Final Fantasy / Tropes S to T

This page covers tropes in Final Fantasy.

Tropes A to B | Tropes C to D | Tropes E to H | Tropes I to R | Tropes S To T | Tropes U to Z

---

S

• Sacred Bow and Arrows: Many of the higher level bows are named after gods or mythological figures, such as the Artemis Bow, Perseus Bow, and Yoichi Bow.
• Sad Clown: This type of archetype is present in Final Fantasy, usually on the party members' side.
  • What do Barret Wallace, Irvine Kinneas, Wakka, Balthier, and Sazh Katzroy have in common? They all use silly theatrics in one form or another in order to cover their personal tragedy—mainly losing loved ones to a devastating attack.
  • Prompto from Final Fantasy XV spends a lot of time cracking jokes and being the Plucky Comic Relief, covering up his insecurities and his origins as a clone created for military purposes by the Niflheim Empire.
  • Then there's the villain Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI, who is given this as an Alternative Character Interpretation in Dissidia Final Fantasy. He's trying to kill everyone and destroy everything while laughing maniacally because he can no longer see the point in anything else, and his last laugh (after he dies) is a sobbing, sad one.
    Firion: [pre-match, if facing Kefka] I've never heard a sadder laugh.
  • In Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, Jed always tries to keep a smile on his face even in the most desperate times, but his happy-go-lucky facade hides a pained man unsure of his purpose and considering himself inferior to others.
• Sadly Mythcharacterized: This series often depicts various mythological characters inaccurately.
  • Gilgamesh is the prime offender. He is depicted as a Multi-Armed and Dangerous Oni instead of the Sumerian king and eponymous character of The Epic of Gilgamesh. He's also obsessed with the Arthurian sword Excalibur. His human companion Enkidu also appears in several forms: a green demon, a green dog and a green chicken.
  • As a result of Copying several elements from Dungeons & Dragons, Bahamut is depicted as a dragon instead of the fish from Arabic Mythology. Final Fantasy XV makes him a gigantic Dragon Knight and the most powerful of the Astrals.
  • Odin is depicted as a Black Knight whose weapon is not the spear Gungnir, but the sword Zantetsuken. Final Fantasy XIII's incarnation is able to transform into a horse and use lightning powers. Odin in XIII is also the Eidolon of Lightning, who takes on the aesthetics of a Valkyrie in Final Fantasy XIII-2 and effectively the job of one in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy XIV's incarnation of the character gave him attacks referencing Norse Mythology such as Valknut, Einherjar and the aforementioned Gungnir. His horse Sleipnir often does not have the 8 legs associated with him (and in Final Fantasy XII is A Kind of One).
  • Shiva. In Hindu Myth, Shiva the Transformer is a male god who defends and changes the universe. Here Shiva is a female entity with power over Ice who is closer to a Yuki-Onna. The name might be a pun on the word "Shiver". Final Fantasy XIII makes Shiva a pair of twins who can merge into a Motorcycle.
  • Final Fantasy XII included a set of bosses based on The Four Gods. One of those bosses is Fenrir, who is a bipedal white tiger representing Baihu. Fenrir in the original mythology was a wolf and a quadruped, not a tiger.
  • Final Fantasy XIII uses summons different from the traditional mold (though Odin and Alexander are still in the game). Most of which are more akin to Transformers. Among them are Brunhyldr (One of the Valkyries of Norse myth) as an Eidolon who can transform into a sports car.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has a few cases.
    • Heavensward introduces Hraesvelgr of Norse Mythology as a dragon instead of an eagle, as well as related to Nidhogg, Ratatoskr.
    • Also from Heavensward is the Primal Ravana, who is now depicted as an insectoid samurai. The actual Ravana was a Multiple Head Case and less of a Blood Knight and more of a scholar.
• Saving the World: What you will end up doing in several Final Fantasy games. Sometimes with the rest of the universe. XII bucked this trend, in that Ivalice as a whole is in no danger (outside of the potential collateral damage of a world war), but the main plot involves getting the reins of history back into the hands of man after centuries of the Occuria controlling things.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl:
  • Vincent Valentine and Yuffie Kisaragi in the Final Fantasy Compilations, especially Dirge of Cerberus. Whether their relationship is romantic or an Inter Generational Friendship is a matter of speculation.
  • Though she dies at the end of the game's first half, Cloud Strife and Aerith Gainsborough from the original Final Fantasy VII fit in fairly well until then.
  • Squall/Rinoa and Irvine/Selphie from Final Fantasy VIII.
  • Gender Inverted from Final Fantasy X with Tidus and Yuna.
• Scenery Gorn:
  • In Final Fantasy V there's a place called Gorn Town that is essentially the abandoned ruin of an ancient town, complete with broken pillars, ruined buildings, and plants that have overgrown everything. It was renamed to Gohn in the GBA release, which somewhat ruins the joke.
    • The Ship Graveyard much earlier in the game also qualifies — an entire dungeon made up of nothing but wrecked and ruined ships, many of which are submerged.
  • In Final Fantasy VI, After the End of the World of Balance occurs, and right before Celes' awakening, there's a silent camera pan across the new, twilit face of the World of Ruin, driving home the point that nothing will ever be the same anymore.
    • And then the ending cinematic indulges in Scenery Porn to show how despite all of the devastation, life (and hope) goes on.
  • Final Fantasy VII begins with this trope: a wretched cyberpunk metropolis of Midgar in birds-eye view... and then you fall into the shoes of terrorists blowing up a scary mad science installation.
    • Later, you have to climb a long rope to get up onto the top of the city to raid the Shinra Headquarters. On the way up you're treated to a view of the recently destroyed Sector 7, which really shows you the scale of how big of bastards Shinra are.
    • Another scene not that long afterwards (well, relatively; this is an RPG we're talking about) involves literal gore as well. Your party must outrun the Midgar Zolom to proceed, which, at this point in the game, is very strong. Upon escaping it, they prepare to enter the Mythril Mine... and see the corpse of another Midgar Zolom impaled on a tree, courtesy of Sephiroth.
  • Trabia Garden in Final Fantasy VIII. The garden Selphie was transferred from at the beginning of the game, it was only recently hit by missile strike. The devastation including bombed sportsground or makeshift graveyard among others really helps to convey a massive Tear Jerker to a player.
  • The Necrohol of Nabudis and surrounding Nabreus Deadlands from Final Fantasy XII. The city was destroyed offscreen during the intro by Reddas using Nethicite there, an event comparable to using a nuke that is repeatedly acknowledged during the game. The necrohol itself is a half-decaying, dimly lit, partly submerged ruin full of mist, while surrounding lands are foggy marshes infested with undead. The ruins are also quite similar to Nalbina fortress - the place where you control Reks - by its layout, so you have an approximate reference to how the untouched place supposedly looked like.
  • In Chapter 11 of Final Fantasy XIII, you visit Oerba Village, the hometown of Vanille and Fang, and find it a decaying, Cie'th-infested ruin, partially covered in crystal sand. It's one of the most powerful scenes in the game.
    • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII: Near the end of the game, you can see What amounts to a world-spanning tornado ravaging familiar locales from the previous games, including the above-mentioned Oerba. Justified considering the very nature of the game.
  • Final Fantasy XV gives us Insomnia in the World of Ruin. While it's implied that the rest of the world is the same, Insomnia is the only place you get to explore. The once-bustling city is shrouded in eternal night, its streets littered with debris and crawling with daemons. One particularly breathtaking moment has you standing atop the tallest building looking down at the city, which is completely dead and silent.
• Scenery Porn: Starting from VI, the series had a focus on rendering beautiful environments.
• Science Fantasy: While the first games were predominantly medieval fantasy, the series began to dabble more with mixing sci-fi trappings in later titles:
  • Final Fantasy featured light sci-fi elements later in the game, including a prototypical Super Boss in the form of the Warmech.
  • Final Fantasy IV remains largely medieval fantasy throughout, but also features a starship that takes the heroes to the moon, which was home to a long-lost technologically-gifted civilization.
  • Final Fantasy VI introduced the concept of Magitek to the series, with The Empire (which has a strong Steampunk vibe) employing magically-empowered supersoldiers and outfitting their rank-and-file soldiers with magitek armors. One of your party members, Edgar, also makes extensive use of technological "tools" while also being king of a high-tech castle.
  • Final Fantasy VII is set in an Urban Fantasy world with modern infrastructure and cars, motorcycles, and robots powered by The Lifestream.
  • Final Fantasy XIII has a strong Cyberpunk aesthetic, with the game's resident high-tech society of Cocoon being powered by magically-empowered fal'Cie.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has Magic Versus Technology in its setting, with the city-states of Eorzea, technologically lagging yet magically gifted, in a war against the Garlean Empire, whose people are physically incapable of using magic and compensate by making extensive use of magitek.
  • Final Fantasy XV is an Urban Fantasy game that looks otherwise indistinguishable from contemporary reality, with massive cities, cars and highways, and everything that comes with existing alongside Vancian Magic, Summon Magic, daemons, and The Empire using magitek.
• Schizo Tech: Sometimes you get just a Standard Medieval Fantasy setting, other times, you get High-Tech airships, guns and futuristic stuff sprinkled on to that, not to mention the use of swords in even the most modern-leaning settings.
• Screw Destiny: The Final Fantasy series as a whole seems to love this trope.
  • The endgame of Final Fantasy leads to a massive time loop over the course of 2000 years involving the battles between the Warriors of Light and Garland. The Warriors kill him in their first battle, and he is revived by the fiends, sent back 2000 years, and kills the Warriors when they come to fight him, before sending the Fiends into the future. This cycle (Warriors kill Garland, Chaos kills Warriors, loop repeats) has apparently happened over and over and over again. However, the Warriors finally go "Screw this, you die now!" and finally defeat Chaos, breaking the time loop.
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake plays with this on a meta level: The Whispers are embodiments of the Planet's will, incarnations of destiny and arbiters of fate who try to keep events on track with that transpired in the 1997 game since those events ended with the Planet's survival. However, both Aerith and Sephiroth have, through The Lifestream, become aware of how future events will transpire, and that if destiny is allowed to go on as it should, then it's going to royally screw over Sephiroth... so, naturally, he attempts to screw destiny first. And the easiest way to screw destiny is by making the heroes attempt to screw destiny, for example by goading them into starting the final boss fight against him within the Singularity, the Whispers realm, way before they're strong enough to actually win, thus forcing the Whispers to intervene, causing a fight to break out between the heroes and the Whispers that the Whispers cannot win without screwing up destiny. Aerith, in the meantime, is torn between giving up, accepting her fate and eventually sacrificing herself for the safety of the Planet as she should, or defying destiny and putting her faith in the possibility of a better tomorrow at the expense of endangering the original timeline's much safer ending. She eventually settles for the latter and takes a proactive role in changing the course of events for the better.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, this trope is Ultimecia's entire motivating factor behind her actions. She's destined to die at the hands of SeeD, so she decides to compress time, absorb it, and become a goddess to make up the rules herself. This trope is also subverted because, as a response to the intense persecution she suffered for being a Sorceress, she became the very monster everyone said she would become which is highlighted in a very hamtastic speech.
    Ultimecia in Edea's body: "...Lowlifes. ...Shameless filthy wretches. How you celebrate my ascension with such joy. Hailing the very one whom you have condemned for generations. Have you no shame? What happened to the evil, ruthless sorceress from your fantasies? The cold-blooded tyrant that slaughtered countless men and destroyed many nations. Where is she now? She stands before your very eyes to become your new ruler. HAHAHAHAHA."
  • This becomes the cry of Yuna's party in Final Fantasy X when Yunalesca confirms that the Final Summoning has absolutely no chance of killing Sin permanently because the Final Aeon that destroys Sin will become Sin in its place.
    • Destiny gets to say Screw You in turn by killing off Tidus. You only get to see him come back if you meet very specific conditions in the sequel.
  • This turns out to be the main motivation of the villains in Final Fantasy XII - Doctor Cid and Vayne Solidor in particular. Their whole elaborate scheme was not concocted to take over Dalmasca, but to wrest control of humanity's future from the Occuria, and "put the reins of history back in the hands of man." By the end, the heroes are also saying the same thing, just a tad less homicidally than the Well-Intentioned Extremist villains.
  • The party in Final Fantasy XIII were Blessed with Suck and became l'Cie, and in doing so were left with only two options, fulfill their Focus and be crystallized for all eternity or become mindless Cie'th for all eternity. Plus the party was given a particularly horrible Focus anyway. The party naturally opted to take a third option in an attempt to change their destinies. This act inspired Cid Raines, who was also a l'Cie, thus Blessed with Suck as well to try and change his destiny as well. Unfortunately, this involved him regrettably doing a Face–Heel Turn and fights against the party.
    • Indeed, this is such a major theme of the story that the main antagonist's battle theme is titled Fighting Fate.
    • Ironically, the villains are also fighting fate. The entire reason the Fal'cie turn people into L'cie is because this is the only way they can work around their own hardwired limitations as magical machines. For all their contempt towards humans, the Fal'cie believe that humanity is ultimately stronger than them because they have free will.
  • The story of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers revolves around averting future calamity. As Urianger explains to the player, he had a vision of a future in which, with the destruction of the world of The First by the overwhelming imbalance of Light, an Eighth Umbral Calamity would ensue in which the sudden influx of light aether from the destroyed First into the world of Hydaelyn, combined with The Empire unleashing a deadly chemical weapon at the end of their war with the Eorzean Alliance, would lead to the destruction of all civilization in Hydaelyn, in addition to the Player Character's death. We later learn that Urianger didn't actually have this vision: rather, Urianger learned of this Bad Future from someone who actually lived through it. The Crystal Exarch, aka G'raha Tia, originally came from Hydaelyn, awakening after a long slumber in the Crystal Tower to a destroyed world, and sent himself and the Crystal Tower from this ruined future into the past on The First to change history.
  • Interestingly, in Final Fantasy XV, the ending seems to avert this with a You Can't Fight Fate message. Noctis sacrifices himself to kill Ardyn once and for all, purging the Starscourge just as the Astrals wanted. He fulfills his role as The Chosen One, but in doing so he plays right into Ardyn's hands since Noctis and himself dying means the end of the Lucis Caelum bloodline.
    • In the Episode Ignis DLC, Ignis has the option of screwing destiny after beating the DLC at least once. After that a different option unlocks, ultimately leading to an alternate ending to FFXV. One in which Noctis (and Ravus) don't die and Ignis never loses his sight.
