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."

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.

I often think of the times the mainstream dips its toe into our colourful corner of pop culture and tries to fit in—Beyoncé tapping away at a Nintendog, the multitude of weird Hollywooded videogame movies, real-life athletes turning up in the videogame version of their respective sport, WEED3.

But it is so rare to see the reverse. When the 2021 Tokyo Olympics paid homage to the industry with a fantastic videogame music-filled opening ceremony, it was newsworthy. It is still incredibly funny every time I think about the fact the Vatican was made privy to the existence of Undertale's Megalovania. Small pockets of nerd culture bleeding out to the masses.

I couldn't help but keep these sporadic moments in the back of my mind as I ventured into the large blue-and-red gazebo that sprawled across the Dogtooth Stage at Download Festival—the largest rock and metal festival in the UK—offering a pleasant respite from the sun beating down over Donington Park. It's a space I'm familiar with, grass I've trodden before. Dirt and dust I've washed out of my hair after too many days of the dreaded wet-wipe-shower.

But this time I wasn't here to live out my perpetual emo teen dreams of drinking in a field waiting for bands like Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit. I was here to see The Primals—Final Fantasy 14's official in-house band. One which has never done a live performance outside of a Fan Festival or Asia tour. A wonderful marriage of my two biggest interests coming together under one very sweaty tent.

With a surprisingly tasty timeslot of 5:50pm, The Primals' biggest competition being Electric Callboy at the nearby main stage, I was curious exactly what the crowd would look like, and how it would respond to something relatively niche. Festivals are always the perfect place to discover a band you've never heard of before, but a very specific videogame band? That can make popping over to a stage on a whim a harder sell.

I turned up approximately 20 minutes before the set was due to start and was met with a small but tightly packed crowd, a dense throng of bodies clustered close to the barriers. I took a spacious spot towards the back, feeling myself become increasingly closed in over the next 15 minutes. I took a quick look over my shoulder shortly before the timeslot and was pleasantly surprised to see how many more people had packed in.

The Primals weren't exactly drawing the crowds showing up for the more mainstream bands populating the larger stages. But as I scanned the area, spotting several folks wearing Final Fantasy 14 t-shirts chatting away about the game, the nerves I'd felt on behalf of the band began to settle.

They abated even further when the first few notes of Shadowbringers began to blare through the speakers, and composer-slash-guitarist-slash-vocalist Masayoshi Soken took to the stage, followed by Gunn Lee, Eikichi Iwai, Tetsuya Tachibana, and fellow Square Enix employee Michael-Christopher Koji Fox. The group riffed straight into the fantastic song Fiend—Sephirot's theme from Heavensward—and another brief scan showed an enthusiastic crowd peppered with eager lip-syncers and those who seemed to not be quite as clued into Final Fantasy 14's whole thing but having a great time nevertheless.

Primal instinct

As the band wrapped their first song, Fox took the mic to ask if the crowd has heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. Knowing whoops and cheers erupted from those around me. "You might've heard its soundtrack… fucking ROCKS HARD," he declared to even louder, more agreeable whoops and cheers. I couldn't help but join in with the deep enthusiasm for what is, in reality, this group of middle-aged Dad rockers living their best lives as Fox continued: "This ain't no Super Mario… be afraid," using it as a segue to dive into the group's next song Not Afraid.

As The Primals welcomed longtime collaborator Jason Charles Miller to belt out the final three songs in the set—Absolute Tyranny, eScape, and Under the Weight—being squarely in this slice of nerdom was giving me a weird sense of… seclusion? Despite being surrounded by half a dozen other bands and tens of thousands of attendees.

The set may have been criminally short at just half an hour, but its curation of classic and new tracks was excellent. Those of us in the Final Fantasy tees heard our favorites, while others were more likely to catch the ears of passersby or future Warriors of Light. And such an enthusiastic crowd made one thing clear: this kind of thing can work! These weird and wonderful niche corners of music can intersect, transcend, and take up space outside the confines of videogame geekery.

It's a thing I would sincerely like to see more of in the future. Let Crush 40 play a Sonic set at Coachella! I dunno, get Lyn doing a full Persona 5 setlist at, like, Glastonbury or something. Finding these little ways to weave the two worlds together more would be lovely—peel off the "videogame music" label and The Primals playing at Download simply felt correct. A rock band, doing rock things at a rock festival.

If I hadn't known their origins (and, y'know, hadn't connected them to the Final Fantasy 14 branding slapped on advertising billboards across the whole festival site) I'd have taken them as a rather good and semi-zany Dad rock band from Japan. Finding more opportunities where these marriages of communities feel downright normal? That's a win for all of us.

We were introduced to the turbulent flow of time in Remake, and we met Sephiroth for his iconic encounter in Rebirth, and now it's time to wrap this story up. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is the third and final act in Square Enix's remake trilogy, and even from its earliest teases, it looks like this one is squeezing in all the nostalgia-mandated highlights. After its Summer Game Fest reveal, Square hasn't been shy about interviews and lore dumps, so I'll keep the updates coming, but here's everything we know so far about Final Fantasy 7 Revelation.

Is there a Final Fantasy 7 Revelation release date?

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will launch in spring 2027 but Square Enix has not confirmed a specific date yet. Revelation is also the first game in the trilogy to launch on all platforms simultaneously, including PC.

There are no PC store pages yet, but Revelation will be available on Steam, Epic Games Store, and Xbox for PC. So no store exclusivity deals this time around, either.

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation gameplay details

What's notable about Revelation's combat?

As the current mainline series drifts further from turn-based combat, it's nice to see Final Fantasy 7 double down on its commitment to honoring the series roots. While not entirely turn-based, the tactical hybrid battle system is back, which at least gives me the option to pause the chaos and consider my options.

A few other details I've noticed from trailers and interviews:

• FITs, a new dress-up system, changes movesets à la classic Final Fantasy
• The gunslinging Vincent Valentine is playable, and can transform into giant beasts
• Cid is also playable, with his classic, aerial Dragoon kit
• Synergy abilities are also back
• Knights of the Round will return, as confirmed by Denfaminico Gamer
• Square Enix describes Weapons as "enemies that Cloud and his companions must stand against," so it sounds like they're no longer optional

And what about the rest of the gameplay?

• There's an open world you'll navigate with the Highwind, Cid's prized airship
• You'll depart from the Highwind via parachute. (I hope someone cracks a "where we droppin'?" at least once)
• Square Enix confirmed in an interview with Polygon that the Queen's Blood card game will return, and it's working on snowboarding
• The Tifa vs Scarlet slap fight is also a mini-game, according to Denfaminico Gamer
• There's new Chocobo content, but no details on what that includes
• Rebirth's affinity system has been reworked to explore relationships between other party members, not just each character's relationship with Cloud

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation setting and story details

The Remake trilogy is the same story, but different

I'm speculating, but from what we've seen in Remake and Rebirth, it seems like Revelation will conclude the trilogy with a story that follows the same big beats as the original. The difference is in the little choices we make in-between, and the glimpses at alternate timelines Sephiroth loves torturing Cloud and the gang with.

When everything is all said and done, I don't expect to see any major differences from the original story when it comes to who lives and dies or the fate of the planet.

Where does FF7 Revelation pick up from?

While Hamaguchi has played coy when answering the question, it sounds like Revelation will begin right around where Rebirth left off—no time skips or ignoring parts of the original PS1 game. In an interview with Bloomberg, Hamaguchi noted that Rebirth ends in the Forgotten City, and that the original RPG moves on to the Icicle Inn from there.

As for the state of the rest of the world, we know Meteor has been summoned, so it's not lookin' too good out there. The planet is (understandably) pissed about all the chaos, so the Weapons are awake and responding to anything they deem a threat.

Where can we go in Revelation's version of the planet?

It sounds like piloting the Highwind gives us access to the entire planet, though I'm assuming story beats will prevent us from entering some areas in Revelation. So expect to see places like Midgar and Gongaga return, along with some new locations like:

• Wutai, home to the ninja village and Yuffie
• Mideel, the hot spring town
• Rocket Town, the place built around Shinra's once-abandoned rocket
• The Underwater world, or at least that's what's hinted at in the Bloomberg interview

Will Final Fantasy 7 Revelation have multiple endings?

No, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will not have multiple endings. In an interview with GamesRadar, Hamaguchi confirmed players will have choices to make that impact the story, but the trilogy will conclude with a "singular ending." While our paths to the big finale may look different, they'll all end the same.

Does Aerith die?

Look in your heart. You already know the answer to this.

The Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy will soon come to an end with next year's third and final entry, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation. The Square Enix RPG was the last big announcement for today's Summer Game Fest live show, and one you can play on PC when it launches next year.

Director Naoki Hamaguchi joined Geoff Keighley on stage for the reveal, which included a trailer packed with FF7 iconography you'll recognize in a heartbeat, like the Highwind, monstrous Weapons, and footage of Vincent and Cid in battle. You can check it all out for yourself in the not one, but two trailers that debuted during the show.

Shortly after the first cinematic aired, Hamaguchi invited Matt Mercer—the voice of Vincent Valentine—to the stage to talk us through an even longer gameplay reveal. The battle system is the same real-time tactical hybrid from the first two, but now you have the additional party members that weren't playable in Rebirth along for the ride.

Both Final Fantasy 7 Revelation trailers throw a lot at you, so here's what stood out to me at a glance:

• Ability to fly around the open world in the Highwind
• You'll also jump out of the Highwind and parachute to your destination
• Brief looks around the Wutai and Mideel regions
• Playable Vincent Valentine, your gunslinging ally that also transforms into a beast
• Playable Cid Highwind, the party's resident Dragoon
• New FITS system for playing dress up and learning new movesets, very classic Final Fantasy (and X-2) of them
• A showdown against the Weapons, FF7's kaiju-like monstrosities, and some of the hardest fights in the original

Square Enix didn't provide a specific date just yet, but Final Fantasy 7 Revelation launches in spring 2027 and will be available through the Epic Games Store and Steam.

We might be years removed from the old "clicking on a placard for hours until an invisible timer decides to run out" method of Final Fantasy 14 housing yore, but that doesn't mean securing your own abode in the critically-acclaimed MMORPG is a total walk in the park these days.

The good news is that buying a house in Final Fantasy 14 is a relatively hands-off experience these days as it's all done in a lottery-based system. The bad news is that the demand continues to far outweigh the supply, so you may need to try more than once.

I'll lay the whole process out below with a Final Fantasy 14 housing schedule tracking both the entry and results periods, along with how to bid and check if you've won your very own plot of land.

Final Fantasy 14 housing lottery schedule

Full housing lottery schedule for June

Final Fantasy 14's housing lottery schedule cycles every nine days: five days for the entry period, and four days for the results period. Here is the schedule for the upcoming month:

How to enter the Final Fantasy 14 housing lottery

If you want to bid for a house in Final Fantasy 14, first make sure that the lottery cycle is currently in the entry period, which you can see above.

To find out which plots are free, PaissaDB is a great website that pulls crowdsourced info to find empty housing lots. You can filter by your server, housing district, and house size. PaissaDB will also tell you whether Free Companies or individuals can bid on the house, how many entrants there are, and how much it costs.

You can only enter the lottery for one house per cycle, so choose wisely.

Make sure you have enough gil on you, as you'll have to pay upfront in order to bid. From there, head over to the main aetheryte for your desired housing district: Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, Kugane, Ul'dah, Kugane, or Foundation.

Find the correct ward and plot, click on the placard, designate whether you're purchasing for yourself or for your Free Company, and enter your gil to bid. And that's it! You'll be given a number, and now it's time to wait for the results period.

How to find out if you've won a house

Once the results period has commenced, it's time to find out whether your number is the lucky one. Simply head back to the plot you bid on (if you've forgotten, you can check by going to Duty > Timers > Estate and then clicking on Housing Lottery Status) and once again click on the placard.

It'll tell you the winning number. If it's yours, congratulations! You'll be directed to finalise the purchase and claim the lot as your own. You must do this within the four-day results period or you'll lose the plot and 50% of the gil you spent to enter the lottery.

If your number isn't chosen, the game will refund the gil you spent on entering the lottery, so don't worry about losing out. You have 90 days to claim back your gil, so make sure you don't forget to return to the placard. Even if you're already being taunted by someone's house standing proud on the plot you wanted.

MMOs love a good recurring seasonal event, and Final Fantasy 14 is no different. It's cultivated a decent rotation at this point, and while Square Enix doesn't tend to share the exact dates for its events super far ahead, each one tends to occur at roughly the same time each year.

There's your classic Valentine's, Easter, and Halloween events (all with their own Final Fantasy-esque names), along with ones similar to Japanese holidays, and fictional in-universe ones. Final Fantasy 14 occasionally peppers in special limited-time collaborations too—like the Final Fantasy 15 collaboration event with the Regalia mount.

Final Fantasy 14 seasonal events 2026

Upcoming Final Fantasy 14 event schedule

While we rarely have concrete dates for seasonal events far in advance, they usually occur in the same month each year. That makes it easier to plot out the Final Fantasy 14 events for 2026:

Upcoming 2026 events

Previous Final Fantasy 14 seasonal events

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 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.

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.

Comment from r/ffxiv

"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.

Final Fantasy 14's Arcadion raid series has been a highlight of Dawntrail for me. All 12 fights have been resplendent with impeccable vibes and a distinct identity thanks to Creative Studio 3 going all-in on the wrestling theme.

With a cast of colourful fighters to contend with, giving each one their own bespoke theme song was the correct choice. It's not something the developer always does when it comes to the eight-player raids—sometimes a four-fight tier (five if you count any savage-difficulty second phases), will only have two or three songs apiece, sometimes sharing a more overarching theme than being tailor-made for the opponent in question.

One of my favourite songs to come out of this raid series is by far Sinister. It's the theme for Vamp Fatale—the first fight in the final tier—a seductress of a competitor whose fighting form consists of bat wings, fishnets, and a tight leather jacket. Before I go face-to-face with her, she literally tells me: "You've been a naughty, naughty girl. And I'm going to give you the punishment you deserve." Gulp.

It's no surprise, then, that her lyrics have "dominatrix" written all over them:

• I'm sinister, under your skin / In lace and leather
• Going hard, going soft, ain't no limits here
• Free for all, consensual, I thought I made it clear
• Ready or not, bottom or top, what you got in mind?
• I don't hear no safeword, honey

For localisation head and lyricist Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, there was only one place he could venture to in order to concoct these lyrics: the BDSM page on Wikipedia.

During the North American Fan Festival, Fox ran a panel around the work that goes behind creating lyrics for Final Fantasy 14. Some awkward moments involving AI pictures aside, it was a ridiculously interesting insight into how many of these songs get made, especially as someone who is deeply in love with this game's music.

Fox says a lot of time crafting lyrics for a song might just involve reading some quest dialogue or taking a look at how the gameplay for the encounter will play out, but "a lot of times it'll involve research on subjects I'm not familiar with."

This is where Fox specifically highlights the Arcadion raids: "Deep dives into pro wrestling, I had to do a lot of research on surfing which was a lot of fun," he said, referencing the Red Hot and Deep Blue fight in the Heavyweight tier.

"And then of course there's Sinister for Vamp Fatale's theme. And the scenario writer [Yuki Kimura], he made it crystal clear in his document that the theme behind this character was BDSM. So of course I go to the internet to study it out, I had to go to Wikipedia."

This is when Koji's presentation throws up a giant screenshot of the BDSM Wikipedia page which, unsurprisingly, is almost entirely redacted save for the words "and ball" before going one step further and redacting the ball, too. "While I appreciate the detail to which Wikipedia describes this subject, I could've used a heads up before going there," he joked to the audience.

"I wanted to do something provocative, because that's what [Kimura] wanted. But I also wanted to be respectful to the BDSM community so I didn't want to come from a place of stereotypes. I wanted to do my research, so I did ample research. So much research."

After squeezing in a "hole" joke (I'll allow it), Koji noted that much of this research was taking place in the office which lead to a lot of "judgemental scowls" from people walking past his booth, but joked that it also led to a handful of sly wink-wink nudge-nudge smirks from his coworkers.

Jokes, japes, and a very dad-humour presentation aside, it was interesting to know the ins and outs of how some of this stuff gets cooked up. I suppose I hadn't thought much about the research that would go into crafting a theme song around a woman who keeps calling me a naughty girl.

