during a cutscene.

It is, however, also a story that requires hundreds of hours to experience the full breadth of its narrative—spread across A Realm Reborn and five meaty expansions, with a sixth one on the way. While Square Enix has pruned quests here and there in an attempt to streamline the experience, it's still a helluva lot of game to ask a new player to commit to.

I've had the good fortune to be playing since the beginning, but I can say with absolute certainty that if I was only just starting the game, I'd be damn near paralysed by how daunting the new player experience is—especially if you want to play with friends who are already across the finish line.

It's something that director and producer Naoki Yoshida seems to be thinking about as well, especially as the upcoming expansion Evercold marks the official beginning of the MMO's next arc with the Godless Realms Saga.

In fact, he's considering two things right now, he told the press during a media Q&A at the Berlin Fan Festival. Though he's being rather secretive about both of them. "The first one is something that we will carry out at Evercold's release or before Evercold," he said.

"The second one involves a system, but we're currently reviewing the possibility of this. We're still considering feasibility and addressing whether or not we would be able to introduce the system. And for these things that I'm talking about, there's a non-zero possibility of us being able to implement it for 8.0. So there is a possibility that we could make it."

Yoshida admits that he's previously been hesitant to allow players to potentially skip expansions or story, but the MMO has grown so much that a potential solution is becoming unavoidable. "I had previously said that I want players to enjoy the story, so I would like them to have a fresh experience right from A Realm Reborn," he said. "But now we are at this point, we've begun thinking about accommodating these kinds of requests."

As for when we can find out more, Yoshida hinted towards more details at the Tokyo leg of Fan Festival which'll be happening at the end of October. But overall, he's "thinking very positively about the possibility of incorporating something and accommodating those requests."

Honestly, I was surprised when Yoshida didn't do this for Dawntrail. Considering Endwalker marked the end of the Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga, I'd half-expected Dawntrail to act as a new, optional onboarding point for players picking up the game for the first time.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's the expansion Yoshida has in mind if the game does end up offering a secondary start point—it's essentially a bridge between the old arc and the upcoming one, and feels like the best fit besides Evercold. I can understand concerns about the narrative holding less weight if you've not experienced one base game and five expansions of it, but it's also a big ask. And when Final Fantasy 14 appears to be the golden goose of Square Enix, any way to make the MMO more enticing to newcomers feels like a win-win.

Final Fantasy 14 has become just as much of a social chatroom as it has an MMO. You'd be hard-pressed to find a veteran Warrior of Light who hasn't spent copious amounts of time rummaging through their glamour dresser or paying regular visits to the aesthetician for a new hairstyle in order to perfectly present their ideal image as they idle in Limsa Lominsa or run around the expansion's latest player hub.

That playstyle has led to an increasing demand for more flexibility and freedom in the way players can present their characters over the years which, for a long time, was met with a fair bit of resistance from director and producer Naoki Yoshida. Requests to unshackle gear from job or role-based restrictions were long declined, with Yoshida once saying that "it would feel awkward if a Black Mage jumped into an instanced dungeon with full plate armour."

That argument very much lost its juice as Final Fantasy 14 started adding in more gear that wasn't particularly befitting of any job or role—hell, the game literally added a full plate armour set for all classes before Yoshida ever made the above comment.

At the end of last year, however, Yoshida relented. Patch 7.4 finally let us mix-and-match gear from all jobs, which made me inconsolably happy, as someone who's always felt as though Dancer's aesthetic was far more suited to Scouting gear than the Aiming gear it's assigned to.

It felt like the first foot in the door for Yoshida relaxing his views on staunchly maintaining the MMO's lore accuracy, and the recent Berlin Fan Festival has taken another step further. Upcoming expansion Evercold is giving players more freedom in how they customise their characters, like removing the warpaint from male and female Miqo'te, or having fully interchangeable horns across Au Ra instead of locking them to certain face shapes.

I can't help but feel like it's perhaps a decision Yoshida isn't entirely happy to be making, but one that he's choosing to do in spite of his own opinions. "It's our responsibility to come up with the lore, the world, and the rules of the game, and then to provide that to the players," he told the media during a Q&A at Fan Fest. "And because of that, I think from a creative perspective, we are really particular about how we want that world to be, and we are really honest about that."

Yoshida goes on to explain why he's perhaps been a little reluctant to relinquish certain characteristics until now. "Let's take, for example, the Miqo'te. The Miqo'te is a hunter tribe, and a warring tribe, so it's only natural that they would have their warring makeup. And previously, I said that we would not remove that war makeup from the Miqo'te.

"In the past, we did receive feedback from players. They were like 'Yeah, we want to turn it off. We want this makeup off.' But I refused because I said these are the rules of the world that we provided, and this is the lore behind the race. And it was for this reason why previously we hadn't allowed it."

The thing that made him change his mind, it seems, is allowing more freedom from a roleplaying perspective. "But when it comes to this lore and being very particular about the lore, I thought to myself that [removing markings] could be considered an aspect of roleplaying. And in that regard, I kind of upgraded my own mindset or my approach to it."

But despite all this, Yoshida still very much seems like he prefers to stick to the ways of the lore accuracy. "As a player myself, if I'm playing with a Miqo'te, I would personally not turn it off," he said. "The reason is that I love the lore behind Final Fantasy 14 and the unique characteristics of each race. But when it comes to the question of following that lore and being really loyal to that lore, I think it's not a question of good or bad. But now I think it's more a question of how particular you are about that aspect, and that's more tied into role-playing."

Ultimately, it seems like providing a choice was where the decision came from. As someone who is also a staunch enjoyer of lore accuracy, especially when it comes to Final Fantasy 14—as much as I love a silly name, I always love when they're actually accurate to a character's race and backstory—I can definitely understand why Yoshida has perhaps been a little hesitant to let go of a world he's helped to craft, even if it's through more trivial matters like a bit of paint on a catgirl.

But more choice is good for everyone, and I'm already excited to see what players do with a slightly more expanded customisation when Evercold launches next January.

Call me delusional, but I think I—well, a collection of sharp eyes from the Final Fantasy 14 community—have cracked what Final Fantasy 14: Evercold's next job is going to be. We were introduced to the Bastion during the latest fanfest, but we've still got one more job to go—a job we happen to know is a ranged physical dps.

Pardon me while I gather my corkboard and red string—I'll be starting off with the strongest evidence to the weaker stuff, but I think you can make a compelling case that the job will be some sort of bird tamer with a crossbow. Firstly, because of lead composer and sound director Masayoshi Soken's tease at the fanfest, clipped here by Reddit user ParvatiLikeaRockstar.

In the first clip, we hear a magical charge-up, a click—like a crossbow string latching or being fired—and then an explosion. In the second, we very clearly hear a bird assailing an enemy, and more sounds akin to something being fired.

In the recently-extended trailer itself, we see a miqo'te named Visna being harassed by her pet bird while checking a wand-like object for flaws. She flinches, touches the tip of the wand, and it explodes into a rune—a rune that looks suspiciously like a job stone symbol and, if you squint at it right, bears a resemblance to a crossbow.

Then there's the "wand" itself—which I think is more likely to actually be a magic crossbow bolt. It has a sharp tip, and it activates when Visna touches it—which would make sense for something that's meant to be fired into an enemy and detonate on impact.

While Visna's connection to the noises Soken shared is pretty obvious in case of the bird, have a careful listen to the explosion that happens at 2:59, then the explosion from the first sound clip from Soken—they sound very familiar.

The crossbow link's also tied to the potential job itself. It's a ranged physical dps, which means it'll need a physical weapon of some kind—and while it's not out of pocket to suggest that you could have a job entirely built around hucking a bird at people, it's a FF14 job, which means it'll need a physical weapon that can be crafted and found, and I somehow don't think blacksmiths will be synthesising full birds anytime soon.

It also makes further sense that a bird will be included because of Evercold's ties to Norse mythology—in which birds are pretty dang prevalent. There's Veðrfölnir, a hawk that sits between the eyes of an unnamed eagle at the top of the world tree—and Visna's bird has a hooked beak, sharing that in common with both hawks and eagles.

And now the most conspiratorial of evidence—told you I was saving the weakest for last. A few months ago, there was a bugged lalafell jump animation, which you can see in action below courtesy of Reddit user BruohWK.

This video on X also shows the lalafell seemingly holding something from beneath in one hand, while having a hand on the trigger in the other. And given there aren't any existing jobs in the game that use, say, a rifle, there could be a shadow of a chance that this is an animation from the new job that got mixed up in the files somewhere. Maybe.

