Final Fantasy 14's chaotic alliance raid lives up to the name by swapping around 2 wrongly labeled attacks an entire month after everyone's already learned them

The Cloud of Darkness (Chaotic) in Final Fantasy 14.

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Final Fantasy 14's first chaotic alliance raid—a higher difficulty 24-player fight that's adapted from one of the original A Realm Reborn raids—arrived at the end of December, and I actually like it a lot. Even if having to rely on 23 other people to consistently execute each mechanic is the definition of futile.

Well, why not make things even more difficult by deciding to swap around two ability names, nearly a month after the fight was released? I assume that's the question Square Enix asked itself, because that's what it's done. It turns out that two names tied behind one of the boss's attacks—either Core-Lateral Phase or Lateral-Core Phase—were the wrong way around in English translations.

Before today's change, the name of the cast actually indicated where the safe spots were: Core-Lateral Phase attacked the sides first and then the middle, for example, while Lateral-Core Phase did the opposite. Admittedly, I did think that was an odd choice. Usually abilities like that indicate where the attack is going to hit first, rather than where it isn't. I remember the first time seeing the attack, my thousands of hours of Final Fantasy 14 logic had me going to the opposite of what the name was actually telling me.

It does seem to have come out of nowhere, though. I checked the known issues segment for Patch 7.15 (the one that added the chaotic alliance raid) and there's nothing about the names being the wrong way around. I have to wonder why they decided to wait an entire month for the 7.16 patch to actually fix this rather than… doing it in a hotfix, especially since it seems to have been a simple text error. A Reddit comment claims that the names have been the correct way around in Japanese since launch, seemingly an English-only issue. Did they just… not notice?

It's only a simple swapsies, sure, but I've no doubt this is going to cause more than a few problems in party finder for the next few weeks. Not just from people fighting muscle memory, like myself, but folk who may not have even read the patch notes and realised that the change had happened. Things will smooth out soon enough but hey, Square Enix, maybe fix it a little faster next time, please? For the sake of party finders everywhere.

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Mollie spent her early childhood deeply invested in games like Killer Instinct, Toontown and Audition Online, which continue to form the pillars of her personality today. She joined PC Gamer in 2020 as a news writer and now lends her expertise to write a wealth of features, guides and reviews with a dash of chaos. She can often be found causing mischief in Final Fantasy 14, using those experiences to write neat things about her favourite MMO. When she's not staring at her bunny girl she can be found sweating out rhythm games, pretending to be good at fighting games or spending far too much money at her local arcade.