Early Installment Weirdness / Final Fantasy

Being one of the biggest and longest video game franchises in the world, Final Fantasy has changed a lot since 1987:

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The series in general

• The original Final Fantasy is essentially an unlicensed Dungeons & Dragons product. It has almost the entire bestiary, including beholders and mind flayers (for those who don't know, these two are original D&D creations; the beholders were changed into one-eyed skull monsters for all releases after the initial Japanese Famicom version in order to avoid legal trouble, but the mind flayers have never been changed), and depicts Bahamut as a dragon (the mythological Bahamut is a giant fish, D&D was the first to depict it as a dragon). The classes are suspiciously similar, and the magic system is almost lifted directly from D&D (with some elements lifted from the Dragonlance variations). This is especially hard to imagine nowadays, with releases like Final Fantasy XIII which have highly futuristic settings and feature Mind Screw plots.
  • It also has no Magic Points. Instead, spells are divided into different levels of magic, characters must buy each spell individually at magic shops, and they can only cast spells of a given level a limited number of times before resting, with the amount increasing as the characters' experience levels increase (much like the Sorcerer from D&D Third Edition). The GBA and PSP remakes remove the "X uses per magic level" system for the traditional MP.
    • Final Fantasy II introduced MP, but also featured a very primitive version of Stat Grinding rather than the Character Level system that most games in the series use. It had yet to be refined; attacking your own party members was the best way to develop.
    • Final Fantasy III used the same spell levels/number of uses system as the first game (albeit the number of charges was much more plentiful). It wasn't until Final Fantasy IV that MP became the standard.
  • In the first game, characters are all chosen from character classes and have no individual personalities.
  • The first three games also featured rivers which could only be crossed by canoe.
  • The first two games lacked auto-retargeting; if an enemy is defeated but you commanded other characters to attack it, those other characters will do nothing. Final Fantasy III did have auto-retargeting, but only for regular physical attacks. Most, if not all remakes, add this feature to the first two games as well.
  • The original split the battlefield into two separate windows, with the enemies in one window and your party in the other. Your characters' names and remaining HP were also displayed at the right side of the screen, rather than at the bottom. These were changed to what would become more the series standard interface in II.
  • The number of hits and damage were still displayed in text boxes until III which displayed damage (or healing) in red (or green) over the affected enemy or character. This became white text for damage in IV.
    • The change to numbers over the enemies for damage also allowed for faster pacing of spells; the first two games displayed damage after each enemy on a multi-target spell.
  • The first game had the Dia line of spells that did massive damage to undead. This was replaced in II by implementing the Revive Kills Zombie mechanic.
  • Players and enemies in the first game could hit multiple times for their physical attacks if RNG was favorable. This was eventually phased out where only certain equipment could grant multiple hits while only certain enemies could attack more than once.
  • When characters in the NES version of I go through a class change, the design and aesthetic of their sprites noticeably change, going from Super-Deformed to having somewhat realistic proportions. The Thief/Ninja is also the only one who gets a significantly different outfit (and even different skin color); everyone else is either the same or the same but with their hat or hood taken off. (Incidentally, this also reveals the Black Mage's face, something later games would avoid doing if they used that character design.) Every other game in the series to depict class changes would depict them as significant outfit changes, and games to use Super-Deformed sprites never had the characters stop being Super-Deformed upon something like a class change. Even the remakes dropped the idea in favor of simply giving the characters snazzier outfits upon class changing.
  • Cid is completely absent from the first game. Remakes add references to him in dialogue as a Posthumous Character.
  • The first game has an unusual approach to party formations compared to the other turn-based/ATB combat entries in the series. Instead of having party members in the front row, or the back (which reduces how much physical damage they take, but also reduces their attack power unless they're using a bow or magic), the order of the characters determines how likely they are to be attacked, with the party leader being most likely to be targeted.
  • For a long time, the first game was the only one of the series to have separate music on the menu, until Final Fantasy XV featured the same cosmetic touch, twenty-nine years later.
  • In the Famicom version of Final Fantasy III, Moogles didn't have their iconic "kupo" Verbal Tic, instead meowing like cats. The DS remake and fan translation replaces this with "kupo", for the sake of consistency with the rest of the series.
  • Bahamut started as a helpful NPC, before he became a strong summon and a recurring tough fight.
  • As stated above, the first Final Fantasy's bestiary was overwhelmingly drawn from Dungeons & Dragons. It wasn't until II that many recurring series staples, including Chocobos, Malboros, Adamantoises, and Behemoths, first appeared. Several other elements, such as moogles and summon magic, first appeared in Final Fantasy III instead.
    • Speaking of, summon magic in III only worked the way it did in the rest of the games when using the Summoner Job. When using the Evoker, the effects were split into two different effects that did not summon the creature itself: One for white magic and one for black magic. Final Fantasy IV would drop the white/black magic effects and focus entirely on the summons' attacks.
  • Final Fantasy IV introduced the series' then trademark "Active Time Battle System," although, while functionally more or less the same, it was a bit less intuitive than in later titles in the series. There was no gauge that filled up that would let the player know when it was their characters' turns to attack, so they just had to wait until an icon randomly flashed over one of them. It also had a strange approach to putting people in the front or back rows; players could choose between having three party members up front and two in the back or three in the back and two in the front. If players wanted to switch people around, a single command would cause all members to swap rows, instead of just the person who used the command. It is also the only (non-MMO) game in the main series to feature five-man parties as standard, though at various points in the narrative you will have a smaller party.
