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Final Fantasy XIV / Tropes A to C

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  • 20 Bear Asses: Expect a lot of these kinds of quests early on as the game tries to ease you in. For instance, one quest has you kill four swarms of hornets so the questgiver can stuff the corpses in a bottle to create a special brand of alcohol.
  • 30-Day Free Trial: Averted. While it started as a simple 14-day trial, the scope of what's available to players who haven't purchased the base game has gradually been increased. As of patch 6.5, the free trial goes up to the end of Stormblood, which also includes the ability to make an Au Ra character and access to jobs added in first two expansions note . There's also no time limit anymore; even if you play for hundreds of hours, the game will never charge you any money. However, there are several restrictions: you can only go up to level 70 with any class, you can't use the Market Board, can't attempt Ultimate Raids, and you can't send friend requests or party invites (though you can still receive both from other players). Also, if you ever upgrade to a paid account, you can never go back to a free one on that account.
  • Absent Aliens: The Endwalker expansion brings it up, showing that there's life on planets besides Hydaelyn. The Endwalker expansion then explains why they're gone by revealing most of them blew themselves up, or worse, after they crossed the Despair Event Horizon. The Big Bad, who was originally tasked with observing alien life, became a Straw Nihilist when she found out that every star was doomed to extinction.
  • Abusive Precursors:
    • The Allagans left behind endless amounts of incredibly dangerous technology, Bahamut sealed in Dalamud being the most well known, though there are others like the Weapons and the entire Crystal Tower which is inhabited by an omnicidal clone of the Emperor Xande and his mad scientist aide with the goal of opening a world-destroying portal to the void. And then Heavensward brings in Azys Lla, a floating continent powered by three sealed primals of unknown power, which also have violent security systems, murderous Chimera beasts that were made to be anything from beasts of battle to housepets, and millenmia-old hostages of the Meracydian dragons as well as their Matriarch Tiamat, trapped in an undying stasis until the world itself ends. The Fractal Continuum even contains a museum to all these "Accomplishments". All in all, it's clear that the Allagans had completely cast off morality and it was probably for the better that the earthquake that heralded the fourth umbral era wiped them out.
    • As revealed in Shadowbringers, the Ascians are this to all the peoples of Hydaelyn and its mirrored shards. The Ascians possessed amazing creation magics that could make almost anything out of thin air, but a mysterious force drove them mad and made them create their own apocalypse. The survivors created Zodiark to stop the apocalypse and repair the damage it caused, but in doing so became tempered to him. Those that escaped Zodiark's power created Hydaelyn to keep Zodiark in check, and she did so by shattering him into thirteen pieces, along with the rest of creation too. Now the remaining Ascians are attempting to restore Zodiark by rejoining the mirrored shards to the Source - which destroys said shard world - and once he's restored, plan on sacrificing all other life to Zodiark so he may restore their once mighty civilisation. 'Abusive' barely describes their attitude; Emet-Selch alone holds such disdain for the mortal races of Hydaelyn and the shards, he sees them as barely alive and completely expendable for the sake of restoring his people.
      • On top of that, the aforementioned Allagan Empire? The Ascians had a direct hand in its creation and development. Who else have they had a hand in shaping? The Garlean Empire, to the point where Emet-Selch himself - in the persona of Solus zos Galvus - was its founder. Almost every single evil empire in Eorzea's history has been influenced to a degree by the Ascians with the express intent on causing Calamities, as they are required to merge the shard worlds back to the Source.
    • At long last the Warrior of Light gets a moment to show just how tired of Allag they are.
      Brusque Loporrit: Then I assume in your travels you have doubtless heard tales of the Allagans.
      Warrior of Light: Yes, and nearly everything wrong with the world seems to be their fault.
  • Absurdly High-Stakes Game: In the Heavensward Culinarian storyline, Melkoko wagers ownership of the Bismarck to Hm'hasi Tia should he win the Dellemont d'Or for the second time in a row. If he loses, he'll have to give up his career as a culinarian forever. Worse still, Dellemont himself is there to officiate the wager, despite the fact that the Bismarck isn't even Melkoko's to bet, much to Lyngsath's frustration.