Throw all that evidence together, and it's looking incredibly likely that the new job will be a falconer with some kind of crossbow—there is also the off-chance they might use a boomerang, based on director Naoki Yoshida's traditional t-shirt hint of "guess who's back?" Though that could just as easily be referring to the eagle/hawk/falcon returning to the user. Avian mysteries abound.

If you love JRPGs and hate DRM, some good news: the Star Ocean series has arrived on GOG. Well, some of it, anyway. As of today, you can pick up Star Ocean The Divine Force and Star Ocean The Second Story R on the DRM-free storefront.

This is a GOG premiere, mind you, not a PC one. These two Star Oceans (Stars Ocean) have been present on Steam for a few years each at this point, but it's always nice to have versions you can actually say you own.

Oddly enough, one game in Star Ocean's PC retinue is still missing from GOG's catalogue: the oldest one, Star Ocean – The Last Hope – 4K and Full HD Remaster. That game was the series' PC debut all the way back in 2017, but it's absent on GOG for now. Kind of ironic that the oldest game in the series available on PC isn't on the website formerly known as Good Old Games, but sometimes things just don't shake out.

Anyway, both games have been insta-inducted into the GOG Preservation Program, meaning the storefront is pledging to keep them running on modern OSes from now until the end of all things. They've not had quite the gussy-up that Thief: The Dark Project got recently, but GOG has made sure the games support modern controllers and run well on modern systems.

Speaking of modern systems, let's chat Linux, the most modern system of all. The hottest people you know are all swarming away from Windows and over to free and open-source operating systems like bees to honey, with the number Steam users on Linux-based systems summiting the dizzy heights of 5% back in April (it, um, has gone down a bit since). GOG has taken notice of the bump in popularity, and told GamingOnLinux that it's working on getting the GOG Galaxy launcher working on Linux systems.

"We now have the specialist on board and are actively exploring the best way to approach Linux support for GOG Galaxy," said GOG. "This is a significant undertaking, so while we’re not ready to share any specific plans, timelines, or results just yet, it’s very much an area we’re investing time and effort into."

Why? Because people like me won't shut up about it: "Linux continues to be one of the topics we hear the most about from our community, and we really appreciate the passion and patience of everyone who’s been asking about it."

I wasn't expecting Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida to directly call out World of Warcraft during a media Q&A at the MMO's Berlin Fan Festival, but that's exactly what happened.

When asked about how the team plans to modernise Final Fantasy 14's housing system—one which is regularly criticised for a lack of supply to meet demand and a fairly obtuse UI to boot—Yoshida's first response was: "I get the feeling that what you really want to ask is, well WoW has come up with this amazing housing system. How about [Final Fantasy] 14?"

Blizzard's own MMO has finally taken its first stab at player housing, and I do admit I've been looking on with some envy. It looks far easier to wield and far more customisable with freely scaling and placing objects, and that's something that Yoshida has absolutely taken notice of.

"We have immense respect for the World of Warcraft team," Yoshida said. "So when we saw that the World of Warcraft team announced the new housing system—and they said specifically that they looked to 14 and incorporated things which they wanted to surpass us in—I think that in itself is a great honour for us to hear."

Yoshida said that he's had "a hands-on" with WoW's housing system, calling it "amazing" and "a good source of research." For what exactly? Well, perhaps for two major overhauls the team has lined up to tackle Final Fantasy 14's housing, which should be releasing during upcoming expansion Evercold.

The first one is set to tackle the housing UI which, by Yoshida's own admission, is "quite technical and not very accessible." He says that the plan with the overhaul is to make it "more accessible for casual players, so that they can easily create elaborate housing." I do wonder if that'll just be a flat menu change, or a larger overhaul that allows greater freedom of item placement which, without utilising floating glitches (or third-party plugins) can be pretty darn restrictive.

Yoshida is being considerably tighter-lipped about the second planned overhaul, though. "But I think you will be much happier to hear what it is compared to the UI update," he said. "It's currently in the planning process right now on our end, and there is a chance that it will get released earlier than the UI update."

He finished by saying that while he couldn't share any specifics, "once we're able to share those details, it's probably the number one thing on the list a lot of people are requesting." Whether Yoshida is referring to housing in general here—it wouldn't surprise me if that and glamour were the two aspects the team received the most feedback about—or the specific overhaul in mind, it's not super clear.

Either way, I'm excited. Even though I've been clinging onto a small house for dear life since 2021, I've yearned for an easier decoration system, the ability to make a cute little neighbourhood with my pals, and easier access to larger housing plots. Seriously, I've been bidding on medium houses in the Lavender Beds for seven months with zero success. Free me, Yoshida, I beg of you.

Remember Chort? He's a sub-boss in one of Final Fantasy 14's newest dungeons—a magnificent large-and-in-charge lad who rolls up into a ball and charges around the arena like a giant, fleshy Sonic the Hedgehog.

I couldn't stop laughing the first time I fought him, and I wasn't the only person to immediately fall in love with how ridiculous he was. He quickly became memed to hell and back—from his goofy name, to the real "Mom, I frew up" stance he's rocking as he patiently waits for you to enter the boss room and beat him up.

His immense reception came as quite the surprise to director and producer Naoki Yoshida. "I'm really glad to hear that Chort was so well received, but honestly I couldn't really understand the appeal of Chort," he said during a press Q&A at the game's Berlin Fan Festival.

"Of course, we do understand that he's very popular and there's been many memes. But really, I just couldn't understand like… why." Yoshida then said he'd love to hear what exactly it is about Chort that people find so appealing, before continuing: "I can understand maybe a little. I mean, this is some huge bulky guy, and then suddenly he's standing there and then he rolls. So from that perspective, I can kind of understand."

I'm not quite sure how exactly to tell Yoshida that Chort just sounds kind of funny, at least to my English ears. His large body, small head, and goofy name give me war flashbacks to the reign of Big Chungus, which I have to assume is a similar image for a lot of other players. Also, you know, the fact that he's in a dungeon called The Clyteum. Yes, Chort is in The Clyteum. I'm not sure if those unintentional saucy undertones translate in Japanese.

But despite not fully getting what made us go crazy for Chort, Yoshida's just happy to see the community doing silly things with the game. "It's really fun for us to see," he told the media. "So, if the people in the community also find some unexpected appeal in any content we produce moving forward, do make your voices heard because the development team is looking at all of the responses on social media, and we very much do enjoy looking at them. We have big smiles on our faces when things like this happen"

Fantasy RPGs have become too comfortable with delivering the expected gaggle of familiar character concepts. Archers, monks, paladins, you know the drill. I've seen it all before! Give me, I don't know, a Viking that shoots triple-barreled laser guns out of its dual shields, which also have metal claws, you know? Final Fantasy 14 knows what I'm talking about—down to the last detail, in fact.

Indeed, the first new job to be introduced as part of the Evercold is just that: the bastion, a main tank that blocks, shoots, and stabs all with the same instrument. Those dual weapons, "known as skyltborg," seem to be entirely new to the Final Fantasy setting, though they are reminiscent of Rhitahtyn Arvina's supersized gunshields. Granted, most of my experience with that setting is through Kingdom Hearts, but I know I would have remembered if Mickey Mouse picked a pair of these up at any point.

The teaser trailer shows off some of its combat animations, and as is FF14 tradition, they're extravagant and accompanied by some badass electronic rock. The roegadyn in the trailer lifts himself into the air to fire laser blasts and uppercut his foe—it looks cool when he does it, but I'm reserving judgment until I've seen how ridiculous a lalafell looks doing all these same animations. Game director Yoshi-P certainly pulled the look off, showing up to the Berlin Fan Festival in full bastion cosplay, as players shared on X.

Notably, the bastion will only be playable in evolved mode, the pruned battle system coming as part of Evercold. More expansion details will come later this year during the Tokyo Fan Festival, and the full thing is set to launch January 2027.

Final Fantasy is very much a theme park for the series. It regularly references other games or weaves their themes into the very fabric of Eorzea and beyond. Occasionally, it straight-up implants entire characters or plots.

Despite all that, it's done surprisingly very little with the series' golden goose: Final Fantasy 7. Sure, there's the Gold Saucer. And materia melding. And Cloud's Advent Children fit. And the Fenrir motorcycle. But as for actual characters or dipping into the game's world? There's not all that much to be found.

Until now, that is. Director and producer Naoki Yoshida took to the stage at Berlin's Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival this weekend to reveal that upcoming expansion Evercold is dedicating its eight-player raid series to Cloud and the gang.

Yoshida was joined by Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi to reveal the collaboration, titled Beyond the Lifestream. Unfortunately we know criminally little regarding what or who will be showing up, but considering both Cloud and Sephiroth were plastered on the screens during the reveal, I'd be surprised if neither one made an appearance.