  • Though practically considered synonymous with Final Fantasy, Limits don't enter the gameplay until Final Fantasy VI, and they're not a fully fleshed out system with dramatically different types of abilities and special effects for each character until VII (in VI, they're more akin to a Desperation Attack), and even then most are operated in the same way, with the majority being chosen from a menu and some using slot reels. It wasn't until VIII that each character gained a unique set of mechanics for their limit breaks.
• In a musical example, in the first three games, The Prelude was simply the same few bars looping endlessly, it didn't gain its second movement until Final Fantasy IV.
• The Chocobo theme was also significantly shorter in its first appearance, Final Fantasy II. It didn't gain its second half until Final Fantasy III.
• Final Fantasy Tactics is just plain weird when compared to the sequels:
  • Your strength was mostly determined by your Brave (physical) and Faith (magical) stats while armor and shields only affected HP, MP, and evasion stats. This was changed in later games to be the usual Attack, Defense, Magic Attack, and Magic Defense.
  • Characters would die for good if they weren't revived in three turns. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has a milder version of this where only certain areas can have characters die and only if they are not revived at the end of the battle. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 gets rid of the perma death completely in exchange for losing the judge's protection for the rest of the battle if you broke the law imposed on your clan, causing you to lose the bonus effect bestowed by the judge at the beginning of the battle and making you unable to revive any KOed party members.
  • Monsters could also be captured and/or recruited to your party and be controlled like a normal party member and they could also lay eggs to produce more monster party members. The later changed this by having the Beastmaster job control monsters and the Morpher job (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance only) having the user transform into a monster to use its abilities.
  • The game used the zodiac signs for both enemies and allies to determine how effective attacks were and genders were also thrown into the mix for further complication. Annoyingly enough, this also applies to things like healing magic and buffs, meaning it's entirely possible for a White Mage to keep missing a downed character repeatedly with their revive spell before they crystallize or for a Time Mage to fail applying a Haste effect on someone on a regular basis if the characters in question have bad zodiac compability, making them far worse options than items or passive abilities when it comes to healing or buffing your characters.
  • The Mediator job had the ability to turn enemy units to your side and have them join your party permanently. The later games don't have this, but they use the Charm status effect for a similar purpose.
  • The first game could have its camera rotated and adjusted as needed and would auto adjust if the current character was performing an action obscured by the scenery. The sequels have the camera fixed in one angle.
  • The first game had a completely human cast (with a few exceptions) compared to having multiple fantastical races the sequels did.
  • A good number of actions have charge time before they actually resolve, which makes it possible for the target to move out of the way if the action in question can't target the unit directly: on the other hand, if the action can target an unit directly and the unit in question isn't harmed by the action in question, you can do things like intentionally target one of your units with an elemental offensive spell if they're wearing equipment that makes them immune to that element and extend the spell's range by having the targeted unit move next to an enemy, although in most cases it's much simpler to just use abilities that execute instantly to begin with.
• Final Fantasy VII was the the first entry to make the leap into 3D and it looks just plain weird compared to the later games. All the character models looked Super-Deformed due them using very few polygons. Player character models had a separate higher polygon model used in battles and there was a second version of Cloud's battle model that was rendered in even more polygons, but it only appears in the post Final Battle. Battle animations were also a bit janky due to how fast the player characters moved when they used a physical attack and some enemy animations looked like they were missing frames.

Final Fantasy XIV

Due to the game being a long running MMORPG, a lot of design changes happened throughout its life as the developers were trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. Even ignoring the massive difference between 1.0 Legacy and 2.0 onwards, there are several mechanics in A Realm Reborn and its expansions that don't quite fit with newer systems.

Weirdness still found early in the game

• Dungeon designs in ARR tend to be more maze-like or have areas you don't even need to go to, perhaps imitating traditional RPG dungeons. From Heavensward and on, dungeons are now strictly linear with no side-paths to get lost in, but it comes with the benefit of sometimes being cinematic to go with the plot. Bosses also tended to have more unusual mechanics compared to bosses in Heavensward and on. Aurum Vale, a late ARR dungeon, is probably the poster child of the comparatively unusual dungeon designs, with a very large opening area with several enemies you don't strictly need to kill and two out of three bosses involving using pre-placed fruit to undo a unique status affliction. This also had the added effect of making the obligatory "Mapping the Realm" achievement for fully exploring a dungeon less a proper achievement and more just congratulatory.
  • Similarly, boss arenas looked more natural to their settings in ARR. In Heavensward onward, arenas were deliberately designed to work with the mechanics of the boss. That is, the arena provides hints on where the party should be at certain times or where certain things will happen. While this makes the arenas look and seem artificial, players with a keen eye will be able to figure out mechanics relatively easily.
• Dungeons in ARR have no background music aside from the first minute or so when entering the dungeon. Most of the music provided is the combat music. Dungeons from patch 2.1 have the background music constantly playing in the background with no separate music for trash mobs.
• While expansion dungeons have it pretty set in stone that you fight three bosses, ARR was much less consistent, with several dungeons having more than that, like Sastasha (four bosses, though mostly on the technicality that you fight Captain Madison twice), the Tam-Tara Deepcroft (five bosses), or Brayflox's Longstop (four bosses and a completely optional miniboss).
• Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda are the only Trial based duties you complete with a four person party. They were considered the "Normal" difficulty duties before the 8-person Hard mode became the standard in Heavensward. Likewise, their hard mode counterparts are the only ones that offer weapon drops upon victory. All other hard mode primals do not give weapons. Ultima Weapon eventually followed when it was split from The Praetorium, but that happens in 6.1, roughly 9 years
• Related to this, in ARR, Trials against Primals (and the Ultima Weapon) were the only ones which had an Extreme version. Fights like The Steps of Faith, Cape Westwind, and The Chrysalis never got one. From Heavensward onwards, all Trial fights would get an Extreme version, the sole exception being the Kugane Ohashi Trial due to it using a Superboss.
• Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, the last two trials of 2.0, are weird dungeon/trial hybrids that require a full party and have frequent cutscenes. Later expansions would change things to having their endgame consist of a single regular dungeon with a light party and a separate trial against the Final Boss with a full party, rather than trying to mix the two together. As of Stormblood the weirdness is highlighted with the Main Scenario Duty Roulette, which is dedicated to sending you to one of the two and is really only there for a nice supply of Poetics and EXP, with unskippable cutscenes as its main caveat. Patch 6.1 of Endwalker makes signifcant changes by changing the two dungeons into light party dungeons, and replacing the Cape Westwind trial with an instanced battle, and separating out the Final Boss and Post-Final Boss of The Praetorium into a new light party trial and instanced battle respectively.
• The jobs' related artifact armor was tied to the job quests' completion, but A Realm Reborn had them spread out a little. You got four out of five of them at level 45, with the final, Body piece given at level 50. Heavensward and Stormblood would give you the entire set at their respective level caps, but it would take Shadowbringers and the phasing out of job quests in favor of Role Quests to be integrated within Main Scenario. It would also make them available from a specific vendor, which can be repeatedly retrieved if you lost your previous copy of the gear. Endwalker made them slightly earlier to retrieve, being redeemable from a vendor in Old Sharlayan once you reach level 89 with that job, likely to make it more useful since you can take it with you in the penultimate dungeon and trial. The level 50 artifact gear sets are also the only sets that can be stored into the Armoire.
• New jobs are released upon the launch of a new expansion pack, but Heavensward did it a bit differently. While new jobs start out an expansion behind the one they were released for (about ten levels), Dark Knight, Astrologian, and Machinist start at level thirty, which puts them twenty levels behind Heavensward content and forces the player to play in the old A Realm Reborn content for quite a while before they can catch up. Heavensward jobs were also gated behind the MSQ where you couldn't unlock them until you actually reached Isghard, something that greatly annoyed many players who wanted to try the new jobs and hadn't progressed far enough in the story. Later expansions would have their new jobs be unlocked within the A Realm Reborn zones with character levels being the only requirement to unlock.
• A Realm Reborn lacks the Title Drop for its final main quest, in contrast to the tradition set by every expansion that followed. Instead, the final quest of the initial MSQ is titled "The Ultimate Weapon", with the Title Drop actually happening in the closing cutscene dialogue.
• Quests in 2.0 get very heavy on fetch quests, which can quickly grate on players, especially in the section immediately after your first visit to Coerthas where a quest to acquire a single elemental crystal spirals into wholly-unnecessary backtracking to check out unimportant areas of previous maps and getting three crystals for no other reason than that your character refuses to just tell people what kind of crystal they need. Usage of items to store other items for quests is another example in itself, as some of these require you to go through every individual step of acquiring the container, setting it down where you need it, opening it, stuffing the other item in, closing it back up, and then grabbing the container again, with only some understanding what exactly you need from the first "use container on item" interaction. Later quests have toned down the ridiculous amount of item-fetching, and what remains has been streamlined to let you just get there, grab the item in one interaction, and go.
• Normally, to prevent Sequence Breaking, mobs in instanced duties lack the "leash" that causes overworld mobs to give up and de-aggro after you've dragged them too far from their spawn point. For some reason, Copperbell Mines is an exception — this dungeon, and just this one dungeon, not the two before or any after, retains the leash. It's even stranger the one time it does come back in a dungeon, for the Praetorium at the very end of 2.0 — but only for one specific enemy.
• The Binding Coil of Bahamut and the Alexander 8-person raids are the odd ones out, mostly due to the format, especially with The Binding Coil due to Square Enix at the time unsure of which direction to take the game's raiding scene. While eventually the 8-person raids would settle on "Fight just the boss," in Binding Coil and Alexander, some of the floors are essentially mini-dungeons with the party taking on trash mobs and sometimes mini-bosses before taking on the floor's actual boss.
• With the exception of the second tier, the Binding Coil raids have no Savage versions — or maybe it would be more accurate to say they have no normal version, as when played with the expected gear at time of release, the Binding Coil raids were about as difficult as later Savage raids under the same circumstances. Not coincidentally, the Normal Raid roulette introduced a few expansions later doesn't include the Binding Coils.
  • Speaking of the Second Coil Savage, it differs from later Savages in that is not a specifically-designed harder version of the regular Second Coil. Instead, they are essentially the earliest playable versions of those raids before they were tuned to their current state, released as an experiment. Additionally, its loot rewards are the same as the standard Second Coil, with the only unique reward for clearing them being an achievement and a title.
• Beastmen content was set up a bit different in A Realm Reborn compared to the later expansions. Several beastmen NPCs offered quests that were level locked and you had to level up your reputation with the tribe to unlock more. By Heavensward and later, all quests are handled by only one NPC, said quests sync to your level, and quest pools are randomized each day (though still with more added to the random pool with every reputation increase). Reputation also started at Rank 1, capping at Rank 4 (with the Ixal being the sole exception, capping at Rank 7), story dictating their initially low opinion of you. Heavensward's tribes raised the cap to Rank 8 and made one tribe start at Rank 3, with Stormblood making Rank 3-8 the standard for the tribes onward.