  • Accent Slip-Up: An independent Au Ra female retainer normally pretends to be a stammering Tsundere, with lines like "I-It's not like I want to sell your items or anything." However, if you dismiss her after she returns from a venture, she briefly slips into a rougher idiolect with "Alright, take yer shite and quit leerin' at me arse. ...What? Ye can't seriously expect me to humor yer fetishes all the time, can ye?"
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Generally speaking, what time it is in-universe won't hinder your efforts in completing a quest.
    • Eorzean time zones don't exist for gameplay purposes. If it's 9:00 pm in Gridania, then it's 9:00 pm in Kugane. If it's midnight on the Source, it's midnight on the First, and it's midnight on the Thirteenth. This is largely to prevent Disciples of the Land from getting confused by time zone differences while they go after rare materials and fish.
    • Need to talk to someone to advance a quest, or need to go to a specific shop? It'll be available no matter what time of day it is. Yes, the sultana of Ul'dah will happily answer your request at three in the morning, and that mender will happily fix all of your gear in the dead of night. But it's better than having to wait around for NPCs to wake up or worry about their schedules.
    • Your retainers play with this. When you ring the bell in most places, your retainers are so loyal that they'll answer your requests at any time, day or night. When using the bells in Shadowbringers where Feo Ul has to act as an intermediary, they'll manipulate your retainer's dreams they next time they go to sleep so that they'll still do what you tell them to do.
  • Accidental Good Outcome: The Heavensward Goldsmith questline revolves around making a pair of gifts for a Happily Married couple. Said couple winds up accidentally ordering the same music box as a surprise gift for the other, leaving the Warrior and Marcel scrambling to find a way to make the gift meaningful without producing two identical music boxes. After learning about the mishap, the couple has a laugh about how they're so in tune with one another that they ordered the same gift. The couple is even more delighted to find that said music boxes play two different versions of the same song that sound even better together.
  • Adaptational Heroism: In the Return to Ivalice raid series, you get an echo flashback at one point that shows Delita to be a much more unambiguously heroic character who clearly cares for Ramza and wants to send his soldiers to help save Ramza (who sacrificed his life to prepare a future Warrior of Light to stop the monster he couldn't). In the source game Delita was Ambiguously Evil and to this day people debate how much he truly cared for Ramza (or anyone else besides his dead sister).
  • Adaptational Wimp: Once again, in the Return to Ivalice raid series, you learn near the end that Ramza's party was unable to defeat Ultima, with most falling in battle and those who remained, namely Mustadio, Agrias, Orlandeu, and Ramza himself, sacrificed themselves to become ghosts, all the former remaining at the Monastery to keep Ultima sealed and test anyone who would face her, and Ramza entering a piece of Magicite to instruct future Warriors of Light of what must be done. In the source game, Ramza's party was fully able to destroy Ultima on their own.
  • Adaptation Expansion:
    • In Final Fantasy VI, the Warring Triad were always together collectively and known as Fiend, Demon, and Goddess. In XIV, each of the Triad gets their own name and backstory: Sephirot the Fiend, Sophia the Goddess, and Zurvan the Demon.
    • In Final Fantasy IV, the Four Fiends were the enforcers of Golbez with little in the way of motivation or backstory beyond just serving him. In XIV, each of them is revealed to have been a low-ranked voidsent until the Knight in Black found them and increased their power. It also gives them a distinct motivation to go to the Source because the constant cycle of death and rebirth on the Thirteenth has driven them insane, which Rubicante says motivates Golbez to merge the Thirteenth with the Source so that the voidsent there can finally die permanently.
  • Added Alliterative Appeal:
    • Like all little liars, Lalafell love to litter letters like this:
      Lalafell Female: Does your world want for a wealth of wordplay and wit? An abundance of alliteration, assonance aplenty and a soupcon of sibilance to seal the deal? Well, you were warned.
    • In fact, some Lalafell naming conventions cause their names to do this as well. For example, female plainsfolk Lalafell have names that follow a syllable pattern of ABB AB (e.g. Losisi Losi), therefore the first syllable of their first name will always match the first syllable of their surname.