Hamaguchi and Yoshida assured players that the two teams are working closely together—long-time Square Enix veteran and FF7 remake co-director Motomu Toriyama is assisting on the raid's story, supervised by the OG FF7's writer Kazushige Nojima. And for the belt-crazed fiend that dwells within me, I'm especially stoked to see Tetsuya Nomura on design. Those raid pieces are gonna be rad, I'm sure.

That's not the only FF7 bit making its way into the game, either. An update to the Gold Saucer on October 28 is going full Saucer-ception by adding in an attraction modeled after the same venue's appearance in Final Fantasy 7. There's also, er, a typing game attached to it. Which—as Hamaguchi himself joked during the keynote—isn't exactly the first connection I make between the two. But I'm a sucker for a typing game, so no complaints here.

Even as someone who isn't a huge Final Fantasy 7 enjoyer, it's hard to not succumb a tiny bit to the hype that something this massive brings. Will we see Sephiroth cap off the raid series as the final fight of Evercold's final tier? God, I hope so.

You might be surprised to hear that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14—I'll spare you the free trial copypasta—has a mobile version. Well, it does… though er, not for much longer. A little over a year after launching in China, Final Fantasy 14 mobile is shutting down and taking its unreleased global version down with it.

The mobile MMO was originally announced in November 2024, with Square Enix handing the reins to PUBG Mobile developer LightSpeed Studios. It wasn't a straight port of what we've been playing on our PCs for the last decade, mind. For starters, the story only included base A Realm Reborn—that's everything up to the end of 2.0 with The Ultimate Weapon.

Quests, systems, and jobs had also been nipped and tucked for a more streamlined and mobile-friendly experience, as well as a handful of features from later expansions folded in. It was essentially a strange stitched-together version, but one that also came with cosmetics and quality-of-life features that had longtime FF14 players (myself included) longing for their introduction into the main game.

Gorgeous and extravagant hairstyles, the way the mobile version handled glamouring armour and materia melding, its inventory system, and making its overworld FATEs more involved and varied were some incredibly neat things that made their absence in regular ol' Final Fantasy 14 feel downright criminal.

But pretty 'dos and quality-of-life changes presumably aren't enough in the ruthless world of the Chinese mobile gaming market. A post on the game's official site reads: "Due to adjustments in business operations and changes in the market environment, Tencent and Square Enix have, through amicable negotiation, decided to terminate the licensing agreement for Final Fantasy 14 Mobile."

The announcement continues on to all but confirm that a worldwide release is also dead in the water. "To everyone who has been looking forward to the global version, we also offer our sincere apologies for being unable to meet your expectations."

Final Fantasy 14 mobile is already winding down service—it stopped accepting new players and in-game purchases a few days ago, and it'll be gone for good after September 30. I'll be interested to see if players will do any get togethers akin to FF14's original big shutdown back in 2012. Though that was actually turned into a canon event and folded into the game's narrative, whereas the mobile version will likely simply go dark. But hey, maybe we can get those hairstyles now Square Enix? Just ask Tencent really, really nicely.

Less than three years after it went live on Steam, Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis is calling it quits. Square Enix said in an end-of-service announcement that the sale of Red Crystal in-game currency has already been halted, and the game itself will be taken offline on October 6.

Square Enix apologized for any disappointment in its shutdown announcement, saying that it has "worked to provide the best possible experience for our players" since the game went live in 2023. However, for reasons unspecified, "we have determined that it will be difficult to continue doing so and have made the decision to end service."

A tepid response to the game may be a big part of the issue. Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis holds a "mixed" rating on Steam, and its player numbers have been in a slow, bumpy, but overall steady decline since it launched on that platform. Android and iOS versions of the game have considerably better ratings, but player numbers aren't known.

PC Gamer Final Fantasy fan Mollie Taylor described Ever Crisis as "a retelling of Final Fantasy 7's overarching story, offering the narrative from the original game, the movie Advent Children, and spin-off games Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus," which seems to me like a lot of Final Fantasy. She seemed a little bit dubious about its gacha game mechanics, though (or maybe just tired of it as a concept), and that can be seen in the Steam reviews too, many of which complain about its monetization and relentless grind.

In-game events will continue to run until Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis shuts down—Square Enix dropped a final roadmap leading into the closure that you can check out below. It also makes clear that once the servers close, it is over: "To protect users' personal information, account information will be deleted once all procedures associated with the end of the service have been completed."

One interesting trend of the MMO genre is its slow drift towards a seasonal structure. Final Fantasy 14's getting properly-named seasons with Evercold, World of Warcraft's got its Mythic+ and Delve seasons, The Elder Scrolls Online's gotten them, and so on.

And there are plenty of advantages to this. Borrowed power grinds that span an entire expansion are obnoxious, and were thoroughly trashed back in Shadowlands: It doesn't feel great to fall behind on the treadmill, and having a routine reset to put everyone back on a level playing field is smart.

It also means that there's an easy excuse to come back. I, for one, don't play World of Warcraft full-time (I have too many games to keep up with, alas) but I will always come back and sink a few dozen hours into every major patch. MMOs that've adopted this model also tend to have fewer content droughts, the death knell of any game that requires (or encourages) you to pump out a monthly subscription.

But there are plenty of downsides. WoW's been struggling with its seasonal cadence lately, bogged down by bugs and balancing issues. There's also the seasonal weariness, too—unlike a sandbox MMO, these seasonal games don't offer much in the way of permanent progression.

If you get your BIS, it'll be replaced 3-4 months later. If you miss a reward, it'll likely be gone or harder to get as things are depreciated.

Most of all, seasonal zones drop off pretty quickly. Studios put all this work into an area that'll only stay relevant to the expansion in question for… well, a season. And while most of these games'll let you come back and still play through their storylines or snag the gear attached to them, there's precious little reason to do so for the gear-motivated.

More to the point, doing so makes you fall behind the current seasonal grind, kicking your can further down the road.

Contrast this to other ways of building MMOs: "Sandbox" games (air-quoted here because I might be stretching that definition here) like Old School RuneScape, EVE online, or Project Gorgon are all less concerned with some seasonal play metric and more concerned with offering you a broad ocean with things to do.

And more to the point, your progress is more permanent. No resets, no moving the gear goalposts—you can set your own objectives, and your progress'll still be there when you come back to them.

Others, like Guild Wars 2, take a more hybrid approach, still offering big zones in major patches, but keeping all progression horizontal so there's no real reason to do the new stuff aside from the fact it's, well, newer.

Which makes me curious: You, my smart, tasteful, and dare I say sensual Terminally Online reader. What's your preference? Do you think the seasonal treadmill's a nice concession between your limited personal time—or is it a pressure cooker that you're growing weary with? You can either give your hot take in the comments, or fill out this handy poll I've made just for you.

Loving someone means putting up with all their flaws. In Final Fantasy 14's case, that's shrugging my shoulders and going "classic server tick moment" every time something that is definitely not supposed to happen does, in fact, happen.

That's been happening an awful lot more lately as I've been progressing through Dancing Mad (Ultimate), the game's newest balls-to-the-wall eight-player raid. The final mechanic of the fight's first phase involves carefully placing 16 teleporting arrows in such a way that when four people get smacked with a classic JRPG Confusion status, they can run in (technically towards another player in an attempt to murder them) and get successfully pinged around the arena.

The problem? Sometimes, they simply straight up did not work. I've had static members run right over them, or get pinged off in every direction except the way the arrow is actually facing. That's because, for whatever reason, the arrows teleported you based on where you stepped onto the panel. Players had come up with ways to try and alleviate some of this bizarre behaviour, but having to create strats around janky netcode never feels good.

It's something I had resigned to forever being a little bit scuffed. So imagine my surprise when, upon peeping today's hotfix notice, I saw something I never expected: it's been freakin' fixed.

"Players will now always be teleported a fixed distance from the centre of the panel in the direction indicated by the arrow, regardless of where they step onto it," the brief patch notes read.

"Previously, players were teleported based on where their character stepped onto the panel. However, when discrepancies arose between the server-side and client-side positional data due to network conditions, the destination of the teleportation appeared inconsistent. To address this, this behaviour has been changed so that teleportation is now determined by the arrow panel itself, rather than the character's position."

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Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't the case from the beginning—it makes far more sense to me, personally—but I'm genuinely jazzed to see it actually rectified. Nothing feels worse than getting through the first three minutes of the fight, only to have to wipe the pull because of a little server side shenanigans.

The hotfix has also made it so that players with speed-buffing abilities like Sprint or Expedience shouldn't straight-up run over the arrows anymore. It's funny the first time, but certainly not the 10th or even 50th time.