  • The framework for magic in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates makes it so that if you're strong enough, you can change fate. Played to a massive scale in the end of the game where Chelinka doubles her power in order to make it so that the source of evil never existed, in order for the Twins to be happy with their parents... before the timeskip... keeping their memories of everything... and this also happened at the very beginning of the game...it's slightly confusing.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has a couple of these. Garland tells Warrior of Light the war is destined to go on forever, and Warrior of Light replies with "screw destiny". Turns out Garland is telling the truth - the war has been going on for centuries, and whenever one side loses, Shinryu revives them and the war keeps going. When all the other heroes find out about this, the motto of pretty much the entire party becomes "screw destiny". In fact, it later turns out that the villains were hoping to end the cycle of war too, so it's actually the entire cast following this trope, except Garland who loves the fact he gets to spend eternity fighting.
    • Made much more terrifying when you realize that, by screwing destiny in Dissidia, the heroes are quite possibly instigating the 2000 year Time Loop in Final Fantasy, since Garland's on his way to becoming Chaos in the end.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  • Final Fantasy X has this when Yuna and company decide to try and defeat Sin without using the Final Aeon.
    • This is also how Tidus meets Yuna, and arguably, an Establishing Character Moment; after learning that the apprentice summoner has been inside the Cloister of Trials for over a day, he decides to go in after her, yelling "Like I care!" when he's told it's taboo to do so. (in the HD Remake, you get a trophy named "The Right Thing")
    • This comes back later in the game, where Tidus yells "You can stuff your taboos!" Only this time, members of the party join Tidus and help him out, rather than chastising him.
  • This is the core of the philosophy of the Dark Knights of Final Fantasy XIV, their origins tracing back to an Ishgardian knight of common birth who slew a corrupt man of the cloth, only to be condemned by the powers that be. The job quests surrounding the Dark Knights revolve around embracing one's inner darkness to serve a greater good, bringing justice to those who would otherwise be above the law, regardless of the cost to oneself.
  • Ramza's entire story throughout all of Final Fantasy Tactics.
  • And possibly Marche's story in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Though many fans see his motivation as "Screw your Happiness, I'm doing what's right."
    • Or just "screw you", depending.
    • Or just "Screw your escapism at the expense of everyone else", depending depending.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • Near the end of the game, you can talk the Turks out of fighting you and into just walking away, seeing as how the Shinra Corporation has just been blown to pieces. Only works if you've established the rudiments of an Odd Friendship with them by playing the Wutai side plot earlier, though.
    • Occurs in the "Weapon Raid" FMV where the Weapon is attacking Junon. After the initial barrage by the Shinra fails and the monster keeps on getting closer, troops on the waterfront are seen hightailing it out of there as the Weapon closes in.
  • Near the end of Final Fantasy VIII, Biggs and Wedge — who've been playing mid-boss to you for most of the game — decide to drop their current assignment (guarding the door leading to the Boss) and just walk away to look for gainful employment elsewhere.
  • In Final Fantasy X, Maester Mika decides to send himself (effectively committing suicide) rather than face a world where Sin cannot be defeated.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, all of the secret characters will do this in a Jagd if left unconscious (you can recruit them again). Unfortunately, the main character doesn't have such immunity.
• Screw Yourself:
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud can visit a brothel. In one of the rooms he has one of his frequent psychotic episodes and hallucinates another him, crouched in pain by the hot tub. If you speak to the other Cloud, he berates the real Cloud for being in a place like this, and then leans in to kiss Cloud. The real Cloud passes out as their lips touch.
  • And the Genesis Copies in Crisis Core. And if Angeal wasn't dead by the time, he and Lazard would have been candidates.
  • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, Kefka's Mirror Match battle taunt resembles this trope (that or Distracted by My Own Sexy):
    Kefka: Who's that handsome devil?
• Sea Serpents:
  • One of the series' most recurring entities is Leviathan, a massive finned serpent who rules over the oceans. His (or in two cases, her) signature attack is Tsunami/Tidal Wave, in which Leviathan raises the oceans to send them crashing down on the enemy. Depending on the game, Leviathan may be a good-willed monarch, an evil dragon, a bestial creature, or something in between.
  • Jormungand (sometimes referred to as Midgardsormr) is also a recurring monster, but oddly enough it almost never appears in the ocean.
• Second Prize: The "don't get the prize you wanted" version appears in Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2 with the Blitzball minigame. In both cases, you'll often want the 2nd or 3rd prize instead of the first as the better moves and skills for the minigame are rarely the first prize's reward. This essentially forces you to lose games to achieve this.
• See You in Hell:
  • Borghen says this as his last words in Final Fantasy II, before springing a boulder trap that ultimately kills Josef. He does.
  • In the later remakes, Borghen meets Josef in (what turns out to be) heaven as well.
  • Final Fantasy IV gets one of these in the DS remake.
    Cagnazzo: The Drowned King, Cagnazzo, deposed! But the wicked are not wont to fall alone. In life, I was terrible... in death, steeped in terror greater still. Drink long and deep of it ere you die! I'll save a briny pit for you in hell! Muahahahaha!! (The walls of the room the party is in start to close in on them)
  • Gets a variation in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years from Golbez to Cagnazzo; odder still, it's intended to be comforting. "Sleep in peace... for I, too, may join you in your hell someday."
  • If your party leader is Lightning during the final battle with Orphan in Final Fantasy XIII, she will blatantly tell him to "find your own road to hell" at the start of the battle.
• Senseless Sacrifice:
  • Josef in Final Fantasy II sacrifices himself to save Firion, Maria, and Guy from Borghen's boulder trap in the Ice Cavern. The reason the party went to the Ice Cavern was to retrieve the Goddess Bell, the only way someone not of the Kashuan nobility could enter Kashuan Keep. But once you have the Goddess Bell and enter the Keep, it turns out that Gordon, who had previously run away in the wake of the Dreadnought's wrath, went to the Keep but couldn't get past the monsters. If you return to Hilda after Gordon joins, she chews out Gordon, aware that had he not run away when he was needed, Josef would not have died.
  • Tellah from Final Fantasy IV using a Dangerous Forbidden Technique to kill Golbez... who survives. Even worse since Tellah is the only character in the game to sacrifice himself and actually stay dead. Not only does everybody else who attempts a Heroic Sacrifice pull it off successfully^note although they could usually have found another way; see Stupid Sacrifice, they're able to stay alive no matter how impossible that should be. At the very least his use of Meteor snapped Kain out of his brainwashing who, in turn, saved Rosa's life, so it wasn't completely without merit.
  • Every time the monster Sin rears its ugly head in Final Fantasy X, a Summoner is sent on a quest for the Aeons in hopes of performing the Final Summoning that is said to be the only way to defeat Sin, a quest that invariably costs the Summoner his or her life. But as it's revealed, the Final Summoning does nothing to stop Sin for good, as the Final Aeon that destroys Sin becomes the new Sin. Unlike most other examples of the trope, this one was SUPPOSED to be senseless; the idea that the Final Summoning is the only way to combat Sin is a falsehood propagated by the local church.
    • Not surprisingly, in Final Fantasy X-2, Yuna rails against the entire idea of sacrificing one's life after her experiences with the Final Summoning debacle in the first game, opposing a plan in which Nooj would shoot Baralai, who was under possession by Shujin, and then kill himself once Shujin re-entered his body because she has lost too many of her friends to sacrifice and doesn't want battles where "we have to lose in order to win."
    • Subverted with regards to Cid: Every opportunity he has to suggest it, he suggests a suicide ramming run using the airship. Every time, he's shot down as there's far less suicidal means of success. Rikku even mocks him for it one time.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2: Serah was aware that she could very possibly die of her visions when she set out on the final leg of the journey to stop Caius. So they fight him, and appear to fix the timeline; as expected, she drops dead. Except Caius' plan worked out perfectly, chaos engulfs the world and all Time literally ends. He even shows up in the Secret Ending to taunt the player with the claim that all eventualities lead to his victory.
• Sequel Escalation: Throughout the series, some sort of hit point inflation seems to be taking place. In Final Fantasy, the final boss has 2000 HP in the original version. By Final Fantasy IV there are a few spells that will generally do 9999 points of damage. In some of the later games, a single attack will do that much. By Final Fantasy XIII early enemies have hundreds of thousands, and each form of the final boss has over 5 million. Final Fantasy XII's optional super boss (well, the most powerful of several) has FIFTY MILLION and is so far still unmatched in the HP department. Make sure you've used the bathroom and gotten a snack before you start one of these battles.
  • XIII continues this in a different way, though no boss approaches even half of 50 million, storyline bosses can reach several million, and Barthandelus, fought roughly halfway through the game, has more HP than the final boss of XII. And the party members have the damage cap raised a digit, allowing normal attacks to hit for 99,999 HP, and with the Genji Glove equipped to raise that, 999,999 is possible, and can be reached fairly easily with maxed-out characters and the right set-up.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • The whole point of the Wings of the Goddess expansion in Final Fantasy XI. In fact, the player's version of Vana'diel was revealed to be the Set Right What Once Went Wrong outcome of the nine Cait Siths nudging the Crystal War into a better direction, until people from the other timeline decided to set wrong what once went right. Leads one to wonder how long the Pandemonium Warden fight took in the "bad" version of the universe.
  • The point of Final Fantasy XIII-2 is to fix the timeline and help everyone find happiness while averting future disaster. They fail, and cause a massive Time Crash.
  • The Time Crash that the heroes cause halfway through Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light allows them to do this. Visiting all the towns in the past lets them kill the demons that were corrupting or usurping many of the world's rulers through manipulation, plagues, and outright Demonic Possession. It also averts tragic events from their own timeline, like Lilibelle's death.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers: the Crystal Exarch of the First (who is actually a denizen of the Source, G'raha Tia) hails from a Bad Future where the Garlean Empire brought about the end of the world by means of a deadly chemical weapon. To that end, he traveled through time and reality itself in an attempt to halt the coming calamity in the First, and in so doing, prevent calamity in the Source.
• Sexier Alter Ego:
  • Cloud's 'ex-SOLDIER' personality in Final Fantasy VII is a cool, hypercompetent, swashbuckling '90s Anti-Hero who is irresistible to women and men - even though he's also a total jerk. His original personality is that of the unpopular town dork, and quite hesitant and awkward.
  • In Final Fantasy XIII-2, it's implied that Chocolina is actually this to Dajh's Chocobo chick. This is later confirmed in Sazh's DLC story. As it turns out, she got caught in the distortion just like he did, and wanted to help the others just like they always helped her, so Etro gave her the form of an attractive woman and the ability to be everywhere at once.
• Shadow Archetype:
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud, a highly-experienced, sulky jerk, has repeated visions of a weak but kindly little boy that resembles himself. The boy is especially likely to appear when Sephiroth is performing Mind Rape on Cloud, and you can actually control him at some points (although he's limited to running around and cannot interfere with events). After Cloud's mental breakdown, the boy helps talk Tifa through sorting out Cloud's False Memories, eventually shown symbolically 'merging' with Cloud to restore him to his real self. Cloud later admits that he was ashamed of his real self and repressed it, making and embracing delusions in order to present a cooler exterior to the outside world.
    • Vincent also counts as a heroic version but nonetheless, he fits. A brooding loner haunted by the loss of a woman he loved at the hands of his arch-enemy? Vincent is what Cloud might become if he doesn't learn to cope with his issues. Word of God shares this viewpoint.
  • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII has Lumina, who seems to be some sort of evil twin for Serah. In actuality, she's everything Claire Farron rejected as weakness as a child when she became "Lightning", now made flesh. Throughout the game, Lumina does some morally ambiguous things that ultimately end up working out for the best for Lightning's friends; some might say Lightning is doing the same by submitting to Bhunivelze's servitude. In their one-on-one talks, Lumina pokes and prods Lightning with facts that the savior herself denies or hides; that the "Serah" that appears to her is fake, that Hope in the Ark isn't quite genuine, and that Lightning needs to admit her own weakness and reach out to her friends for help. In the end, Lumina breaks down and cries at the prospect of being left alone in a dead world. When Lightning admits her weakness, she does the same.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has the Warriors of Darkness, introduced late in Heavensward as counterparts to the Warrior of Light and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. Like the Warrior of Light, the Warriors of Darkness were the chosen champions of Hydaelyn from their own world in The Multiverse, and they had succeeded in defeating the forces of darkness — at a terrible cost. With their world on the brink of destruction due to the power of light overwhelming it, they were manipulated by the Ascians into crossing over into the main world of the game and trying to plunge it into darkness under the misguided belief that it would save their own world. Thankfully, they are set straight and return to their own world to forestall its destruction.
• Ship Tease:
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • One would be forgiven for mistaking Locke rescuing Terra in the opening minutes and his promise to stay with her until her memory returns for a Rescue Romance, but he quickly moves on to form the closest thing the game has to an Official Couple with Celes.
    • Terra also gets a Ship Tease scene on an actual ship with first General Leo, then Shadow. Hell even Sabin protects Terra from Ultros‘s Naughty Tentacles
    • Edgar gets at least one moment of teasing with every female party member, including Relm of all people. Depending on the translation, he either has the decency to act squicked about it or else implies a Jailbait Wait.
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • There is a micro-Dating Sim where one of the three girls (and Barret) can go on a date with Cloud.
    • Tifa's introduced in a Bait-and-Switch where we're meant to think she's the mother of Cloud's child before we realize the little girl is actually Barret's. Immediately after, she and Cloud reminisce about a promise under the stars they had when they were kids. When Cloud tells the story of Nibelheim, he goes into her room and pokes around in her bedroom, and teases Tifa by pretending to have gone through her drawers (which makes her cross).
    • Cloud and Tifa get more explicit Ship Tease in Advent Children where they have a Sleep Cute moment, and an even greater tease in Last Order: Final Fantasy VII where Cloud strokes Tifa's hair after carrying her away from danger.
    • Aerith tells Cloud that if he acts as her bodyguard she'll go out with him, and we don't know if Cloud's participation is out of hatred for the Shinra or a desire for a date. When sitting around the fire in Cosmo Canyon Aerith talks about her being the last Ancient and how it makes her lonely, and Cloud tries to reassure her with 'but I'm...we're here for you, right?' Cait Sith looks at Cloud and Aerith's horoscopes and determines that they'd be a perfect match just before she leaves your party and is killed by Sephiroth. At the end of the game, Cloud also talks about wanting to find Aerith in the Promised Land.
    • Yuffie will kiss Cloud if you take her on the Gondola.
    • Barret gets a lot of Ho Yay with Cloud, getting moved when Cloud talks with him about politics and nervously apologizing to him after realizing he's not all bad. If the player chooses to have Cloud compliment Barret's sailor suit ("a bear wearing a marshmallow"), they'll later find Barret locked in a room with a mirror, checking himself out. He even gets Gay Bravado flirting and the opportunity to date Cloud.
    • It even has instances of Ship Tease with random male characters, like Mukki and Don Corneo.