• The Ixal beast tribe was made to help players level up their crafter jobs, but in order to craft anything for the Ixal, you have to wear a specific pair of gloves. Said gloves are only level 1, which means more difficult crafts become needlessly more difficult since your stats are gimped from the gloves. Likewise, most of the crafting attempts would induce a debuff on the player to add an extra challenge like lowered max CP and not being allowed to use skills from other crafting jobs. The Ixal tribe also had quests where you had to have a Fisher, Botanist, and/or Miner on hand to gather materials before you could craft the requested items. Beast tribes in later expansions would simply give the player the materials they needed to craft and gathering jobs would have their own quests instead of merging them with crafting quests.
• Guildhests and Levequests were heavily encouraged to be used by players in order to gain extra EXP. Levequests were either an Escort Mission, have the player kill a specific target, or kill everything that spawns. Guildhests were duties made to teach players certain enemy mechanics. By Heavensward Guildhests did not return and by Stormblood, Levequests were reserved only for crafters and gatherers as a way to help them get EXP faster. Since EXP gains are more plentiful and have more ways to grind for them, the developers likely saw no need for battle classes to keep using the Levequest system.
• Every crafting job quest required the player to craft specific items using their own materials. Doing so could be extremely time consuming on the higher level quests due to all the materials you'd have to gather. Players with gil to burn would just buy the required item on the marketboard and complete the quests that way. Crafter quests in Stormblood and later would do away with this by giving the player the materials needed to craft the requested item and said item can't be bought on the marketboard.
  • The crafting quests in Shadowbringers brings back the need to gather up materials. But to offset this, there's only three crafting questlines and each questline serves 2-3 of the crafting jobs.
• Most of A Realm Reborn is pretty grounded in terms of cutscene presentation. Content beyond A Realm Reborn have their cutscenes with bigger presentation (more action between characters, more use of mocap animations, etc) and some battles even get their own form of cutscenes to make the fights more exciting. Likewise, the player's choices on how to respond to characters is pretty basic in A Realm Reborn and become a lot more fleshed out and colorful later on, Shadowbringers in particular letting the player constantly poke fun at how little it actually matters what they pick.
• Sightseeing Logs, the game's way of encouraging exploration, was one part puzzle, another part Pixel Hunt. You were given a blub on a specific sight or landmark to seek out, except there were extra conditions to consider for it to count. Not only were you supposed to find a very specific spot, you'd have to perform an emote at that spot, at a specific timeframe, at a specific weather. To make things more ridiculous, the spot itself was invisible, and your only cue was a text prompt telling you arrived at a vista, and usually followed up with another prompt telling you strayed from it. Heavensward and onward did away with all the time-based requirements and turned it into hunting down shiny points, and performing /lookout (with some exceptions) to check it off your list. The main puzzle for some of the notorious logs is either trying to reach the seemingly-easy-but-actually-unreachable spots, or utilizing platforming skills to solve jump puzzles.
• As the first of the new Ultimate Trials, the Unending Coil of Bahamut, was far more grounded in the same idea as an Extreme trial as a revisit of the boss fights with their mechanical difficulty cranked up to eleven, with Golden Bahamut's phase, while being new, still used attacks that could be handled similarly to his base form. Not only would Ultima Weapon and Alexander Ultimate move away from remixing moves to the point they were almost entirely different fights at their new final phases, both also featured a stunningly complicated puzzle that stumped raiders for a period of 12 hours (Alexander) and a full 24 hour day (Ultima) before they could actually reach said new final phases.
• Hunting Logs are unique class-based bounty hunts that send players after a certain number of certain enemies, giving fairly decent for the level amounts of XP and giving a huge chunk when the entire set of levels is complete. While they still exist for a nice boost of experience from 1-50, they didn't leave ARR and none of the jobs from Heavensward onward were given them to begin with, even the ones that start at level 30. A sort of successor exists in the form of clan hunts, which are bounties that are given out daily for randomly chosen enemies in the zone that aren't related to your class, and give marginally less experience as well as other currencies.
• Job skills were obtained by completing your job quests, a method that was used in A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. Due to how easy it was for players to level up without doing their job quests, job skills acquisitions were changed to being obtained upon leveling up instead, with the exception of the player's level 70 skill being acquired at their level 70 job quest in Stormblood. Shadowbringers would abolish job quests entirely and would use role quests instead in order to give a more cohesive story that would fit each role and would also work alongside the main story. Only jobs that were added for expansion get job quests, but only for that expansion.
• On a more personal level, Alphinaud and Alisaie were introduced with a number of servants and retainers at their beck and call, fitting their status as de facto Sharlayan royalty. These quietly disappeared after a time, Alphinaud's getting replaced by more junior Scions and later Crystal Braves while Alisaie's vanish offscreen when she's Put on a Bus following the Binding Coils questline, and the twins in later story arcs are presented as having no allies or influence beyond that which they have personally cultivated.