As someone who has also had to send some diabolical access requests to IT for some wildly NSFW sites (all research for news, I promise), I can definitely relate to Koji's awkward disposition. Will I now be thinking about the BDSM Wikipedia page every time I have to fight Vamp Fatale? Definitely, but to be fair it's hard not to when you listen to the song in its entirety.

While it's unlikely we'll ever be seeing a Final Fantasy 14 classic to relive those painful, polygon-plenty 1.0 days, there is one neat thing that Creative Studio 3 does to revitalise some of its older content: Unreal trials.

It was introduced as part of the Faux Hollows minigame back in Shadowbringers, and essentially plucks old Extreme trials (the difficulty sits above story content and below Savage raids) and then scales them up to whatever the current level cap is. No reworked mechanics or tweaks beyond just a stat push-up and letting everyone go ham with full access to their current kit.

With one fight occurring each major patch, it means Creative Studio 3 can slowly recycle each fight from all the way back in the A Realm Reborn days, before we inevitably end up getting closer and closer to current-day fights.

I've been particularly enjoying the Unreal trials available throughout the Dawntrail expansion. They've all been from Stormblood—the only expansion I skipped in its entirety—so going through each one has essentially been like a brand-new piece of content for me to sink my teeth into, even though it's actually close to being nine years old at this point.

Not all of them are equally exciting, of course. Some of the fights, like last patch's Tsukuyomi, are painfully easy with only one major mechanic to work through. I mostly put that down to how job and fight complexity were balanced with each other back then—while the scale used to tip more towards the former, it's very much firmly in the latter these days.

But some fights feel just as fun as I can only presume they were back when it was current, and that is most definitely the case with the Unreal fight that just dropped with Patch 7.5, Shinryu's Domain. I was lucky enough to dive into it blind with a full party of my pals, only one of whom had actually done the fight back in Stormblood, and was still going in with a pretty hazy memory.

And you know what? It was an absolute blast. A dose of nostalgia mixed with the excitement of getting to learn something none of us had tried before. It's a fight that utilises cast bars as tells in ways that I just don't see from encounters of this difficulty in the game anymore, and paying attention to all of the different spreads and stacks that don't come through your standard telegraphed markers was a ridiculous amount of fun.

Sure you can still MINE these fights (minimum item level, no echo for HP and damage buffs when you die) but that also scales you down to the level they were originally designed for and, crucially, locks you out of your job's full kit. Loads of abilities have been pruned over the years, which makes some classes far worse synced down than others.

Being able to experience these at current level with every ability is an absolute joy, and ultimately it's another way to enjoy the game that I presume is also quite resource-lax for the developer. Obviously brand-new encounters are always the preference, but I genuinely love Unreal as a way to introduce older content to newer players in a way that encourages them to actually play it, rather than simply unsyncing your level for the original version and killing it in a matter of seconds. It's something I wish that Creative Studio 3 could utilise elsewhere.

The developer is pretty good at making sure most of its casual-level content is populated for newcomers thanks to daily roulettes—even if nobody is actively queueing for that random level 20 dungeon.

I'm not sure what else Creative Studio 3 could do it for. Savage has a much higher ceiling compared to Extreme—the latter of which can be bashed out from the start in a single lockout, whereas Savage raids often take hours, days, or even weeks to clear.

Maybe it's something we can see in the far-flung future, though. Upcoming expansion Evercold is introducing a third 8-player raid difficulty to slot between Normal and Savage, so who knows? Maybe in a few expansions' time those can be chucked into the rotation, too. For now, I'm just feeling all buzzed for the concept of level 110 Shadowbringers fights when Evercold drops next January.

I've always felt inventory space was the most valuable thing in Final Fantasy 14, and in the wake of patch 7.5, that's never been clearer for packrat players like me. I'm sure you know the type—those of us who can't stop shoving ceaseless amounts of garbage we know damn well we'll never use into precious, limited retainer storage.

My army of retainers can hardly keep more than a handful of free inventory slots available at any given time, but thanks to the 7.5 update, that's less of a problem. Now, I can at least unburden my one item mule that was drowning in thousands of multicolored dye pots I totally, most definitely, absolutely needed. You know, just in case.

That's right, Final Fantasy 14 has blessed the glamour and housing sickos again with another space-saving upgrade. You can finally consolidate all of those ten million dyes into just a few item slots by speaking to your local Calamity Salvager. Thank the Twelve.

Well, I say a few, but my collection didn't consolidate neatly into one stack of the new Standard Spectrum Dye. I exceeded that, thanks to my nasty what-if-I-need-this-later habit, and so I have five stacks of the standard color. That's still better than the 85 inventory slots they originally occupied, mind you, so I'm not complaining. If you're tight on inventory space, I recommend you beeline it to the nearest Calamity Salvager and do the same.

Find the Calamity Salvager and reclaim your inventory space

It's not a complicated process to trade in all of your old dye in FF14 and free up some space. Just speak to the Calamity Salvager in any of the three starting cities and select 'Dye Exchange' to consolidate your collection of pigments.

All it takes is a single dye from one of the three new consolidated items to access the dozens of color options you're used to. If you've collected a little of every color, then that's 105 inventory slots consolidated into three.

Calamity Salvager locations for exchanging old dye

• Old Gridania (X:10.0, Y:8.4)
• Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks (X:11.4, Y:14.4)
• Ul'dah - Steps of Thal (X:12.6, Y:13.1)

New dye consolidation items

• Standard Spectrum Dye - Obtained from any of the 85 common dyes that were crafted, bought, or rewarded through questing
• Wide Spectrum #1 Dye - Obtained from any of the nine dyes unlocked in special side content like Ishgardian Restoration, Island Sanctuary, or Cosmic Exploration
• Wide Spectrum #2 Dye - Restricted to the 11 dyes obtained in Dawntrail's special crafting and gathering content, Cosmic Exploration

You can no longer buy the vast majority of classic colors, so you won't find those high-value pigments like Dragoon Blue or Gunmetal Black in The Firmament or Island Sanctuary. Instead, FF14 has replaced 20 pots of dye with just two items, the Wide Spectrum #1 Dye and Wide Spectrum #2 Dye. You can sell both of the consolidated items too, and with the patch day rush they're quite pricey on my server.

The extra expensive colors like General-purpose Pure White are still their own thing; you can't combine them into a singular space saver. The same goes for cash shop dye, which is kind of a bummer since I pick up a few colors whenever there's a sale, but I'm too elated about the other billion inventory slots I'm saving to be fussed.

Combine the new dye system with all of the dungeon gear I can finally toss into the glamour pile, and I've got tons of extra space for hoarding more crap I don't need. I should probably use this as a chance to cut a few retainer slots from my monthly FF14 subscription, but I know myself too well to pretend like that's going to happen. All of those item mules glamoured to look like Estinien will be over encumbered with junk by next week.

Patch 7.5 for Final Fantasy 14 landed today, and with it a strange appearance in the inventories for some players: an adorable otter backpack that reminds me of those weird Loungefly bags that seem to permeate every pop culture store in the UK.

It wasn't mentioned in the patch notes, and stuff randomly appearing without due notice is very rare. It also wasn't immediately obvious exactly what was triggering it to show up for some but not for others—I didn't have it, but my friend did.

After some tinkering around and dropping 140,000 gil on a Black Embroidered Parasol (and a handful of other registrable accessories), I saw the backpack instantly pop into my fashion accessories tab as if by magic. My friend surmised it was probably an accidental item ID overlap, and I now have to regrettably tell him that he's pretty smart since Square Enix has now confirmed this to be the case.

In a known issues post on the Lodestone, it goes into a little detail about what happened here. "Upon investigating this issue, we confirmed that during data configuration, the internal ID for the 'Senor Otter pack' was mistakenly set to the same internal ID as the 'Black Embroidered Parasol.' As a result, if you have already obtained the 'Black Embroidered Parasol,' you will also be able to use 'Senior Otter pack.'"

The post continues: "We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. However, we plan to correct the internal ID in an upcoming HOTFIX, so the feature will no longer be available at that time. We would appreciate it if the content could be reviewed again once the revised version has been officially published."

As for where the backpack is actually supposed to come from, that's less clear. Square Enix just calls it "a fashion accessory that is scheduled to be released as a content reward in the future." Could be treasure maps, could be an upcoming event. My money's on the annual Make it Rain event, personally.

Either way, prepare for a huge surge in the price of black parasols on the market board until a hotfix is out, I guess. Presumably the backpacks'll be taken away when the hotfix lands, so make the most of 'em.

And so, the Final Fantasy 14 free trial copypasta gets longer once more. The MMO has been show-ponied around by the community for its rather generous free trial for ages now. First it was up to level 60 including Heavensward, and then in 2023 was extended to include Stormblood. And as of today's Patch 7.5, the free trial includes the best damn expansion of them all: Shadowbringers.

The free trial expansion was actually announced during the North American Fan Festival keynote over the weekend, but the news of its imminent arrival seems to have blitzed past a ton of folk. But yup! It's here! Well regarded as the best expansion of the bunch, Shadowbringers is the lethal combination of ridiculously good storytelling, wicked fun encounter design, and bunny girls.

Having Shadowbringers in the free trial means that you now don't have to fork out any money to have full access to every race in the game—that includes bunny boys and hrothgals introduced in Endwalker and Dawntrail respectively, as they only require Shadowbringers to unlock. It also means free trial players can dive into the Nier-themed alliance raids—2B leggings are about to get a whole lot more common, huh?

There are still all of the usual limitations, mind. If you're looking to do some hardcore raiding without a subscription, you're out of luck as The Unending Coil of Bahamut (Ultimate), Weapon's Refrain (Ultimate), and The Epic of Alexander (Ultimate) aren't available on the free trial. That's a relatively niche obstacle, though, and roadblocks that have the potential to be more of a nuisance is stuff like:

• A 300,000 gil cap
• No access to /shout, /yell, and /tell chat
• No market board or retainers
• You can't join a Free Company (FF14's guild equivalent)
• No access to Party Finder
• No PvP

If you're willing to work around those limitations though, you can squeeze a helluva lot of time out of this game's free trial. The inclusion of Shadowbringers easily brings it up to a good 500 hours of stuff you can wring out of it, which is absolutely wild to me. And being able to play the absolute peak of Final Fantasy 14 without even having to spend a dime? Now that's even wilder.

Let's just not talk about how long it'll actually take you to get there, first.

When Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida took to the stage for his opening keynote at the North American Fan Festival, I knew change was coming. He'd been hinting that the next expansion—which we now know is called Evercold—would mark a new era of Final Fantasy 14.

Despite that, I still thought it was all going to be relatively safe. Creative Studio 3 has been trying little bits here and there throughout Dawntrail, but its core gameplay and patch cadence has remained staunchly the same.

I was wrong.

Yoshida's keynote felt like a recognition of the community's frustrations, one which culminated in the big announcement: Evercold will mark the end of the two-minute meta, and a brand-new combat style intended to return some flexibility to rotations and individuality that has suffered at the hands of homogenisation.

For those who aren't familiar with Final Fantasy 14's current combat, almost every job essentially revolves around one big button that's on a two-minute cooldown. It usually grants either a buff to themselves or to the party. In the vast majority of encounters, making sure everyone is aligning their big button (and pooling any resources to spend during its effect), is incredibly important.

It's a rather rigid choice that's led to Creative Studio 3 designing themselves into a hole. New jobs have to slot into this meta, and designing encounters has to be done with this two-minute synergy in mind.

But when January 2027 rolls around, these big buff abilities are going away and two combat styles are being introduced. Reborn mode, which is what we have now, and Evolved mode. New jobs will only have the latter mode available, which makes me think Reborn only exists because CS3 is too scared to force everyone over to the new style straight away.

I don't blame them either, especially after seeing a huge mix of opinions on Evolved's combat. It's condensing skills down—think putting your 1-2-3 rotation onto a single button or two abilities on one button that'll do different things depending on who you're targeting—which some are construing to mean "easier".

Will it be easier? Who knows. We did get a glimpse of the changes during a developer panel on the first day, with Yoshi-P showing off Bard, White Mage, and Paladin. I'm not completely sold on White Mage's damage ability, Glare, becoming an instant-cast, but the team said it was in the interest of placing greater emphasis on GCD healing, which is something I am sold on.

They've put a little pizzazz into Bard with some sweet aerial dodges and once again giving the job an ability you have to cast—something we haven't had since Heavensward. And while tank is by far my least played role, I was really liking what I saw with Paladin's kit.

I don't think it's going to be perfect, and I think there'll certainly be a lot of teething issues when Evercold first launches. It is not going to have everyone on board from the off. Hell, I don't even know if I'm going to like it. It's hard to say based on a snippet of something that's actively in development.

But honestly? It's so refreshing to see Creative Studio 3 trying. Despite Dawntrail being my absolute favourite expansion for encounter design, the stench of stagnation has been all over it. Relatively little has changed in terms of gameplay since Shadowbringers, and that exhaustion is being felt even harder than usual with increasing waits between major patches and a story that hasn't gripped the masses.

And for a long time, it felt like the developer had no intention of switching things up, either. But the keynote was clear: CS3 is listening, and it's making an earnest attempt at changing things. That alone is huge for a company so accustomed to digging in its heels and sticking to the status quo. And it's going to make me a little more open to whatever the future of Final Fantasy 14's combat looks like—better for the studio to try, fail, and work it out from there than to have never attempted to do things differently in the first place.

It's definitely understandable to be apprehensive about what Evolved combat and a game without a two-minute synergy looks like. While the game's story is what draws a lot of people in, the encounter design and combat is what keeps many of us around. But I'm so excited to see CS3 taking a stab at evolution—it's the very thing we've been asking for, after all.

The first Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival for the MMO's next expansion kicks off today. We should be getting a little glimpse at a trailer, the expansion's name, and more than likely producer Naoki Yoshida's usual mind games with a t-shirt that'll give some sort of hint about one of the new jobs.

But first, we still have a whole other patch for Dawntrail to get to first. Patch 7.5 is set to drop on April 28, and as usual we've been handed some preliminary patch notes to comb through in anticipation.

My verdict? There's some ridiculously good quality-of-life changes here. The biggest ones were already revealed in previous livestreams: player housing is getting a furniture limit increase for both indoor and outdoor furnishings, and a whole bunch of dyes are being consolidated so they stop constantly clogging up your inventory.

Housing is still far from perfect, mind. It's still not instanced, and certain items might get culled if a house is full of folks and furni—which potentially scuppers methods a lot of FF14 house designers use like clipping furniture through two storeys to change its function or appearance. But an overall increase is a net positive, and the poor patch of my small house's front garden that's been negleted due to the 20-item limit will no doubt be happy to finally receive some attention.

The same can be said for the dye consolidation. They're all still single use and the premium ones you can purchase with real money are still unconsolidated. Gotta sell those Pure White and Jet Black dyes in the cash shop somehow. But the rest are split into three categories, which is infinitely more manageable for my inventory and retainers than the 100+ dyes we have right now.

Some of the QoL changes are new knowledge to me, though. One of the neatest is the fact that you can finally share hotbars across characters. It's something that might not feel entirely necesary—after all, it's an MMO that prides itself on being able to do everything on one character—but as someone who recently made an alt, it was super frustrating not being able to port over my main's hotbars and UI with the click of a button.

Technically it's still not a click, it's multiple clicks. And a 16-digit share code. It feels a little archaic of the Nintendo variety, but the process does seem to open up the possibility of sharing hotbars and HUD layouts between friends, which will be an incredibly neat use. Especially as someone who has seen some of my friend's hotbar layouts. Please let me fix them now, buds.

Not every change has me jumping for joy, though. I'm admittedly a rather casual PvPer, but the Frontline changes have me raising my eyebrow. Battle High—the thing you accrue through kills and assists, with five ranks that grant you increasing buffs as a reward—no longer deteriorates when you get killed.

You'll also earn a lot more Battle High the further up you go. It feels like a bizarre change that takes a huge part of Frontline's dynamic away—maintaining Battle High is half the fun, and I'm not sure if these changes will actually fix any of the stomping issues the huge 72-player mode currently faces.