    • Barret and Tifa get teased throughout, but particularly in the second disc where Aerith is gone and Tifa becomes Cloud's primary love interest. He gets jealous of her feelings towards Cloud, though it's unclear if it's because of his confused feelings about Cloud in general. She helps him look after his daughter, he calls her 'some kinda lady'...
    • The Turks get a bit. Rude admits to liking Tifa. Tseng asks Elena out for dinner, but has a certain amount of involvement with Aerith, who Reno says he 'likes'. Aerith doesn't seem interested, but she doesn't seem all that scared of him either, and she expresses attachment to him when she finds his unconscious body, saying he's one of the only people who really knows her.
    • The Remake continues this trend as well. Both Aerith and Tifa have moments with Cloud throughout - Tifa and Cloud reach for one another in the heat of battle, have a Suggestive Collision, stand back to back together and Cloud has the option to comfort Tifa very intimately at the end - while Aerith is showing wearing the red dress for Don Corneo's mansion from Cloud's perspective, while fireworks go off in the background. There's even a moment where Cloud has both women holding his arms!
    • Surprisingly Jessie! Gets heaps of moments with Cloud compared to the original and unlike Tifa and to a lesser extent Aerith she doesn't hesitate to show him great affection. In the bike racing mini-game depending on how well the player does Jessie even kisses Cloud on the cheek causing him to become shy in an endearingly dorky fashion, then she outright invites him to her room later. Unfortunately as anyone whose played the original will remember Jessie is killed, in this continuity by falling rubble leading to a Tear Jerker where she's so glad that Cloud is the one to hear her last words before she dies.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • Tidus and Auron seemed to flirt a bit in Luca during Auron's reappearance. Between Auron saying things like "Come or don't come. It's your decision," and Tidus assuming the position shortly thereafter, the UST was palpable. (See 6:15 and 6:38-7:00.)
    • Depending on your affection rating, you can have Tidus outright tell Lulu or Rikku that he would rather have them in Guadosalam. Rikku will get a little weirded out (which makes sense given she and Tidus are Like Brother and Sister) while Lulu simply says "hmm, I could add you to my list."
    • Lulu gets teased with Wakka quite a bit since she used to date his brother. Then come the sequel, they're an Official Couple with a baby on the way.
    • Rikku also gets a Ship Tease with Gippal in X-2. An optional conversation has him saying the two "were quite the couple", though Rikku denies it. However, she shows plenty of signs throughout the game such as ordering everyone to go and rescue him. The two are also seen leaving the Farplane together at the end.
  • Final Fantasy XII:
    • It's subtle, but there is a little ship teasing between Balthier and Fran in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. When Tomas is trying to woo Fran, she mentions that Balthier's methods were different. You might also count the scene in the Pharos when the Sun Cryst explodes from the original game as rather shippy. Balthier's lines regarding Fran always have some kind of sexual undertone to them (but hey, don't all his lines?)
      Balthier: "No one knows men like Fran does."
      Balthier: "I always knew Fran didn't take well to being tied up. I just never knew how much. How about you?"

    This scene is also fairly shippy.

    Fran (cupping Balthier's cheek): "Hadn't you best be off? That's what a sky pirate does, you fly, don't you?"

    Balthier (holding Fran's hand): I suppose you'd better hang on then."

    • There's also some Ship Teases for Balthier/Ashe too, especially in the original game. During a scene closer to the end of the game, he seems rather agitated when Al-Cid flirts with her, prompting Fran to give him a knowing look. Also, in the scene in which Balthier is risking his life to stop the Bahamut from destroying Rabanastre Ashe seems particularly scared that he might die, (especially in the original Japanese version) The following is a translation of some of the scene:
      Ashe: "You... do you understand what you are doing?"
      Balthier: "Princess, there's no need for worry. Who do you think I am? I'm the hero of the story. And the hero never dies."
      Ashe: "Please, Balthier, hurry and get out of the Bahamut! Please. If you die... if you die... I..."
      (as the Strahl blasts away)
      Ashe: "BALTHIER!!!!"
    • Ashe and Basch is also plausible. In the ending, Penelo writes to Larsa, and she tells him how she hopes Basch will see Ashe because she thinks Ashe misses him (which Basch reads after Larsa hands him the letter).
    • Penelo also gets a lot of scenes with Larsa in the first game, which could be construed as this, and they certainly seem to feel affectionately for each other.
  • Final Fantasy XIII:
    • Aside from Serah and Snow, the rest is all up to interpretation, the biggest source of tease coming from Vanille and Fang, whose relationship is so laden with Les Yay their Ambiguously Gay status is barely ambiguous at all.
    • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII has a lot of Hope/Lightning tease. Hope giving up the chance to be reborn with his parents in favor of saving Lightning, or Lightning desperately trying to grab his hand as his body disintegrates, are just a few of many examples. The rest (and, again, there's a lot) can be found on the game's main trope page.
    • There's also this line, which is a Shout-Out to Squall's promise to Rinoa.
      Hope (to Lightning): "Even if the entire world hates you, I'll always be by your side."
    • All games from this trilogy have a bit of ship tease between Hope and Vanille. In the first one, during a side-quest event in Grand Pulse, Hope says to her "her smile makes him happy", which is immediately interpreted as a love confession by Vanille, judging her expression. But soon after saying that, Hope says this was a joke, angering her. In the second game during a dialogue in Yaschas Massif 110 AF, Hope seems concerned about Vanille's well-being. And in LR, Lightning seems to be aware Hope has a thing for Vanille in one dialogue.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • The Player Character Warrior of Light's relationships with many NPC is usually written with a bit of leeway for people to assume a romantic implication. There is also a case where within the fifth-anniversary livestream, two segments were shown with the Warrior on various dates during the Rising that practically screams ship bait.
  • Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy:
    • A series of scenes involves Firion trying to approach Lightning to talk to her, only for a string of Moment Killers to scare him off. It turns out he lost his rose and she found it, and he's trying to ask for it back but is embarrassed about the Hot-Blooded rebel having to ask the resident Action Girl for his flower (in his exact words, "a grown man asking for his flower back..."). However, the subtext is very thin, and is complete with Cecil appointing himself Firion's wingman.
    • And then when he finally does get to talk to her, the Ship Tease still goes strong as Lightning returns it to him and notes that for both of them, the sight of that rose is the key to their memories^explanation In Firion's case, the phrase "Wild Rose" is a Continuity Nod to the Wild Rose Rebellion that Firion and his friends were a part of; in Lightning's case, her Eidolon-summoning crystal was shaped like a rose, and splitting it caused a shower of rose petals, and asks him to keep it safe because when he remembers everything, she might need it back for help with the same. He watches her leave with a dreamy smile.
    • Terra gets ship teases with Onion Knight, Cloud and Vaan. Vaan and Onion Knight appoint themselves her protectors, worrying about her safety and counselling her on following her heart to find out what she truly wants. Cloud meanwhile waxes poetic with her about their dreams for the future in spite of their self-doubts. When Cecil, again playing Shipper on Deck, asks Onion Knight if he's fallen for her, he denies it, but in a fairly flustered manner.
• Shadowed Face, Glowing Eyes:
  • The Black Mages wear blue robes with a yellow hat, leaving their face obscured while their eyes glow from within. The design was initially due to the sprite limitations of the NES, but stuck around as graphics improved.
  • Dwarves in Final Fantasy IV the appearance of a dark shadowy face with glowing eyes, but lack the traditional wizard attire of a Black Mage. They even have visible hair on their heads, but their faces are still darkened.

• Shut Up, Hannibal!:
  • Immediately after killing Aerith in Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth starts to give his umpteenth villainous speech about how everyone will live again as part of him when he absorbs the lifestream and becomes a new god... and Cloud's text box pops up and actually covers up most of Sephiroth's speech with the words "... Shut up."
    • Even the Turks get one of this in on Don Corneo in Wutai, after Cloud And Friends and the Turks team up to release Yuffie and Elena from Corneo's clutches. Mostly they turn his "Reason You Suck" Speech against him.
  • In Crisis Core, Sephiroth's delivers one hell of one to Genesis:
    Sephiroth: Whether your words are lies meant to deceive me... or the truth that I have sought all my life... it makes no difference. You will rot.
  • In Final Fantasy IX, Garland tells Zidane to destroy Gaia, since he's an Artificial Human created for exactly that purpose. Zidane refuses, obviously, but when Garland tries to push he delivers an amazingly snappy and spoilertastic comeback:
    Garland: Regrettable. I thought your soul would be a perfect choice for the new Angel of Death.
    Zidane: I am the new Angel of Death. Yours!!!
  • Lightning in Final Fantasy XIII does this to Orphan just before the final final boss fight. He only manages a creepy laugh and three words before she gives him a lecture that lasts about a minute. But it is an awesome minute.
    "You don't believe in anything. You gave up on life before you were even born. Sat poisoning Cocoon from the inside, waiting for someone to come and destroy you. Sure, you think the end of the world is salvation. All you care about is death's release. So take it, and leave the rest of us alone! We don't think like that. When we think there's no hope left, we keep looking until we find some. Maybe Cocoon is past saving, but it's our home, and we'll protect it or die trying! We live to make the impossible possible... that is our Focus!"
  • Most of the boss battles in Final Fantasy Tactics consist of you shutting up the enemy via superior firepower, as they will at various points through the battle taunt you about their supposed superiority until you defeat them. One of the most satisfying deliveries of such a Shut Up Battle is against Algus/Algrath.
    • Elmdor shuts up Barinten/Barringten by having his assassin toss him to his death when he confronts Rafa on the rooftops of Riovanes Castle.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has several examples. Ultimecia in particular not only gets a good snarky one from the Warrior of Light ("Are you finished talking?" ... "If you have no business with me, you should leave now. The world's time runs short. There is not a moment to waste with the likes of you."), she also gets an even more badass one from Squall after he defeats her in Shade Impulse: he responds to her preaching about time by finishing her off with his gunblade, before she'd finished talking.
    • Which of course is a reference to her original game where she gives a similar speech during the final battle and gets struck down mid-sentence.
• Shut Up, Kirk!:
  • Kefka, the Big Bad of Final Fantasy VI, gives a priceless one when faced with the heroes' "No More Holding Back" Speech before the final battle.
    Kefka: Sickening! You all sound like chapters from a SELF-HELP BOOKLET!
  • He does it again in Dissidia Final Fantasy, casually brushing off Terra's assertion that the meaning of existence can be found when one has something to protect:
    Kefka: Meaning, schmeaning. This whole world's going bye-bye, you included!
  • Garland brings up a similar rebuttal in Final Fantasy IX when confronted by Zidane and three other party members at the end of disc three; after listening to them explain how they're better than him and how they know more than him (sometimes using arguments which don't apply to him in any way, shape or form) Garland challenges them to actually demonstrate their superiority.
    Lecture me again when you are on the verge of death!
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: Just about everyone in the Crapsack World that is Ivalice have accepted the status quo and just want to be at the top of the heap. For daring to express a different opinion, Ramza is called variants of naive and foolish. (For example, in the battle against Gafgarion when he makes his Face–Heel Turn, one of the things he can say to Ramza is: "Stop being such a child!") This rarely helps, as Ramza ends up killing most of them. And most of the rest end up being killed by the scheming Delita instead.
• Side Quest: Loads of them. For the first few games, they weren't more than "Go here, fight this guy, come back," but starting with IV, they really became deeper and grew to become a staple of the series. Reached its logical conclusion in XII, where doing every sidequest can take longer than doing the main story itself.
• Single-Minded Twins: Zorn and Thorn, from Final Fantasy IX. They habitually repeat what the other says (i.e. "what the other says they habitually repeat"), and their boss reveals they aren't even really two beings just before they merge into a single two-headed Eldritch Abomination body for their final boss fight.
  • Final Fantasy series in general averted this.
    • Palom and Porom is the first prime example. Palom is boastful and rude, Porom reserved and polite.
    • In Final Fantasy VI, Edgar is a Chivalrous Pervert while Sabin is chaste, but acts without thinking.
    • Final Fantasy XII: For Basch and Gabranth/Noah it's quite complicated, as their different personality might be due to the different "environment" they faced.
    • In Final Fantasy XIV Alphinaud and Alisaie, despite being Half-Identical Twins in terms of their looks. While Alphinaud throws himself into the task of filling the shoes of their grandfather, Louisoix Leveilleur, and assisting the Scions of the Seventh Dawn in repelling the Garlean threat and restoring stability to Eorzea, Alisaie grows disgusted with Eorzea's politics and follows her own path, seeking the truth behind the Battle of Carteneau and Louisoix's disappearance and ultimately finding the Dreadwyrm Bahamut on the verge of resurrection. Alisaie is largely absent from the main story while Alphinaud remains a central figure throughout; this status quo changes towards the end of the Heavensward expansion, where Alisaie returns with a new costume, new abilities, and new purpose.
• Sir Swears-a-lot or Lady Swears-a-lot:
  • Cid and Barret in Final Fantasy VII:
    Cid: "Shut up! Sit your ass down in that chair, and drink your goddamn tea!"
  • Compared to the rest of the cast of Dissidia Duodecim Final Fantasy, Prishe drops mild swears much more often. Most notable are her quote for being called in as an assist character "It's about damn time!" and having "Aw hell!" instead of a death scream.
• Situational Damage Attack: The Grudge (sometimes called Karma) attack deals damage to a character based on how many kills the character has made. So it'll likely kill the fighters and mages, while the healer will take very little damage (if any).
• Sliding Scale of Continuity: The series are Level 0 (Non-Linear Installments). A couple of games had sequels or spin-offs; the others are each their own reality with their own characters, their own plot, their own setting... However, they share various nods to one another such as similar monsters, summons, chocobos, and characters named Cid.
  • Curiously, the games are sometimes hinted to take place in a Multiverse, most notably with the character Gilgamesh, who is all but explicitly stated to be the same character across all his appearances, Ultros and Typhon have started getting similar treatment in recent releases (XIII-2 and XIV), and the character Shinra from X-2, who seems to go quite a bit further than just a "shout-out" to the company from VII. And then there's Dissidia Final Fantasy...
    • XIV also featured Lightning directly from XIII to help promote Lightning Returns, while XI's Iroha seems to have somehow ended in Eorzea instead of returning to her future on Vana'diel at the end of Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, and seems to be here to stay.
  • Final Fantasy IV: The After Years directly connects the first six games in the series through aggressive Canon Welding. Each of those planets exists within the same universe, and their various magic crystals were put in place by the same outside observer.
• Smash Mook: Particularly the Behemoths.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside:
  • Squall Leonhart of Final Fantasy VIII puts an extraordinary amount of effort into being brusque, unsociable, and unsympathetic to others in order to keep anyone from getting too close to him. As the game progresses, it reveals that he does this because he's actually cripplingly insecure and desperately afraid of coming to care about and rely on others only to lose them, which he believes is inevitable.