• For a narrative example, for a large portion of the story, Hydaelyn appears to the Warrior of Light as a gigantic crystal. One could easily assume that the crystal was Hydaelyn, that she was an abstract being. Furthering this, there is one time where the Warrior of Light has a vision of what is all but stated to be Zodiark, who appears as the opposite of "Hydealyn", a pitch black inverted version of the crystal you've seen multiple times. However, this isn't the case. Hydaelyn and Zodiark have actual physical bodies (as they are primals, not true gods), and the crystal we've seen repeatedly is actually "just" an aether crystal that has been gathering aether for millenia for Hydaelyn's plans. All of that doesn't necessarily imply early installment weirdness, but the fact that the "Zodiark" crystal never appears again after its first appearance does. Per Word of God, the Ascians weren't fully fleshed out lore wise until it was time to start preparing for Shadowbringers, until then they were just the shady evil organization.
• Minfilia introduces the Archons as the Sharlayan scholars who chose not to join the exodus and start to safeguard the realm. Later events would depict them as the reverse of this: Archons are a type of Sharlayan scholar, some of whom chose to stay in Eorzea when the rest retreated from Eorzea following the fall of Ala Mhigo.
• A lot of trial bosses had the ability to knock players off the area and permanently took them out of the battle. This could cause Disaster Dominoes for uncoordinated or unlucky parties if too many players fell off, especially if they were a healer or a tank. Starting with the trial against Sophia, players who fell off the platform would reappear so that the healers can revive them, and later patches would (eventually) backport this to the earlier trials.
• A Realm Reborn could get pretty heavy on gear pieces that would take up multiple slots, such as long robes for casters with hoods that precluded separate headgear or flanchards for tanks that covered both the legs and feet in armor. Usually, these pieces would have boosted stats to make up for the difference, but ultimately this would be dropped starting with Heavensward focusing on gear that only takes up its intended slot, with multi-slot items mostly being relegated to glamour items simply because there was no way for gear that takes up multiple slots to play nicely with the much greater amount of gear that only takes up one slot (e.g. getting a really good piece of chest armor but being unable to upgrade to it without losing stat boosts until you also got a similarly-good piece of headgear). The only case where this mechanic is still in play for regular gameplay is an ironic contrast to another case of early weirdness, that being with White and Black Mages: their early weapons, as a holdover from 1.0, are one-handed staves and wands that could be used alongside a shield, but which are rarely used in favor of two-handed staves and wands that offer greater stat boosts than a one-handed weapon and shield would grant - in fact, there are so many two-handed weapons that it's common for White and Black Mage players to never upgrade from the starting wooden shield before being forced to drop it, and other than those dropped by the hard-mode versions of the original Primal set they don't even get shields anymore from level 50 onward.
  • One of the pieces of gear that seemed superfluous were, oddly enough, belts. Like hoods and flanchards, the belts were meant to give certain stats as well as glamour pieces. However, it was discovered that trying to use glamour on belts didn't work out the way they had intended, thus belts were just slapped onto various clothes as needed and the belts suddenly became equipment that served no purpose than to add in random stats. Endwalker would finally put an end to the usage of belts and whatever belts still exist are changed to have silly text about how people have evolved beyond belts.
• Heavensward added the ability to fly upon attuning to aether currents in a given zone from the expansion, ten found in the field via an aether compass (though Patch 6.0 later reduced this to four for the non-Endwalker expansion zones) and five through completing quests (one Main Scenario and four sidequests). Being the first to include the mechanic, it had a few oddities about it: first, one of the sidequests to unlock an aether current in the Coerthas Western Highlands requires you to complete an otherwise-completely-optional dungeon, which would only be done one more time with a single current in Stormblood's Ruby Sea before being dropped; second, the last area of the expansion doesn't have field aether currents or sidequests to unlock any, it instead simply giving you a set of five currents through progressing in the MSQ.
• Deep Dungeons were introduced in Heavensward as Roguelike content where players would explore floors with randomized layouts and traps while getting story behind the dungeons. Palace of the Dead, the first Deep Dungeon, had two sets of stories split between floors 1 to 50 and 51 to 100 while floors 101 to 200 were an optional challenge. While the reception to Palace of the Dead was mostly positive, many people agreed that getting to the 200th floor was was too long and it was a major blow to morale if parties got close to the end and wiped since they had to start all over again upon losing. Additional Deep Dungeons that were added later only go up to 100 floors and the first 30 floors are used for their stories. Palace of the Dead kept its 200 floors.

Weirdness from 1.0

• In contrast, Legacy originally didn't have mobs in the overworld at all — you could go wherever you wanted almost from the very beginning, only locking quests behind level requirements. Irritatingly, the developers overcompensated when adding them in ARR, and several quest objectives will now happily and repeatedly send you into dens filled with dozens of hostile mobs that you will have to clear out just so they don't interrupt you when you attempt to actually perform the objective^note Fortunately for Rogue/Ninja players, they can use the Hide ability to avoid confronting most, if not all, of these enemies for quests..
• Interestingly, a few of the jobs actually had throwable weaponry - Gladiators/Paladins could throw knives, Pugilists/Monks could throw chakrams and Lancers/Dragoons could throw javelins. This has been somewhat modified later on, as while Lancers can still throw their javelins, and Marauders get in with the ability to throw their axes, Gladiator's ranged attack has been reworked into Shield Lob (the later Dark Knight and Gunbreaker go for respectively blasts of magic and sword beams) and Pugilist has lost throwing weapons entirely in favor of long-range shoulder tackles; knives and chakrams have since been reworked into weapons for entirely separate classes, respectively 2.4's Rogue and 5.0's Dancer.