It's not very often I get to see my love of rock music and my love of videogame music intersect in interesting ways. But almost every single time I do, one game can be found at the core—Final Fantasy 14.

Part of that is certainly thanks to The Primals, the MMO's official in-house rock band. It's led by FF14 composer Masayoshi Soken, accompanied by localisation lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and non-developers Eikichi Iawi, Tetsuya Tachibana, and GUNN.

Sporting a raw sound with distorted, screeching guitars and high-energy vocals from Soken and Fox, The Primals manages to strike this incredibly interesting balance of being right in the heart of nerdom while also putting out the kind of music that wouldn't sound amiss at your local rock show or festival.

It's no surprise, then, that The Primals felt right at home at Download, the UK's biggest rock and metal festival. It was the band's first non-Fan Festival appearance outside of Asia, and despite a short timeslot it was an absolute corker. I had the opportunity to sit down with Soken, Fox, and GUNN the day after their high-octane set, and it immediately struck me just how jazzed all three seemed to be—even after a night to sleep off the post-performance high.

I thought part of that might have been the release of all the nerves building up to the main performance, but it turns out the band didn't have much time for that. "[Download] took us around [the festival site] before we started, and the buggy that was supposed to take us back didn't come," Fox said.

"So we didn't get back until like, 10 minutes before we were supposed to go to the stage. Normally you sit around and you get nervous because you're thinking about it, but because all this was happening I didn't have time to get nervous. And by the time you get on the stage, it's like 'go, go, go'. And of course, once you see people, you take all of that power and go."

Scions and sinners

The Primals is rocking with a pretty decent discography at this point, but curating it to appeal to both fans and potential newcomers (some of whom may have never even played Final Fantasy 14) was important when it came to putting together the five-song setlist.

"Not everyone knew [Final Fantasy] 14, so we approached it from that perspective," Soken told me. "We wanted to make the most of the time we had, so we knew that we couldn't just rely on the songs that get a really good reaction at Fan Fest." Making sure The Primals could show their musical talent to "get everyone on board and make sure they're having a good time" led to a tight selection of some of the band's biggest, most energetic tracks. A choice which, as Fox tells me, actually proved a challenge in execution.

"[The Primals concerts] have the ups and the downs—you have the heavy songs, then you go into the slower songs, more electronic stuff. This time we focused on the heavy, on the power, on the 'go, go, go,' and our drummer was probably this close to dying," he said. "Even though it was 25 minutes—our shortest set ever—I think that's the most tired we've been after a set because it was just 'go, go, go, go, go' all the way to the end, 100% of the way."

Soken leaned forward, telling me: "Shouting. I just shouted the whole time."

Fox joked about the exhaustion he felt by the time the band's final track, Under the Weight, came around. "I was like, am I gonna pass out on stage? But if I pass out on stage, that'd be pretty fucking cool. I was like, I wanted some oxygen!"

While my favourite moment was hearing Absolute Tyranny—one of the game's more recent tracks from this January's last batch of Arcadion raids—the two tracks Not Afraid and Under the Weight were perhaps the most fitting energy for Download Festival, and the ones that The Primals plucked out as the one that had the biggest chance of reeling in new listeners.

A sound reborn

Seeing a videogame band giving it their all on a stage surrounded by tens of thousands of rock fans sprawled across half a dozen stages really drove home just how much closer the two worlds have become over the years, something which the band wholeheartedly agrees with.

"10, 15 years ago, when we were starting out with this kind of thing, there was game music and there was rock music. And there was a divide in between the two," GUNN said. "But in the past few years, I really feel like they've come a lot closer together, and in fact, sort of within that same bubble now."

But as Koji points out, videogame music has always banged—the technology just wasn't always there to fully realise it. "You look back at the music in games 20 years ago and go 'Oh, that's game music,' but it's only because that's how it was sold. You go back and listen to some of those soundtracks from Mega Man. They hit hard. You've got some rocking beats, bass lines that are just crazy.

"But it was because the technology limited it, so you got the bleeps and the bloops, and it was 'Oh, that's just game music'. But you go back and listen to that now and you're like, 'Oh, I see what they were trying to do. If only they had the technology they have now.'"

Now that The Primals has tackled one of the UK's biggest festivals, what's next for them? First of all, a new album, Soken tells me—which should be plush with rearrangements of music from Dawntrail's stellar Arcadion raid series.

But doing this also seems to have given the band the desire to take their music all over the world. "We've never had any opportunity to go and meet our fans in Australia. I want to make contact with The Primals fans in areas and regions where we haven't been able to get in touch with yet. So the next goal: Primals world tour."

Final Fantasy 14 will give you a dog (among other rewards) for paying your taxes—if you're in Japan, that is. There's really nothing else I can say that isn't funnier than the truth of the situation, though I'm not pointing and laughing at Square here. It's a genuinely sweet incentive to have players contributing to other municipalities.

As reported by Famitsu, Square is partnering with the Shibuya Ward (which it has an office in) as part of Japan's "Furusato Nozei", a system whereby urban Japanese residents can voluntarily put forward some of their money to rural areas of their choice, such as their hometown—in exchange, they get gifts, such as travel tickets, gift cards, and so on.

If you do this for Shibuya, you'll get a dog. Specifically, you'll get the Megashiba mount if you donate 9,000 yen (the equivalent of $55)—or a bunch of other rewards, including five fantasia (used to change your character's appearance), the Collegiate Attire set, the Magitek Attire set, or a bunch of dance emotes, all with varying donation amounts.

The donation amounts are all far more expensive than their store prices. For instance, the Megashibu's usually around 2,530 yen (roughly $16)—but if you're a Japanese resident that's feeling particularly charitable with your money, it's a neat way to get some items while also contributing to the place you grew up.

Also, you can get a tax write-off if you're over a certain amount—which is the slightly more self-serving reason to do it. But hey, if you're paying a similar amount of yen in income tax anyway, it's a neat way to get a free digital dog out of the whole deal. If you happen to live in Shibuya yourself, you can go to the official collab site to sign up.

I always thought history was boring as a kid. Nuts to the past, I want cool tech, body mods, and lightspeed travel! But maybe I would have felt differently if I had a game like The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales back then. What better way is there to appreciate the past than violently cutting down a million monsters in a ye olde fantasy Philadelphia?

Centered around the—you’ll never guess—adventures of a guy named Elliot, this is a classic top-down action adventure through and through. I can taste a healthy smattering of Zelda in its recipe, a smidge of Ys, a dash of Quintet’s informal Gaia series. Traveling through time to explore the history of the magic city Philabieldia (no relation to the real magic city of cheesesteaks stateside), all the elements you’d expect of the genre are here: a condensed map, various tools to help uncover secrets, and plenty of puzzle-filled dungeons, all spruced up with Square Enix’s now-iconic HD-2D style looking the best it ever has. You’ve even got a little blue fairy friend yapping your ear off.

And boy does she talk.

With her portrait sitting in the corner of the screen so she can mug gameplay and cutscenes alike like a hungry react YouTuber, Faie the fairy truly loves to yap. All I'm trying to do is fight my way through a tiny cave, and yet there she is complimenting me after every fight, pointing out every item that drops or chest sitting out in the open or immediately explaining how to solve the world's simplest block pushing puzzle the second I see it. Luckily for my sanity, there's an option buried in the menus to cut her rambling down significantly, turning her from borderline unbearable to a charmingly optimistic companion. It’s frankly baffling that’s not the default.

Besides making sure you’ve always got someone to listen to, Faie provides The Adventures of Elliot’s biggest addition to a style of turn-based RPG Square Enix has gotten comfortable with in recent years., She has an entire host of abilities of her own to experiment with. I can urn her into a body double to clear out a host of monsters while sitting safely in another room, or have her warp me past entire sections of dungeons. Faie specializes in producing moments that make me feel like a genius cheating the system.

Controlled with either the right stick or by a friend, taking full advantage of her freeform powers can be brain-breakingly busy (and sometimes left me gripping my controller in a monstrous double claw), but the satisfaction of whacking an evil elephant with a hammer into Faie right as she’s turned into a mini tornado to hurl them into a pit is incredibly satisfying.

Timed events

Not that I wasn’t swinging a sword plenty myself. The Adventures of Elliot is a lightning fast game. Classic JRPG electric guitar wails while I hop over boulders that are sinking into lava. As soon as I land in a locked room, half a dozen murderous monsters are beelining right for me. At its best it’s positively exhilarating, a total high-octane thrill ride. Many of the bosses especially, these gorgeous behemoths of detailed pixel work, call to mind the furious action of Ys, dashing and jumping and blocking and parrying in an endless back and forth ballet of violence.