    • The fishermen's guild's guildmaster Wawalago (also a lalafell) speaks entirely in alliteration. This habit seems to have been picked up by the guilds' receptionist, whose pitch is a dizzying flurry of non-stop alliteration.
    • Also applied liberally to otherwise nameless filler NPCs (Glowing Goodwife, Mocking Miner, Positively Pungent Pirate, etc.)
    • The Qiqirns love this in their speech pattern as well. Chuchuroon from Fisherman's guild especially seems to have picked it up from his guildmaster.
    • The Garlond Ironworks member obsessed with the Garleans' warmachina tends to introduce his scaled down figurine replicas of the Weapon Project with extensive alliteration.
      Warmchina Fanatic: Behold the Malevolent Malachite Marauder, the Vicious Viridian Villain, the Jumentous Jade Giant (...Actually, maybe not that last one.) Anyway, it's the Emerrrald Weeeaaapon!
  • An Adventurer Is You: The ARR release puts a rather large emphasis on the roles of the character classes (Tank, Healer, and DPS).
  • Advertised Extra: The Moon, of all things, in Endwalker. It received a huge amount of attention and focus in both the post-Shadowbringers lead up to the expansion and trailers and other promotional materials, but in the story proper it amounts to the battleground where you fight the Disc-One Final Boss and the location of the following Breather Episode and is never visited again.
  • After the End: This is sort of the gimmick of A Realm Reborn; it wasn't a particularly big apocalypse, but it did change the world and you're playing through its aftermath.
    • This is also revealed to be the situation, after a fashion, for the Amalj'aa in patch 2.1; it turns out that there are actually Amalj'aa who have not been tempered by Ifrit. They're such a tiny minority, however, that the race as a whole seems doomed to mindless servitude to Ifrit forever and the best the "Brotherhood of Ash" can hope to accomplish is to try and prevent their fanatical kin from doing too much damage. Reversing the effects of the tempering is impossible, so it has to end in either containment or slaughter. It is also hinted that some of the Amalj'aa aren't tempered and follow their brethren anyway, while some have thoughts of deserting for the Brotherhood of Ash because they view them as the stronger side of the war (though they never get to join the group, due to one of the Brotherhood members seeing the deserters as people who are too easily swayed by whoever has the most power and could easily turn against them if the tide of the war tilts back in the tempered's favor).
      • Before patch 2.1, there were hints of some Amalj'aa not following Ifrit's influence or going with their kin's way of worshiping Ifrit. Kazagg Chah, who is relevant to the Black Mage questline, spends his time hiding from people because he knows that everyone would mistake him as another Ifrit worshipper and he could possibly be killed as a result.
    • Note that there's been at least six of these. The world's state tends to move between the golden age of the Astral Eras, and After the End of the Umbral Eras. The length varies, as well; 1.0 started during the 6th Astral Era, which is noted to have lasted close to 1600 years, then moved to the seventh Umbral Era after the fall of Dalamud. This Umbral Era lasts five years until the conclusion of the 2.0 main story when the city leaders declare the Umbral Era is over, with the rest of the game taking place in 7th Astral Era (though with the threat of it ending even faster than the 7th Umbral Era did starting to pop up in later expansions).
    • Shadowbringers takes place in the First, a world that fell to an overabundance of Light a hundred years ago (leaving only Norvrandt and most of the island of Kholusia hospitable), and it's not doing so good. It's also revealed that the Crystal Exarch comes from a Bad Future where the Source, the setting of the rest of the game, underwent an eighth Calamity from the Garleans unleashing a chemical weapon called Black Rose, which went crazy thanks to the First's Flood of Light turning the weapon into a plague that killed the Warrior of Light among countless other people, with the Calamity still technically ongoing some century or so later.
    • Endwalker reveals that almost every other civilization that spawned in the universe (besides Eorzea) was either completely wiped out or was heading in that direction. Which is a major retroactive plot point for the entire saga - the discovery of this fact actually led to the creation of the being that projected the Sound which caused the Final Days on Etheirys, which also led directly to the summoning of Zodiark, which led to the summoning of Hydaelyn, the Sundering of the world, and everything that followed.
  • Aggressive Play Incentive: Some of the Player Versus Player modes discourage tactics which require the player(s) to stall in order to get a Victory by Endurance.