• Relatedly, the Archer and Bard used to have an ammo limit for its bows and had to restock arrows regularly. For balancing purposes they were reworked to have infinite ammo.
• All the cutscenes were motion captured and player character animations were made with realism in mind, meaning characters had weight to their movements and attacks. When A Realm Reborn launched, characters in cutscene had their animations made much more basic and player characters lost their weighty movement in exchange for faster and floatier movements. It wasn't until Heavensward that the dev team started to use motion capture again, but only for important cutscenes. Similarly, the game engine used in 1.0 had some pretty visuals and lightning, but it wasn't optimized properly and it led to a lot of performance issues. The engine was swapped to a different one in A Realm Reborn which downgraded the visuals somewhat, but allowed the game to run a lot more smoothly compared to before.
• When Yugiri was introduced in patch 2.3, she was used as a teaser to the then soon-to-be-playable Au Ra race. She work a veil to hide her face and it was explained that her kind were still new to Eorzea and she didn't want to cause people to freak out over her appearance. Yugiri's decision to hide her appearance became pretty silly when Au Ra became playable since players could be an Au Ra before meeting her and you could see other Au Ra players running around. Additional races that were added in later expansions didn't bother trying to hide their faces or other features and it was easier to just pretend that they always existed everywhere.

Weirdness that was prominent, but later patched out

• The game's free trial used to be much more limited. Initially it was your standard time-limited trial, letting you play for 14 days and capping you at level 35. Sometime after patch 3.5 the time limit was removed. Then, sometime after 5.3, the cap was boosted up to level 60, including making all the content of Heavensward free to play. This was expanded again in patch 6.5, this time including Stormblood in the free trial and boosted the level cap to 70.
• Prior to Patch 4.1, players got Veteran Rewards that gave them various items with the big prizes being four costumes of 4 iconic FF heroes. However, it required players to be subscribed for nearly four years. Naoki Yoshida opted to streamline this by putting virtually every item on the Achievement Vendor save for the costumes, which now only requires under a year of subscription time to get all four, and the freebie Fantasia, which is now a prize for completing “The Ultimate Weapon”. Thankfully, players who earned the items the old way can still get them when they make a new character.
• The Job system and Soul Crystals, already so flow-breaking and unnecessary that producer Naoki Yoshida has gone on-record stating he hates the system with a passion and would love to get rid of it, was once even more flow-breaking and unnecessary by having a secondary requirement that the player had to level a second, often completely-unrelated class to level 15 before the one they already had at level 30 could advance to a Job; for instance, Gladiator could only become a Paladin if you also had, of all things, Conjurer at level 15. While the secondary class requirement was removed early in the Stormblood patch cycle in favor of simply needing the player to have reached a certain point in the ARR story to advance Classes into Jobs, the overall system still remains only because removing it would require massive reworking of the classes and rewrites for the starting class/job storylines; as far as post-release classes go, Rogue is the only one that doesn't start as a full Job (and, in a double example, the only non-limited class added after the initial release that you can't actually start as, owing to the story reason for its introduction in 2.4), with the classes added in the later expansions (Heavensward's Astrologian, Dark Knight and Machinist, Stormblood's Red Mage and Samurai, Shadowbringers' Gunbreaker and Dancer, and Endwalker's Sage and Reaper) and patches (Blue Mage) all giving you a Soul Crystal from the get-go.
  • Another oddity was, well, clothing. To wit, when a player went to start a new class, they would only be given a weapon to equip. Equipping the weapon would spit you out of all your armor, leaving you to run around in your smallclothes. Having the designated weapon was all they asked for you to have and you can go and do the missions without clothes. Starting with the addition of the Rogue class, you have to wear clothes to start the mission. In Heavensward, players getting the Dark Knight, Machinist and Astrologian jobs would get a basic Level 30 set of armor comprised of a top and pants while Stormblood and beyond would give you a chest containing a full set of clothes.
• PvP had a very rough launch which, over the course of its runtime, got tuned into its current incarnation.
  • When it was new, it had its own brand of gear and materia that either only worked in PvP or had more use there compared to PvE. After some time, all forms of PvP abolished gear and materia so that everyone's stats would be synced equally and allowed people to jump in right away without being curb stomped by players that outgeared them. While the PvP materia was removed, the old PVP gear remained and can be used as a PvE upgrade or glamour. Since then, all the gear from Stormblood onwards are level 1 with no stat boosts, explicitly designed to be used as glamour.
  • PvP used to be Faction-based, with your Grand Company affiliation determining what team you are when you participate in Frontline. The faction aspect slowly phased itself out when queueing as a Freelancer was introduced, allowing you to participate in any team regardless of allegiance, and is eventually nixed entirely when Freelancer became a mainstay, with no way to toggle it off. There also used to be a traditional deathmatch ruleset, but that was retired when Stormblood went live.
  • The mode was locked to level 50, the then-level cap of A Realm Reborn, due to requiring the full skill set your job offers, adjusted to fit the pace. PvP eventually overhauled the skill system by giving everyone a standardized, highly-compressed skill set that rolls Weaponskill combos into one button, made certain abilities part of their job's Limit Break, etc. The level requirement was bumped down to level 30, the level you get your Job advancement.