There's loads more stuff, including:

• New chocobo interactions, like having them react to pets
• A new 24-player alliance raid
• Bonus Second Chance points on select Wondrous Tails entries
• A new message telling you which emote to use or what weather is required for some of A Realm Reborn's fussier Sightseeing Log entries
• More hats for Viera (a lot of the metal helmets we were missing in the first update)
• Changes to party KOs in deep dungeons
• Loads more gear getting two dye channels

There'll no doubt be more revealed across this weekend's Fan Fest. I hope this sea of QoL changes is the sign of something good. Even if they're not completely perfect, they're a start. And when you've got over a decade of spaghetti code to untangle, better to do it bit by bit.

I've fully entered my raiding era in Final Fantasy 14—I finally cleared my first full savage tier with the latest Arcadion raids, and I'm in the throes of progging my first ultimate (we do Looper, and then we do Looper etc). It's been a learning process of not only what my job does, but what everyone else's does and how they all intersect. Plus, you know, learning all the mechanics.

Has any of that come in handy with this Final Fantasy 14-based logic game that has recently dug its claws into me? Absolutely not, but these daily puzzles are a must-play for anyone looking to flex their knowledge of the critically-acclaimed MMORPG.

Clock Spots gives you eight different jobs spread out in a circle (at their "clock spots", hence the name), with each one having different criteria you need to fill in order to complete the puzzle. One spot might need a job released in a certain expansion, while a healer might have to be positioned with an AOE heal in order to catch other players with low HP.

It's a real test of just how much you know about the game—do you know who has a ground-targeted heal? Or which jobs you learn in Gridania versus Ul'dah or Limsa Lominsa? Or who wears Aiming accessories? Clock Spots has tooltips that you can hover over if you're not a walking Final Fantasy 14 encyclopaedia, but there's also a "blind prog" setting that turns them off entirely, which means you really have to know your stuff.

The puzzles vary in difficulty each day, all thematically named of course with Normal, Extreme, Savage, and Ultimate giving a little nod to how hard a time you might have with it. Clock Spots has only been going for a week as of writing so there's not too many archival puzzles to dive through, but they are releasing daily so you can get a consistent fix.

My times have been pretty average across most of the puzzles. I completely flubbed the April 23 puzzle and walked away with a measly solve time of 7:41, but managed to wrangle every other day at around the two-to-five minute mark.

As someone who is a total sucker for daily puzzles—I am a stout NYT Games enjoyer with Wordle, Connections, the Mini and the Midi practically being a ritual for me at this point—having one which is so specifically catered to my interests has me kicking my feet in pure joy.

I hope Clock Spots carries on for a good long while, and who knows? Maybe all of this random knowledge (I'm sorry, I cannot remember every job with a single-target raid buff), will actually come in handy when I play the actual game, too. One can hope, anyway. I need all the help I can get.

It's almost time for another Dawntrail-era update, so that means the Final Fantasy 14 Moogle Treasure Trove event is back with a little something to do until patch 7.5 drops on April 28. This time, we're on the "Hunt for Aphorism" and have new ways to obtain old rewards through alternative (often easier) methods.

I'll cover the basics of getting started with the Moogle Treasure Trove event below, along with how the Mogpendium works and all of the Aphorism Tomestone rewards. If you're just looking for suggestions on the best ways to farm Moogle tomes or want advice on what to exchange them for, then I've got you covered there too.

How does the Moogle Treasure Trove Event work?

The Moogle Treasure Trove event itself is pretty straightforward: You'll complete an assortment of challenges ranging from raids to deep dungeons to fishing excursions, and receive a few Irregular Tomestones of Aphorism for your troubles. You can then exchange tomestones for rewards (like mounts from old extreme trials or Triple Triad cards).

How to start the Moogle Treasure Trove event

If this is your first time doing the Moogle Treasure Trove event, the whole process looks something like this:

1. Speak with the Itinerant Moogle to receive the Mogpendium (lists objectives)
2. Queue for challenges in the Duty Finder or join tome farms in Party Finder
3. Upon completing an objective, tomes drop directly into your inventory or are claimed from the Mogpendium
4. Exchange Aphorism Tomestones for rewards by speaking to the Itinerant Moogle again

A few other basics to keep in mind for the Moogle Treasure Trove:

• You cannot receive irregular tomes when using squadrons, supports, or trusts
• You cannot receive irregular tomes from unsynced duties
• You can receive irregular tomes with atypical party compositions and level sync

Where do you exchange Moogle Treasure Trove tomes?

You can exchange Moogle Treasure Trove Aphorism tomes by speaking with the Itinerant Moogle in any of the three starting city-states (Limsa Lominsa, Gridania, or Ul'dah). You may hear the Moogle's cute, squeaky hovering noises before you spot it, but here are the specific coordinates in each city:

Itinerant Moogle locations

• (X:9.4, Y:11.6) Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks
• (X:12.4, Y:12.1) New Gridana
• (X:9.6, Y:9.1) Ul'dah, Steps of Nald

The Moogle Treasure Trove Mogpendium

You've got four different ways to grind Irregular Tomes of Aphorism before the Moogle Treasure Trove ends, and the Mogpendium is your handy in-game reference for types of tasks that earn you more tokens. Some Mogpendium objectives are one-time-only challenges, while others you can farm to your heart's content.

Types of Mogpendium Challenges

• Standard Objectives - Duties available for unlimited Aphorism farming
• Weekly Objectives - A single objective that's completable once per week
• Minimog Challenges - Sets of two challenges; complete one per week
• Ultimog Challenges - Special challenge only available once per event cycle

Accessing the Mogpendium

• Standard Objectives deliver tomes directly to your inventory
• Weekly, Minimog, and Ultimog tomes must be claimed from the Mogpendium
• You can place a shortcut for the Mogpendium on your hotbar
  • Character >> Actions & Traits >> Main Commands >> Collection >> Mogpendium

Best ways to farm Irregular Tomestones of Aphorism

The Hunt for Aphorism - Standard Objectives

Moogle Treasure Trove Duties

What should you spend Tomestones of Aphorism on?

If the name didn't clue you in, the Moogle Treasure Trove is an easy way to score some of Final Fantasy 14's most desirable mounts, minions, and glamour. The event typically includes a new reward that's exclusive to the Treasure Trove grind, but sometimes those rewards return in future iterations of the event.

Really old trial rewards aren't worth spending your Tomestones of Aphorism on, so I would buy exclusive items like the Miner's Earring and Fat Cat Parasol first.

First, buy the limited-time event items for 150 tomes

Still have tomes to spare? Spend another 140 on these

Once you've got the earring and parasol, fate-exclusive mounts like the Ixion Clarion and Ironfrog Ambler aren't bad choices if you don't feel like watching old fate timers and trying to catch them when they spawn.

The Bomb Palanquin Horn and Direwolf Whistle are old Allied Society rewards, so they're another easy shortcut if you don't feel up to doing so many daily chores.

Have everything? Irregular Tomestones are still worth farming!

The event is still useful for people like me who have been playing Final Fantasy 14 for too damn long. I use it to grind MGP Platinum Cards, which are worth 50,000 MGP a pop, and it's how I get just about all of my MGP for buying those pricy mounts from the Gold Saucer.

I'm constantly on the achievement hunt grind too, so I buy things like the Seemingly Special Timeworn Map, Ostensibly Special Timeworn Map, etc. They guarantee a portal to their specified treasure dungeon, and it's a great way to grind out some of the more annoying map achievements.

Moogle Treasure Trove rewards

The new version of Final Fantasy 7 that Square Enix announced in a boldly detail-free post last January hit Steam yesterday and, well, people aren't happy about it.

In an event scientists are (probably) calling "more predictable than the sunrise," it seems fans rather think Square Enix mucked it all up, so much so that one cadre of modders has decided to use the release as a shoe-in-the-door to angle for a gig at the studio. After all, they reckon they could do better than this.

The new version of FF7—now on Steam and GOG—adds a 3x speed mode, the option to disable random encounters, autosaves, and a "Battle enhancement mode" that lets you "recover HP/MP during battles and max out the Limit gauge." It's worth noting, before we get to the complaints, that if you had the older version of FF7 on Steam, you still have access to it. So at least there's that.

At the time of writing, Final Fantasy 7's user reviews sit at an ugly red Mostly Negative on Steam, with fans taking issue with framerate bugs (though in fairness, some report that Square Enix has at least patched a gamebreaking combat speed glitch), texture filtering, and in general the fact it feels like a worse version of the game than a modded copy of the old version.

"OG 2013 release had modders that did all of this already from controller support and button prompts to frames and cheats, but with better visuals and skins," wrote a player named Jamesie Ghost. "I just don't understand how they tested this and said 'Yes, this is the definitive edition of Final Fantasy VII,'" wrote ehs03y3ol.

You know who else reckons modders did it better? Modders. The Tsunamods team—responsible for various FF-related projects, including the Cosmo Memory and Echo S-7—has been tweeting its impressions about the new FF7 version since it dropped. They're unimpressed. "Why did they need to make the backgrounds look worse!" the team posted on its X account, alongside a side-by-side comparison of some FF7 backgrounds. "It's one thing to release a new version that's worse. But to fully delist the better version is just… ehh. We must fix this!"

So confident is the Tsunamods team that it could do better that it's… turned its dismay at nu-FF7 into a job application. "You know what, I'm taking our shot in the dark here. @SquareEnix, hire us. I'm not joking. Our contact info is in our bio," wrote the team.

"We have Programmers, Musicians, 3D artists, 2D artists, Upscale engineers, and we help keep your older games alive. People trust us. Let us help you."

I… somehow doubt this will work, but you know what? There are much worse ideas. I'm a long-time advocate for studios essentially canonising the mod projects that keep their old games alive. I can't fault Tsunamods for giving it a go.

After taking a wee half-year break from Final Fantasy 14, I have been (for better and worse) deep in the no-life trenches since December. I've been sucked straight back into the world of bunny girls and perpetual Limsa Lominsa drama—the kind I dutifully observe from the sidelines, of course. Looks like I'm not the only one waking their Warriors of Light up from an extended nap, either. At least, if this unofficial census is anything to go by.

It comes courtesy of LuckyBancho, who's been running the census for a hot sec now. Like I say, it's unofficial—pulling data from The Lodestone to determine which characters are 'active' through means like newly registered minions and mounts or changes in HP and experience—so it's not to be taken as gospel. But it's still decent enough for a broad view of how the game is doing.

As it turns out, it seems like it's doing pretty well! At least, significantly better than the census conducted back in November of last year. It estimates that we're around 110,000 active characters up from three months ago for a pretty healthy-looking 930,000 Warriors of Light runnin' around. Roughly 60,000 of those are new characters, while the number of returning players (those who were inactive but are now considered active) is estimated to be around 210,000—that's an 80,000 increase from the previous census.

That last stat can likely be partially contributed to the fact that Final Fantasy 14 ran one of its semi-regular free login campaigns a few days after the launch of Patch 7.41—which added the Savage difficulty of the final four Arcadion raids, a new step for the relic weapon, and a new area for Cosmic Exploration.

But aside from that, Patch 7.4 (which released in mid-December) has been quite good. The main storyline is starting to pop down the breadcrumbs that'll lead us to the main meat of the next, currently unannounced expansion. It "completely charmed" fellow FF14 sicko Harvey Randall, and it's also the first time in a while that I've really felt excited about where this game's narrative is going.

It's also the patch that unshackled us from class-locked glamour, letting me finally wear 'Scouting' armor (once locked to Ninjas and Vipers) on my Dancer, since it's often far more thematically fitting than whatever steampunk vibe my actual role-specific gear often touts. I know, it sounds like a wild reason to bring people back into the game, but fashion is the endgame. It is, in fact, a very good reason to bring people back.

And let's not forget the release of the Arcadion Heavyweight raid tier, the conclusion to Dawntrail's excellent raid series that has done a lot of narrative heavy lifting where many felt let down by what the main story offered. It's an excellent tier, too, though the final fight has divided a few folks for being arguably a little anti-climactic. The final Savage fight though? Now that one is an absolute banger, and I've been having a great time reclearing it each week.

They're all big reasons for someone to come back and start playing again—hell, it got me—and with word of mouth quickly spreading about how the patch was actually pretty good, it's no surprise to see people jumping back on to see for themselves.

And like I say, it's a significantly better position than the game's been in recently. Here are some of the previous numbers from LuckyBancho:

• November 2025: 820,000 active characters (two weeks before Patch 7.4)
• September 2025: 880,000 active characters
• July 2025: 880,000 active characters (right before the release of Patch 7.3)
• May 2025: 950,000 active characters
• March 2025: 990,000 active characters (right before the release of Patch 7.2)

So yeah, this is the healthiest we've looked in… well, almost a year. It's good to see so late into the expansion's life cycle, too. Not to doom too hard, but I don't think I was the only one who expected to see a steady decline/stagnating number in the lead up to the next expansion.

I'm sure the number will inevitably go down. Most of the regular raiders will already have all of their gear from the Savage raids, if not very close to best-in-slot. The Variant and Criterion dungeon set to launch with Patch 7.45 won't be that big a pull. People will likely come back to see what Patch 7.5 has to offer story-wise. And if there's an Ultimate raid, that'll keep the hardcore players happy for a bit longer.

There will certainly be a calm before the storm. But for now, I'm happy to see that it's at least a little on the up and up.

I've had the pleasure of attending a single Download Festival—one of the UK's biggest rock and metal events going—and I thought I was cool with never attending another. Well, erm, that certainly was the case until about two seconds ago, when the organiser dropped another 14 acts for this year's festival. Among them? Final Fantasy 14-themed rock band The Primals, headed up by the game's composer Masayoshi Soken.

Not that The Primals isn't a real band, mind: they have a full lineup, they've released albums, they've toured. But it's also wild to see a band formed by the composer of Final Fantasy 14 with the express purpose of covering songs from Final Fantasy 14 in a heavier alt style taking to the stage of one of the biggest festivals my little island home has to offer.

For reference, this year's headliners include Limp Bizkit, Guns N' Roses, and Linkin Park and past years have been graced by the likes of Metallica, Slipknot, Fall Out Boy, Iron Maiden, and Green Day as main headliners. It's a pretty big deal! It's also the band's first showing outside of Asia, Fan Festival performances notwithstanding.

I can't help but notice that this year's Download lineup includes Tom Morello and Architects, too. Both have contributed to Final Fantasy 14's soundtrack over the years—Architects lead singer Sam Carter lent his vocals to the last expansion, Endwalker, with its theme song Footfalls. More recently, Morello collaborated with Beartooth vocalist Caleb Shomo in Everything Burns, which featured in the game's latest patch as the theme song to the final fight of the Arcadion raid series.

Both songs are absolute bangers, and there is a teeny tiny bit of me (huffing massive supplies of copium) that hopes one or both will make an appearance alongside The Primals to perform their respective tracks. It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. It's pretty common for artists who've collaborated to perform together at these things. One of my favourite memories of attending Download in 2023 was getting to see Bullet for my Valentine take to the stage alongside Pendulum for their then-new song, Halo.

But I also hope it doesn't happen because I am currently over here being a giant jealous baby who is suddenly ready and prepared to get over absolutely everything I hated about Download. Listen, I love listening to music and walking around all of the different stages, but I also hate shivering in a sleeping bag perched atop a crappy air mattress while some drunken bozo falls on top of my tent at least once a night. Maybe a day pass and a hotel is in order.

I am, ultimately, interested in seeing how well The Primals' specific flavour of 'videogame music but also just very good in its own right' will translate over to the masses. Part of the joy of these festivals is discovering new acts and while Download is no stranger to great-but-niche additions in its lineup, I am curious if The Primals will land outside of its dedicated circle.

If you are interested in seeing The Primals live, they'll be performing at Download on Friday, June 12.

I know you've done a million Final Fantasy 14 events already and may hit Skip Cutscene when given the chance, but hear me out: this year's Valentines Day celebration is the best seasonal sidequest FF14 has had in ages. And you should do it before it's gone.

All you have to do is help the holiday NPC Astrid by successfully decorating five overly extravagant cakes in time for the annual "Valentione's Day" celebration. The instanced task is available to solo players, pre-made parties, or matched with strangers. I know it doesn't sound like the usual high-stakes affair that's suitable for Warriors of Light, but don't judge the sidequest too hastily. As long as you don't complete the challenge alone, it rules.