  • Lulu from Final Fantasy X is a milder example; she puts up a very cold, alienating front - being outright abrasive to Wakka, Tidus and (very occasionally) Yuna - but is revealed to just be an exceptionally sad person inside as the game progresses, due to the loss of her fiancé, Chappu, Lady Ginnem, her first Summoner due to her own inability and the fact that Yuna will die too once they finish the pilgrimage.
  • Lightning qualifies as this in Final Fantasy XIII, at least in the first few chapters of the game. She comes across as confrontational, aggressive, and outright cold with people she has just met. In reality, she's deeply concerned about her sister Serah and, considering that she herself was branded a L'Cie, had pretty firm justification for being under some heavy stress. She begins to open up to Hope and show more of her inner fragility as the plot advances.
• Spell Levels: Some games have tiers of spells that even have their own set of spell uses. It's a staple to have some more advanced spells under the naming format "[spell]", "[spell](a)ra", "[spell](a)ga", and "[spell](a)ja", though the English translations only began to use it since Final Fantasy VIII (before, spells were simply named "[spell] 1", "[spell] 2", etc. due to limited characters). This naming system is carried over to the Kingdom Hearts series.
• Sphere of Destruction: The trademark design of the Ultima spell.
• Spinning Out of Here: Several of the earlier games show teleportation this way.
• Spiritual Successor: Dissidia spawned a subseries of similar Crisis Crossover games that focus on iconic cast of past games. Aside from direct prequel Dissidia 012, there's Theatrhythm, Airborne Brigade, All the Bravest, and to a certain degree the Trading Card Game, all of which borrow gameplay terminology and character designs from Dissidia.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • In Final Fantasy, the story begins when the Warriors of Light are sent to the nearby Temple of Chaos to kill the renegade knight Garland. As Garland is dying, the four Elemental Fiends of the game magically send him two thousand years into the past, when he becomes the demon Chaos, and sends the four Fiends to the still-the-past future to seize control of the four Elemental Crystals. The Fiends take roughly four hundred years to obtain all the Crystals and use them to wreck the world until the present day, when the Warriors of Light fight Garland, slay the Fiends, and travel to the past to confront Chaos and die fighting him. The game ends when the Light Warriors kill Chaos and end the stable time loop.
  • This is essential to the plot of Final Fantasy VIII. Because the main party kills Ultimecia in a partially time-compressed realm, she is able to give her powers to Edea, thirteen years in the game's past, before she perishes. This is what makes Edea the perfect choice to possess for Ultimecia's plans, and causes the main conflict in the present that leads to the need to destroy Ultimecia. Additionally, after Edea inherits Ultimecia's powers in the past, the present-day Squall explains the concept of SeeD to her, thus inspiring the creation of the mercenary organization he grew up in and setting up his own role in the events of the game. The Stable Time Loop is further illustrated by the futile efforts at one of the cast members to Set Right What Once Went Wrong; she ultimately concludes that the past cannot be changed. That said, when time uncompresses after Ultimecia's death, Squall is returned to the "present" and he and everyone else in the main cast (including Edea) get to go on living the rest of their lives otherwise unaffected by the loop.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2: Small-time example in the form of Dajh naming the Chocobo chick "Chocolina". He named her after the quirky merchant of the same name. Where did she get her name from? Dajh, because she is the chick. She just happens to exist everywhere and at every moment in time, because she asked Etro for the ability to help Serah and Noel anywhere (and anywhen) during their journey.
    • Another example is the Proto-Fal'Cie Adam. The artificial Fal'Cie was reprogrammed by someone from the future to become malevolent, murdering its creators and ruling over humanity. Who reprogrammed it? It's the future self who was in turn also reprogrammed by its future self. Eventually the whole event is erased from existence anyway.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: The Alexander primal is an ontological paradox Mind Screw. The goblins summoned it using a robot cat (created by Alexander) and a book an NPC in our time wrote about it, these are sent back in time during one of the boss fights. A failed summoning in the past was the player characters travelling back in time (to drop off the book and the cat). The goblins observed this failed summoning and used it, along with the book and the cat, to summon Alexander. When it's defeated, the character that created the object that summoned Alexander to begin with is sent back in time centuries along with her fiancee, and they become the founders of their tribe (and their own ancestors). The instructions to create the object that summoned Alexander is sent back with them.
  • In Final Fantasy Legend III the party is warned by their Elder that people in the Past are looking for the Talon Units. In said Past, they meet the said Elder and ask where they can find Talon Units. Past Elder also is thinking about naming a town and asks for a name.
  • An odd example from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time: A thousand years before the game starts, a shockwave from the future causes all the crystals to vanish from the world. Larkeicus, the villain of the story, gained immortality from these crystals and also used them to develop crystal-powered technology that he build an entire civilization upon, which naturally fell apart when the crystals vanished. A thousand years later, Larkeicus enacts a plot to build a tower as part of his scheme to prevent the shockwave that caused the crystals to vanish. Turns out the tower he built was the cause of the shockwave in the first place.
• Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting: The series is the Trope Maker and Trope Namer for standard RPG magic classes (White Mage, Black Mage, etc.), and its Job system includes at least one of each class on the list, sometimes combining them into character in games with a smaller cast. Magic crystals are omnipresent, and usually significant to the plot. Elves and orcs are rare, but there's usually a few goblins as early enemies, Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors slime enemies in the form of Flans, and at least one beastfolk race. Actual demons and gods are rare, with the role of religion typically instead going to otherworldly spirits or beasts (most commonly known as Eidolons) and their summoners.
  • Final Fantasy is much more of a Standard Western Fantasy than the later games, fighting D&D specific monsters like liches and mind flayers which became less common later in the series. But it did introduce the standard classes of Fighter, Thief, Monk/Black Belt, White Mage, and Black Mage, and included some then-unusual additions such as a Humongous Mecha as a late-game boss and a Cool Airship.
  • Moogles first appeared as forest-dwelling cute mascot race in III and have served in that capacity in every main entry from V onward.
  • Final Fantasy IV introduces summon magic, and the Land of Summons — powerful magical creatures/spirits which can be magically called to the caster's aid. These appear in every subsequent entry, sometimes by names other than Summon or Eidolon — on several occasions as the Kaiju-sized threat which levels a city or castle.
  • The world of Ivalice, as seen in Ivalice Alliance games (starting with Final Fantasy Tactics, later appearing in a numbered entry in Final Fantasy XII), is perhaps the straightest example, a densely historical setting of war and political intrigue. While Hume (humans) empires control most of the setting, there are many prominent beastfolk characters, from the lizard-like Bangaa and Pig Man Seeq to the furry, masked Garifs and aloof, rabbit-eared Vieras, who live in secluded forest villages.
  • This trope is best demonstrated with Final Fantasy XIV which, in addition to establishing its own complicated lore and setting, is heavily inspired by previous games in the series. For example, part of the backstory is that there are multiple generations of Precursors, as an Eternal Recurrence is that the world gets repeatedly destroyed during multiple eras of prosperity. Further, Hyur (Humans) are the most widespread race, but there are also the Elezen (Elves), Lalafell (Halflings/Dwarves), Rogaedyn (Giants), as well as the cat-like Miqote and Hrothgar and the draconic Au Ra. Most races from older Final Fantasy installments also return, such as the Bangaa and bunny-like Viera. There are also groups of "Beast races" which receive varying degrees of discrimination. There's an evil empire wielding advanced Magitek, a religious kingdom doused with heavy Anime Catholicism and fighting a Forever War against dragons, multiple stand-ins for Japan, an eternal struggle between entities of Light and Dark, and even giant Kaiju and Humongous Mecha. And naturally, the series has most of its usual character classes, such as Paladins, Bards, Monks, White Mages, Black Mages, and of course, Ninja and Samurai.
• Star-Crossed Lovers:
  • In the Final Fantasy VII series, Aerith Gainsborough and Zack Fair are fairly happy at first, as shown in Crisis Core, but then Zack goes on the infamous Nibelheim mission and disappears for years, ultimately dying just outside Midgar before he can reunite with Aerith. She never learns what happened to him and, in the meantime, briefly sees Cloud (who happens to have been Zack's best friend) as a Replacement Goldfish... but ultimately faces her own death at the blade of Sephiroth. They end up Together in Death, as shown in Advent Children.
  • Final Fantasy VIII:
    • Played with when it comes to Laguna and Julia. They have an attraction to each other during Laguna's military days, but it's not known if it ever progressed beyond that. Julia later wrote a song invoking this trope, as she believed Laguna to be killed in action. It is however a slightly straighter example for Laguna and Raine, who were together briefly, but Laguna left to rescue Ellone from Esthar soldiers. While he was gone, Raine died in childbirth.
    • Fanon liked to assign this to Squall and Rinoa (who are the children of Laguna and Julia respectively). A fan theory for years was that Ultimecia the Big Bad of the game was actually a future version of Rinoa, driven mad by Squall's death, due to sorceresses living longer (itself just Fanon). Square ultimately debunked this theory.
  • This could apply to Final Fantasy X's Tidus and Yuna with Tidus being actually a dream of the Fayth. But at the good ending of Final Fantasy X-2, they are happily reunited.
    • Final Fantasy X-2 has Lenne and Shuyin, whose romance was interrupted by the war between Zanarkand and Bevelle. As a summoner, Lenne was put onto the front lines to fight. Shuyin sought to use the machina Vegnagun to essentially commit genocide and stop the war. Although Lenne stopped him, both were killed. They couldn't be Together in Death because of Shuyin's soul being trapped in the Den of Woe.
  • Serah and Snow in Final Fantasy XIII-2. The first game's ending was pretty good for them, then the sequel kicked in and Snow went on a quest to find Lightning. It all goes downhill from there. Except in one of the Paradox Endings, i.e. an alternate, non-official ending, where they go on adventures together.
  • The Warrior of Light and Cosmos from Dissidia Final Fantasy, as well as Cid and his wife, whose likeness they were created in.
• Status Quo Is God:
  • Final Fantasy X has the trope used as a plot point. The world of Spira is always under the constant threat of the gigantic monster Sin, that destroys everything it comes across. Summoners, who are the followers of the Yevon religion, go on pilgrimages so that they can obtain the final aeon and use it to kill Sin while sacrificing their lives in the process. This brings out a period known as the Calm where people can live in peace for a while (the current one is a record ten years) until Sin is reborn and the cycle starts all over again. The cycle has gone on for so long (a thousand years to be exact!) that nobody questions it. When the main character, Tidus, starts questioning everything and the teachings of Yevon, that's when everyone starts to wonder why things never change and they vow to actually change the status quo once and for all. Yevon doesn't like people questioning them and threatening the status quo (Yevon ruled all of Spira for a thousand years aren't going to let that go anytime soon), so they brand the main characters as traitors that are sentenced to death. The party does find a way to defeat Sin once and for all while also exposing the lies that Yevon had upheld for a thousand years.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has a rare in-universe case of this. The heroes and villains have been waging war in the name of their gods for a while now, but every time one side comes within reach of winning, Shinryu resets everything back the way it used to be, starting the war over again. This is because Shinryu made a deal with Cid, aka the Narrator, that he would keep the war going forever in a "Groundhog Day" Loop in order to temper Chaos into the ultimate force of destruction. In this case, God is in fact, keeping the status quo!
    • The game has some fun with this concept. The villains' main plan involves killing Cosmos in such a way that not even Shinryu will be able to resurrect her. And they succeed...sort of.
    • There's also the matter of the prequel actually being an aversion of this. It has several new characters, some pre-existing characters being on different sides, Kuja not being written poorly and thus acting like a completely different character, and the plot having a completely different focus. Everyone forgot this by the next status quo reset, which is why it seems like it's never changed in spite of actually changing.
• Stepford Smiler:
  • Aerith from Final Fantasy VII Remake is heavily implied to know how the events of the original story are "supposed" to go, including her fated death at Sephiroth's hands. She knows her days are probably numbered but she still clings to the idea that fate can be changed. She also maintains a cheerful demeanor and is a bonafide Nice Girl.
  • Nearly the entire population of the world in Final Fantasy X is this way due to the Crapsack World setting. Sin, a whale monster that is size of a city, roams around the world and destroys everything in its path. The populace is lead to believe from the Church of Yevon that if everyone atones for their sins, then the Sin monster will go away for good. Despite people trying to do this for 1000 years, Sin still exists and you can see people trying not to crack as they keep insisting that things will be ok if they keep atoning for their sins, despite the fact that they know things have not changed for so long. You eventually find people that finally break out of their stepford smiler state and wonder if things are just hopeless.
    • Yuna from plays with this trope in a very interesting way: it's made very clear that she deliberately takes on the role of 'heroic savior of Spira' so as to inspire hope in the rest of the world even though she's much more scared and sad than she lets on, but it's not just a simple matter of her putting on a totally fake mask. In the infamous laughing scene, Yuna admits that she tries to smile even when she's feeling sad, and the more she does it the less sad she feels. Sure enough, as she encourages a reluctant Tidus to force himself to laugh with her, they end up actually falling over each other laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing is. So Yuna definitely does pretend to be much more happy, confident, and perfect than she actually feels, but to her it's less about putting on a mask as deliberately turning into that kind of person inside and out. Also defeating Sin would mean her death; to add onto this, Tidus unintentionally teases her with promises of taking her to see his Zanarkand after her pilgrimage is over. Naturally, this causes her a great deal of emotional pain, and the only thing that really keeps her going is knowing that she is Spira's salvation and that she'd die a martyr. She breaks down when she learns that Yevon is corrupt, but later finds the strength to carry on and find another way.
    • Tidus's Idiot Hero persona is mostly just an act to deal with his angst over his Disappeared Dad. And he has a more traditional Stepford Smiler moment later on, after discovering that defeating Yu Yevon will end his own existence.
  • Vanille from Final Fantasy XIII is a perfect Depressed example. Her unnaturally happy and positive attitude was just a way of running away from her past failures. She has an authentic death wish and blames herself for everything that has happened.
    • Hope is implied to be Depressed in Final Fantasy XIII-2. When Serah and Noel first meet him, he mentions that everyone he was friends with disappeared from his life immediately after the fall of Cocoon. Becomes more explicit in Academia 4XX - Hope sends himself on a one-way trip 400 years into the future because his father had died and there was nothing left for him in his own time.
  • Thancred in Final Fantasy XIV seems to be chipper and borderline Chivalrous Pervert, but deep down, he resents himself for not being able to save Minfilia's father from being killed by a Gobbue several years ago and he also blames himself for not doing more to help out his fellow Scions. Thancred's constant self pushing to make himself useful gets him physically exhausted to the point where he is weak enough to be possessed by Lahabrea for a while.