And while there’s not many graphic options—mostly the prerequisite smattering of resolution sliders and depth of field toggles—the HD-2D style ensures a strong visual look while keeping the requirements humble, and on my rig it all ran at a perfectly constant 120 fps; ideal for a game that has a tendency to get chaotic.

It’s too bad, then, that the game is so obsessed with making sure I’m never without a rogue rodent to explode that the puzzles suffer. Most about as complex as pushing a single block left a couple inches. Worse, without any memorable puzzles or interesting layouts, the dungeons all lack a strong identity, slipping right out of the mind the moment they’re done.

Acting your age

The Adventures of Elliot will have you hoping through a handful of time periods. Here's what to expect.

Link to the past

Still, it’s nice that the game treats its story with a similar sense of speed. You can easily hit the end of the of this adventure in under 20 hours, and while the narrative itself is mostly fine—every single beat is extremely familiar and wrapped up in a well-meaning if clumsy fantasy racism metaphor—it shows a real knack for connecting its mechanics to the story and endearing me to the cast with only a few lines of dialogue.

That cast gets plenty of love in sidequests. From helping a grieving widow find a way to remember her late husband to helping a researcher preserve the dreams of those who came before, they're all about the past, memories, and dreams, building out a sense of thematic unity and interconnectedness as Philabieldia's NPCs big and small see their stories cross in surprising ways.

It’s in that interconnectedness where the warm spirit of The Adventures of Elliot really lies. Setting the entire game in the same fairly small area across four time periods is a bold move, and one that pays off wonderfully. The game is deeply enamored with the very idea of history, with the joy and sense of adventure that comes with seeing how a single home or batch of trees might change with the years, with the way the past reflects the present and stories continue over generations. Just look at the world map to see the proof, each new age stacked up on top of one another exactly the same as the floors of its cavernous dungeons, layers of history peeled back as you dive deeper into the past.

Like that map, The Adventures of Elliot is built on a long and ever-evolving history of a genre. And while it might not stand quite as tall as its towering influences, its dedication to brevity, thrills, and a genuine passion for the past gives its own adventure a solid place to stand in time.

I rather enjoyed the first Final Fantasy 7 remake—I sank a comfy 35 hours into it, plodded along its story, and had a grand old time. I never got around to Rebirth, though. Partially because I just didn't have the time, but also because I didn't want another fully-priced AAA game taking a chunk out of my wallet.

Well, now I will be playing it, because as part of the Final Fantasy franchise sale on Steam, both games are (relatively speaking) dirt cheap. These are some genuinely hefty discounts, with the first game currently being around $14/£12, and the second being about $20/£16 at the time of writing.

Heck, you can even go ahead and snag FF16 for $20/£18 if you'd like. Just about every game in the series has some sort of discount—including one of my personal favourites, FF12. That's right, the best combat system to ever be put in a Final Fantasy game (and you can quote me on that. Also, former PCG writer Sarah James) is currently available for just $15/£11.

Okay, I'm being a little facetious—but the gambit system really is something special, and the Zodiac Age version of the game has several major perks, including the ability to speed things up. And you might be asking "but Harvey, if the combat system is so good, why do you want to speed through it?" and that's a very good question which I will talk around so as to not have to concede that the Gambit system isn't perfect. Which it is.

Basically, FF12 works a lot like an autobattler game with some fine-tuned control. You can program your party of adventurers with Gambits, "if>then" orders that can be purchased in-game and assigned on an individual basis, with extra slots for bigger priority lists available through level-up bonuses.

What makes it cool is that, once you're all set up, you can rock around the game's areas as an autonomous ball of death, only giving the occasional command to deal with edge cases that your master plans couldn't foresee. It's satisfying and, more to the point, feels well-earned. A result of your investment into your party, tactical progression that makes them savvier fighters as well as just bigger stat sticks.

And that's to say nothing of the vibes. Sure, it's basically just Star Wars—but that's why I like FF12! It's a sweeping swashbuckling adventure that has a lot more to do with fantasy politics and personal struggles rather than the end of the world (until the final hours, but that's just how Final Fantasy works). Also, Balthier and Fran are gaming's best power couple. Don't come at me.

Anyway, even if you don't agree with my infallible and omnipotent knowledge of RPG design, you might enjoy snagging a few of the series' biggest games at a heavily discounted price.

We predicted last week that, with Summer Game Fest season upon us, we'd be seeing an uptick in the number of cool-looking new games that, whoops, were made with AI. Is the new Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3), announced today during the Nintendo Direct showcase, one of them? To paraphrase the famous Ancient Aliens meme, I'm not saying the answer is yes, but it's yes.

The potential use of AI was once again given away by funky fingers, in this case on official artwork featuring the great American avatar Donald Duck. As noted by Tracker_TD on Bluesky, the second-best waterfowl maniac in animation history (I'm a Daffy man, myself) has three fingers on his right hand, but four on his left—plus a thumb in both cases. There's really no missing it.

that KH Switch collection pack thing sure has some interesting cover artinteresting choice to give Donald a mismatched number of fingers on each hand, and a beak that absorbs into itself

— @tracker-td.bsky.social (@tracker-td.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:32:10.415Z

A number of press images accompanying the announcement have Donald's four-fingered hand covered, but it's clearly visible in an image posted by the official Kingdom Hearts account on X, and in a different piece of key art available on the Square Enix website—it's 100% official, extra finger and all.

There are no other cases of extra (or missing) fingers in the image that I've noticed, but I do wonder what exactly is going on with—to quote PC Gamer wordsmith Morgan Park's reaction—"Sora's whack-ass hand." Is that normal? At least it's got the right number of fingers, I guess.

I've never been very good at picking out telltale signs of generative AI in promotional images, but those Donald fingers seem pretty egregious—and even more so when compared to this image posted in response to Tracker_TD's message, which looks very similar but contains the correct number of fingers.

Did they take this old 3D render and get AI to turn it into an "illustration"...?

— @cdrom.ca (@cdrom.ca.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.422Z

Interestingly, folks who are hip to the scene said the real evidence isn't in the obvious stuff, but in the backgrounds, which are also visibly off when you get in close. "It's always the backgrounds," jessarcade wrote. "It's detailed but lazy in a way that doesn't make sense for a human artist."

Oh my god just why

— @chrisscheidig.bsky.social (@chrisscheidig.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.254Z

Yeah, there's more. Some of the oddities could be explained by an artist in a rush, or just good old-fashioned sloppiness, but collectively? It's a lot.

Here is a post going around that is pointing out each of the signs that this is indeed AI

— @retrogameart.bsky.social (@retrogameart.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.345Z

I'd say it's pretty certain that generative AI was put to use here, but at this point all we can really do is speculate. Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3) is coming to PC along with consoles, but Square Enix only announced it for the Microsoft Store—there's no listing on Steam, which is the only storefront that requires AI disclosure. I've reached out to Square Enix to ask about the use of generative AI in the new game, and will update when they apologize for it.

I had damn near forgotten that Square Enix was making Kingdom Hearts 4. I was starting to wonder if Square Enix had also forgotten Square Enix was making Kingdom Hearts 4. It's been total radio silence since the game's initial 2022 announcement—four long years with nothing but a three-minute reveal trailer to sustain the gaggle of eager fans (hi, it's me, I'm eager fans). Until now, that is.

The game made a very surprise appearance during today's Nintendo Direct, offering a brand-new 90-second trailer that'll hopefully keep me going for another four years. It's pretty in keeping thematically with the 2022 reveal—a gigantic heartless manifesting among skyscrapers in Quadratum (the Kingdom Hearts version of Tokyo, more specifically here Shibuya) while protagonist Sora does some of his classic airborne flips and tricks while flourishing his keyblade.

We get a wee glimpse of some of the cast, too—there's Strelitzia from one of the mobile games, who we saw in the first trailer, along with Organization XIII member Luxord. The most interesting appearance by far is who appears to be a young Xehanort, holding a comically busted umbrella over Sora.

At least I'm going to assume it's a young Xehanort, considering the art Tesutya Nomura drew earlier this year to commemorate the series' 24th anniversary has him in the exact same getup (with an umbrella that hasn't actively been mauled by a strong gust of wind).

I am still getting whiplash from seeing Sora in a more grounded setting compared to previous games—and I'm going to generously assume that the emptiness and slight crustiness of the setting is a Switch 2 thing, not a Kingdom Hearts 4 thing—but this tiny little glimpse of my clown-shoed boy spinning and flipping around enemies, and getting launched into the odd skyscraper here and there, has already gotten me incredibly giddy.