    • Frontlines has the "Battle High" system. Every takedown and assist fills a meter, at ten points for a KO and two points for an assist. Every twenty points, the player receives a Battle High buff that increases damage and HP recovery. At 100 points, the player earns Battle High V, which is called out in the chat log. Finally, when a player get a KO on an opponent, their team gains five points and the enemy team loses five points, so there's a way to get back in the game even when another team gets ahead.
    • The Rival Wings mode has a mechanic called "Soaring" that increases when defeating enemy players. Stacks are also granted to all alliances when an enemy tower is destroyed. This buff can stack up to twenty times, increasing damage dealt and HP restored via healing spells/skills up to a maximum of fifty percent. More stacks of Soaring also increase the rate at which the Limit Break gauge fills up.
  • A.I. Roulette: NPCs in Triple Triad games have this due to their decks always containing powerful cards. Without the induced random behavior, the AI would crush unprepared players or back others into a corner every time.
  • Alien Invasion: Stormblood reveals that Midgardsormr, who sired all the dragons of Eorzea, and Omega, who chased him are all from another star. The dragons themselves were subjected to this on their homeworld by the Omicrons, a warlike machine race that conquered numerous other worlds and built Omega.
  • Alien Sky:
    • In 1.0, Hydaelyn had an unusually bright starfield and two moons, although the second was very small and difficult to see at certain times of night and moonphases. A less common, non-in-your-face instance of the trope.
    • Near the end of the original version, the smaller moon, Dalamud, grew larger — and redder — as part of the final storyline before A Realm Reborn. It turned out That's No Moon, but a massive artificial satellite created by the ancient, far more advanced Allagan Empire during the 3rd Astral Era. One of Garlemald's generals went rogue and poured aetheric energy into it to make it crash down to the earth - and when it was stopped, it turned out to also be an ancient prison for Bahamut, who escaped and promptly did about as much damage as if Dalamud had just hit the planet.
    • Azys Lla in Heavensward has a perpetual orange/yellow/green sky.
    • The First, the primary setting of Shadowbringers, has a sky that is perpetually bright shades of pink and gold, until you defeat the Lightwarden in a given area, which returns the regular sky and day-night cycle to that area. It's so alien that the presence of light does not actually effect the environment's temperature.
    • [he final zone of Endwalker is an expanse of several floating islands drifting among the ruins of destroyed planets and stars, with the lifeless dead husk of a burnt out sun hanging very close overhead.
    • At the conclusion of the main story arc of Endwalker, Meteion takes the Warrior of Light to visit several worlds that had been completely destroyed in different ways. The first world has a sickly red sky filled with floating orbs of blackness rather than stars or moons, and the last one has a brilliantly vivid night sky that is filled with stars and nebulae, even as the sun shines.
  • All Deserts Have Cacti: Averted, at least as far as normal vegetation goes. The deserts in this game are extremely realistic, and have proper vegetation in the different areas. Only one desert, that of Thanalan, has any regular cacti at all - they're completely absent from Gyr Abania. Even cactuars are limited to Thanalan and its counterpart in the First, Amh Araeng.
  • All for Nothing:
    • Relatively early in A Realm Reborn, the Warrior helps the Ala Mhigan refugee Meffrid acquire a traditional remedy to treat his poisoned ally, Gallien, to save him from a mortal wound that the Hearers wouldn't treat because the elementals supposedly forbid them to. In Stormblood, the Dark Knight questline reveals that Gallien gave half the remedy away to a friend to save his life, dooming Gallien to a slow, painful death. That friend would wind up becoming The Griffin's body double and perish at Baelsar's Wall.
    • The quest Back to Old Tricks has the player follow Urianger because he's acting suspicious. It's a stealth trailing quest, so if Urianger spots you the quest fails and you have to go back to the beginning. Which can make it a little annoying when you complete the quest by remaining unseen only for the following cutscene to have Urianger turn around, spot you, and wave you over so he can explain why he's acting suspicious.