• A Realm Reborn had its Limit Break system act a bit differently compared to its current iteration. While every job had its own flavor for using level three limit breaks, the type of limit breaks used in 2.0 were baesd on job type (tank, melee DPS, caster DPS, and healer). Melee jobs had Final Heaven, casters used Meteor, healers and ranged jobs used Pulse of Life (physical ranged jobs also shared the low level healing limit breaks with healers). Since ranged DPS wasn't officially classified in the game yet, Bards (the only physical ranged DPS job at the time) could act as back up healers in terms of reviving via limit breaks. However, this also meant that if your party's DPS were all Bards, you effectively had no offensive limit break to use. Heavensward would change the limit breaks by giving each job their own flavor while still using the same function and power and ranged DPS would have their own unique damging limit break as well as gaining new ones for lower level versions.
• The Steps of Faith trial at the end of A Realm Reborn was the final hurdle players needed to clear before being able to progress into the Heavensward story. Initially, the trial was incredibly tight where making one too many mistakes with the mechanics meant current run was basically busted and players wouldn't have enough DPS to kill the dragon before it reached Ishgard and forcing a restart. Because the trial required eight players to coordinate and having eight random players that may or may not know the proper strategies working together, the trial received a negative reception where people who got the trial chosen in their roulette would rather eat the 30 minute penalty for leaving than to endure a trial with uncoordinated players, leaving those who needed the clear to access Heavensward behind. The developers quickly nerfed the trial to the point that you can easily kill Vishap while ignoring all the mechanics so that more people could reach Heavensward. From that point on, every climatic finale to an expansion's story is done in a solo instance where the player can clear it at their own pace. In 6.2, the Steps of Faith got changed into a solo duty where the player and their NPC companions simply has to kill Vishap's dragon minions as he advances towards Ishgard and initiates a DPS check when he reaches the final barrier.
• There used to be Materia that would boost your main stats (Strength, Mind, etc). While most players used them as normal, tanks would meld Strength over Vitality, which made their attacks stronger at the expense of having far less HP. Accuracy Materia also existed and savage raiders would meld a lot of them since you couldn't afford to have your attacks miss when tight DPS checks were involved. Stormblood removed the main stats Materia and the accuracy stat was removed, but still implemented when it came to attacking enemies whose level was higher than yours.
• Elemental resistances used to be part of the game, with skills such as the Black Mage's spells doing fire, ice, lightning damage, the White Mage's spells doing earth, wind, and water, etc. What your resistances were was based on the deity you chose during character creation (e.g. Halone and Menphina would give your character more ice resistance but less fire resistance), and there were white-colored Materia that would boost those stats. Elemental resistances as a general mechanic would be retired in 4.2, making deity selection extra fluff for your character. Elemental damage is relegated to Eureka, where you could alter your elemental affinity to your situation, and the Masked Carnivale, where elemental weaknesses played a part in some encounters.
• Up until Stormblood, players were given Attribute Points when they leveled up, which could then be allocated to the player's stats. This was a non-issue with most classes, since it was well-understood that Min-Maxing stats relevant to your class was ideal - e.g. if you're playing as a Black Mage, putting your attribute points in anything other than Intelligence or maybe Vitality meant it was wasted, since Black Mage simply has no use for something like Strength or Dexterity. For the Arcanist jobs, however, this was a big pain in the ass, since one of the jobs, Summoner, was a DPS class that required high Intelligence to be viable, while the other job, Scholar, was a healer that required a high Mind stat. Switching between these jobs, thus, would necessitate resetting your attribute points to maintain any viability. As of Stormblood, thankfully, Attribute Points would automatically be assigned to stats as a job requires, including separate stat dispersals for Summoner and Scholar to fit their needs, eliminating the need to use reset items when juggling the Arcanist's jobs.
• Also related, physical DPS classes used a resource called "Technique Points" when using their weaponskills. While TP recovered at a faster rate than MP (a flat rate of about 500 points every couple seconds), long and drawn out battles could see DPS players running out of TP, especially if they were making heavy use of attacks that hit multiple targets, which had much higher TP costs; couple this with the fact that there were very few means of recovering TP faster in comparison to MP, this would leave them at a significant disadvantage, especially classes that made use of both TP and MP, like Paladin and Dark Knight (who use MP in large chunks) or Red Mage (whose physical weaponskills had very heavy TP costs). As of Shadowbringers, TP has been removed outright.
• Certain play styles were changed up in Stormblood, then heavily again in Shadowbringers:
  • Healers used to have an ability called Cleric Stance. As their attack spells were based on Intelligence while healing was based on Mind, and healer builds favored Mind, Cleric Stance offered a way to swap both stats if the healer needs to DPS more than heal (usually for solo instances). However, for higher-end play this evolved into the technique known as "stance dancing," where a healer would switch to Cleric Stance to do maximum DPS, then switch back to heal. The problem is this can be a gamble, and Cleric Stance had a 10 second cooldown before it could be deactivated or reactivated again, which could be the difference between keeping the team alive and losing someone if the healer expected to be contributing damage and found themselves needing to focus on healing instead. Stormblood made it so Healer's attack spells worked off Mind instead, and Cleric Stance offered a small damage buff for 15 seconds. The ability was removed altogether in Shadowbringers.
  • Tanks used to have a "DPS Stance", which was supposed to be used in solo content or in 8- or 24-man instances when another tank is the "main tank," or the tank holding enemy aggro, as the "Tank Stance" would lower DPS output in order to generate more enmity. Like Cleric Stance, it became common in higher-end play styles to swap to the DPS Stance from Tank Stance after a certain amount of time or require the DPS players to pop their enmity-dumping abilities because the tank simply refused to use tank stance to maximize their own damage. Shadowbringers simplified it so tanks only have a Tank Stance, and all it does is generate a ton of enmity without arbitrarily negating their damage output.