Unfortunately there's still not even a vague release window for this thing. But it's exciting to know that the game'll at least be on PC and console at the same time—the trailer uploaded to the Kingdom Hearts YouTube specifies that it'll be "multiplatform at launch" while listing Steam, Epic, and Xbox on PC alongside our console siblings.

I've always been deeply impressed by Final Fantasy 14's solo only challenge runner RathGames—who has been working through the MSQ on his lonesome. Or, as much as is possible given the circumstances. See, FF14 is an MMO, it's not meant to be done on your own, there are explicitly mechanics, encounters, damage checks that are designed for a full party of four to eight people.

Furthermore, RathGames refuses equipment from quest rewards, making most of his gear himself—the one time he's had to renege on his promise was within the Crystal Tower, in which he assembled a group of other solo-only challenge runners because the game quite literally wouldn't let him inside otherwise.

The other time he's technically broken the rule of the run was recently with Shadowbringers' Hades fight. Though I'll say he did so by the letter of the law, not in spirit. RathGames beat that duty with a second character, but he swapped between them by alt tabbing without any external programs, and he levelled that second character all the way through the MSQ a second time without help.

Alas, it didn't take long for RathGames to hit another wall—the Seat of Sacrifice, a battle that has a massive group-based check: Ultimate Crossover, wherein Elidibus throws a Limit Break 4 at the party. Usually, you need to counter this with a Limit Break 3 from a tank, but given RathGames doesn't have access to those, it wasn't looking good.

Thus once more came his alt character, Solo Savior, to the rescue. Rather than trying to out-DPS the fight so that Ultimate Crossover never triggers, RathGames instead showed up running two clients: One with his main as a Blue Mage, and his alt as a Sage—a healer.

Blue Mages are a 'limited job' with a bunch of gamebreaking spells and, as such, aren't usually permitted in group content (but viable via an unrestricted party). They can obtain an ability called Self-destruct, which does what it says on the tin. Rath waited until Elidibus began casting Ultimate Crossover, had his Blue Mage main blow themselves up, and raised them with his Sage.

Because raises in Final Fantasy 14 have a grace period of one minute, and a brief invulnerability window after the target's resurrected, Rath was able to skip the mechanic entirely by timing his main's acceptance of the raise spell, being either in the raise animation or invulnerable for the oncoming damage.

He only had to do this once, mind, given the fight gives you a checkpoint afterwards—but still, the amount of preparation needed is immense, and it's not as though the rest of the fight was a cakewalk, either.

What ensues is a delicate dance where Rath has to use the Blue Mage's diamondback spell to avoid certain death, occasionally raising his sage alt (who spends most of the fight dead) to deal with other mechanics, usually causing them to immediately die afterwards while his Blue Mage lives on.

It's another incredible feat, and one that took multiple arduous streams just to theorycraft and tackle. Rath's determination in the face of absurd, self-inflicted (a little worryingly so) odds continues to be an inspiration.

I knew something had to give, but I never realized just how fatigued I was with Final Fantasy 14's current state until I walked out of the Anaheim Convention Center last month after Fan Fest. Years of rigid adherence to aging systems and its predictable patch structure were finally catching up to me. My favorite game was stagnating, and I was burned out.

I felt it, my friends felt it, and the community certainly felt it. But I'm pretty easy to please when it comes to Final Fantasy 14, so I'm not that surprised I left Fan Fest reinvigorated and ready to make the MMO part of my daily routine again. I am, however, quite surprised to have so much company when I log in now. Company that's in good spirits, at that. The event seems like it really charmed the playerbase, and I'm feeling better about the path to a new expansion.

In the month since Evercold's reveal, the change in community sentiment is palpable. Everyone has an added pep in their step. The empty player houses in my neighborhood are suddenly occupied, I see tons of sprouts in mismatched gear discovering new zones for the first time, and it doesn't take my roulettes three to four business days to pop. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I left Anaheim, but it certainly wasn't this.

Time with my Free Company has really made it clear there's a change in attitudes, too. My Eorzean besties are all back to in-game grinds and staying chatty—no more hopping on just to quietly do a few chores before logging out. They're playing the MMO like it's an MMO, socializing with other players in ways I haven't seen since Dawntrail's launch.

It's exciting to see, but I keep asking myself why it's sticking now. What was it about the Evercold keynote and subsequent patch that rekindled some of that FF14 magic? I know there's the normal uptick in players after a big announcement or even just a regular patch, but this time around it feels a little healthier than the usual flash-in-the-pan.

Nothing promised in Evercold has meaningfully changed the game yet, but when Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida took to the stage for this year's first Fan Festival, it felt like we were clearing the air after a falling out. It's what my aggressively southern roots would call a "come-to-Jesus" talk—it's the type of chat you have when you know you really need to level with someone before things get worse. They don't always feel great when you're in the thick of it, but you at least walk away with realigned expectations and a new direction.

That's how I felt leaving this year's Fan Fest. I showed up with my list of frustrations, and Creative Studio 3 brought an actual plan to address them. We both went into the event knowing there was a problem, and (hopefully) left on the same page.

Yoshida's North American Fan Festival presentation is typically limited to a short trailer reveal, a handful of new zone screenshots, and vague promises. Our event is the kickoff, and that's (usually) fine. But the playerbase has undoubtedly grown more restless over the last couple of years, and I reckon FF14's big boss showing up with nothing on the real meat of the expansion wouldn't cut it this time.

So I can really appreciate that Yoshida (and later, Mr. Prime) rolled into that convention hall ready to really speak to what must be one of Evercold's biggest changes, Evolved Mode. It's a major overhaul to the combat system that seems more significant than any of its previous evolutions, and not the type of announcement I was expecting at the North American event.

Evolved Mode feels like the result of a little soul searching at Creative Studio 3—real evidence that our grievances have been heard and understood. They've killed the two-minute meta, decided everyone gets a limit break, and even doubled down on more combo actions. We haven't seen it out in the wild, so it's hard to say if it'll fix anything, but I'm too excited by the idea of Final Fantasy 14 braving significant change to care about all the ways it could go horribly wrong.

And, had I not been surrounded by thousands of other people, I would've done cartwheels around the room when they revealed plans to implement a regional Party Finder system before Evercold. I know I cheered louder than that for anything else because I got the "you're being too much right now" jab from a friend, but the North American Party Finder situation is miserable if you like ranked PvP, raiding, and just being on your home server.

I can't say I'm completely sold on what I saw. Much like my colleague and fellow FF14 sicko, Mollie, I'm worried Evercold won't keep all of its promises, but what I really need to see is the MMO at least trying to make good on them.

That's really all there is to it. I would rather see the game fail at new experiments instead of slowly suffocating in the stagnation of current combat metas or dead open worlds, and that's where a lot of us seem to be at. I don't know if Evolved Mode, regional Party Finder, or anything else announced at Fan Fest will be the thing to reinvigorate Final Fantasy 14, but I know its current paint-by-numbers approach isn't it, either.

I went home feeling a little lighter, primed to be more receptive to the 7.5 patch that launched just days after Fan Fest. It wasn't particularly special now that I look back on it, and I was mostly excited by its quality of life changes, but the little things are easier to appreciate as some of that goodwill returns to Eorzea.

Final Fantasy 11 is a seasoned MMO with grey in its beard, at this point—not entirely unheard of in the industry (World of Warcraft itself is over two decades old), but absolutely in its veteran years. I mean, this is a game that originally came out on the Playstation 2 as well as PCs.

Still, it's trucking along quite nicely. That's per a Famitsu interview (translated here by Automaton) with Yoji Fujito, the director and producer of FF11.

There've been some events that the developer says were expected to give a player bump—such as the crossover raid series with Final Fantasy 14, Echoes of Vana'diel, as well as a Welcome Back campaign and giveaways. Fujito expected things to even out, but the new playerbase has, to his surprise, kept steady:

"Overall, the player count remained stable at a high level, and we never saw the kind of sharp decline we had anticipated, so honestly, the outcome exceeded our expectations and came as a surprise."

That doesn't mean the team isn't facing problems, though. For one, FF11 is encountering a similar problem to Old School RuneScape, wherein the developer is running out of IDs for in-game areas, requiring large systems architecture changes to accommodate new expansions (the following quote's been machine translated):

"However, we know that we can free up a few more ID slots if we are creative, so we are investigating how we can make that work. If we can make it work, adding a new area will not be impossible … Depending on the results, I have a feeling that some kind of project may start moving forward."

The idea of fleshing out FF11 with full-blooded expansions is exciting to me—not because I've played the MMO, but because I'm excited about MMO conservation in general. I think these games are important, and I always feel a sad kind of melancholy when I see an old titan diminish and go into the west. Especially since nobody's really making them anymore.