    • The Alzadaal's Legacy dungeon goes back and forth on this. The Warrior and Estinien decide to follow a treasure map to a long lost vault they can plunder to secure funds to aid the needy of Radz-at-Han. However, the map is of dubious reliability and when the two are out of earshot the merchant they bought it from admits he swindled them. Turns out the map is real and the "swindling" is the merchant expecting them to die to the vault's guardian constructs like everyone else who's tried to raid it. Estinien and the Warrior recruit some other Scions and make short work of the defenses, at which point Vrtra arrives. He informs them the vault is not a long lost store of treasure but rather his personal rainy day fund that he was already going to use for the exact same reason they wanted it and all they've done is wreck his valuable guard automations. However, the Scions also found a Void gate locked within the vault that Y'shtola takes an interest in, setting up a new plotline where they intend to use it to explore the Void.
  • All the Worlds Are a Stage: The Hero's Gauntlet, the final dungeon of the main Shadowbringers story arc. The Scions of the Seventh Dawn race across Norvrandt to get back to the Crystarium and avert a cataclysmic disaster. Its three zones include regions from Ahm Areng, Ill Mheg, and Lakeland, with the dungeon's theme having motifs from all the Shadowbringers zones. Crosses over with Back for the Finale as a number of cameos from characters you've met across the expansion appear to help.
  • All Myths Are True: So far, every religious system seen in-game has foundation in reality.
    • The Twelve do heed Louisoix's call at the end of Legacy and there are multiple instances of Kami manifesting themselves, whether it is Susanoo being summoned from 3 specific treasures being gathered together or Tsukomu's possession of a Kojin doll (which it turns out no one can see is alive besides Kabuto and the Warrior of Light). And then there is the Top God Hydaelyn who talks to the Warrior of Light multiple times throughout the game. And then there is Zodiark...
    • Subverted with Primals, as they aren't actually avatars of the gods, they are simply Aether given shape and form by the desires of the gods' followers. This comes as quite the blow to Ysayle, who honestly thought she was channeling the will of Shiva.
    • The Garleans' view is more "All Myths Are False". Their term for Primals is "Eikons", and during Gaius' rant in the Praetorium dungeon, he claims that the only difference between the Primals and the Twelve is who their worshippers are, and they're really all just Eikons bleeding the land dry of aether.
    • In Shadowbringers it's revealed that Hydaelyn and Zodiark are actually archprimals created by the ancient Ascians, Zodiark as the will of the planet and Hydaelyn as something to keep him in check.
    • Also in Shadowbringers it's heavily implied that Azem's name and solar symbol may have been the basis for Azeyma the Warden, one of the Twelve (the common pantheon of Eorzea), and Azim, god of the sun worshipped by the xaela au ra. It's also possible the rest of the Twelve, as well as various gods in in the world's setting, are similarly based on members of the Convocation of Fourteen that were deified as the old world drifted further and further from memory.
  • The All-Seeing A.I.: Some fights will have computer-controlled units in a fight with you, such as unique character quest allies, the Trust system from Shadowbringers, or Command Missions for a grand company. In these cases, the AI just knows exactly where to move and/or stand to avoid the most heavy-hitting attacks from enemies, sometimes before every attack marker is placed down and before any human player could realistically know what's coming. It's one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality for AI partners, since having to tell them where to move manually would be needlessly complicated.
  • All There in the Manual:
    • Outside the game, the team releases a collection of side stories that show what several major characters have done before and after the events of the game. Tales from the Calamity shows what city-state leaders and the Scions did before the adventurer came into the picture for 2.0, Tales from the Dragonsong War showcases what the major characters from 3.0 were doing before the expansion happened, and Tales from the Storm shows background behind some characters and what happened after Stormblood. The first three collections were eventually put to print under the "Chronicles of Light", which has two additional stories exclusive to the book. Beyond the print release came Tales from the Shadows for Shadowbringers, Tales from the Twilight on the eve of Endwalker, and Tales from the Dawn for post-Endwalker. Keep in mind that several of these stories are laden with spoilers, so it's best you read these after you finish their respective Main Scenario.