  • Prompto in Final Fantasy XV's affectedly optimistic attitude masks his secret about who and what he really is. He admits to Noctis that he knows he is an endlessly generous and cheerful 'giver' to his friends because he is convinced that he's faking being worth something. No matter how much the others reassure him that they like him for who he is, and even though he believes them, he can't make himself feel it.
  • In World of Final Fantasy, even in the good / true ending, none of the characters are entirely happy about how things have turned out. Reynn and Lann's parents, Lusse and Rorrik are dead and defeating the evil beings that had possessed their spirits only bought a bit of time for their spirit forms to bid good-bye to their children. Furthermore, Reynn and Lann have to leave Grymoire. But Lusse tells Reynn to not be sad and to "turn those corners up," then Reynn later says the same thing to the Champions of Grymoire as she and Lann are about to leave.
• Stock Weapon Names: Names such as Excalibur, Masamune, and the series' own Ultima weapon.
• Stock RPG Spells: Has the core Fire, Ice, Lightning as offensive spells, a whole slew of Elemental Powers, curative magic, status buffs and debuffs, as well as status effects.
• The Stormbringer:
  • Garuda, Lady of the Vortex, brings twisters and tornadoes wherever she goes. In fact, the heroes' struggle to reach her lair at all because of the enormous wind storm that would tear apart any airship short of Cid Garlond's Enterprise. The cutscene preceding her fight also has her descending from the sky as the winds pick up around her before the battle opens in the eye of the storm.
  • The coming of Susano, Lord of the Revel, instantly turns clear blue skies into a rain storm. The rain escalates into a torrential downpour as Susano assails the party with thunderbolts and gushing waves in the final phase of the fight.
• Stripperiffic: Almost every game has an example. Some stand out more than others (particularly X-2), but every game will feature at least one person like this. Final Fantasy, however, is notable for its equal opportunity — even the men are prone to this trope (Kuja can even put most of the girls to shame). There are too many to list in just one page.
  • Both used and averted for the Viera, a race of bunny women. In Final Fantasy XII, they wear pretty revealing clothes, especially Fran. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics A2, only the Elementalist class is revealing while the rest are modest in clothing. The Seeq, a race of pigs, are the most stripperiffic.
  • Summoner/Black Magician Girl Rydia, from Final Fantasy IV, was already skirting the line with her post-adolescence Leotard of Power. Her outfit for the sequel, The After Years, doesn't resemble clothes so much as strategically-applied, gravity-defying green paint. Porom winds up with a Stripperiffic costume of her own, too; both of them actually had their clothing censored for the North American release of the game. Surprisingly, there's also a male example in Golbez of all people.
  • Lampshaded by some of the female guards of Troia on the Nintendo DS version, a nation ruled by women. One of them even gets annoyed at being mistaken for a dancer.
  • In Final Fantasy XI, certain types of armor had a somewhat odd tendency to spontaneously gain Zettai Ryouiki when equipped on female characters, the Mithra getting hit the most by it. However, there are also plenty of armor that looks exactly the same when equipped on both genders, ranging from practical armor and robes, to harnesses and subligar, which is stripperiffic even on the male characters.
  • Mobius Final Fantasy ran into the slightly peculiar situation of having to cover up a male character because playtesters found his outfit 'too sexy'. Originally a sort of skintight leather cloth glued over his chest that showed his sides, thong-lines, enormous tribal back-piece and butt, Wol ended up dressed in a (still very revealing) carapace with a little shoulder-cape.
  • Final Fantasy XIV plays this for laughs with Godbert Manderville, the Ultimate Blacksmith father of Hildebrand Manderville. Nine times out of ten, the man is walking around in his small clothes (re: his underwear and a pair of sandals) and if he's wearing clothes anywhere else, the man'll have it shed sooner or later, usually before he opens up a massive can of whup-ass.
• Studded Shell: The Adamatoise type enemies have sharp spikes on their turtle shells. Later, more animated versions will even tuck themselves inside their shells and attack by spinning at the heroes.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: Probably every Final Fantasy has at least one stupid trap the player must fall into.
  • Final Fantasy has an elf king living in a decrepit castle in the middle of nowhere, who supposedly dropped his crown in a dungeon. Despite the party having - presumably - heard about how a random dark elf, Astos, stole Matoya's crystal ball, they go through the dungeon and give the elf the crown. Guess who the elf was. Making things worse, the dungeon you have to go through to get the crown is (in the original game) more difficult than everything that came before.
  • Final Fantasy II has a point in the story where you return to your base and are told by just about every single person in the base that the queen has been acting very strangely, some speculating that she might have lost her mind after the death of the king. She then invites the lead protagonist to her bedroom specifically excluding the rest of his party. Considering that at worst, this is some kind of trap by the villains influencing the queen in some manner, and at BEST trying to sleep with a clearly very emotionally unstable person, you are still given no option but to follow her into the bedroom hop into bed and make no effort to resist at all. The truth is that the queen was replaced with a monster and the ONLY thing that saved the hero from getting stabbed in the back was that one of your party members was spying on you for fun.
  • Final Fantasy IV:
    • There's a point where the villains demands the last of the four crystals in exchange for the life of the protagonist's love interest. Instead of refusing or at the very least switching the real crystal out for a fake one like any other smart person would, our brainless heroes decide that the only option is to trade the world away for the life of one person. Even in this regard they nearly fail, as they hand over the crystal before they get their hostage back or even see that she's safe. In order to get her, they have to fight their way through a large dungeon and still barely manage to save her in time before she's executed.
    • Twice in the face of decisive battles, the party decides, "Let's make the women Stay in the Kitchen!" Yes, they're the game's best spellcasters and the only reason they have made it this far. The men decide big boss battles are exactly where not to bring the heal spells and earth-shattering summons. Even worse, the first time they do this they get their asses handed to them and still get one of the girls abducted, but learn absolutely nothing from it. Admittedly, the first party split is suggested by the King of Fabul, and he has a good reason (both women have healing magic and the infirmary will need help.)
  • In Final Fantasy V, right after arriving in the second world, there is a scene where a monster kidnaps Lenna and Faris, and Bartz must fight it one-on-one so that he can be dragged off to the villain's hideout. Should he lose, he goes straight there, but if he wins, you'll be taken back to the area you were in, with a treasure chest that wasn't there before. It's quite obviously a trap (one containing sleeping gas, to be specific), but since Bartz can't leave the area and there's no other way to advance the story...
  • Final Fantasy VI has the part where the emperor pretends to be regretful for what he's done and to lock Kefka away, while commanding you to go make peace with the Espers. There is no reason for your characters to believe this guy who's been a villain the whole game, but every attempt to assign blame or reject him has a "But Thou Must" that sets you up for the sudden but inevitable betrayal. To add insult to injury, the entire *nation* is in on the conspiracy, despite being decimated.
  • In Final Fantasy X-2, you watch a sphere in which the two people doing terrible, horrible, very bad, no good things are instantly recognisable by their distinctive voices, but the characters Fail A Spot Check and decide to trust these people.
  • In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, you have to help Larkeicus in return for his providing you with medicine... despite the main character having a recurring dream featuring him as an obviously evil figure since well before they met him. Unsurprisingly, this results in him doing evil things and everything going wrong. Justified since the plot centers around a Stable Time Loop; you are predestined to help Larkeicus, because every part of the main character's life up until this point is a direct consequence of Larkeicus's plot. Failure to help him would beget a Grandfather Paradox. As the hero, you receive a small crystal for your 16th birthday. You pull it out frequently. What happens when you do? An innocent little female friend of yours is cursed by a mysterious illness with no apparent cure, the evil mastermind you defeated mere seconds ago is resurrected and vows to annihilate you, and an ancient peaceful immortal is transformed into a gigantic insane electric flying bird monster that tries to kill you. Thanks for the gift, mom!
• Stupid Sacrifice:
  • Practically all of the sacrifice in Final Fantasy IV.
    • Palom and Porom turn themselves into statues hold a pair of advancing walls of doom in place. In the party, however, was a mighty sage who probably could have brought the castle down around them if he had thought of doing so. This mostly served as a gimmick to remove the characters from the party, as the number would otherwise have exceeded the Arbitrary Headcount Limit. There's also the fact that Porom usually knows Teleport by the time this occurs, and there was absolutely no given reason for this slightly more logical way to escape not to work.
    • Speaking of Tellah, the pointlessness of his own sacrifice was part of the plot — if he'd waited for everyone to wear Golbez down before using his Combined Energy Attack, his sacrifice might have done a bit more than knock the Big Bad back (though it did free Kain from his control and might have also shaken Zemus' control of Golbez long enough for the latter to stop himself from killing his own brother. After all, anger makes you stupid and reckless.
    • All of the game's fake-out deaths are like this. Cid did not need to jump off the ship with a bomb — he's more than capable of building advanced remote controls, so it's hard to believe he didn't have a remote-controlled detonator. Even assuming he didn't, jumping with the bomb would not alter its speed any. And going back a few minutes earlier, if all Yang did to stop the cannon was blow up the guns...why not just walk out of the room with everyone else and let Rydia set it on fire or use one of her summons?! There was no particular reason the sequence required him to stand in the room and die.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus proves guilty of this on one occasion. When Implacable Man Azul is attacking the party, Shalua holds the hydraulic door open for Vincent and Shelke to escape through. This wouldn't be so bad... except that Shelke had literally just finished demonstrating her ability to paralyze Azul indefinitely with a barrier materia. Even disregarding this, there was no need whatsoever for Shalua to stay behind to hold the door open, considering that it had an adjacent button to open it. Was it really too much trouble to just push the button again and open the door a second time?
    • Parodied in this Let's Play
  • Explicitly invoked in Mobius Final Fantasy. Mog throwing himself at the Lich only to be mortally wounded, and admitting to doing so just because it was in the prophecy ends up shaking Wol's resolve in a prophecy that drives people to throw away their lives meaninglessly.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Usually one of the three female members of the party tends to have this.
  • Celes from Final Fantasy VI, due to her Broken Bird status and the fact that she is initially cold and pessimistic before being defrosted by Locke. After the halfway point of the game, Celes becomes much more friendly towards the rest of the party and is altogether more optimistic and hopeful, to the point where she eventually becomes their unifying force.
  • Cloud in Final Fantasy VII is flamboyantly cool, never failing to point out how little he cares about things, crack a cruel, deadpan joke or show off for attention. When he lets the act drop he's chivalrous, caring, sensitive, and displays a charming, eccentric sense of humor.
  • In the Final Fantasy VII prequel Crisis Core, pre-insanity Sephiroth is shown to be aloof, cool, and professional...but also capable of displaying concern (about his friends Genesis and Angeal), empathy (allowing Zack to return to Midgar to check on Aerith), and humor (to the point of cracking a wry joke or two).
    • Vincent. He speaks little and appears cold and uncaring at first. As the party gets to know him, he gradually shows a kind, helpful, and protective nature.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, Squall Leonhart is cold with everyone besides Rinoa, to whom he is a Defrosting Ice King.
  • Lulu in Final Fantasy X, but tends to be more sardonic in nature.
  • Fran in Final Fantasy XII, but more amiable than usual. She's just very quiet.
  • Lightning in Final Fantasy XIII: an Establishing Character Moment in the introduction has her staring at a dandelion-like piece of fluff with her regular stoic expression. However, when she catches it her touch is gentle enough to keep it perfectly intact until a gust of wind blows to pieces out of her hands.
    • Fang could also qualify. She's aloof, cold, and snarky to everyone except Vanille. In her own words "I'll tear down the sky to save her."
• Summon Magic: Creatures that a particular class of character can invoke, and which represent most of the combat power for that character.
• Super-Soldier:
  • The Empire in Final Fantasy VI used drained magical power both to create magic-wielding super-soldiers (called Magitek Knights in the translation, but simply madoushi — mages — in the original) and actual Magitek. Celes is an example of when it goes right, but Kefka is what happens when it goes horribly, horribly wrong.
    • It's even worse with Kefka than one initially thought, as he was the first of the Magitek Knights.
  • Final Fantasy VII (and its associated Compilation works including Crisis Core) include numerous SuperSoldiers, many of which were created using Mako energy, Jenova cells, a combination of both, and/or other experiments, to produce superhuman fighters with greatly improved combat abilities, including (but certainty not limited to) enhanced physical strength and speed. SOLDIERs, members of Shinra's elite military unit, are carefully selected humans treated with Mako energy and Jenova cells to produce superhuman combatants. Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal, while generally called SOLDIERs First Class, are actually prototypes for competing Shinra research projects directed to infusing humans with Jenova's genes.
    • Sephiroth was created by directly infusing a developing fetus with Jenova cells (Project S, headed by Hojo).
    • Unlike Sephiroth, Angeal was indirectly exposed to Jenova cells because his mother Gillian was the one injected with Jenova cells before his birth, while Genesis was exposed to Jenova cells even more indirectly with his mother being treated with cells harvested from Gillian (Project G, headed by Hojo's rival Hollander).
    • They also had radically different results. Sephiroth was by far the strongest of the three. Eventually, he gained the ability to control the Jenova Cells perfectly... in exchange for losing all his humanity. Angeal received a weaker power boost but inherited Jenova's ability to infuse other organisms with his cells to give them some of his power and vice versa. Genesis was a Flawed Prototype who shared Angeal's abilities but also suffered from degradation (as did his copies) — and boy, does these cause problems.
    • Zack Fair, probably the strongest of the officially and 'conventionally' produced (i.e., non-prototype) SOLDIERs.
    • Cloud Strife, while never an actual member of SOLDIER, has all the physical enhancements of a SOLDIER, thanks to Hojo's sadistic experimentation after the Nibelheim Incident.
    • Vincent Valentine, an ex-Turk who becomes a shapeshifter with superhuman physical abilities thanks to Hojo's and Lucrecia Crescent's experiments.
    • From Dirge of Cerberus, Weiss, Nero, Rosso, Azul, Shelke, and the other members of Deepground, who underwent SOLDIER-type treatments as well as special individualized experimentation to develop unique powers. It was said they used Genesis as the basis since his cells gained the ability to use Mako similar to Jenova, but without the degradation, loss of sanity (Well, okay, he did briefly lose his sanity, but for different reasons), and having a desire to smash a meteor into the planet to eat it for breakfast.
  • Final Fantasy VIII's SeeDs, who are superhumanly boosted, cast powerful magic, and able to summon deific beings to smite their enemies. These guys are apparently so badass that nine of them (in three-man teams) are expected to hold off an entire invading army, complete with artillery and killer walking robots. Twelve more candidates to become SeeDs are expected to assault and clear out an entire city of enemy soldiers.