Final Fantasy 14 isn't the only Final Fantasy-related MMO. Its ancient ancestor, Final Fantasy 11, which released all the way back in 2002 before World of Warcraft reshaped the landscape for massively multiplayer games, is still trucking along. It's not exactly bustling next to the likes of FF14, Guild Wars 2, and WoW, but it occasionally attracts so much activity its dusty old servers buckle.

It seems like Square Enix wants to bring the game, if one small step at a time, into the current decade as well. Its website just got a shiny overhaul, and now it looks like something from 15 years ago rather than 25 years ago. Just to be clear, you still have to wrangle the abysmal and esoteric PlayOnline installer to get the game running; this is just a fresh coat of paint for the web.

It's part of the game's 24th anniversary celebrations, which you can read about in more detail in a blog post on the new site. The post talks about some in-game festivities as well as new features, like the ability to replay story missions. It also links to a nifty FF11-themed music video which looks like the opening credits to an anime that doesn't exist.

"The fact that the game has continued to thrive for so long is due to the tremendous support it has received from all of you adventurers out there and the 'culture' you have created around the world of Vana'diel," wrote game director Yoji Fujito in the post. "The game's success has forced us to update our long-term goals for the project yet again … the entire FFXI team will be hard at work to further solidify the game's foundation and help it reach its 30th anniversary."

It certainly sounds like more is on the horizon for the classic MMO. A livestream from Square Enix reportedly shared another tidbit of news yesterday, though I can't verify it myself as the stream is in Japanese. Reddit user hikiri translated the stream's FF11-related info in a post, with the headliner being that the game's 14-day free trial limit will no longer be time limited and will allow players to progress to level 75. "The areas are limited like normal, but you'll be able to play forever at level 75 on the trial in the OG zones," the post reads.

In any case, it's remarkable to see such an old MMO with a more popular sequel by the same company continue to draw in players and get substantial updates. With some MMOs of FF11's tenure, you're lucky to find a decent private server that isn't a cease and desist away from oblivion.

Final Fantasy 14 has sent my unintimidating, run-of-the-mill-looking cat girl on all manner of world-saving missions. She's squared up with a dying god on the moon, fist fought an alien super weapon, and even confronted the literal embodiment of nihilism at the ends of the universe. My girl has been through a lot, but the MMO is pretty good at making me feel like there's no challenge I can't rise to meet.

Well, that is until you give her a fishing rod. For a cat person, my little Warrior of Light absolutely sucks with a rod and tackle box. You would think the hero of the universe could do a little black magic and complete her fishing log, but nah. I haven't even caught fish that Final Fantasy 14 added over a decade ago. It's that dire.

So I'm not joking when I say that nothing, and I mean nothing, in Final Fantasy 14 intimidates me in the same ways some of its strictest fishing challenges do. I don't care how hard the raid is or what new world-destroying evil awaits in the next expansion; the Bobgoblin Bass is enemy number one forever and always.

As for the title of enemy number two, I'm awarding that to the Purse of Riches.

Like so much of the ultra-rare aquatic life in Final Fantasy 14, both fish are finicky bastards that only nibble on your reel under specific environmental conditions. For the Bobgoblin, you have to wait for the MMO's weather system to bless an old Heavensward map with a very specific weather pattern. Then it's all got to happen within a certain in-game time window.

Before Square Enix updated Fish Eyes—an ability that removes time requirements from rare fish in old expansions—you had to wait for the stars to align in a brief five-minute window every few days, weeks, or sometimes even a month. The opportunity could arise at any time, even at 3 am on a Wednesday night, because the fish don't care if you have to wake up for work in a few hours. Happen to sleep in and miss it? Tough. Your next chance is in another five-minute window a month from now.

Fruity Snacks, one of the MMO's resident angler experts, has even documented the freshwater terror's downtime on X, but now there's another sea creature driving FF14's bravest players mad. It's my aforementioned enemy number two, the Purse of Riches. If you don't catch the elusive guppy by August 1, you'll have to wait 92 days before you can try (and possibly fail) to catch it during another short window. Then it's back to waiting.

Maybe I wouldn't have even bothered with this particular challenge right now had it not been for a post on X from Mr Happy, who blessedly warned players about the upcoming drought in its availability window, but I'm back on my bullshit (achievement hunting in Final Fantasy 14), and need to make a dent in my long-neglected fishing log.

"Getting a house, fishing and finding enough inventory for hoarding glam," wrote Happy in a response to another player. "These challenges scare hardcore FFXIV players."

The PSA was much appreciated, but his follow up is what really rekindled my reluctant interest in the MMO's most cursed job. Fishing may seem like one of those things snubbed as "casual" for whatever reason, but he's got the right read of it. I've spent weeks and months throwing myself at Ultimate raids, Blue Mage challenges, and the no-death dungeon runs of Criterion Savage, but I'm still too intimidated by these soul-crushing spawn windows to get serious about fishing for more than a day.

I say that, but here I am, writing this just after failing to catch the Purse again, and I'll be waiting in this same spot for its next spawn window in 11 days. Remind me to bring more than 10 pieces of bait next time. That was more embarrassing than any goofy raid death.

Naoki Yoshida's opening keynote at April's North American Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival made one thing clear: the team is serious about change. Or at least, it appears to be. Especially, for a studio that's dug its heels in the sand about any sort of drastic change in the past half-decade or so.

For upcoming expansion Evercold, abating the stagnation that's permeated the MMO since 2022 (even longer than that, some may argue), seems to be Creative Studio 3's number one priority. An entirely new combat system that promises to highlight job individuality and skill expression, changes to gearing to make it less unfriendly to anyone hoping to play more than one job in savage or ultimate raids, and deprioritising daily tasks to give players more flexibility to complete their in-game goals week-to-week.

Those are all genuinely great things that I am incredibly excited to see manifested in Evercold. But I can't help but carry that eager anticipation with a side of cautiousness. A wariness of a company who has been so reluctant to tweak even the tiniest cog in its core setup at the risk of upsetting the balance. Of creating a little more friction for the sake of a more interesting experience.

Because I so desperately want these changes to spark bigger overhauls. These are all well and dandy, but if we can still look at a two-year life cycle for an expansion and know exactly what to expect—an alliance raid on the .1, .3, and .5 patches, savage raids on the .0, .2, and .4 patches, etc etc—then I don't know how much that staleness will actually fade away.

I want Evercold to be the expansion of risk-taking. Of experimentation. I never expect Creative Studio 3 to return to the puzzles and mazes of A Realm Reborn's dungeons, but I crave more than the whole "two packs of trash mobs into boss" pattern that persists across all of them. More opportunities to dictate the pace and flex those tank mitigations and healing spells, more enemy varieties that do more than the odd auto attack, bosses that don't automatically open every goddamn fight with a raidwide attack.

I really think the studio has hit its stride with designing higher-difficulty fights in Dawntrail—the Arcadion savage raids are some of the best the game has ever seen. And while I haven't been a fan of every extreme fight, they've all stood out to me for different reasons. Valigarmanda in particular stands strong as one of the coolest trials with its incredible power fantasy tank busters mid-fight. Putting more of that pizzazz into designing its story-difficulty dungeons would go a helluva long way.

Final Fantasy 14's overworld has also been criminally underutilised for years now, and Evercold is the perfect time to return its relevance. I don't want its use to remain solely on lightning-fast hunt trains and FATEs that stand idle and undefeated mere months after an expansion's launch—which are also two things that require being in non-cross-world parties to make them viable, something which isn't possible if you're utilising the Party Finder function. Which is also usually the perfect time to actually make use of the overworld, since Party Finder locks you out of doing any instanced stuff like dungeons or field operation zones in the meantime.

Having "evolved" jobs and quality-of-life changes is great, but it means very little if the ways to put them into practice remain the same as they have done for a half-dozen years and a handful of expansions. I don't want Creative Studio 3 to abandon its core identity entirely—I'm not in complete agreement with folks who think fight design should veer into WoW's more reactionary direction—but it doesn't have to.

It just needs to make Final Fantasy 14 a more dynamic, engaging world to exist in once more. I'm sure we'll discover more about how it plans to do that during July's European Fan Festival. I'm just sincerely hoping that Creative Studio 3 doesn't let its fresh new ideas sit in stagnant water.

I've always loved dissecting song lyrics, but doing that for videogame music always feels like a coin flip. I do find that, more than anywhere else, videogame music is absolutely rife with nonsense lines. Take this one from raid boss Sugar Riot in Final Fantasy 14: "Now we come to orange / Gotta rhyme something with orange / 'Cept that nothing rhymes with orange / Think that I'll just forget 'bout orange."