The Pâtisserie—the Valentine's Day limited instance—is patrolled by mobs of hostile, sugar-flinging mammets. You can defend yourself with a special duty action, but their conic AoEs retaliate with a stun and cost you precious seconds in the race to decorate enough Valentione cakes.

The goofy minigame is a messy trial of "don't stand in the shit," like most FF14 encounters, but the premise feels more Mario Party-lite than big boss battle. It's chaotic, kind of like that TLC show, Cake Boss. But instead of a foul-mouthed man from eastern New Jersey, I get to be an even fouler-mouthed cat girl from Limsa Lominsa.

I'm kidding, it's actually way better and the most fun I've had playing FF14 with strangers in a while. My usual experience is to load into a duty, greet the party with a friendly "\o," then fall into my job's usual role. But I ran The Pâtisserie three times—that's two more times than required—and every run had chatty players stopping to joke around or gpose at the end.

I know we've had communal jump puzzles and cute Halloween events in the past, but this year's Valentione's Day sidequest felt like a nice refresh of an otherwise monotonous chore. It's not very often a shared FF14 goal doesn't have me stressed as hell and clenching my jaw, so it was nice to goof off and make a few fleeting friends. It's been ages since FF14 reminded me it's an MMO, and that the formula requires some degree of socializing.

The Final Fantasy 14 Valentione's Day celebration is also stacked with rewards, so if not for some baking camaraderie, then at least do it for the glam. Every run of The Pâtisserie yields event currency based on your performance, and you can trade those tokens for the 2026 goodies. This year's rewards include two outfits, three orchestrion rolls, and new seasonal furnishings I'm not ashamed to stick in my Eorzean abode. Finally.

If you want to try the Final Fantasy 14 Valentione's Day celebration, you've got until Monday, February 16, at 7 am PST to queue up. It begins in Old Gridania (X: 10.2, Y: 9.4) by speaking to Astrid and accepting 'The Icing on the Cake' quest. You'll receive 150 Valentione's Day Chocolates for completing five cakes. It's enough to trade for every reward with some extras to spare.

I've spent an undisclosed, embarrassing number of days playing Final Fantasy 14, and Steam says I've got 370+ hours logged in Phasmophobia. So, what better way is there to lure me into your Eorzean personal quarters than with a Final Fantasy 14 housing tribute to Phasmophobia's most beloved map?

There isn't one; that's the perfect formula. And it's what @ww_Yuki_www has done with their recreation of Phasmophobia's haunted house, 6 Tanglewood Drive. The screenshots posted on X look like something straight out of the co-op horror game—so much so that I assumed they were regular ol' Phas screenshots and almost kept scrolling.

They pasted in video camera and digital thermometer assets from Phasmophobia, but I'm not noting that as a wag of my finger. It's impressive that they so easily blend in, and once I started inspecting the craftsmanship, I couldn't stop playing an FF14-themed game of I Spy with all of the furnishings.

Picking apart intricate builds is just one of those delightful aspects of being an FF14 housing sicko. I'm fairly certain the white light is the Steamed Shumai tabletop item after it's been fully consumed, and that's no ceiling fan hanging above the couch. It's just four Antique Wall Shelves and a Metal Work Lantern in a trench coat.

I also love that this is Phasmophobia's smallest map staged in the largest Final Fantasy 14 house size, and it (understandably) looks like they didn't build the basement or bedrooms. I'm assuming that's due to the MMO's system constraints, but this is impressive as is. Most space in Final Fantasy 14's biggest lots goes unused thanks to the limit on furnishings—you can only have 400 items placed indoors at a time—so players often wall off entire floors of their mansions to create smaller, more detailed spaces like the Tanglewood build.

Yuki has another example on a smaller scale with their recreation of Level 974 from The Backrooms in a Final Fantasy 14 apartment. It may not look like it, but I guarantee the build takes up all 100 of the studio room's furnishing slots.

Resourceful and crafty players have been forcing the MMO's fairly limited housing system to misbehave and "float" objects since A Realm Reborn, but they've only gotten more creative over the years as Square Enix adds new furniture and architecture. Browse any FF14 housing enthusiast's work, and you'll most likely find dozens of items mashed together to create something new. There's an art to forcing dozens of Zabuton Cushions underground, painting them grey, and calling it a stone floor, y'know?

Before we had better alternatives, I used to spend hours vaulting beds into the air with the glitch so I could use their underside to create decorative ceilings. I'd toss in a few indoor ponds too, just so I could force the player camera to do what I wanted at the right angle, and usually end the build with a tragic misclick to break the whole thing.

Third-party tools have (understandably) stepped in and become more popular to circumvent that pain, but you didn't hear that from me.

Much like my terminally online colleague Harvey Randall, I love player housing in just about any MMO, and find some charm in FF14's limitations. Regardless of the approach, the creative solutions borne from finicky physics and furnishing restrictions make for some seriously imaginative builds that I've spent countless hours touring. Screw an actual TV, I want to see solutions like Yuki's—two Dance Poles and a flipped Ironworks Tool Set.

To celebrate last year's 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy 9, Famitsu (via Automaton) spoke with its creators about the lasting impact of FF9's return to more traditional fantasy. Looking back on its production, legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu said FF9 features some of his favorite compositions—even if he's convinced it's more popular outside of Japan.

"When I go abroad, I get the impression that there are a lot of FF9 fans," Uematsu said. "I feel like people overseas mention FF9 more often than people in Japan."

Asked whether he believes FF9's medieval fantasy setting—following FF7 and FF8 skewing toward a more modern, belt-heavy aesthetic—is responsible for its greater popularity abroad, Uematsu only said "I wonder." But its middle ages theming did help him produce some of the best videogame music he's composed.

"Personally, I think there are a lot of songs from FF9 that I like," Uematsu said.

That might not sound like strong praise for his own work, but Uematsu said listening to his own work as it plays in-game generally makes him miserable.

"I can listen to something that someone else has arranged for an orchestra, but when it comes to the music that plays in the game, I'm not satisfied. From the moment I make it, I don't want to listen to it anymore," Uematsu said. "It's too embarrassing and I can't bear to listen to it. I listen to it so much during debugging."

Given that he's his own harshest critic, it says a lot that Uematsu thinks FF9's "melody and chord movement are good." He also expressed a particular fondness for its final boss music, which features the results of some unconventional music direction.

"I wanted the voice of the dead at the beginning, so I asked the synthesizer operator, Keiji Kawamori, to 'go to hell and record it,'" Uematsu said. "He said, 'Okay,' and the next day he came up with something amazing."

While he said it had been "fun to shift gears" for Final Fantasy's sci-fi departures—unsurprising, given his recently-shared frustration over game music getting "less weird"—FF9 offered a welcome return to form.

"I was happy to return to something medieval with FF9," Uematsu said. "I am a medieval otaku after all."

It's a phase we all go through, though Uematsu's seems to be pretty long-lasting. In an interview with a Japanese magazine just before FF9's release in July 2000 (translated here by Shmuplations), he recalled traveling to Ireland during the production of FF7 and seeing an inspiring recording of the musical Riverdance.

"I watched the video of Riverdance over and over again, and every time I watched it, I cried, it was so wonderful," he said. "The opening theme of FF9 is closer to Early Music (Medieval and Renaissance music) than Irish folk music, though. Early Music is a kind of bridge between Irish music and classical music. At first, I was thinking of using Early Music for the entirety of FF9, but that would probably be going too far."

Uematsu composed both the opening theme and fanfare in the Early Music style, and the familiar ground of classic fantasy also made it easier for him to compose early in development, even before much of the game had been built.

"FF7 and FF8 had a very different atmosphere from the previous FF games, so I drew more inspiration from the story and visuals there," he said. "But for FF9, I was less bound by that and the music came more naturally. To be honest it was more fun for me this time."

In Famitsu's 25th anniversary interview, Uematsu said that the development of Final Fantasy 9 had offered him an opportunity that would likely fill his fellow medieval otakus with envy: He and his wife traveled overseas for inspiration. Unfortunately he didn't have a Riverdance-caliber revelation on that trip.

"I thought it would be a good idea to get a feel for the atmosphere of Europe, so my wife and I went on a tour of old castles," Uematsu said. "But we were surrounded by college students and we were the only elderly people there. It was pretty tough."

Patch 7.4 hit Final Fantasy 14 earlier this week, bringing a conclusion to the excellent Arcadion raids. Not only have all 12 fights been an absolute joy to play, but the series has some of the strongest identity and cast of characters the game has seen in a good long while.

That's thanks in no small part to each fighter having a unique theme song—something that is not afforded to every raid in this game—and I firmly believe the Arcadion series simply would not have hit the same without Soken's excellent and varied musical work on it. A world where I didn't have Bee My Honey permanently stuck in my head? That's a world I don't wanna live in.

So tell me why, then, Final Fantasy 14, did you STILL manage to cram Machinations into one of the goddamn cutscenes?

Plan of action

Machinations is that one friend you can't get rid of despite your best attempts. That bit of mold in your bathroom that keeps growing back. That once-favourite song you still can't listen to because you thought setting it as your alarm was a great idea. An ever-present song in Final Fantasy 14, one that has been around since the MMO's not-so-humble beginnings.

It's not even a bad song, really. It's a bold and battle-spurring piece. It's fine.

But its rampant overuse across one decade and five expansions' worth of cutscenes has caused the song to long overstay its welcome, and hearing it yet again in this newest patch has me desperate for the game to mix it up.

It certainly does not help the context in which the song is most often used: unvoiced cutscenes where characters often rehash plot points, plans, or imply some sort of battle lying ahead for the Warrior of Light that will then be discussed again but in a different location. To be blunt, it's filler, reminders of what's actually happening in case you weren't paying attention or took a long break.

I've been Pavlov'd into associating Machinations with the story's lulls. Those first notes play and I feel my eyes glazing over, preparing to only half-read the next several lines of dialogue. I want to be excited about every aspect of the story, and Machinations kinda makes it hard to do that.

Sure, games have always relied on reusing songs; it can immediately establish the vibe with very little effort. Most games do not have hundreds of hours of cutscenes. To make matters worse, it's also the main theme of Wolves' Den, the PvP zone I'm required to visit if I want to tweak my PvP hotbars or spend currency earned through its modes. It is inescapable.

I had hoped the song would be retired when Dawntrail released last year. It was the beginning of a new narrative arc, and the perfect opportunity to shelve it even if it was in favour of a slightly altered rearrangement of the thing. But for whatever reason, Creative Studio 3 are insistent on clinging onto it.

I'll admit it's being used considerably less, but you know what? It's still not enough. So this is my plea: whatever the next expansion may be, please let me never hear Machinations again. Final Fantasy 14 is a game positively spilling over with an exciting and eclectic musical catalogue. Tom Morello has a song in the game, y'all! There are far more bangers than there are duds.

While I wouldn't exactly say Machinations falls into the latter, it has certainly outlived its usefulness. Switching things up would revitalise some of the game's more sluggish narrative moments and breathe new life into clicking through unvoiced dialogue for the millionth time. Please, pretty please. Let the next expansion be the start of something new.

Dungeons, raids, boss battles? In my MMO? Pshaw, lame. Predictable. Overdone. A glitched-out level one nothing mob minding its own business out in the wintery wilderness? Now that's the good stuff right there. Something actually worth playing the goddamn game for.

Final Fantasy 14's Patch 7.4 dropped on Tuesday, tying up most of Dawntrail's plot points while gently ushering us towards whatever narrative the next expansion has in store for us. There's the conclusion of the Arcadion raids, an overhauled glamour system—oh, and a debug "blue deer doe" roaming around in Coerthas Western Highlands with no name, just a menacing icon indicating it's hostile if approached and a level one indicator next to it.

Naturally, it has taken no time at all for the community to rally around this being and treat it as if it were our collective son. Groups have gathered near the deer—which some theorise has a measly 40HP—to take photos of it, pet it, and quickly scold anyone who dares kill it. The level 1 debug mob cult is strong.

"I went and saw one a while ago," a Reddit comment reads. "I killed it and the person standing there yelled at me. I thought it would be stronger. I wanted to see how strong it really was." A user on X posted a screenshot of the level 1 nothing, adding: "If you kill this thing people get really mad at you btw," to which someone replied "if it kills you people think it's awesome though".

Despite only existing in all its nothingness glory for just over a day, art of the creature has been popping up all over social media in the hours since its discovery. It feels like Endwalker's low-poly grapes all over again—or, for the veterans among us, Heavensward's skybear situation which occurred in the exact same region over 10 years prior to this incident.

As for why this has happened, players have their theories. The most prevalent is that it's an accidental leftover from the team testing the upcoming Beastmaster limited job—fellow limited job Blue Mage also has mobs exclusive to it, so the theory certainly holds water.

Unfortunately, much like the jank of grapes and skybears past that the community came to love, I imagine that level 1 __ will be departing in a hotfix pretty soon. But for now, get your pets in, take your /gposes, and for the love of Hydaelyn don't kill the poor thing. He's our stupid idiot deer son.

I honestly don't know how much further Final Fantasy 14 can go from here, musically.

I thought it had peaked when Jason Charles Miller sang To The Edge in Shadowbringers—the man was on an episode of The Osbournes, y'all. Then Masayoshi Soken took it once step further when he enlisted Sam Carter—lead singer of Architects, one of my favourite metalcore bands—to sing the main theme of the Endwalker expansion.

He wasn't done, though, deciding to then bring along Chrissy Costanza of Against the Current fame (also, you know, they did a butt-ton of League of Legends stuff) for Give It All, an all-out banger for the final fight of Arcadion's AAC Light-heavyweight Tier.

Okay, so we finally went as high as we could go, right? WRONG. Because now we have Tom motherfuckin' Morello—Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave guitarist, all around rock royalty—and Beartooth's Caleb Shomo (an equally very cool dude) lending their talent to the final tier of the Arcadion raid with Everything Burns.

We only have a little preview to go off right now—the full thing'll be out when Patch 7.4 drops on December 16—and right now it's sounding a little more in Shomo's musical wheelhouse than Morello's. Not that I'm complaining, mind. I've been a fan of Shomo since he was part of Attack!Attack! and an enjoyer of all things Morello for even longer than that. The track sounds freakin' fire.

It's always been a damn good time being both a Final Fantasy 14 enjoyer and raging emo, though. Even without big-name non-videogame talent on board, Soken's music has always had a rebellious streak. Heavensward's Fiend, Endwalker's Scream, even all the way back in A Realm Reborn with Under the Weight. Hell, Soken's own Final Fantasy 14-themed band The Primals rearranges tracks with a heavier rock flair to them.

For me, I've always felt like Soken's music has broken the boundaries of what a videogame song is. His contributions to the MMO are stuffed with tracks I could whack on at a party without being questioned. I mean, I've literally done that. I once busted out Hic Svnt Leones at a friend's house, and he asked me for the band name. No assumptions of its origins to be seen.

That feels especially true for Everything Burns. It sounds like the kind of song that radio stations would blast with the same full sincerity they give to any other track that exists outside of videogames. That certainly can't be said for every rock song manufactured with the intention of having it play while virtual people fight each other.

According to the most recent Live Letter, Soken didn't even go seeking out Morello. It happened the other way around. Morello got word through Jason Charles Miller about the game and its community, and cold-sent a song straight into Soken's inbox from there.

If that doesn't speak to Soken's talent and Final Fantasy 14's reach, I don't know what does. Sure, Morello has made appearances in videogames before—I've kicked his ass in Guitar Hero 3 and his songs have made an appearance in a handful of sports games—but making a song specifically for one is a whole other deal.

Without sounding too much like a "Videogame music ain't just yer beeps and bloops anymore!" writer, it's stuff like Final Fantasy 14 that redefine what videogame music is by enlisting such huge talent—diversifying its discography with tracks that beg to be listened to outside the confines of their creative intent. It breaks down the barriers between 'real' music and stuff penned for digital worlds, because if you had played Everything Burns to me without all of my Final Fantasy 14 knowledge, I never would have guessed the song was from a goddamn catboy-filled MMO. The gap is closing, and I freaking love it.