    • Their single greatest advantage is actually the Guardian Forces, which allow, among other things, the casting of magic (which is insinuated as artificial and weak when used by anyone other than a Sorceress), the collection of magic, and the use of magic to increase abilities from well above average to omni-powerful. No other group specializes in junctioning magic, which is why SeeDs are so devastating. This makes a small, specialized group more than a match for most smaller armies, as long as they have specific objectives. The GF forces are capable of granting characters permanent stat boosts. If you assume the normal stat growth is "average" human stats, then it is the possible endgame for SeeDs to be 3-5 times stronger, faster, etc. using GF forces.
  • A slightly less traditional form of the Super Soldier would be the black mages from Final Fantasy IX.
    • Both Zidane and Kuja would fit better as Super Soldiers in this game, but it was only because unlike the rest of the Genomes, they were given souls. Makes you think what would happen if the other Genomes had gotten their souls too...
  • The yin to Cloud's yang, Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. She can fly (well, actually, manipulate gravity) while machine-gunning hordes of Mooks, and most amazingly do it all while protecting her modesty. And all that is before she gets her l'Cie powers.
    • Lightning was actually more of a Mook herself, roughly equivalent to a police sergeant, so it can be inferred that the stuff she had access to was probably the standard issue.
    • It is revealed through the story that millions of l'Cie were created and trained to fight the ancient War of Transgression in secret bunkers. Eight of them were sufficient enough to bring down a planet, so only God knows what a full force was capable of.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Here are the list of it.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: The series kinda has this, since you can use tents at save points, and there is usually a save point right before each boss. This practice started with Final Fantasy IV, however. Programming limitations kept save points from being used in the NES games, and to this day, Final Fantasy III is the only game whose remakes still don't let you save right before a boss. Screw up or find an unwinnable battle in the Dark World? Enjoy climbing the Syrcus Tower from the ground floor again!
  • The beginning of the first Temple of Doom in Final Fantasy XII. When you first enter the area, you have the option to save (in a menu prompt, not a normal Save Point) and are fully healed automatically before having to fight a flying Mini-Boss that can be difficult without the proper equipment.
  • Save points in Final Fantasy games X through XII also heal and regenerate MP. It gets to the point where you start dreading the image of a save point deep within a dungeon.
  • Especially in Final Fantasy XII when you encounter Crystalbugs, which look like save points...
  • There is one part of Final Fantasy X (Bevelle) where you run down a fairly short linear corridor with save points at both ends, which features random encounters that give tons of AP and good items. Especially notable given that Yuna has been missing for a while, and is consequently missing a lot of levels relative to the rest of the party. A hint, perhaps. There is, of course, a That One Boss at the other end. (On the other hand, the game is pretty clear that you're looking at a boss battle; it's just the difficulty that's the surprise.)
    • And then we have the Omega Dungeon, who lacks the generosity. A Save Sphere at the start, have fun fighting yourself through powerful fiends, including the horrible Great Malboro who always starts with a ambush and then goes to inflict a variety of Status effects on your party.
    • Generally, Final Fantasy X gives the player several save points with not-so-large space in between. Not only the case in Bevelle, though that one is by far the worst offender. On the Thunder Plains, in one version, there's even a Save Sphere right outside the Travel Agency and one right inside it. And "right outside" and "right inside" means what it sounds like. You only need to walk 5 steps at most from you enter, until you reach the sphere. The outdoor one is right adjacent to the door, so it almost even blocks it.
    • When you arrive in Sanubia Desert, your party is split up. As you collect each member again, you may notice that the game is giving out a lot of healing items (of note are Al Bhed Potions, which heal statuses and restore 1000 HP to everyone; you'll reach the maximum 99 very fast if you do any sort of exploring). You may also notice that your only dedicated healer, Yuna, is the last person you need to find (after the only person who can actually use the Al Bhed Potions, Rikku). Guess who you won't be seeing for a long time...
  • One interesting example in Final Fantasy VII involves a point immediately after leaving Nibelheim. Traveling through an eerie passage, you get a savepoint at the very beginning of a largish room with a snakelike pathway, very innocuous, as many winding paths are common in areas throughout the game. In fact, there's a T-shaped intersection immediately after the save point. Head right, a chest and dead end. Head left, what some players consider That One Boss, Materia Keeper.
    • Another interesting example (in fact, a subversion) in this opus is the infamous "Yuffie savepoint". Upon defeat Yuffie (a random encounter in a forest), you will be brought to a screen with her, and taking the right choices in the dialog tree when you speak with her will make her join you. Since it's very easy to get answers wrong in the dialog tree, a savepoint is generously offered on the screen before talking to her. The subversion? Taking the save point requires you to turn your back on her, which let her assault you, steal your money and flee. Damn ninja!
    • After Yuffie steals the party's materia, the player would expect all the random encounters to be a nightmare since everyone is now crippled with stat changes and no abilities other than items and attack. However, the random encounters drop powerful items like X-Potions (full healing), Phoenix Downs (revive), and powerful attack items as compensation for a severely disadvantaged party.
    • In addition, Wutai side quest is supposed to be done just after Temple of the Ancients. Incidentally, weapons you find as treasures in aforementioned temple all lack materia slots but compensate with almost double attack power than their contemporaries. They will come useful soon enough.
  • In Final Fantasy IX, first had a healing spring before the first boss battle in the Evil Forest. Later, right before the first Black Waltz, there's a split path. On the left is a Moogle, which can save and heal you, and on the right is the cutscene for the boss. The problem is this: you need Vivi to free the Moogle from the block of Ice it's trapped in, but if you went right and then went back, Zidane's alone and Vivi can't help him. It doesn't help that the boss has to be fought with just Zidane, so if you went right first, Good Luck!
  • Final Fantasy XV: The game's Fire, Ice, Lightning magic, Elemancy, is obtained by gathering energy from elemental deposits scattered around the world; outdoors, these take the form of odd spikes surrounded by their corresponding element, while indoors they're more like gas canisters filled with magic. Elemancy is an expendable, highly damaging tool, so elemental deposits are generally found only near havens (one of each deposit). Thus, finding an elemental deposit elsewhere tends to be this trope.
    • At the Disc of Cauthess, you'll find a surprising number of Fire deposits. Besides being thematic (the place is hot enough to avert Convection Shmonvection), the last maneuver for the boss at the end involves dealing a large amount of damage in a brief time; it's perfectly possible to meet the requirement with Noctis' weapons (and technically the finisher happens nevertheless), but if you're doing a Low-Level Run the provided Elemancy makes it much easier.
    • Most large dungeons have at least one of each deposit scattered around the dungeon. Not all of the optional dungeons have bosses; if you find them all close to each other, prepare for a difficult boss fight.^* Fodina Caestino has two of each, but one set is around the haven and the others have very little energy; it's mostly Foreshadowing for the new Technique that Ignis gets at the end.
    • While hunting Deadeye the Behemoth, a single, isolated Fire deposit is found after an Optional Stealth segment. There are also a bunch of explosive barrels scattered around the boss fight down the next drop; hit one with a Fire spell while Deadeye is near for massive damage and bonus AP.^* This is also a Development Gag; Deadeye was the boss of the Episode Duscae demo, where you got a proper tactical takedown and Prompto shot a gas canister for similar effect.
    • During Chapter 13, in Zegnautus Keep, you'll find a room with four of each type deposit, all gathered together. There are also two vending machines, one for weapons and one for healing items. Down the elevator at the end of the following hallway, enter That One Boss Ravus daemonified, who cuts your allies down easily, crosses the battlefield in an instant if you try to get distance, and has a ridiculous amount of HP for a mandatory boss.
  • Final Fantasy Type-0: the second playthrough introduces Code Crimson missions, which are a prime example of Checkpoint Starvation. There is only one relic terminal accessible during Code Crimson; the rest of the mission leading up to it is a Stealth-Based Mission, and the area after it is a boss fight during which you are under sniper fire.
• Symbol Swearing:
  • In Final Fantasy VI a man in the town Narshe says "Narshe is a neutral city. We want no war here. But that #@%!* empire won't listen."
  • This is one of the things that a lot of people remember Final Fantasy VII for. Usually, it's Cid unleashing the grawlixes, but Barret was also prone (and Cloud uses it in one instance). In one case (when confronting Don Corneo in Wutai), Barret announces a string of symbols longer than any actual swear words. This was not a game that was otherwise entirely clean - the word 'shit' is used several times uncensored. Although in the PC version, it's censored this way as well.

T

• Tagalong Kid:
  • Vaan in Final Fantasy XII — a bit unusual in that he's the viewpoint character. Gameplay-wise (and keeping in mind that there's a large amount of Gameplay and Story Integration) Vaan is out and out the best character on the team, assuming you use him at all. This would seem to imply that Vaan is a monster killing machine the team, fortunately, has lying around.
    • Later games show Vaan has gone into business as a god-like thief and have him be a skilled enough fighter to hold off a Physical God for a long time. So, the FFXII team probably didn't know what they had on their hands. As incidental as Vaan's inclusion on the team maybe, he's probably the single most powerful weapon at their disposal, if not instrumental to their success.
    • Vaan can be best described as an "Ace-in-training". You know how in fiction, really skilled Rouge-type or heroic type characters come from dirt-poor backgrounds? Well, that's Vaan. In Final Fantasy XII he's still very young, but clearly has a lot of potentials, while Revenant Wings shows us how he went from Street Brat to the swashbuckler we see in later games.
    • Penelo went through a similar change. She played even less of a role in Final Fantasy XII than Vaan did and her only purpose for tagging along was to make sure Vaan was staying out of trouble since he was the only family she had left. Her role was expanded upon in the spinoffs, but she's still mostly portrayed as Vaan's partner who makes sure he doesn't cause too much trouble.
  • Hope in Final Fantasy XIII is a civilian that was unlucky enough to be caught up in the Purge. He stubbornly follows Lightning for the bulk of the game. Unlike some kids, he's incredibly useful, because he has the highest magic stat in the game.
• Take My Hand!:
  • At the end of Final Fantasy VI, as the heroes escape from Kefka's crumbling headquarters, Celes drops Locke's bandana, an item of tremendous sentimental value to her. She hurries back to retrieve it, and as she does, the ground gives way underneath her. Locke himself (or Setzer, if you didn't re-recruit Locke in the game's second half) rushes to her rescue.
  • In the ending of Final Fantasy VII, Cloud has a vision in which he's taking Aerith's hand, but the scene then shifts back to reality and he sees Tifa reaching out for him, only for the ledge beneath her to give way and for him to have to catch her and grab onto the platform.
  • Happens several times in Crisis Core: after Angeal saves Zack from a monster in Wutai when the latter gets reckless, then Cloud reaches out to Zack as he goes to confront the Shinra army outside of Midgar, and at the very end, when Zack dies and takes the hand of Angeal's spirit as he returns to the Lifestream.
  • Final Fantasy X features a variation: when the S.S. Liki is attacked by Sin en route to Kilika, Tidus grabs a nearby rope-rail with one hand, and Yuna's hand with the other... only for her to slip, land hard on a cannon/harpoon gun and get saved by Kimahri a second later.
  • Right at the beginning of Final Fantasy X-2, Yuna falls off a cliff and is miraculously caught by Rikku and Paine. They're unable to pull her up at first, and thus spend a few moments struggling to hold onto her while complaining to their overly chatty Mission Control to shut up and petulantly pronouncing the predicament an especially "disasteriffic" one before finally managing to pull her up and fill in Brother on what was happening.
  • Happened in a flashback in Final Fantasy XIII when Serah was taken prisoner by the Pulse fal'Cie and Snow was reaching out to save her... and failed.
    • Another, more successful attempt, is done at the end of the game between the main party. Fang and Vanille, however, are unreachable and perform a Heroic Sacrifice becoming part of the crystal pillar holding up Cocoon.
• Take That!: A recurring enemy is the malboro, which attacks with breath awful enough to inflict almost every ailment on its target.
• Tears of Joy:
  • Final Fantasy IX: Garnet in the ending, upon being reunited with Zidane, who she believed to be dead for a year. Combined with Anger Born of Worry and The Glomp too.
  • Yuna cries these at the end of Final Fantasy X-2 if you get the good ending and she is reunited with Tidus.
• Tech Points: Usually called "AP", and often relates to a quirky new experience and character advancement system in each game.
• Thematic Series: One of the most notable game examples. None of the numbered titles in the series are related to any of the others except by series-wide hallmarks, like the ATB battle system, Chocobos, Moogles, and the names of spells. Only four^note five, if you count Legend of the Crystal, an OVA set after Final Fantasy V of them have sequels taking place in the same continuity as the original game. There are occasionally hints that one world is related to another, like Final Fantasy X-2 hinting that it's related to Final Fantasy VII and the XIII trilogy having the same mythology as Final Fantasy Type-0.
• Theme Naming: A recent trend in Final Fantasy games, mainly ones written by Nojima, is having the protagonists' names related to weather or the sky, Like Lightning or Cloud. Chances are that, if you have a Dragoon in a Final Fantasy game, a weapon or the character will have the name Highwind. The most famous examples are Kain Highwind and Cid Highwind.
• Those Two Guys: Biggs and Wedge, who appear in various guises in almost all of the games from VI onward (and who were retconned into IV by The After Years), and die horribly about half the time.
• The Three Faces of Adam:
  • Final Fantasy IV: Cecil and Pallom (Lord), Kain and Edge (Hunter), Yang and Tellah (Prophet)
  • Just like the three female l'Cie in Final Fantasy XIII fit into The Three Faces of Eve pattern, the three males fit here: Hope is the Hunter, doggedly pursuing Snow to exact revenge throughout half the game; Snow is the Lord, commanding NORA early on and then serving as the pillar of motivation for other l'Cie (his Signature Move is even called "Sovereign Fist"); and Sazh is the Prophet, a lone voice of reason who only wants to save his son and live out his life in peace. Their ages also all fit.
• The Three Faces of Eve: The games, in general, have a pattern to their three playable females (and there are always three; see the Three Females Rule in the Grand List) are almost always represented as an Innocent Princess type, a Tough but Sexy Type, and a Perky Girl type. Occasionally this overlaps with the faces of Eve archetypes, although often times the Tough but Sexy character is not a seductress but more passively sexy.
  • Final Fantasy IV does a similar trick to the later VII in that it reverses the appearance and character of two of the girls. Rosa is pure Wife/Innocent Princess whose main desire is to be helpful, and who marries Cecil at the end. But Rydia looks sexy but is in personality the Perky Girl; Porom is a child, but hits people to keep them in line and is extremely clever and dangerous (being a brilliant mage and a spy).
  • Final Fantasy V:
    • Lenna, the wife/innocent princess. Her main plots are about her family, specifically her quest to rescue her father, her backstory about her mother, and her connection to drakes, for which she will harm herself to any extent to protect.