Erm, yeah. A little goofy and sorta thematic with her whole graffiti artist shtick, but the lyrics still give me insane whiplash every single time I hear them. Then there's your edgy stuff, like Devil May Cry's Devil Trigger: "All of these thoughts runnin' through my head / Arm on fire, veins burnin' red / Frustration is gettin' bigger / Bang, bang, bang, pull my Devil Trigger." Does the song go hard? Yes it does, but do I also think its lyrics are ridiculous? I absolutely do.

And finally, my personal candidate for worst videogame lyrics has to be the opening song for Dead Island with Who Do You Voodoo? I almost have to commend just how closely the song toes the line between terrible and hilariously good. Seriously, I don't know any other song that could have gotten away with lyrics like: "Handful of fingertips, toss 'em up like confetti / Stable of corpse bitches, I'm a pimp of the dead." Very much a product of its time, I fear.

That doesn't mean all videogame vocal music sounds like it was written with a heavy dose of teen angst, of course. Portal's Still Alive is by far one of my favourite tracks ever penned for a game—written from the perspective of GLaDOS as she writes her assessment report. It plays as the credits roll with lines like: "Now these points of data make a beautiful line / And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time / So I'm glad I got burned, think of all the things we learned / For the people who are still alive."

It's the perfect blend of Portal's slightly dark humour without veering into total cringe or silliness, while also giving players a glimpse into the sadistic robot's actual fate.

I'm also a huge fan of Nier: Automata's Weight of the World—another end credits song—which people theorise to actually be from different characters' perspectives depending on which language you listen to it in. As someone who regularly bumps the English version, I adore the chorus: "Cause we're gonna shout it loud / Even if our words seem meaningless / It's like I'm carrying the weight of the world." It's incredibly befitting of the journey 2B undertakes throughout the game, and the best culmination of that game's gripping narrative you could ask for.

But what about you? Is there a videogame lyric that's proper stuck with you—either for being powerful and impactful, or for being so utterly ridiculous that you have to wonder what was going through the writer's head when they penned it? Be sure to drop a comment below with the lyric and which game it's from.

MMOs stop being games where you go kill mobs for XP and chase fat loot when you discover player housing. Once that bug nips you, they become 3D diorama creation software with a bunch of useless RPG crap tacked on for a few days, or maybe forever, depending on your capacity for rotating couches. I've never been so lost in the sauce that I've recreated entire zones from other games inside an MMO's player housing feature, but then again, I'm just not built for this like X user Miya Shikhu.

Shikhu shared their latest creation in a post on X Wednesday, and it's an uncannily good recreation of the shelter from hack 'em up third person shooter Pragmata. If you haven't played that game, the shelter is a hub you return to between checkpoints to upgrade your stats and equip new build items. It's got a sleek, futuristic aesthetic and walls of computer screens, all of which have been approximated using Final Fantasy 14's housing props.

"I was playing a different game for a while, but I've come back to FF14," said Shikhu in the post (via X's machine translation). "Everkeep-style furniture is the best! Increased placement limit is the best!"

Based on Shikhu's posts, it sounds like the Everkeep Sofa and similar items are what make this particular illusion tick. Lay out enough white sofas in close proximity and it looks a bit like sci-fi paneling: "The floor couches fit the space perfectly, don’t they? I really like how they turned out," Shikhu said in a reply on the same thread. The players running around in cosplay as Hugh and Diana make for a nice touch that makes the scene unmistakable.

Another part of what makes this work is a recent update which increased the number of furniture items that can be on-screen simultaneously. If MMO player housing has taught me anything, it's that players will continue to cook up projects that boggle the mind, like Dust 2 in World of Warcraft, for as long as these games exist.

The last few times Square Enix has unveiled the name of a new Final Fantasy 14 expansion, I've wondered whether the team plans to stick to its love for a good compound word. As it turns out, the answer is "yes" every time: Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, Dawntrail, and now the upcoming Evercold.

But as it turns out, director and producer Naoki Yoshida has tried to break that pattern a few times. At least, if his list of rejected expansion names is anything to go by. During a Q&A at the North American Fan Festival in April, Yoshida divulged what Evercold and expansions of Final Fantasy 14 past could have actually been named.

"When we were trying to come up with a name for what became Stormblood, one of the names that came up was Rebellion," Yoshida told press via a translator. "But unfortunately that was rejected for various reasons, including legal reasons, so we couldn't choose that one. It was already taken."

I wonder whether that was studio Rebellion who got in the way of making that name a reality—you could certainly argue that both a videogame developer and a game called Rebellion could cause some confusion. It's also the name of a game on Steam as well as a short-lived television series, as I'm discovering. Really, it could be anything, but I'm glad Yoshida and the team weren't able to go through with it as I think Stormblood sounds a lot neater.

But what about other expansions? Well, for Shadowbringers the name Darkbringer was toyed with but ultimately rejected—once again, very pleased about that—while an attempt to break the compound curse was made again during Endwalker when the name World's End was pitched, "but obviously that was not possible either." A little clash with Edgar Wright's movie of the same name, perhaps?

When it comes to binned candidates for Evercold, I actually quite like the title: Absolute Zero. Yoshida said he "really wanted to go" with it, even going so far as to imagine what the expansion's logo would look like with that name, but it was once again nixed. You can't escape the compound names, Yoshida.

He goes on to say that he thought a lot about the different meanings of things or people icing over—from the theory that our humble planet was once entirely frozen over, to even the way that a person's heart can metaphorically freeze over, causing them to grow cold and distant.

"So with this expansion, the Warriors of Light will be encountering many instances where various different ice that they would either melt or even have to destroy to move forward and explore and become that sort of wanderer," Yoshida said. "And I hope that the players will experience and enjoy that journey."

As for when the whole idea for Evercold was conjured up, Yoshida said he began to put the wheels in motion approximately two months after Dawntrail released. "But of course, I do have a general idea of what direction I want to take. The overall scenario or saga, and so it's more like narrowing down, determining, pinpointing what the next theme would be."

Final Fantasy 14 has some weird bosses. In fact, some of the hardest encounters in the game are against enemies like his cobbled-together majesty, Perfect Alexander, and then whatever awaits us in Kefka's ultimate-tier clown show when it launches this summer, but they're all old news as far as I'm concerned. The real FF14 sickos are all about a new dungeon boss, Chort. He lives in the Clyteum.

Chort—a patch 7.5 boss with zero spoken lines who violently rolls around the arena a few times before he's slain for a pair of gloves—is the new weird little (big) guy players are obsessed with. We've only known Chort for about a week, and his popularity rivals last month's Evercold reveal. I'm only sort of kidding, but look at this guy.

He's of no major significance to the plot, and he doesn't drop anything particularly good, but he's beloved by all for his clearly seasoned battle posture—just look at that wide stance, ain't no one tipping him over—and brick house build. He's also quite the speedy boy, and has a whole mechanic where you've got to dodge him as he flings himself around the arena.

Honestly, I think Chort belongs in FF14's wrestling-themed raid series, the Arcadion, not the Clyteum. And no, Clyteum isn't a typo either. That's a real Final Fantasy 14 dungeon name. There's a lot going on in Patch 7.5, okay?

A fixation with weird little guys isn't a new FF14 phenomenon; the MMORPG is full of them. Last year, we had this nameless, glitched deer roaming the Coerthas Western Highlands, and before that, there was Dawntrail's no-thoughts-behind-those-eyes baby Mamool Ja and Endwalker's son with every disease. Now we have Chort, and once again the community hasn't let me down. They're Chort posting through it all.

"Moments like this are why I play this game and love this community," a Reddit comment reads. "I gave chort some jorts," another user wrote on X, attaching an incredible screenshot of Chort wearing jorts. "Chort appreciation post, do you appreciate Chort?" another player asked on Bluesky.

Then there's this Chort fancam. Nothing tops the Chort fancam. It's looping on my second monitor as I write this.

#7.5spoilers Chort Fancam

— @brutejussy.etheirys.social (@brutejussy.etheirys.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-05T22:18:01.173Z

Even the Final Fantasy 14 official social media account has joined in, simply posting "Chort," because what else is there to say, really? "They don't even know Chort is the word for devil in many Slavic languages," reads another meme posted on X. "Very fitting name for a voidsent fought in a northern region."

I guess that explains this other Chort from The Witcher 3, but I think Final Fantasy 14's Chort could take him. That guy is just a silly goat (cow?) baby, he's no match for my Chort son from the Void. Maybe they can duke it out 1v1-style, Chort versus Chort.