Do you know your Squires from your Mystics? Final Fantasy Tactics has finally made a home on PC, and its entire stable of jobs have come with it. While strategy RPG fans have been eating good for the last few years with the entire genre having a tactical renaissance on PC, Tactics looms above them all, a mythic figure every bit as compelling as Delita, Ramza, and Thunder God Cid, but not everyone can be a legendary armor-busting sword deity. Most of your rank and file allies have everyday Tactics jobs to earn enough to feed their families fresh Chocobo drumsticks.

Over my decades of obsession with this king of strategy RPGs I’ve created a highly scientific system to compare and contrast each and every job across four critical axes:

• Style: Any dummy can swing a sword, but I need more than that, I need fashion sense. How color coordinated is the job, and does their fit have real chutzpah, or did their mom dress them right out of the fantasy Gap?
• Shenanigans: Tactics is where we all learn that rules are meant to be broken, and some jobs laugh in the face of convention in favor of rock throwing, teleporting, stat buffing, and ability copying. These are the best kinds of jobs if you like to break outside the intended norms.
• Sass: Some jobs have serious moxie, whether it’s their ability to wreak destruction, afflict spicy status effects on enemies, or just raw attitude in their abilities and look.
• Stoutness: Does any of the rest matter if a job wilts at the first sign of damage? Well, yes, but how tough a job is and the abilities it can use to stay alive make a big difference in how useful the rest is.

Squire

Style: 3 Shenanigans: 8 Sass: 1 Stoutness: 4

Best abilities: JP Boost, Focus

Everyone has to start somewhere, and Squire is the lowest rung on the job ladder, but the default job does have a few things going for it. For one, Squires learn JP Boost as a support ability, essential for the entire game. While nobody is ever afraid of a Squire and their pitiful attack stat, their Focus and Throw Stone abilities are extremely useful throughout the game for giving you a method of guaranteeing you’ll generate XP and JP on your turn. Better yet, Ramza has an upgraded pool of Squire abilities to pull from, including the fantastic Tailwind (and later Shout) to buff yourself or an ally’s speed.

The Squire is boring to look at in their mishmash of leather and metal armor and a pushover in terms of hitting power, but some of their skills are critical for all kinds of things: like power leveling or just buffing yourself repeatedly before going in to tackle a tough boss.

Chemist

Style: 4 Shenanigans: 5 Sass: 4 Stoutness: 8

Best abilities: Auto Potion, Throw Item

It’s easy to see the Chemist as "Squire but for nerds" since it’s the other starter job, but the Chemist has some real longevity. Using items is the most reliable way in Tactics to heal—since items aren't modified by your target's Faith stat and can’t miss, it’s a guaranteed way to revive your allies.

While eventually healing spells and summons can hit larger areas and heal for larger amounts, there are other reasons to pay attention to the Chemist. The biggest is their reaction power Auto Potion: in the running for the most powerful Reaction in the game, with a high chance to automatically feed you your lowest level Potion type when you take damage. There’s also the fact the Chemist can equip guns—that’s right, your friendly team pharmacist is packing fantasy heat.

Knight

Style: 5 Shenanigans: 5 Sass: 6 Stoutness: 10

Best ability: Rend Weapon, Equip Heavy Armor

From the moment you have access to the Knight it’s a feeling of power. Granting immediate access to heavy armor and shields already makes the Knight one of the most durable jobs, but the easily acquired Parry reaction skill lets you add even more chance to evade attacks (worth noting that the White Mage has some staves that really benefit from Parry), but they’ve also got strong offensive stats and access to powerful knight swords.

Their Art of War skills are feast-or-famine, either missing and wasting your turn or delivering a critical debuff to an enemy like Weapon Break. Amazingly, they also combine excellently with ranged weaponry through Support abilities like Equip Gun or Equip Bow, allowing you to re-enact your favorite western and literally shoot the weapon out of an enemy's hand. If that isn’t cool enough for you, I can only point at the incredibly boss looking cloaks they get to wear.

Archer

Style: 3 Shenanigans: 1 Sass: 3 Stoutness: 4

Best ability: Concentration

With the pedigree of most bow-wielding heroes in fantasy, it’s extra disappointing how underwhelming the Archer ends up being. Wielding bows and crossbows in their massive oven mitt gloves, the Archer stays safe at a distance, but they don’t deal enough damage to stay useful. Archers are burdened with the worst job skill, Aim, which delays your attack and lowers your defenses in return for more damage. However, the trick is that your attack won’t follow the enemy, so if they get a turn before your attack goes off they can just stroll away.

The possibility of bonus damage is nice, but Aim commits the biggest sin of all: it’s boring, with several thousand hard-earned job points just getting you small boosts of damage. In fact, the only abilities that the Archer has worth noting are the Support skills Concentration—which makes attacks not miss—and Equip Bow.

White Mage

Style: 4 Shenanigans: 5 Sass: 6 Stoutness: 2

Best abilities: Curaja, Arise, Regenerate

One of the first jobs that slings magic, the White Mage is the standard healing-and-supporting type, complete with white robes with sharp red trim that look suspiciously like bedsheets. The White Magic skill can heal allies, remove status effects, revive the fallen, and give them defensive buffs—but with the downsides of spells having casting times, and that the results are based in part on your target's Faith stat. This means that healing someone with low Faith is going to be underwhelming, and it can likewise be difficult to get buffs to succeed.

Aside from all that support duty, White Magic packs a secret weapon: the Holy spell, which hits like a magical bread truck full of anvils. Sadly, White Mages are also stuck in the wizardly category for gear, so they have minimal HP and low defensive stats, though some of the better staves for the White Mage can benefit from the Knight’s Parry Support skill and equip their own Magic Defense Boost Support skill.

Black Mage

Style: 6 Shenanigans: 5 Sass: 7 Stoutness: 1

Best abilities: Flare, Arcane Strength

The other half of the light-and-dark magic duo, the Black Mage trades having a face for neat blue robes, a big pointy hat, and a bucket of elemental magic. With all the standard lightning bolts, fireballs, and deadly ice cubes at their command, the Black Magic skill is reliable throughout the game, though like all magic it’s still at the mercy of the target's Faith stat.

While they’re mostly just amusing (bonus Shenanigans points, though), Black Magic also has a couple of status spells, the best of which is the classic Toad spell—which renders an opponent useless if successful. One of the most handy things to take away from the fragile Black Mage is also their support skill, Arcane Strength, which not only increases the damage of spells, but also increases their success rate.

Monk

Style: 6 Shenanigans: 5 Sass: 6 Stoutness: 6

Best abilities: First Strike, Critical: Recover HP, Revive

It's a special moment when you first get a Monk on your team, and one that’s typically followed by your entire team turning into Monks and the next battle resembling an unruly karate tournament. The punch-bread and kick-butter of the Monk job is their Martial Arts skill, a tremendously useful toolbox of skills that allow them to strike enemies from a distance, damage entire rows of foes on the same height, heal themselves and allies, and more.

If this wasn’t enough, they’ve also got two excellent Reaction skills in Counter and First Strike, the latter of which cancels an opponent's melee attack and replaces it with your own. Combined with their high physical attack and physical evade, Monks are dangerous and useful in every situation—even on the high fashion runway, showing off their fall catalog looks.

Thief

Style: 7 Shenanigans: 6 Sass: 3 Stoutness: 4

Best ability: Movement +2, Steal Heart

Masters of thrift and grift, the Thief job takes the approach that enemy gear is really just their gear being temporarily stored on enemies' bodies. The Thief skill Steal works as you’d expect it to—letting you make off with enemies' equipment for yourself—but it also has one more incredibly useful feature in the ability to charm enemies with the Steal Heart skill.

Despite their serious style and attitude, the Thief’s weak base stats make it difficult to stick with, serving far better as a job you learn key skills from and then move on. In Tactics, crime pays, but with a postdated check.

Mystic

Style: 8 Shenanigans: 8 Sass: 6 Stoutness: 3

Best abilities: Invigoration, Manafont, Defense Boost

Dressing like a last-minute Halloween costume of an unsharpened pencil is certainly a strong statement, but the Mystic owns the look. Mystic is a tricky job, as a magic user whose Mystic Arts skill is composed of nearly all debuffs, having them miss enemies can be frustrating. If you spend some effort maximizing their success chances with equipment and support skills like Arcane Strength, they can wreak havoc on enemies, dropping a silence or berserk on a dangerous magic user or just putting enemies to sleep while you deal with their friends.

They can equip poles and rods, which attack at a helpful range of two. They’ve also got the innocuous but useful Manafont Movement ability, which recovers a portion of MP every time you move.

Time Mage

Style: 1 Shenanigans: 6 Sass: 3 Stoutness: 2

Best abilities: Teleport, Haste, Meteor, Swiftness

There’s a lot of useful stuff packed into the Time Mage job, though most of it works better if you’re not a Time Mage anymore. The Time Magic skill has powerful buffs like Haste and Reflect, powerful debuffs like Slow and Stop, and the devastating-but-glacially-slow Meteor. With their other skills, Time Mages really shine: the reaction skill Mana Shield shifts all damage you take to MP first, The Support skill Swiftness lowers the charge time of all spells, and the Movement skill Teleport allows you to ignore heights and move as you wish (usually).

But meddling with the elemental forces of time had to come with a downside, and the Time Mage is burdened with looking like they were dressed by accident in a collision with a Bed, Bath, and Beyond in Vatican City.

Geomancer

Style: 6 Shenanigans: 6 Sass: 5 Stoutness: 5

Best abilities: Tanglevine

Wielding the power of nature magic in hippie tunics, Geomancers sidestep most of the typical magic-user package in favor of being a well-rounded job with a handy skill. The Geomancy skill allows the Geomancer to use an area-of-effect magic attack based on the type of ground they’re standing on, each different type also has a chance to cause one of a wide variety of debuffs.

While the Geomancy skill does modest damage, it also doesn’t use MP, has no charge time, and doesn’t miss—making it incredibly reliable. Geomancer also has good stats and equipment all around, with high physical and magical attack, HP, and MP, plus the ability to equip swords, axes, shields, and all light armors.

Dragoon

Style: 8 Shenanigans: 2 Sass: 7 Stoutness: 9

Best abilities: Horizontal Jump 8

The Dragoon is a powerful and sneakily tough job, wielding polearms that can strike from two tiles away and stomping on enemies from across the battlefield when you invest in their Jump skill. With high attack stats and access to heavy armor with imposing winged helmets, the Dragoon starts out strong, but their toughness also comes from easily avoiding enemy counter skills by attacking from two tiles away, or from using their Jump skill to leave the battlefield temporarily.

The only real weakness to the Dragoon is that their skills are so straightforward they’re boring. Jump is excellent, but just like the Archer, it's hard to get excited about spending hard won job points on the next +1, and the Dragonheart reaction is neat in concept but not very useful in reality.

Orator

Style: 7 Shenanigans: 8 Sass: 9 Stoutness: 4

Best abilities: Tame, Mimic Darlavon

Taking style tips from Soviet commissars, the Orator has powerful hat game and backs that up with damage-dealing rhetoric. With their Speechcraft skill Orators can raise and lower Faith and Brave, debuff enemies with sleep or berserk status, and even recruit enemies to join you. Most notably, their Faith and Brave increases will permanently raise the target's respective stat each time, which can be a serious way to power up your allies over multiple battles.

Orators are also the only job other than Chemist which can innately equip guns, which gives them a ranged attack option when they aren’t buffing and debuffing.

Summoner

Style: 3 Shenanigans: 6 Sass: 8 Stoutness: 2

Best abilities: Any of the tier two summons, Halve MP

Summoners are the perfect example of how vast magical power can’t overcome a weird wardrobe choice, as they’re stuck with their little unicorn hats despite access to eldritch beings of immense power. With a long list of elemental spells, the Summon skill is unique in how big the area of effect is, and the fact it cannot accidentally harm allies.

The Summon skill also has access to healing, a few buffs, and even a mass silence—all of which gives the Summoner versatility. Of the rest, the Summoner’s Halve MP Support skill is the only standout, useful for most MP hungry casting classes.

Dancer

Style: 4 Shenanigans: 4 Sass: 3 Stoutness: 3

Best ability: Mincing Minuet

As one half of the duo of "gender-locked, confused musical theater majors" jobs, the Dancer is focused on handing out debuffs to enemies while fighting (for some reason) with a rug. With their Dance skill, the Dancer can do small ticks of damage to HP or MP, or apply various stat debuffs or status debuffs to all enemies, regardless of where they are on the map. While this is a fun concept, it comes with some big downsides, as the Dance skill has to charge before going off, and the Dancer is vulnerable while they’re using it.

Functionally, this means you’ll be playing with one less party member, since your Dancer does their job best hiding off in a corner, which is an odd choice for a job that clearly wants to be the center of attention and wears scandalously little clothing to battle.

Bard

Style: 2 Shenanigans: 5 Sass: 3 Stoutness: 3

Best abilities: Movement +3, Life's Anthem, Rousing Melody

The other half of the weird musical job duo, the Bard goes for the inverse plan: handing out buffs to all his allies with the Bardsong skill and fighting with a musical instrument. Bardsong is an inverse of the Dance skill, allowing the Bard to buff stats, heal small amounts of HP or MP, or give buff statuses out—all from anywhere on the map. Just like the Dancer, the Bard has to charge between each tick of Bardsong, and they’re vulnerable while singing.

Overall the Bard is probably slightly more useful than the Dancer if your party is all-in on a similar strategy, since the Bard can hand out uniform increases to Physical or Magical Attack stats (but not a mix of both at once). All of this still relegates the Bard to a position of shame in the map corner, where he and his mullet belong.

Samurai

Style: 10 Shenanigans: 5 Sass: 8 Stoutness: 7

Best abilities: Doublehand, Chirijiraden, Masamune

As the pinnacle of cool, the Samurai is packed with power and versatility while strutting around the battlefield in their lamellar armor. The Samurai has high base attack and physical evasion, plus access to the Shirahadori Reaction skill, which drastically improves the Samurai’s chance to avoid physical attacks of all kinds—though they are more susceptible to magic attacks, since they don’t equip shields.

With their Iaido skill, the Samurai can risk breaking (12.5% chance each time) a katana to invoke its specific power, which usually is an area-of-effect of damage around them. Some specific swords can heal allies, damage enemy MP, buff allies, or debuff enemies—but beware, Iaido damage is based off Magic Attack and not Physical, and the better skills usually risk the better katanas from your inventory.

Ninja

Style: 9 Shenanigans: 6 Sass: 9 Stoutness: 7

Best abilities: Dual Wield, Reflexes, Throw Book

Winners of every playground argument and fight since the beginning of time, the Ninja job lives up to the hype in both look and ability to flip out and murder enemies. The Ninja’s innate dual-wielding ability allows them to equip a ninja sword (or flail) in each hand and attack with both, but they’re also packing the highest Speed and Physical Evasion in the game and still have high Physical Attack. Their Throw skill gives them high damage at range, based on their Speed (and the Strength of the weapon you pick to throw), but they can output truly staggering damage in melee.

The Ninja can become nearly impossible to hit if equipped with a cloak accessory and either the Samurai Shirahadori Reaction skill or the Ninja’s own Reflexes reaction skill, and likewise other jobs can learn their Dual Wield Support skill to become deadly melee combatants.

Arithmetician

Style: 5 Shenanigans: 10 Sass: 10 Stoutness: 5

Best abilities: Height, Multiple of 3-5, EXP Boost

Striking a bizarre pose in their Dracula collars and weird math-smocks, the Arithmetician is the strangest job in Final Fantasy Tactics. Before you set out to understand the Arithmetician, ask yourself one critical question: Do you enjoy taking five minute turns with a single unit that involve using a handheld calculator and ultimately trivializing all battles? If not, Arithmetician may not be for you. The simplest way to explain the Arithmetician job and their Arithmeticks skill is that they have no innate spells of their own, but have access to other magic skills from other jobs—like Black Mage, White Mage, Time Mage, etc—and learn different modifiers that allow them to cast those spells without using charge time, range, or MP cost.

By going through your list of modifiers you can find the right combination to cast a powerful damage spell on only all the enemies in the battle, or to heal only all of your allies. With the lowest speed in the game, it's best to equip their math magic as your second ability set on another class, like Black Mage.