    • Faris, the seductress/tough but sexy girl. She's a pirate who is shown as being sexually irresistible even when dressed as a man and passing, with most of her crew having crushes on her. She also tries to kidnap the princess for ransom money and climbs up rope bridges with her teeth.
    • Krile is the child, fourteen and has supernatural sensitivity coming from her innocence. However, she's very much not perky, with the end of the game revealing her to be actively suicidal once her desire for revenge isn't sustaining her. (She does get one comic setpiece where she gets into a slap-fight with Bartz, though.)
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • Terra is the wife/innocent princess type - despite being the least stable of the three, she's the sweetest and most compassionate, and pretty level-headed regarding her role in the story. No wonder her name means "earth".
    • Celes is the seductress/tough but sexy type - she's a Tsundere in her romance with Locke, and she's also the tough one, being a war general.
    • Relm is the child/perky type - Strago didn't even want her to be involved in any combat at first because of this. She's precocious and optimistic.
  • Final Fantasy VII has an interesting version of this. For starters, one of the three women is an Optional Party Member, and secondly, the two who weren't looked like they played one role, but in fact, were the opposite:
    • Tifa, who looks the part of the seductress, is in fact most reasonable and sensitive — also the secret-keeper of the group (her last name, Lockheart foreshadows this).
    • Aerith, who looks the part of the demure wife, is in fact flirty, street-wise, and the most assertive in her sexuality.
    • Yuffie (the optional one) both looks and acts like the child and is naïve and idealistic (if not particularly honest or trustworthy).
  • Final Fantasy VIII uses these archetypes, but much more loosely than anything before (and most after), suiting the game's approach of using more psychologically realistic characters:
    • Rinoa is the wife and introduced with the nickname 'Princess'. Unlike the typical portrayal, she's quite bratty and selfish, but like the typical portrayal, she has pure, supernatural powers, and tries hard to bring out the main character's better nature (and even succeeds, sometimes).
    • Quistis is the seductress. She is experienced and in a position of authority, has a highly mature appearance compared to the other characters, flirts with the main character, and fights using a whip. Her apparent maturity is Deconstructed in that she was a prodigy who had achieved a high rank at 15, and she ends up sent back to her previous rank very early in the game due to her atrocious social and emotional skills, which repeatedly hobble her during the game.
    • Selphie is the child, her clearly high intelligence doing little to dampen her relentless enthusiasm and short attention span. Unlike the typical example, she's something of a Deadpan Snarker Nightmare Fetishist
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • Yuna is in the wife role, being unerringly calm and lives to helps others, self-sacrificing, soft-spoken, and graceful.
    • Lulu is in the seductress role, most obviously in how she dresses, the tone she uses when she speaks, and how she holds herself and moves around in her battle animations.
    • Rikku is in the child role, the fact that she is the youngest is exaggerated by her consistently upbeat personality, her sweet but shortsighted convictions, and her occasional ditziness.
  • Final Fantasy XIII has this in its three female party members.
    • Lightning (believe it or not) plays the part of the wife. She's the most motherly and caring of the group — particularly towards Hope and (much later) Snow. She is also said to have acted this way around Serah.
    • Fang plays the role of the seductress; she is the most flirty and provocative of the group, and is quite Hot-Blooded at times. Interestingly, these aspects of her personality originally belonged to Lightning (with Serah as the seventh party member and playing the part of the wife), but when Fang was made a woman, they were given to her instead.
    • Vanille is usually very bubbly and other characters will comment (or complain) about her childishness. Vanille is actually putting a lot of that behavior up as a facade to hide her guilt, but genuinely is like this otherwise.
  • Final Fantasy XV is more complicated; it has an all-male main cast where The Hero's three friends fill these archetypes - Prompto is childish and hyper, Ignis is domestic and nurturing, and Gladio is mean and sexy, with a hyper-gendered appearance and revealing outfit. Its prominent female side characters fold into this archetype too - Cindy and Iris are perky and childish, Aranea and Gentiana are seductive, experienced, and dangerous, and Luna is Incorruptible Pure Pureness and so much a 'wife' that she is literally the hero's fiancée.
• Thunder Hammer: Thor's Hammer is a recurring weapon throughout the series. It is often used to cast lightning magic or deliver lightning-charged strikes.
• Tiered by Name: The series in general does this for the spells: Fire -> Fira -> Firaga -> Firaja.
• To Be Lawful or Good: Here are the examples of characters forced to break from "lawful", or whose status as such is called into question.
  • Cecil has a crisis of conscience at the beginning of Final Fantasy IV based around this. He knows that what his king orders him to do is wrong, but can't yet bring himself to disobey the man that he swore his allegiance as a Dark Knight to. However, Cecil makes his decision to turn from a Lawful non-Good character to Lawful/Neutral Good after he and his longtime friend, Kain, are used by the King of Baron to massacre an entire village of innocent summoners. He then spends the next section of the game atoning for the various sins he committed while under his king's orders and ultimately earning his redemption by being transformed into a Paladin: an exemplar of the side of good. It's even more difficult for Cecil since the king was also a father figure to him. Good thing the one who gave him those awful orders wasn't the real king who was Dead All Along.
  • Steiner and Beatrix both have to deal with this in Final Fantasy IX when they turn against Queen Brahne after they realize her lust for power has driven her mad. Steiner in particular is extremely conflicted about this. It takes Steiner much longer to realize the truth compared to Beatrix and it isn't until Steiner actually witnesses Brahne's lackeys, Zorn and Thorn, rip Garnet's Summon Magic out of her soul and learning that Brahne wanted Garnet dead and had her soldiers attack Beatrix (someone he had feelings for) for her betrayal that Steiner finally decides to go against the Queen and fight to protect the people he cares about.
• Together in Death:
  • Tellah from Final Fantasy IV is reunited with his daughter Anna after he cast a deathly spell called "Meteor" to kill Golbez for revenge.
  • Aerith reunites with Zack in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
    • Zack also reunited with his mentor Angeal from Crisis Core. Who Zack was forced to kill Angeal after he became monster.
  • Lenne and Shuyin from Final Fantasy X-2. Both were shot and died by each other's side. Due to an odd set of circumstances, their spirits did not end up together... at least, not until Yuna reunites them.
  • In Final Fantasy XV, Lunafreya dies midway into the story, while Noctis sacrifices his life in the end to thwart her killer, Ardyn Izunia's plans. The Stinger reveals that their souls have reunited in the afterlife, and they fall asleep in each other's arms to seal their eternal love.
    • Ignis tries to invoke this between himself and Noctis, telling him of his plan to die alongside him once Noctis completes his sacrifice. Ultimately averted, as Noctis is able to talk him down into continuing to live on for his sake.
• Token Good Teammate:
  • General Leo in Final Fantasy VI is also a known case of this. In fact, the game likes to lampshade the fact that the only reason why Leo is considered an antagonist is that he works with the Empire.
  • Reeve in Final Fantasy VII, Shinra's head of Urban Development, seems to be the only person on Shinra's board of directors with a conscience or sense of ethics. He eventually defects to AVALANCHE as a Double Agent.
  • Among the Primals in Final Fantasy XIV, there is Ramuh. Among the likes of Ifrit (who intends to brainwash everyone into his thrall) or Garuda (who wants to destroy everything except her followers), Ramuh is at worst territorial. He only wants to be summoned by his Sylph followers in case their forest home is in grave danger to protect it. Although he does believe Humans Are the Real Monsters and is willing to bring down his judgment on them.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy:
    • Jecht is good, or at least neutral, despite being a member of the Warriors of Chaos, all composed of Final Fantasy villains. Every other villain is out to either Take Over the World, or destroy it - Jecht is just a rather lousy dad who wants to fetch his kid and go home. The reason he's siding with the villains is that Emperor Palamecia manipulated him into thinking that their victory would let him rejoin his son, Tidus. It's also revealed in the prequel that he was actually on Cosmos' side in at least the previous cycle. He probably would have remained there for the 13th cycle as well, had it not been for the Emperor's machinations.^note Tidus, on Chaos' side at the time, sacrificed himself to save Yuna from one of the Emperor's attacks, prompting Jecht to transfer his life energy over to him. The Emperor, noticing Jecht's crystal (which Cosmos had provided to all of her warriors), got an idea to use them in the next cycle of conflict. From there, he kidnapped Jecht and had Chaos revive him as one of his own warriors for the following cycle. Golbez, on the other hand, is a good guy posing as a villain.
    • To a lesser extent, Judge Magister Gabranth. In the 13th cycle, he's nothing more than a disgruntled jailer who serves as a warden for those no longer used in the conflict. Several of the lines are somber and hint that he wants nothing more than penance for his past transgressions, while most of the other Chaos warriors mock him for his more admirable qualities. Compare this to Shantotto, who serves as Team Cosmos' Token Evil Teammate (to the point that most of the villains revere her). Both of these are somewhat subverted in the prequel Duodecim, as the two are actually affiliated with their respective deities this time around (however, Gabranth just seems to be doing his job and seems to be confronting Cosmos simply to end the war—thus lacking an ulterior motive unlike most of the others, while Shantotto is still a fair bit malicious, even towards her ally Prishe).
    • Also, Kuja is a bit of a tragic case. He's actively working with the heroes Bartz, Zidane, and Squall, up until Kefka intervenes. He's even responsible for Cloud's Heel–Face Turn and Terra's too. After he's defeated by Lightning, Kefka implants false memories to ensure his full-on villainy in the Thirteenth Cycle.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl:
  • Final Fantasy V has Lenna and Faris. The former is a well-educated, selfless princess while the latter is a rough, violent pirate captain who passes herself off as a man (although her crew is well aware of her gender and keep quiet to avoid pissing her off.) Even the Job System acknowledges the dichotomy, as Lenna's outfits are stereotypically feminine while, with the sole exception of the Dancer class, Faris' would be equally appropriate on a man. Meanwhile, the third female on the team, Krile, is more of a child than anything. Furthermore, Lenna and Faris are sisters. Faris is the elder.
  • Final Fantasy VI has Terra (Girly-Girl) and Celes (Tomboy).
  • Final Fantasy VII, Aerith and Tifa, in an interesting inversion; the White Magician Girl in the pink dress is the boisterous one, and the Cute Bruiser in the cropped shirt is secretive and nervous. In later installments of the FFVII Compilation not involving Aerith, because she's dead, Tifa's calmer and more motherly personality makes her the Girly Girl to hyper ninja Yuffie's more tomboyish ways. Funny enough, Aerith herself posthumously got a healthy dose of Chickification due to her Incorruptible Pure Pureness being played up; her old sassy personality made way for a more demure one, which would have made her the Girly Girl to Tifa in the end; otherwise, both Aerith and Tifa now have the exact same girly personality, with Tifa being a tomboy only by virtue of her physical appearance and fighting style.
    • Final Fantasy VII Remake brought this dynamic back to a certain extent mainly due to their personalities now being more accurate to the original game, with Tifa being more demure while Aerith finally regained her old feisty tomboy attitude back.
  • Final Fantasy VIII the two trained mercenaries Quistis and Selphie against the sorceresses Edea and later Rinoa. Selphie is borderline enough to qualify as Tomboy with a Girly Streak, evoking this contrast with Quistis.
  • Final Fantasy IX has Little Miss Badass eidolon summoner Eiko and Lady of War Freya. Garnet/Dagger plays with the two types. She's an elegant princess and white mage, but is also an eidolon summoner and shows tomboy traits when trying to blend in as a commoner. At one point, a villager sees her picking up an oglop bug and tells her that girls are usually afraid of them, so she pretends to freak out over it.
  • Final Fantasy X-2 has the Tomboyish Paine and the maternal and empathic Yuna. Rikku the third female protagonist, is a combination of the two.
  • Final Fantasy XII is similar as it features three females. Fran is a Proud Warrior Race Girl and sky-pirate while Penelo is The Heart and a dancer. The third female Ashe is a combination, being the leader of La Résistance but also being a princess who has no problem wearing a Pimped-Out Dress when there isn't a war going on around her.
  • Final Fantasy XIII has two pairs. Guardian Corps soldier girl, Lightning and her sister, Serah, who wants to be a teacher. The other is Fang and Vanille.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak:
  • Understated with Final Fantasy III's Refia. She's the adoptive daughter of a blacksmith and has no problem with fighting, traveling, etc. But there is a bit of frill in her outfit and she sports a pair of earrings, plus she readily befriends girly-girl Salina and sympathizes with her boyfriend trouble.
  • All three girls in both the original Final Fantasy VII and the Remake, four girls if you count Jessie, in different ways. Aeris (Aerith), the most feminine in terms of physical appearance, has a girly outfit, loves flowers and fights using the conventionally feminine setup (in Final Fantasy mythology) of a staff and White Magic, but she wears big boots, has a pushy and fearless personality, takes the lead when flirting and talks in tough-girl, tomboyish slang in the Japanese version; however, she also has a terrifying fear of being abandoned and left alone. Tifa, who is relatively centrist on the Tomboy - Girly Girl spectrum in comparison to the other two girls in terms of both appearance and personality, is an ass-kicking martial artist in minimalist clothing, but her personality is defined by her loyalty, supportiveness, shyness, empathy, and general 'quiet inner strength', as well as her desire for Cloud to rescue her someday. Yuffie, the most tomboyish, is a loudmouthed, fast-talking thief with a hugely inflated opinion of herself, but she talks in girly-girl-style Valley Girl slang and is less brave than the other girls, often looking to Cloud to comfort her when she gets panicked or upset. And in the Remake, Jessie tends to be somewhat aggressively flirtatious with Cloud, but she's also very bubbly, sweet, and kind, and although she is an Action Girl, she sometimes still needs Cloud to rescue her every now and then.
  • Final Fantasy X-2 Paine is the most tomboyish of the three girls - with Boyish Short Hair and an aggressive personality. However, a few of her Dressphere outfits are quite feminine (Songstress, Black Mage, Lady Luck, White Mage) and she enjoys giggling about boys with Rikku once or twice. Also, when the party is wondering whether it's really right for them to take a relaxing dip in a hot spring on sacred Mt. Gagazet grounds, she's the one who comments "No one's looking."
• Town Girls:
  • Final Fantasy IX: Freya is a Burmecian dragon knight, Garnet is a Princess Classic, and Eiko is a Bratty Half-Pint.
  • Final Fantasy X-2: Out of the three main playable characters; Rikku (neither), Yuna (femme), and Paine (butch).
  • Final Fantasy XII: Fran is a Proud Warrior Race Girl, Penelo is a soft-spoken dancer, and Ashe is the leader of La Résistance.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: Out of three female playable characters, Fang is the butch, Vanille is the femme, and Lightning is neither. It also helps that there is a lot of Subtext in Fang and Vanille's relationship.