  • Astrologian's card system had a lot more options, which included things like a damage buff, higher MP/TP regeneration, and a defensive buff. You could also burn a card to apply an additional effect. This got simplified in Shadowbringers such that all cards throw on a damage buff, but the effect is greater depending on the card and which job type it's thrown onto (three of them give a greater benefit to tanks and melee-focused DPS classes, the other half give a greater benefit to ranged DPS classes and healers). You also can't burn cards for an additional effect, instead being reworked into converting them into a different card which gives a slightly stronger buff, but doesn't grant any seals for use with another new mechanic.
• MP was very weird for spells costs and caps. As a player leveled up, the costs for spells as well as the player's maximum MP also increased with very odd numbering. For example, a White Mage's Stone IV spell could cost 1259 MP whereas spells in other Final Fantasy games would be a more even number like 100 or 1000. MP caps could also be increased by melding Piety materia and using enough of those could give a player a ton of MP to work with. By Shadowbringers, everyone has 10,000 MP by default no matter what their level is and spell costs are at fixed and even numbers that don't increase with the player's level, which makes it much more manageable for players to guess how many more times they can cast certain spells.
• Prior to Stormblood, certain classes and jobs had abilities they could learn that could be shared among certain other jobs and/or classes. For example, the vitally important Swiftcast for casters and healers required the player to level up a Thaumaturge to level 26.
  • Stormblood introduced role actions that tidied up class/job actions and was available as part of the ability pool for that class/job in general. But this also had some weirdness early on. Initially, each role could only use up five skills, which meant that players would have to constantly shuffle skills around until a later patch allowed them to use every skill. Several role actions that were introduced in Stormblood were removed by Shadowbringers due to their uses being too niche or redundant compared to similar skills.
• Job skills generally get revamped and sometimes removed when a new expansion is launched. Certain skills that are removed are sometimes brought back in their original form or a slightly tweaked form to be used in other content where preserving game balance isn't an issue. For a few examples, Cleric Stance was brought back as a lost action for Bozja content and works mostly the same as it did in its original form (extra damage while sacrificing healing potency). Ultimatum, which was an AOE Provoke skill that used to be a role action in Stormblood, was brought back as a skill for the Variant Dungeons where its AOE provoking ability was retained and gives the player a buff that lets them generate more aggro so that they can act as the party's tank.
• Up until the introduction of the Glamour Dresser, Glamours were very different in mechanics. Players were allowed to buy a basic "Clear Prism", but they had to be used to craft specific Prisms for each article of clothing, thus players were toting around five different types of Glamour Prisms. The introduction of the Glamour Prism led to the unification of Glamour Prisms, depreciating the old ones in favor of one catch-all Glamour Prism.
• Conjurer and White Mage had their Stone and Aero spells as separate skills, which would take up quite a bit of space on a player's hotbar. Players who hardly did low level content would usually remove the weaker versions of their spells and then wind up having to scramble and put them back on their hotbars for the times where they did go into low level content. By Shadowbringers, all Stone and Aero spells are just one button and they change to the stronger versions upon reaching certain levels.
• Prior to patch 6.5, items from the online store had to be stored in the glamour dresser, potentially taking up lots of space and leaving little for other items. When patch 6.5 rolled out, all paid costume sets were able to be stored in the armoire.
• From A Realm Reborn too Stormblood, jobs using pets as a part of their toolkit (Summoner, Scholar, and Machnist) had a few quirks that were changed or removed later on:
  • Summoned pets had their own HP pool, which meant it was possible for them to get knocked out from taking too much AOE attacks. Healers could heal the pets and some jobs had a skill that let them restore their pet's HP over time, but it was a lot of busywork with little gain. Pets could also be afflicted with status ailments, which made managing them even more troublesome. If a pet got knocked out, the player had to summon them again, which meant halting their attacks to do so. It was possible to move the pet to safe spot, but most players did not bother since fights that had AOE spam from enemies made it too tricky to perform. The developers would make pets take far less damage in battle before completely removing their HP in Shadowbringers, effectively making them immune to all attacks.
  • The Summoner's Carbuncle was quite different in the beginning compared to its later iterations. Along with their Egi counterparts, the Carbuncle type that could be summoned were divided into caster, support/tank, and melee DPS. The caster form had the pet use mostly AOE attacks, which most people used on trash mobs in dungeons but hardly ever in fights where there was only one enemy. The support/tank pet could be used as makeshift tank, which made it handy in solo duties or in cases where the party's tank was down. Lastly, the melee DPS pet poured on the pain since it was able to do more damage compared to the other pets. The summoner themselves were also able to give their pets various buffs such as boosted damage or damage reduction. By Endwalker, the elemental Egis (Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda) will only appear for a limited time when summoned while the Carbuncle themselves won't attack unless certain abilities are ready.
• While this still exists for some bosses, in A Realm Reborn, many dungeon bosses had mechanics that weren't obvious what to do with. Though for the most part, most of the mechanics weren't debilitating as much as they are in the later expansions. For example, the original Copperbell Mines had a boss where the DPS had to summon an add and either draw it to the boss itself or have the tank aggro it towards the boss. The final boss in Brayflox's Longstop required the only instance where the tank had to kite the boss around the arena. Several bosses also had mechanics whos only tell was either a text blurb or you had to look at the skill name from the enemy's cast bar (which you had to target to see) or from their "wind-up" animation.

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