Mime

Style: 2 Shenanigans: 9 Sass: 5 Stoutness: 5

Best abilities: n/a

As a strange looking yellow-clad weirdo, the Mime lacks any skills whatsoever, and basically exists as a gimmick job and reward for characters who grind enough to level up most jobs. Instead of having skills (or equipment, since the Mime can’t wear any), the Mime will copy the actions of other allied units exactly.

With careful planning, you can set up a Mime to act like a cog in a well-timed Rube Goldberg machine of your own design on the battlefield. They’re especially good at copying Dancer and Bard skills, since they will copy every instance of their usage and there’s no need to position them correctly for it to work. Nod silently if you love shenanigans.

Who doesn't love a chocobo? Perhaps the most ever-present member of the Final Fantasy cast, these idealised chad chickens have been in the series since Final Fantasy 2, and are the true series icon. And now one enterprising player has proven that there is a chocobo god.

Take a bow Saint Riot, a streamer who mainly focuses on FromSoftware games but has taken a break with the (excellent) remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, and dared to ask the big question: do chocobos believe in god?

Well… do they? To briefly explain: one of the character stats in FFT is faith, which is a double-edged sword that measures a character's faith in the divine as a percentage. A higher faith stat means their magic attacks are more effective, but they also take more damage from magic. The important thing here though is that, if a character's Faith score hits 95 and stays there, that character will leave your party to go find god.

One more thing. The Orator class can use an ability called Beast Tongue to take control of a monster (such as a chocobo) and use it in battle, and the creature will level up.

So over to Saint Riot: "Have you ever wondered what would happen if you had Beast Tongue and got a monster unit to maximum faith? Of course you haven't. No one has."

In Final Fantasy Tactics if a unit gains too much faith they leave your party to go find God. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you had Beast Tongue and got a monster unit to maximum faith? Of course you haven't. No one has.

— @saintriot.bsky.social (@saintriot.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-10T14:13:05.261Z

The video shows a chocobo called Kilix hitting 95 faith and then, with an eloquent cry of "Kweeeh! Kweh!", deserting the party. "We've created the chocobo Pope" laughs Saint Riot. "I'm happy that so many people enjoyed this. It took a lot of time to get a chocobo unit to 95 faith but it will be worth it when I die and am embraced in the loving arms of Monster Jesus, amen."

There you have it. Not only do chocobos believe in god, but they believe so hard they'll leave you behind to go look for him. I mean, the actual Pope seems to be a Pokémon fan, so maybe this is holy expected.

Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida says the game's upcoming collaboration with Monster Hunter Wilds will be different from the one it had with Monster Hunter: World, putting a bigger emphasis on the MMO's mechanics rather than trying to fit an action RPG's square peg in a round hole.

Capcom and Square Enix teamed up during Tokyo Game Show this weekend to show off a little more of the crossover. Monster Hunter: Wild's half is out right now—with hunters able to take on Omega Planetes—while Final Fantasy 14 joins the party on October 7 with The Windward Wilds trial that lets Warriors of Light face off against Arkveld.

Even skimming through Final Fantasy 14's portion of the showcase this weekend, the encounter with Arkveld felt considerably more MMO-y than Monster Hunter. Which sounds daft, but not so much when you compare it to the game's previous collaboration with World which introduced a fight against Rathalos.

While it was still quite MMO-like—it was literally in Final Fantasy 14, after all—it felt like there was a real concerted effort to integrate as much Monster Hunter madness as it could. That meant a lot of untelegraphed moves, huge knockbacks, and the ability to down the monster and break off the tail.

From what I can tell, Arkveld looks a lot more like a Final Fantasy 14 boss fight: exaflares, more traditionally telegraphed attacks, and an attack pattern that feels more like a standard encounter for the MMO.

As it turns out, that was quite the intentional change. Speaking with GamerBraves, Yoshida said: "What's going to be different with this collaboration with Wilds is that this one will feel more [like 14] in a sense. Yes, battles are still gonna be a bit crazy, but it's gonna play and have that Final Fantasy 14 feel to it, so you don't have to go into it thinking you're going to get something different from that 14 style."

He continued: "What we're creating here is something that will introduce players from 14 into this wonderful lore and this wonderful story that Monster Hunter has, but have that feel natural in Final Fantasy 14. Whether it's the housing items or gear that players are able to equip, and the battles as well."

As fun as I think the Rathalos fight is, I understand the shift. The World collaboration was pretty unorthodox, one which can be a major pain in the ass to grind if you're not uncapping the level sync and blitzing through the fight with level 100 characters in a matter of seconds.

Thankfully it still looks like one thing has been retained from Rathalos—using potions to regain health instead of getting topped up by a healer. It's a nice compromise that bridges the two games in a way that doesn't alter things too much, though I'm sure I'll still accidentally be throwing out a heal or two when I see those HP bars plummet.

Speaking to Automaton, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi assured fans that sales of the game have improved since a 2024 Square Enix financial report showed it underperforming, while work on a third game in the Remake trilogy continues apace.

“The second entry, FFVII Rebirth, has been doing very well on both PS5 and PC," said Hamaguchi. "I know some fans have expressed concerns, but please rest assured, we’ll be able to deliver a proper, high-quality third installment.

“Development is going extremely well, and the game is shaping up nicely. A lot of the content is already playable, and the game’s direction and form are firmly set in place. Right now, the team is united around refining everything.”

Both Final Fantasy 16 and 7: Rebirth underperformed in sales according to a May 2024 internal report that was made public last September. Notably, the report was written before either game got its eventual PC port. FF16 came to PC in September 2024, 15 months after PS5, and Rebirth in January 2025, just under a year out from PS5.

Square Enix is one of the only non-first party companies to still do this, and unlike Rockstar, no longer commands the kind of universal, "drop everything and play" popularity to be able to set its own (baffling) terms when it comes to timed console exclusivity. Going back a little further, FF7 Remake made the unforced error of first being an Epic Store exclusive (remember those?) 20 months after its PS4 launch, only coming to Steam another six months after that.

Square Enix seems to be more aware of how the board's laid out at this point though. Last May it committed to "aggressively pursue" a new strategy "designed to win over PC users." Having Final Fantasy 7: Revengeance or whatever it winds up being called launch on PC day and date with the PS5 (PS6?) version would be suitably aggressive in my book.

Somebody pinch me. They've done it. They've actually done it: Not only can I finally play Final Fantasy Tactics on my PC, but this timeless classic has been done justice. It's not some old game hastily shoved in an emulation wrapper and sent out to die. It's not some brand new thing so polished and changed it feels ashamed of its heritage, either. It's simply everything I had hoped for.

I dived into the classic mode first, keen to see how the decades-old strategy game I first fell in love with on a PlayStation had been recreated for modern hardware. Here polygonal edges are rough and raw, the pixels in every sprite are so large I can count them, and the pre-rendered movies are old enough to buy their own drinks. It's unvarnished in a respectful way, as if it were an ancient relic to be handled with great care.

Satisfied there was a nigh-perfect recreation of Tactics to retreat to whenever I needed an authentic dose of Old, I then ploughed ahead with the completely separate remaster—and ended up even happier than I already was.

Made in heaven

I know "timeless classic" is an overused phrase, but I think it's the only one that accurately describes this game. It's a thrilling political and personal drama where every revelation quickly leads to another heartbreaking tragedy. It's a fantastic twist on Final Fantasy's traditional job system, encouraging me to hand-craft a small team of battle-ready specialists. These halves come together beautifully, every fight part of a story, every story leading to a fight. It's no wonder so many indie PC RPGs still try to recapture the feel of everything from its tactical skirmishes to its gorgeous art.

So I approached its visual changes with some trepidation. I'm not normally a fan of smoothing out or sharpening up low resolution textures, and The Ivalice Chronicles does both. However, instead of merely smearing all the art, making corners so sharp I could cut myself on them, and calling the end result "HD", what's been achieved here shows a great deal of care and respect for the original work.

Lightly bevelled edges work in harmony with a subtle noise filter, creating just enough coarseness to tie the smooth 3D environments and flat 2D sprites together. An optional soft focus effect turns every battlefield into a handcrafted diorama. It's all instantly recognisable and true to the spirit of the original, while still looking crisp on modern displays.

I expected the freshly recorded voice acting heard during cutscenes to be expressive, but I didn't expect the all-new in-battle lines for even generic units to bring as much personality to the game as they do. My White Mage was automatically assigned a surly voice, often responding with a curt "Wot?" when selected. This simple coincidence transformed what used to be "some healer" into an enjoyably abrasive character, a fun contrast to all the sparkly divine magic she dished out.

Even my opponents are better for the new banter. A reused floating human sprite with an undead tag really does feel more believably ghostly when they open their turn with a monstrous groan instead of a voiced line. The game's honestly better for it.

Under pressure

The battles themselves remain blissfully untouched: Final Fantasy Tactics is as unrelentingly deep as it's always been. Height and depth and even rocks jutting out of the ground need to be taken into consideration.

Because every detail matters, right down to the type of ground beneath my feet, it's easy to believe I really am out here in the baking desert, or fighting in a deep forest while it's raining. Swamp water isn't just a sickly colour; it's poisonous to touch, and if I'm not careful I might leap into a too-deep pool and have a tough time getting out.

Wherever I am, there's always some dangerous snag to watch out for or some clever trick to exploit: a high vantage point that will give my archer an edge or a troublesome enemy I can stop with magic while I work on thinning out the rest of them. There's a lot to keep track of all the time, right down to which direction someone faces at the end of their turn.

The difference is how much effort the remaster puts into helping educate and inform players. For the first hour or so I can't sneeze without another concise tip turning up, covering everything from basic menu commands to the purpose of an outfitter's fitting room. Newcomers, or even those that have simply been away for a while—the original's almost 30 years old, after all—get context-sensitive help whenever something new comes up, and experts can dismiss these screens as quickly as they appear.

Detailed tutorials on every subject under the sun are accessible whenever our hero, Ramza, is sitting on the world map, but thanks to these organic pop-ups they become optional extra help rather than mandatory homework.

Keep yourself alive

Additional assistance is everywhere I look in battle, making it easier to make good, tactical decisions and fully enjoy the interlocking job/skill learning/equipment systems. At the start of each fight I'm now invited to place my formation directly onto the field rather than on an entirely separate (and not especially helpful) generic deployment screen.

As movement can now generally be undone, I can try to find the perfect spot for a spellcaster to sit or test a ranged character out in a few different places, learning through playing how the landscape interacts with each job's skillset.

The turn order bar running down the side of the screen allows me to see at a glance exactly when a crucial healing spell will kick in, or if an enemy has a chance of killing off my archer before their lengthy aimed attack is unleashed. A new overhead tactical view makes it so much easier to understand my surroundings and reposition my units without having to constantly spin the camera, and even integrates per-tile magical terrain information—essential knowledge for any would-be geomancer—into this point of view.

This knowledge was always in the game somewhere, but its accessibility now means combat flows better than it ever did before. I find myself clearly remembering—and then actually using—small bits of information I was once only vaguely aware of and could never quite be bothered to look up.

If that's not enough to keep my party alive I can always fall back on a small set of frequently updated autosaves, or retry a battle from the start if things aren't going well. The latter even allows me to alter my formation and their equipment if it turns out a particular setup is about as useful as a cocktail umbrella in a thunderstorm. And there's no fear of saving myself into an unwinnable position anymore, thanks to the option to warp back out to the world map any time I need to (minus any XP, progress, or items acquired).

However deep into a tough string of battles I am, I know I can always escape and come back better prepared later. Personal experimentation is warmly welcomed and encouraged, and always more satisfying than rummaging around someone else's guide for answers.

Or I could swap between a trio of all-new difficulty levels any time I'm not in the middle of a fight. The default (Knight) is generally balanced and fair, but if I've built a dual-wielding super team capable of crushing everything to dust I can give hard (Tactician) a whirl and enjoy an extra challenge. If I'm tired, stuck on one particular boss, or just so enthralled by the latest plot twist I can't wait to see what happens next I can knock it down to Squire and enjoy a little leniency (just a little, mind you). Much like my beloved XCOM 2, the game's primary concern is that I'm having fun with the tactical combat provided, not that I'm playing it "correctly".

Somebody to love

The story that ties these enjoyable battles together is as fascinating (and sadly, relevant) now as it's ever been. Every cutscene seems to introduce a dozen new twists as nobles with more money and power than sense fail to go five minutes without betraying each other and routinely kick the poor when they're already down for some short-term gain. Tavern rumours slowly, subtly peel away from reality. They're not lies, but they eventually become a conveniently selective and biased retelling of the truth.

This tangled web of betrayal, tragedy and intrigue—motives wrapped in half-truths, traps waiting to be sprung—used to be a little overwhelming, but now I don't need a photographic memory for who just stabbed who thanks to several helpful recap features. The excellent State of the Realm tab will show me exactly who was active (and alive) at any major point up to the present moment, and there are multiple detailed entries on everything from the fate of unseen royals to distant kingdoms.

I can even rewatch cleared events as they are shown in the remake (which is essentially as they were in the PlayStation game, now with added voice acting) or, where available, watch crisp HD renditions of the PSP's cinematic movies instead.

Whether I want a general idea of what the heck's currently going on or hope to become a respected scholar of Ivalician history, this game will happily tell me everything I want to know.

It's this willingness to share its knowledge that makes this remaster so special. It wants to be played and understood by everyone, to be taken apart and put back together however suits the person playing it best. Whatever draws you to the game, whether that's boss-breaking character builds, chocobo breeding, or political turmoil, this release is the definitive way to experience it.

As reported by Automaton, iconic video game composer Nobuo Uematsu, best known for his work on the Final Fantasy series, has recently given his take on the state of videogame music. In an interview with Japanese outlet Real Sound, Uematsu commented on where the industry is now, particularly concern about creative freedom for composers being stifled.

"I won’t go as far as to call it stagnation, but I believe directors and producers hold too much power in their hands even when it comes to the music," said Uematsu, according to Automaton's translation. "Even now, game composers aren’t in a position to speak their opinion freely, and no matter how much musical knowledge or technical skills they possess, they’re still in a position where it’s difficult to speak their mind.

"There are almost no game producers who are well versed in worldwide entertainment and are familiar with a wide variety of musical genres, so anything goes for them as long as you make it sound like a John Williams movie soundtrack."

Uematsu compared the situation to the game music industry back in the NES era of the 80s. Back then, few composers had their eye on making music for games, but that has changed dramatically over the course of Uematsu's career.

According to Uematsu, the industry has gone from giving game composers little attention to stifling composer's creativity or pushing them toward a narrow type of sound (often a John Williams style). As a result of that, Uematsu added that, "Frankly speaking, there’s less ‘weird things’ now."

Uematsu didn't seem too pessimistic about the future of game music, though. He's an avid fan of Elton John and cited the pop-rock artist's ability to create great music while still prioritizing commercial success. He sees this as evidence that it's possible to work with the demands of game directors and producers without compromising creativity.

With that said, Uematsu seems to be exclusively addressing professional development in this interview, and likely has Japanese developers in mind. This makes sense given it's the area of the industry he operates in, but we'd be remiss if we didn't mention how much good, weird music there still is in games, particularly independent ones.

Pizza Tower's Sega-style beats, Hollow Knight's haunting strings, the slick rock tracks in Hades, and Skald: Against The Black Priory's DOS soundcard-inflected fantasy score all spring to mind.

Uematsu suggested aspiring game composers keep trying new things, saying, "If you make the same stuff as John Williams and grow complacent with that, you’ll get nothing more from it. Now, what if someone put a bit of techno in there – what kind of sound would it become then? I believe that would be a good way to approach music."

Final Fantasy 14, as we've often observed on this very site, has a bit of a design problem when it comes to its jobs—they're pretty stale. Tanks mostly play the same, healers get like two damage buttons, DPS all try to shove their buttons into the same two-minute window: It's a little droll.

For a while, game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has promised that this'll be changing in 8.0, FF14's next expansion. Back in 2024, he stated: "By strongly differentiating the jobs, we will be able to reach the goal we have set ourselves." It is now 2025, however, and a recent PCGamesN interview from Gamescom is casting doubt.