• Tornado Move: Aero is usually a tornado. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 adds the Illusionist spell Tornado. There's also Weak/Cyclonic/Tornado, which are typically used by enemies and removes a massive percentage of your health.
• Training from Hell:
  • Although there's not a Training From Hell sequence per se, Final Fantasy VIII's Balamb Garden military academy has a "Training Center" which consists of an area where live monsters (including T-Rexes) roam. The Training Center is the only Garden facility open to students at all hours; the infirmary, meanwhile, closes at curfew. It's also worth noting that the prerequisite for Garden's final exam involves traveling to a monster-infested cave to do battle with an elemental spirit; the field exam itself involves squads of teenagers being turned loose on an actual battlefield.
  • In order to cure herself of her crippling (and painful to watch) Fear of Thunder, Genki Girl Rikku from Final Fantasy X spent a solid week in the Thunder Plains, a region with endless rain and lethal thunderstorms that are barely kept in check by a few lightning rods here and there.
    • The Chocobo training in the Calm Lands. At first, you just have to steer a wild chocobo (who likes to run in every direction but the one you need it to), but as you progress through stages, the trainer starts to throw blitzballs at you. And then starts to throw birds carrying more blitzballs. By comparison, the race you're in training for is easy.
  • In Final Fantasy XIII, Barthandelus sends the party to Gran Pulse to force them to become strong enough to kill Orphan — an act that would destroy Cocoon and everybody on it.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, the Goug Nightwatch (a gang of rather wimpy Moogles) beg your clan to "train" them. Said training obviously consists in beating the crap out of them.
• Tragic Keepsake:
  • In Final Fantasy VI, Setzer kept one of an old friend/rival/love interest Darill, who died in an accident before the start of the game. When Kefka ruined the world and Setzer is roused from his Heroic BSoD by Celes, he takes the group to her burial place to retrieve it, so they can use it to save the world. The keepsake? The Falcon.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics: Delita keeps his dead sister Tietra's necklace as shown in the Zeirchele Falls meeting with Ramza.
• Traitor Shot:
  • The last shot of Alyssa in Final Fantasy XIII-2 is one of these. Mog actually notices, but apparently doesn't know what to make of it, and doesn't warn the heroes.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, after a hearing on whether to accept Doman refugees into Ul'dah, Teledji Adeledji, who vouched for the refugees, is seen alone in the dimly lit meeting hall for the Syndicate with an underling, grinning deviously as he speaks of "revolution".
• Tranquil Fury:
  • The BSOD has undertaken by the main antagonists of both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy IX the first by setting fire to a village, the latter by setting fire to an entire planet are both done with just the hint of a serene smile on their faces... although both of these may be more properly described as Dissonant Serenity.
  • Sephiroth of Final Fantasy VII. In any scene he is, whether he is single-handedly fending off two super soldiers at the same time, or burning down a town, you will never see him raise his voice.
    • During the entire Nibelheim incident, the most you'll get from him is, "Don't TEST me..." (Ironically, that's right before he is defeated).
    • Expect this whenever Vincent is faced with Hojo. He usually becomes noticeably more talkative, emotional, and may employ the silent death glare.
  • Considering Squall in Final Fantasy VIII is Not So Stoic, an Alternative Character Interpretation could have him being in a state of this for at least half of the game.
  • In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, when protagonist Layle attempts to crush Jegran to death after the latter kills Amidatelion, the expression on his face seems almost like one of boredom.
• Transformation Horror:
  • Final Fantasy VII's resident Mad Scientist Dr. Hojo, and what happens to him when he downs one of his serums when Cloud and Co face him. Back in the day when FF7's graphics was top of the line, this looked horrifying.
  • Many Sorceresses in Final Fantasy VIII appear to slowly mutate into no particular end form. One unnamed Sorceress boss looks less like a human being and more like a giant grub. Ultimecia's (quickly changing) One-Winged Angel forms deserve an honorable mention: first she fuses herself with a giant lion-like beast, and later turns into a form no less repulsive than the aforementioned grub woman.
  • The Sin Eaters in the Shadowbringers story of Final Fantasy XIV are stated to be humans or other living things after they are transformed by the primordial light. A few people tell you that once a Sin Eater plants its seed in you via wounding you or other methods, you will become one of them in due time. Early on in the main story, you get to actually witness someone transform into a Sin Eater and it's not pretty; their whole body becomes white, they let out a blood-curdling scream, their faces become hard like plaster, they puke up light aspected vomit, and then they finally transform into a winged monstrosity with a vaguely human-looking face.
• Trauma Conga Line:
  • In Final Fantasy IV: Cecil has a crisis of conscience after being ordered to commit an immoral act for the King of Baron. Then he gets demoted for questioning the king and manipulated into carrying out another immoral act, which results in the destruction of an innocent village and the apparent death of his best friend Kain.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Before the game even starts, Cloud Strife has already: (1) endured a lonely, alienated childhood; (2) been wrongfully held responsible for putting his childhood crush, the mayor's daughter, in a coma by the mayor and everyone in the town (3) been told he's not good enough to become a SOLDIER and gets stuck as a humble grunt trooper; (4) watched his hero Sephiroth destroy his hometown, kill his mother and nearly murder both his childhood crush Tifa and his good friend Zack; (5) suffered over four years of sadistic experimentation by a Mad Scientist which reduces him to a catatonic vegetable; and finally (6) helplessly watched Zack die in a gut-wrenching heroic last stand to protect him. All this results in Cloud suffering his first Heroic BSoD, a very understandable case of Trauma-Induced Amnesia, and identity confusion.
    • THEN, during the game itself, Cloud ends up being mind raped by the Big Bad Sephiroth into: (1) nearly killing his teammate Aerith not just once, but twice; (2) handing over the Artifact of Doom to Sephiroth (again, twice); and (3) questioning not only his memories but his very identity as a real person. He's also forced to stand by and watch Sephiroth murder Aerith while being unable to do anything about it. Cue a second massive Heroic BSoD that requires a Journey to the Center of the Mind to fix.
    • Advent Children throws him back into massive depression and despair by making him and the orphan he's adopted suffer the painful and deadly disease Geostigma. The disease also allows Sephiroth to constantly Troll Cloud's subconscious, thereby making Cloud obsess about the promises he'd failed to keep and the lives he failed to save.
    • Fortunately, Cloud manages to avoid further major physical or emotional trauma in the sequel Dirge of Cerberus. Vincent, however, is not so lucky.
    • All that said, Sephiroth himself suffers from this. At the start of Crisis Core, one of his best friends, Genesis, deserts Shinra. After failing to bring him back, Sephiroth's other best friend, Angeal, also deserts. He is tasked by Shinra to hunt them down and kill them, if necessary. During this, Genesis keeps trolling Sephiroth. Eventually, he learns that he is the result of a science experiment. Afterwards, he plans to leave Shinra because, well...it's Shinra, but before he can, on his last mission, he finds out that he is part Ancient. The Ancients died in a catastrophic event while the humans survived by hiding. And so begins his life of evil...hard to blame him, really.
    • Aerith also endures a lot of horrible things in her life, though she handles them much better. Her father was murdered when she was just a baby, then she and her mother were taken hostage so that Hojo could experiment on them. Her mother dies, and she spends the majority of her youth fleeing from the Turks. Then she is captured again, where the resident Mad Scientist tries to mate her with Red XIII. Shortly after this, she discovers she's the last remaining Cetra, and then Sephiroth kills her. Despite this, she remains an eternally hopeful Iron Woobie.
  • Final Fantasy XIII pretty much puts each of its protagonists through one. But the prize goes to Hope Estheim. He was merely on vacation in Bodhum when the active Fal'Cie was discovered and everyone was sent to be purged. Before knowing that it meant killing them, it was thought that this meant sending them to Pulse, which people in Cocoon had been told was practically hell. After the train he's on is derailed, the civilians are riled up by Snow's group to fight back and Hope is left alone by his mother, who leaves to fight and protect him. Hope watches in horror as his mother falls to her death and he begins to blame Snow, whom he follows into the Vestige with Vanille. In the Vestige, Hope has to fight his way through, only to be branded a Pulse l'Cie. Now, he is the enemy of the entire planet and will be killed on sight, if the government gets their hands on him. And, unless he fulfills his Focus and turns into a crystal statue, he'll turn into an abomination. No wonder the kid's big scene included a Freak Out!
• Trapped in Another World:
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 both use this as the main plot for the player character, but handle it in different ways. Advance has the main character wanting to go back to the real world because running away from life's problems is not healthy. A2 has the main character wanting to go home so he doesn't worry his aunt, but is in no rush to go home and tries to enjoy the time spent in the fantasy world.
  • Final Fantasy X. The main character Tidus is a sports star from the great city of Zanarkand, who one day finds himself transplanted in the world of Spira, and his city was apparently annihilated... one thousand years ago. It's revealed that Tidus's world, and Tidus himself aren't real to begin with.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers has the Player Character whisked away to The First, an alternate plane of reality that makes up Hydaelyn's Multiverse. The "Trapped" part of the trope is downplayed, as a means for the player to travel freely between The First and the main game world, The Source, is quickly established. The player's allies from The Source, on the other hand, are very much trapped in The First due to the Crystal Exarch botching his first attempts to summon the player.
• Treants: Treants, generally resembling walking trees of various sorts — generally leafless, sometimes with topes broken off into stumps, and with faces in their trunks — appear as monsters in various games, debuting in Final Fantasy IV. They're weak to fire attacks and often found in forest areas, and Triffids, Ents and Elder Treants appear as stronger Palette Swaps of the basic Treant.
• True Companions:
  • Final Fantasy V. The four Light Warriors hold together through failure, poisonings, and the death of one of their own without fail. Galuf even calls a retreat when he's attacking Castle Exdeath to go and rescue the other three, alone. And in the ending, a lonely Krile is told by the other three that there's no way she's going to be alone when they're around.
  • Final Fantasy VI has the quintessential Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that become True Companions. Not even the end of the world can keep them apart.
  • Final Fantasy VII and Crisis Core both stress the importance of having True Companions. Cloud needs his friends and comrades to be a complete and effectual person and in the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children movie, Cloud actually calls the other characters his family.
    • It is revealed in Crisis Core that even Sephiroth had True Companions through Angeal and Genesis. Though that was not enough to stop Genesis and Angeal from leaving Sephiroth behind when they discovered their true origins and went rogue.
  • The party from Final Fantasy VIII, especially after they learn that most of them grew up together in the same orphanage.
  • Final Fantasy IX has a similarly strong message about the importance of true companions and how what you do and who you love is more important than where you come from. This is most strongly illustrated during the You Are Not Alone sequence, when Zidane's tendency to help people for no real reason other than it's the right thing to do pays off in spades. Broken in mind and spirit, he's in the middle of a Heroic BSoD when his friends risk life and limb to save him, because he'd have done it for them. It's absolutely beautiful.
  • Final Fantasy X. Although Tidus functions as the narrator, the story as a whole is centered around the exploits of Yuna's guardians, as mismatched and misfit as they were, in their efforts to protect her and defeat Sin. It's carried on to a lesser extent in FFX-2, with Yuna as the main protagonist, though much of the original cast has disbanded and moved on. Tidus's sword is even named "Brotherhood," and powers up as he grows closer to the party.
    • Somewhat played within that most of the party were already True Companions to Yuna before her pilgrimage: Rikku is her cousin, Kimahri and Auron knew her father, and Wakka and Lulu grew up with her on Besaid.
  • In Final Fantasy XII we have a rare case where the villains are this.
  • The six main characters of Final Fantasy XIII form a powerful bond thanks to the fact that the entire world wants to kill them. Especially poignant with Fang and Vanille, who come from an egalitarian culture where everybody shared everything and took the same last name. At one point when Vanille's hit rock bottom, Fang encourages her by reminding her that they have a new family now.
  • The cast of Final Fantasy XV are pretty buddy-buddy. The game's even been compared to taking a road trip with a bunch of friends from college.
    Cid Sophiar: Those ain't your bodyguards...they're your brothers.
  • Class Zero, the heroes of Final Fantasy Type-0 are a class of fourteen teenagers who have been raised by their government as living weapons of war. Due to their life of constant military training, they aren't able to make friends with other kids their age, so they form a surrogate family among each other. They're so close that in the end they die together, and when the two surviving members find the others' bodies, they are all holding hands.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy, the ten main heroes in this crossover are true companions and several smaller, fluctuating groups are as well. The concept serves as a major overarching theme across their stories.
• Trust Password:
  • Early on in Final Fantasy VIII the Player Party is sent on a mission to aid an anti-government group called "The Forest Owls" and is given a Password to confirm their identity. Upon reaching the rendezvous point and saying the password to the group's representative (regardless of whether or not you gave the correct response), he takes you to meet the other members.
  • During one side quest in Final Fantasy XIII-2, Serah and Noel need to find six members of a military squad that have been split up. Since some of them are in completely different time periods, the commander tells Serah and Noel to use "Thunder", his call sign, as proof that the other men should follow his orders to cooperate with them.
    • Downplayed in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII when Lightning says the first half of their personal motto ("Keep your eyes front") and Hope fails to correctly finish the phrase ("I'll watch the rear") even after Lightning prompts him, so she stops trusting him. She doesn't know what's wrong with him (he's possessed), but it's something big for him to forget that.
• Tsundere:
  • Harsh (Tsun):
    • Final Fantasy VIII: While Squall Leonhart is typically just standoffish, his interactions with both Rinoa and Zell results in his developing a more hostile personality. These two, especially Rinoa constantly try to get Squall to open up throughout the game. By the end of the game give you a smile◊.
    • Lulu from Final Fantasy X, but only towards the men in the party; Yuna and Rikku she treats like little sisters, and she doesn't really interact with Kimahri or Auron, leaving Tidus and Wakka. Towards them (Wakka in particular) she is usually very harsh, aside from a few moments when she shows a sweeter side; most notably, in Luca, she holds Wakka up when he's too exhausted to stand (despite being half a head taller and much heavier), and compliments his performance in the game. By the sequel, the two of them are hitched, expecting a child, and she's almost completely lost her tsuntsun side.
  • Sweet (Dere):
    • Final Fantasy IV has Rydia and Porom, towards Edge and Palom, respectively.
    • In Final Fantasy XII, Penelo might be this to Vaan.
• Twin Telepathy:
  • In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Porom knows when Palom's in trouble half the world away. This might seem odd, given that the two are Polar Opposite Twins, except for the one thing both have in common: magical prowess.
  • In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, Yuri and Chelinka can speak telepathically with each other after the Time Skip, since Chelinka lost her voice after watching their adoptive father die. She's slowly trying to get better, though.

---