As always with these interviews, Yoshi-P often speaks in Japanese with a live interpreter, so specific word choice might be skewed based on the hard work of a poor translator having to suffer the Gamescom hall's terrible cafeteria prices and the stifling heat of a German summer. Still:

"When it comes to using the jobs in battle content and bringing out more of that uniqueness of each job, we are working on a big update." So far, so good, Yoshi-P. But then:

"People might think of it as an expansion of the system that we have in the game. So the players who already like the way things are can feel at ease that nothing is going to change for their experience. But we are trying to do something new on top of what we already have."

That… doesn't quite sound like the revolutionary overhaul we were hoping for. Which is something that's been stirring up (and I mean this with love) FF14's most sceptical community, the r/ffxivdiscussion subreddit. "Things will both change and stay the same. Please do or do not look forward to it," one player jokes, quoting Yoshi-P's usual sign-off.

Meanwhile, user EnkindleBahamut beat my gut-feeling response to the punch: "These types of interviews get absolutely misinterpreted to hell and back, and I feel like it'd just be better for everyone if there was direct communication from Yoshi-P about the subject, even if he only feels comfortable speaking in vagaries."

The only really concrete detail in this statement is that this "big update" will be additive—layered on top of already-present design, which might or might not be changing the maligned 'two-minute meta' that's had the game in an increasingly tight deathgrip. Are we talking subclasses? Are cross-class skills making a comeback? Who knows, we're in Schrodinger's 'look forward to it'.

Personally, I hope to see more of the Yoshi-P we saw when that mod drama boiled over late last month: Refreshingly earnest and to-the-point. Well, as much as one can be in a several-hundred-word blog post. I also hope to see a real shake-up, but that's another thing entirely.

Back in June, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles director Kazutoyo Maehiro offered something of an explanation for why it's been more than a decade since FF Tactics has been playable on current platforms: Square Enix had lost the game's original source code.

At a recent PAX West 2025 panel on August 30, Maehiro offered additional details on how the devs of the Ivalice Chronicles remaster stitched together a replacement for the original FF tactics source code, and how we should all thank fan archivists for their contributions to that effort.

"It's true that we didn't have the source code," Maehiro said via translator. "The reason we didn't have that has to do with how we managed things at the time."

Today, Maehiro said, Square Enix has "some really nice resource management tools" that archive a new version of a game's code with every minute, daily update. But during the original development of Final Fantasy Tactics, the protocols were… a bit more lax, particularly while localizing the game in different languages.

"We would take the data from the Japanese version and overwrite the English data on it. And then if we wanted to do another language, we would just keep stacking data on top and overwriting and overwriting," Maehiro said. "Basically, because we kept doing all that overwriting, the true original ceased to exist."

That sound you hear is the collective shuddering of all the world's programmers.

While Square Enix didn't have to start from scratch for The Ivalice Chronicles, Maehiro said it was "difficult" to reassemble "the true original" of Final Fantasy Tactics from its PS1 release and its ports on PSP and mobile. Eventually, the Square Enix devs turned to the ultimate archival authority: the devoted sickos on Final Fantasy fan sites.

"We were using whatever resources we had available to us. We analyzed all those different versions to try and find what we felt was the original," Maehiro said. "On top of that, we actually went to different websites made by fans and looked for data there, because we know you guys do such a good job of keeping that all up to date."

After acknowledging the efforts of the "really good" engineering team that analyzed the various versions to reconstruct the ur-Final Fantasy Tactics, Maehiro offered his gratitude for fan archivists and game preservationists.

"I do want to thank all of the fans for all of their help in keeping that information archived like you do," Maehiro said. "I think with all of that put together, we were able to make a very good version of the game that is true to the original."

Ask anyone who even dabbles in Final Fantasy 14's most laid-back fights to explain a mechanic, and you'll quickly understand how the MMO's encounters can go from exercises in teamwork to all-out PvP brawls. After listening to FF14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida explain where his love for videogames started, that all makes more sense.

Speaking to Jesse Cox during PAX West's Storytime panel, Cox asked Yoshida where his love for games began on the path from fan to professional. The FF14 producer cut his teeth early in the 1980s with Nintendo's original Mario Brothers, explaining how he grew tired of playing games by himself at arcades and visited a friend who lived nearby.

That friend owned a Famicom, and the home system surprised little Yoshida.

"I was about ten years old at the time, and I thought the TV was something you would watch," said Yoshida. "It's a screen where a picture would play. And that machine [the Famicom]...connected to this TV, moved the things that were on this TV and that had such an impact."

When they tried the multiplayer, Yoshida's friend suggested they take on specific responsibilities—the FF14 producer would punch the enemies to flip them over, while the other kid kicked the shell off-screen. Yoshida seemed a little miffed he couldn't be trusted with kicking duty, and after a while his friend suggested they swap roles. The friend flips the enemy, and Yoshida gets to kick the shell off-screen.

"Of course you would hear that and think, 'Okay, we're switching turns, what a nice guy, he's giving me a chance to do that now.' So he would punch from underneath and flip the enemies over, and I would get ready to approach the enemy to kick it off the screen. And then he would punch the thing again to reverse it, so they revived.

"That was my first experience with PVP," said Yoshida.

His expression was the same one I make every time I fall for the most obvious bait in FF14's PvP mode, or even while raiding with friends. Just complete, utter disappointment. I can't believe I saw that, trusted that, and stepped forward into danger anyway.

"What's really incredible is that the gameplay rules are the same, whether you play it by yourself or with another person. So with the basic rules in place, you can enjoy the game by yourself, and then you can play it with another person. You can do co-op, like earlier, but then you can turn it into PvP if you want to. It really amazed me how such game design could be conceived. It made such an impact on me."

Those fleeting interactions sat with the producer on his walk home and sparked his interest in game design. Since he was just a kid, he didn't know how or what he needed to do to become an expert in the field, but he knew he wanted to make games from then on.

And now I understand why anything in FF14 can be PvP if you try hard enough. Sure, the tank isn't supposed to take the giant warning sign signaling tank buster and stand on me, the healer, but what if they did? Wouldn't that be fun? Anyway, I appreciate Yoshida passing down the same design philosophy that terrorized him as a child. It's brought me plenty of laughs (and a permanently clenched jaw).

In case you're unfamiliar with the Final Fantasy 14 community, recently, a mod named Mare Synchronos—which had many thousands of users at its peak—was sent a cease & desist order. The mod in question allowed players to share their modded appearances with each other, either via an individual code, or by allowing players to join 'syncshells'.

From a community standpoint, Mare was used in two ways—either for innocuous roleplayers or outfit enthusiasts to customise their character, say, by giving a human model pointy ears—or, and I say this without judgement, smut. There is an enormous underground modding scene in Final Fantasy 14, covering both adult and non-adult content.

The biggest issue being that addons are against the terms of service of Final Fantasy 14—however, Square Enix will only take action if a player is obviously cheating, or if they are reported for mod use. In other words, players don't get banned for having a DPS meter, they get banned for using that DPS meter to chew out their party members in-game.

Community uproar around Mare Synchronos has been loud, however—loud enough that game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has felt the need to create an extensive blog post on the subject.

At the start of this blog post, Yoshi-P asks media outlets (hey, that's me!) to "Please do not summarize or provide only excerpts." This obviously puts me in a tough spot, given it's my job to add context to videogame news—especially as someone with thousands of hours in this game, and a foot in its roleplay community.

Some summarising is inevitable, because it's my job to talk about things that have happened in informative ways. That being said, please read the full blog, linked above, before drawing conclusions from anything I say.

Yoshi-P writes: "Firstly, while I am in charge of FF14, I am also a PC gamer, and have been for many years. I've spoken about this multiple times in the past, but my own personal stance regarding mods─that I do tolerate them─has not changed. In the past twenty or so years, I've seen numerous positive examples of games with fan-made mods that expand upon existing gameplay."

He then goes on to reiterate what he's said before, that "these mods are generally created with a vital premise in mind: they are for personal use only, and the individual player is responsible for the mods they use. Furthermore, the mods must not impact the core game, its services, or the intended game design in a negative manner. I personally feel that these rules should be followed by all mod creators and users."

Yoshi-P then goes on to mention a few things that cross this line. Again, I encourage you to read the full blog for context, but to briefly summarise, it's mostly a list of problems that Mare Synchronos caused—even though he's (understandably) careful not to invoke its name, or single any mod out.

Either because it infringes upon player enjoyment, like modding your weapon to look like an Ultimate reward (and then, more importantly, sharing that modded appearance with others)—or because if "the user posts a screenshot of their naked character publicly on social media, FFXIV itself may be subject to legal measures by regulators in certain countries."

The specifics, which I shan't attempt to summarise out of respect for Yoshi-P's direct request, are less important than the tone here, which is refreshingly earnest and non-judgemental. He makes a repeated point that none of this is a discussion on whether "that behavior is right or wrong".

"Allow me to repeat myself," he writes, "When I say that I do not intend for these examples to be a censure of mod users or creators. I only wish to provide some tangible examples of how using certain mods can damage other players, FF14, and the services we provide, regardless of the mod's original intent."

It's the most mod-positive we've seen Yoshi-P so far. While the 'don't ask, don't tell' circumstances have been more of a community assumption made by players, matching his words to Square's actual actions and the proliferation of mod use, this is absolutely an olive branch to the modding community. A clear and adult explanation of what is and isn't acceptable.

There's even some hope for improved glamour systems, too: "As always, we will do our utmost to keep creating a world which all players can enjoy. Even though it may take time to do so, it is my hope to incorporate player feedback and officially fulfill as many functionality requests as possible. I am also considering how to increase the freedom of choice players have in the gear they choose to equip.

"While paying respect to the long-standing tradition of modding PC games, I ask that all players in turn respect our game by enjoying their fun within the confines of some basic rules."

If you've been following my writing on Final Fantasy 14, you'll know I can get a bit grumpy about the state of the game sometimes—but I think this blog post is unequivocally reasonable and well put-together. And I hope, as I imagine Yoshi-P might, that it does enough to ease the frayed tensions after Mare went a little too far over that line in the sand.

Earlier this week, Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida unveiled the three Fan Fest dates for 2026: April for North America, July for Europe, and October for Japan.

Those dates put the playerbase in a little bit of a tizzy—traditionally a new expansion comes around six months after the final Fan Fest, which left number-crunchers ballparking a March 2027 release at the very earliest. That's the longest we've ever had to wait between expansions, which understandably had Warriors of Light worried we'd be spending the majority of next year twiddling our thumbs in Limsa Lominsa while waiting for a new big bad to wail on.

But as I initially wrote, there was a little bit of hopium in Yoshida's words—a promise that things would be "rolling out at a whirlwind pace" once the final Fan Fest wraps up. It seems like we shouldn't be taking that sentiment lightly, if his recent follow-up statement is anything to go by.

Right at the end of a very lengthy Lodestone post from Yoshi-P detailing his stance on mod culture following the shutdown of Mare Synchronos—arguably the largest plugin in the game that allowed players to sync up their mods with each other—he once again gives a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge to how quickly we can expect the next expansion post-Fan Fest.

"And one more thing: for those wondering what comes after the Japan Fan Fest… while I can't give any details just yet, rest assured you won't have to wait long," the post reads. That definitely feels like a response to just how many people were wigging out over the potential timeline the dates posed, myself included.

Does Yoshi-P's reiteration make me just a little bit giddy? Hell yeah, it does. Square Enix's approach to Final Fantasy 14 has been pretty damn rigid for the better part of eight years now. It's been easy to chart out an entire expansion's timeline without even knowing what's on the horizon, and that predictability has been half of everyone's problem with the current state of the MMO.

Yoshida hinting at a much quicker pace post-Fan Fest is my first glimmer of hope for Creative Studio 3 getting a little more loosey-goosey with its structure. Having a playbook to follow is no bad thing, but it's clearly not been working for the developer for a few years now, and the opportunity to shake things up feels like a good thing for both sides.

I am curious just how quickly things will be coming, though. I doubt CS3 will gun for another holiday release à la Endwalker, which makes me think we could be seeing an early January launch for the next expansion. It makes 2026 a far more palatable year as a Final Fantasy 14 enjoyer, and I'm already eagerly anticipating next April to find out just where we'll be adventuring off to next.

Final Fantasy 14's gonna be shaking up how it handles difficulty come patch 7.35, after a mini-disaster with patch 7.25's Occult Crescent back in May. To put a long story short, Creative Studio 3's somewhat fumbled approach to content difficulty came to a head; the Forked Tower somehow managed to thread the needle, becoming a raid made for no-one.

Hardcore players weren't keen because it was almost impossible to get an organised group of players into; meanwhile, the casual, midcore, and solo crowd were turned off thanks to stringent preparation requirements and "body-checks", where one misplaced step could wipe the raid.

That's changing with 7.35's Pilgrim's Traverse, which'll have all sorts of variable difficulty content—you'll be able to tackle all 100 floors of the deep dungeon with a matchmade group, but you'll then be able to challenge a "quantum" difficulty boss via offerings. Give more offerings, get a harder butt-kicking.

Per a new PCGamesN interview with Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), this is going to be "the general direction that we've set for Final Fantasy 14 moving forward".

As he explains, "With the changes that we are implementing in Pilgrim's Traverse, we will also be implementing similar changes based on feedback in the new variant dungeon." Said variant dungeon will be dropping in Patch 7.4, and it's not the only thing Yoshi-P says might get the Quantum treatment.

"Moving forward, for content that we produce in Final Fantasy 14, it could be that we incorporate a scheme where there is a variable difficulty. Or it could be that we prepare a selection of difficulties in advance, and the players can choose which difficulty they want to challenge.

"This is the general direction that we've set for Final Fantasy 14 moving forward," he re-affirms, then follows that shot with the chaser: "And because of this new direction, it could be that the overall [amount] of content that we implement in the game goes down. But in doing so, we hope that many more players will be able to enjoy the content that we implement."

Uh oh. If you're out of the loop, Final Fantasy 14's patch cadence has been, one might say, not very good. A three-month schedule has turned into a four-month schedule, which is more often than not a five-month schedule. And with the latest fanfest dates announced, some players are worried we might get a grand total of two patches next year.

This might be a problem with the live translation—language barriers are a nightmare—but I cannot imagine a less reassuring thing to hear as a player. However, to play optimist's advocate for a moment, less volume doesn't necessarily mean less to do.

A huge thorn in FF14's side has been its one-and-done content: Whereas most MMOs give you gradual grinds and reward incentives to repeat dungeons or raids, Final Fantasy 14 has a habit of putting out some great stuff and then giving you jack-all reason to do it again.

Take Endwalker's variant dungeons: I enjoyed all three of them tremendously. I also beat each route once for the mount and never touched them again—because I've not been given a reason to do so. Like it or not, MMORPGs (and arguably games in general) are about progression. Without a carrot on the end of the stick, the horse simply does not gallop.

In theory, I'd be happy to take less overall dungeons, raids, etc. for things that're designed for, y'know, an actual MMORPG game loop. In practice, we've already been waiting longer and longer for FF14 patches to drop—and that's despite the game being one of Square Enix's biggest earners. I hope 7.35 knocks my socks off, but I've been burnt before.

Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn turned 12 years old this week—pause while I crumble into dust. Alongside a sweet ol' video message from director and producer Naoki Yoshida came the news I and many others have been waiting for: dates and locations for this expansion's Fan Festivals.

There are two reasons these dates are important. The first is, of course, getting to go and celebrate the game, potentially meet up with your guildmates, all that fuzzy and heartwarming stuff. But they're also excellent yardsticks for figuring out when we can probably expect the next expansion to arrive. Square Enix is nothing if not predictable. There are always three Fan Fests. There are always five major patches. There are always two new jobs. You get the idea.

Except now people are using these dates to plug the numbers and are coming to some dire realisations—this is probably the longest non-pandemic expansion we're getting, and we might end up going an entire year with only two major patches to show for it.

For reference, here are the dates and locations for each Fan Fest:

• North America: Anaheim, California – April 24 to April 25, 2026
• Europe: Berlin, Germany – July 25 to July 26, 2026
• Japan: Tokyo, Japan – October 31 to November 1, 2026

Side note—I am very pleased for my American Warriors of Light that they no longer have to deal with Las Vegas in the summertime. Very happy for you all.

Back to dates and number crunching, though, new FF14 expansions generally manifest around four to six months after the final Fan Fest has concluded. Dawntrail launched six months after Japan's 2024 Fan Fest leg, while both Shadowbringers and Stormblood saw a four-month gap.

That means, at the earliest, we're probably seeing a March 2027 release date for whatever the next FF14 expansion is. At worst… May or June 2027. Almost three entire years after Dawntrail's launch. Regardless of whether it lands on the earlier or later side of the usual timeline, it puts this expansion as the longest-running one, beating out the Covid-induced extended residency Shadowbringers had.

Compounded with the fact that—if history is anything to go by—Dawntrail only has two more major patches left to go and a minimum of 18 months to cash 'em in, players are not particularly jazzed about this timeline. Patch cadence and "content droughts" have been huge topics plaguing the game since Endwalker, and the thought of having to wait even longer is, uh, not the most exciting thing.

"It's insane to me that we're in 7.3 but still have a year and a half until the expansion," one Reddit commenter wrote. "If 7.4 is at the end of this year, 7.5 would need enough content to somehow carry the game for a year on its own". Another wrote "Does this mean that we are potentially looking at a three years gap between 7.0 and 8.0… oof," while another compared FF14 to its biggest competition, writing: "WoW is eating 14's lunch."

I'm here to offer some potential hopium, though. In his video, Yoshida rather interestingly says: "Our 2026 Fan Fests will kick off major future plans which we'll be rolling out at a whirlwind pace." Considering the narrative has very much been about slowing down the pace over the last couple years—like increasing patch cadence from three months to four and even five months—it has me wondering if the next expansion will be dropping much sooner after the final Fan Fest than we're used to.

I kind of hope so, honestly. I love the game, but I've been running out of reasons to play on a regular basis. Even when I've been loving some of the new modes Dawntrail has been pushing out—I actually really liked the 24-player Chaotic raid, and had a lot of fun with Forked Tower despite its atrocious entry requirements—they're in that weird limbo where the setup time versus playtime and reward is far too skewed in the former's favour.

It's a lot of faff sometimes, faff I'm not necessarily willing to deal with. I'm very much hoping 8.0 ramps up how engaging all its bits and pieces are, and that I don't have to wait almost two years from now to find that out.

Square Enix is putting its foot down once again when it comes to modding in Final Fantasy 14. The creator behind Mare Synchronos—a player-made plugin for synchronizing and sharing appearance mods between FF14 players—is shutting the three-year-old project down after apparently receiving a cease and desist order from Square Enix. It's not the first mod to catch Square's ire this year, but its latest demand certainly seems like an escalation.

The tool's creator, DarkArchon, announced his decision to end Mare after he "received a legal inquiry concerning the project" and reviewed his options with counsel. The plugin is easily one of FF14's biggest in terms of both scope and popularity, as glamour mods are among some of the most popular player-made changes in FF14. It's an awfully big scene, and the Mare Synchronos Discord has just over 200,000 users at the time of writing.

While Mare isn't the main mechanism for adding things like modded hairstyles, outfits, and other visual changes to FF14, it is the tool for sharing those changes between users in-game. Using the plugin required a suite of other add-ons to work, in addition to completing a registration and verification process through Discord and FF14's Lodestone.

DarkArchon has already closed new user registration, and has removed the client, server, and API repositories. So if you were looking to try it out before tomorrow, you're out of luck. As for anyone hoping to have one last hoorah with the mod, DarkArchon gave a specific deadline:

"The server will continue to run until Friday, August 22, 2025 5:00 AM, after that, the server will shut down, and the main repository will be removed as well. Enjoy your last doomsday party."

This doesn't put an end to FF14 players modding their appearance, but it does effectively kill the easy way to see whatever outfits your buddies have put together. The game was filled with players modding their appearances long before Mare launched in 2022, but those client-side changes had no way to sync between users before DarkArchon's mod provided an intermediary.

If you've never ventured into the realm of forbidden FF14 magics, think of Mare as an extra (and unofficial) friendlist with special permissions. Friends with modding benefits. You could upload your character's modded appearance through the plugin, then add a friend (also using Mare) to your sync group. Anyone in the group could see your mods, and you could see theirs.

Before everyone flocked to the social plugin, players would often swap mods if they wanted their appearance reflected in a friend's client, then go through the ordeal of installing those files. It was clunky, tedious, and required a lot of extra effort to change just one user at a time. Mare circumvented all of that, instantly changing your Warrior of Light for groups of people.

So are mods in FF14 a no-no, or not?

From the beginning, Final Fantasy 14 has always had a strict no third-party tools rule in its terms of service agreement. And just like every other ToS in existence, players mostly used the legal jargon as suggested dos and don'ts. Depending on the crime, the rules felt negotiable.

Square Enix didn't do much to help draw the line, either. For years, the team wagged a finger at some third-party add-ons while ignoring others. There were occasional instances of bans for in-game mentions or occasional smite over raid races, but the community mostly policed itself. Director and producer Naoki Yoshida clearly didn't approve of any add-ons, but as long as everyone quietly played with their toys, Square Enix was (sort of) chill about it.

It's certainly more heavy-handed in issuing punishments for some mods now, but Square got serious when the PlayerScope mod rolled into the scene earlier this year with a creepy stalker toolkit. Yoshida promised in later livestreams that the team was taking action against invasive add-ons like it, and eventually PlayerScope's creator took the mod down after Square Enix issued a cease and desist.

That's the incredibly brief version of where it all came to a head, and not all modding sins are equal, even if the FF14 ToS treats them as such. A social tool like Mare is clearly quite different from PlayerScope, which could be used for nefarious purposes. But both may look like a security risk to Square Enix.

Mare's shutdown is a real bummer for the players involved in FF14's creative modding scene, and a blow to the social aspect of the MMO. As for the bigger picture, I have to wonder where the line is drawn now and whether Square Enix's crackdown on third-party tools will end here. Perhaps this was to be expected, given the nature of Mare. The community has played it fast and loose with the rules for a decade, I don't expect that to end here.

I'm all for a simple, no-nonsense set of instructions on how to participate in a videogame. Perhaps in Final Fantasy 14's case, though, it could have popped a little clause underneath its two-step guide to its upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds collab to note that there's, well, a healthy dose of triple-digit hours between them.

How do you participate in the newest Monster Hunter collab, then? Step one: create a character. Buy the game, essentially. Step two? Play through the base game, four expansions, and approximately 500 hours of story in order to reach Arkveld. Even more if you actually want to check out side quests and level other classes. Easy enough, right?

This how to participate for FFXIV's MH collab is so fucking funny

— @envinyon.bsky.social (@envinyon.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-08-20T10:27:22.872Z

To be fair, it's not the first time that a Final Fantasy 14 collaboration has required reaching the endgame. When Square Enix originally collaborated with Capcom for Monster Hunter: World, you had to finish Stormblood (the current expansion at the time) to fight Rathalos. The Nier: Automata raid series requires you to finish Shadowbringers and be at least level 80. Even all the way back in A Realm Reborn, the Final Fantasy 13 crossover event needed you to be maxed out at level 50 in order to nab the entire Lightning or Snow armor set.

Does that make this any less funny? Of course not. It would have been considerably more frustrating if the event was a limited-time run—which the Final Fantasy 13 crossover was, I cry as it wrapped up while I was still ploughing through the level 30s—but similar to the Rathalos event, Arkveld should be around for the foreseeable.

It's still a tough sell for Monster Hunter fans, mind you. Dedicate at minimum between 300 and 500 hours on the main story alone—though you could do it in less if you skip all the cutscenes, you heathen—for a single fight that folk'll probably be able to blitz through in sub-10 minutes.

That's not to say it hasn't been done before—a friend of mine mainlined the game to hell and back just to fight Rathalos a couple years ago—and if we're being real, it's not as if Monster Hunter fans aren't used to a terrifying timesink of a grind.

I am looking forward to seeing what fighting Arkveld in the confines of FF14 is going to look like, though. The Rathalos fight is easily one of my favourites in the game, and my second-favourite collab after Nier: Automata.

It does a great job of playing around with MonHun mechanics—like having to heal through potions instead of being zapped with Cure by a White Mage—and even has a mechanic that lets you cut off the tail. I'll just be over here praying that Square Enix makes the Arkveld armor for my Warrior of Light, it's rad.

Forget the game awards, forget our top 100 list, I know what you're secretly interested in: my own personal trophy for The Most Specific Bug Fix in a MMO 2025, an award I promise you actually exists. It goes to Final Fantasy 14 which, as part of its most recent update, has announced this doozy.

In today's patch notes, an update that mostly just grants access to the new Moonfire Faire event, Square Enix writes: "In Sinus Ardorum, a player could get disconnected from the server if they put an item up for sale on the market and the asking price was set between 44,442 gil and 49,087 gil." No longer!

Sinus Ardorum is part of patch 7.21's cosmic exploration content. This zone had summoning bells—which you use to summon retainers, who'll put things up on the market for you—added in patch 7.3.

As to what could be causing this lunacy? Sadly, the update doesn't say, though I can take some somewhat-educated guesses. To put it simply, numbers in videogames are weird. Computers have a very hard time counting to infinity (in that, they can't) often causing overflow errors, which can trap you in a menu for two years, make you unable to deal damage, and summon billions of RuneScape bucks out of nowhere.

If I had to take a stab at it, some internal piece of spaghetti in Final Fantasy 14's code has intersected with whatever trick Creative Studio 3 pulled to make a summoning bell in Sinus Ardorum possible. Cue the server throwing a fit and simply punting the player off the moon in a fit of pricing-induced panic.

The bigger question is how did anyone find this bug? I suppose a range of 4,645 gil isn't too small, meaning there are plenty of appropriately-valued items in the game to put a player in the danger zone. Mind, I figure once you get punted from the game for trying to list the same item on the market board several times in a row, the cause becomes clear.

Anyway, my congratulations to whichever dev fixed that. You have won all the bounties I have to offer—which is like, uh, about five quid I found in my pocket and some leftover shakshouka I made yesterday. You're welcome. I'm keen to see what bugs the next update, which I am actually really looking forward to, brings.

As we've discussed quite a bit on this very site, Final Fantasy 14 is in a weird spot with its content—a sluggish patch cycle has paired terribly with a somewhat scattershot design philosophy that's left casual-to-midcore players feeling underwhelmed, and hardcore players with precious little to do in between raids.

This came to a head in the Forked Tower—to cut a long complaint short, the Forked Tower was a raid plonked at the tail-end of the Occult Crescent, a kind of open-world content designed primarily for casual-to-midcore players to have something to grind away at. Only, the Forked Tower was an absolute nightmare to get into, requiring a fatal mix of cooperation, mechanical perfection, and the stars aligning.

In many ways, it was kinda a raid for no-one—hard enough to put your average joe off, but too difficult to join as an organised group. While director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) and co. are making changes to it, which have been further announced in today's Live Letter, there's also been another promising sign that the MMO is slowly, but surely on the mend.

The game's new deep dungeon, Pilgrim's Traverse, was announced—with the bold statement that it's a "deep dungeon for everyone! … whether you're more casual or hardcore, whether you fly solo or run with a fixed party, Pilgrim's Traverse has something for everyone to enjoy".

Yoshi-P then went on to say (thanks to the Final Fantasy XIV Discord for the fan translation) that this philosophy was a response to feedback—essentially, FF14's added casual content to the odd patches, and hardcore to the even patches. However, while the game might have "so much content in FF right now, for someone who doesn't do savage, an even patch might bring zero content.

"When we're adding 10 sorts of new content, hardcore players might enjoy three of them, casual players might enjoy three, allrounders maybe four to six. It's rare to have someone who enjoys all 10. A design philosophy change I want to get into is to show how there are different ways to enjoy the same content, in a casual way or in a more hardcore way."

What follows is a Deep Dungeon that basically uses the whole chocobo—making sure Square isn't simply wasting the asset and design work that went into it by gating it behind difficulty or organisation, while still adding harder versions for the sweats. Here's a quick-fire list of changes:

• While other Deep Dungeons locked off later floors to "fixed" (or premade) parties, every floor of the Pilgrim's Traverse can now be attempted by matchmade groups.
• In general, the difficulty should be more evenly spread out between the floors, with less early spikes.
• The Deep Dungeon will have two new "checkpoints" you can start from—floors 51 and 71, in addition to the traditional floor 31 checkpoint.

What's more, you can now challenge the final boss of the Deep Dungeon any time you like with its own separate duty—"It does not count as reaching floor 100, but it allows you to practice the last boss and re-entering at 71," Yoshi-P explains.

For hardcore players, however, there'll be a version of the boss fight dubbed "The Final Verse (Quantum)". This seems a little similar to WoW's Mythic+, in that you'll be able to scale the battle's difficulty via "offerings"—a minimum of 15, up to 40. This won't just change stats, but also mechanics: "With 40 offerings, this is more difficult than the 4th floor of a savage fight."

All in all, Yoshi-P says the team is "trying to improve the possibilities for the different play styles of our players. If we add 10 content [types], I hope players can find seven things to do."

We'll need to see this play out in practice, but I, for one, am downright feeling optimistic. For the longest time, FF14's problem has been catering unevenly to its playerbase—leaving some overfed and others starved. I might be giving gold stars for basic, modern MMO design, but as the saying goes, the best time to make broadly accessible, but scaling content was 10 years ago. The next best time is today.

You know that part in Barbie The Movie where the beloved bubbly doll played by Margot Robbie totally kills the dancefloor fun by asking, "Do you guys ever think about dying?" like it's the most normal question to ask mid-bop?

That's what Final Fantasy 14 has done to me with Dancing Green's theme song, Ride the Rhythm, though I'm not sure who's the Margot Robbie in this situation.

As is Square Enix tradition, official lyrics for FF14's most recent raid themes are trickling in via its Community Blog months after their in-game debut. They do this every time, revealing what verses actually say long after I've committed misheard versions to memory, and I'm somehow consistently surprised. The unveiling always gives those boss battles new weight, but Dancing Green's high-energy disco never allowed me much time to think about how sad he really is.

But do not let the fabulous shades and smooth moves fool you: Dancing Green is not having a good time, and I'm mildly alarmed I've spent the last several months cheerily twirling to his depression disco.

For a bit of context and some Dawntrail story spoilers, the Arcadion saga drops the Warrior of Light into a wrestling raid series structured like a classic anime tournament arc. It's brilliant, flashy fun with some overly dramatic character archetypes I'd expect to find in real-life wrestling arenas, but like everything in FF14, they can't just let me be blissfully unaware for long.

My opponents, sporting their brightly colored costumes and boisterous personalities, are all various shades of exhausted, sad, and brutally exploited by a system that slowly erodes their souls until death. Fighting in the Arcadion will eventually kill all of them—some know it and fight, some don't but seem to sense it, others give in.

It's a joke, right? Ride the Rhythm is groovy and fun! Dancing Green is just a bunny-frog cutie with a playful attitude and smooth moves. Like some folks on the r/FFXIV subreddit, I didn't even realize the song had lyrics—I thought those were weird frog noises. But no, they do, and while some lines intend to inspire, others make me feel a little guilty for spamming dance emotes:

"No one said that life'd be easy
Workin' hard from nine to five
Grindin' daily, nightly, weekly
Turn to the left to the right
Ain't no end in sight

City breakin', people shakin'
Sellin' low and buyin' high
Brothers, mothers, lovers, lately
Everybody's tired
Just tryin' to stay alive"

This is not the first time I've jammed out to FF14's most tragic anthems, either. Equilibrium is a hypotonic retelling of the Goddess Sophia's pursuit to restore 'balance' to a grieving family through a desperate woman's murder-suicide. Wayward Daughter is a melodic narrative chronicling the decades of abuse Stormblood villain Yotsuyu goe Brutus faced leading up to her transformation into the primal Tsukyomi.

But at least with those two, I knew I'd be swaying along and crying later. Now I just feel bad.

In all seriousness, it was a weirdly comforting realization. Dawntrail's raid story by no means pretends everything is all groovy, but my ignorant 10-minute bliss in the face of Dancing Green's plight seems thematically fitting given the state of, well, everything. It oscillates wildly between the moods 'I'm too tired to keep going' and 'Screw it, let your hair down.' So really, he's just every 20 to 40-something-year-old I know.