    • The king of examples of this for XIV is Encyclopaedia Eorzea, a pair of books released by Square Enix that is up to date on lore through Patch 3.3 (Part I) and 4.3 (Part II) that cover an utterly staggering amount of information ranging from people of interest (some of which hadn't even been introduced in the game proper yet), talk of the lands, the foundations of the world, basic aetherology, and even things like the military structure of the Grand Companies. For someone hungering to know everything they can about Eorzea, there is no better manual than this.
    • Players may be wondering what ultimately happened to Fordola after the battle with Lakshmi, as she simply returns to her cell and is not heard from again. The second to last Tale from the Storm shows that she was conscripted by Raubahn into a special Primal hunting unit (with cameos by the Immortal Flames summoners from the Summoner questline) since her artificial Echo makes her immune to the mind control abilities of Primals. She is given a cursed collar that will strangle her to death if she attempts to escape, but she seems content enough with where she is (to the point of saving the thaumaturge who has control over said cursed collar when he was wounded when she could have killed him and ran). This was partially taken out of the manual in Shadowbringers... but only if you had a level 80 Summoner. If so, you are put into contact with Jajamasu by Y'mhitra, who in turn explains what he's been up to with Fordola and Arenvald, and asks you to talk with them about it all.
    • In cutscenes involving flashbacks to members of the Convocation of 14 from Amaurot, when we see hooded figures talking, usually their names in the dialogue box are a description of who they are rather than a name. But with certain scenes, the text file will have a name attached to it. For instance, with the memory that Elidibus has of two Convocation members telling him that he is working too hard, the text file for their dialogue reveals that they are Lahabrea and Igeyorhm.
  • Alt Itis: Notably averted for the most part. The game allows players to play as each of the classes on a single character, making it fully possible to explore everything the game has to offer without ever touching an alt. One of the few situations where this would be played straight however is if a player wants to play on multiple Data Centers; even the addition of a system to travel to other data centers only allows players to visit other data centers that are within the same region as their home one.
  • Alternative Calendar:
    • Years are grouped into Astral or Umbral eras, which are cycles of prosperity and disasters, respectively, and are of uneven distribution, with the Seventh Umbral Era, whose epoch was Bahamut's rampage at the end of the Legacy (v1.0) timeline, lasting only five years before being replaced with the Seventh Astral Era after the definitive repulsion of Garlean forces by the Eorzean Alliance at the end of the A Realm Reborn (v2.0) storyline.
    • Each year in Hydaelyn lasts 384 "suns" (or days), divided into twelve "moons" (or months) of 32 suns each. Two successive moons in a year are associated with one of the six elements (in succession, Ice, Water, Wind, Lightning, Fire, and Earth) and alternate between astral and umbral phases—for example, the first and second moons, associated with Ice, are respectively termed First Astral and First Umbral Moons.
  • Always Night: Northern Thanalan seems to be under an eternal dusk, possibly due to the constant smog that the ceruleum processing plant produces. Inverted in Shadowbringers, as the First is constantly brightly lit until the player defeats each area's Lightwarden.
  • Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The final boss of the Heavensward story quests, King Thordan, is fought in Azys Lla's Singularity Reactor. Over the course of the battle, the arena is awash in various colors while fighting the Knights Twelve, while one of Thordan's more powerful attacks changes the background to show the planet of Hydaelyn from space.
  • Amazing Technicolor Population: Characters with blue and green skintones are a common sight, being a racial trait of the Sea Wolves, Keepers of the Moon and Duskwight; while Hellsguards can have dark red skin. Heavensward shows that Au Ra of both of clans are capable of very odd skin tones like fire red, grass green, grape purple, or obsidian black.
  • Ambiguous Gender: The Dwarves of the First all look exactly alike, as all of them wear full armor and helms and have beards, so there's no way to tell male dwarves from female dwarves unless they say so (it doesn't help that nearly all content involving dwarves have been without voice acting). That makes it a surprise when Giott, who is a stereotypical brash foul mouthed alcoholic, reveals herself to be a woman at the end of the Healer questline. Also, the beards that every dwarf cherishes and boasts about are fake.
  • Ambiguous Situation:
    • The tank of a party of Heroes of Another Story has his life tragically cut short in a dungeon run gone wrong. The surviving party members blame the healer's inadequate skills, while the healer sobbingly protests that the tank ran out of range before she could finish the spell. The question of who is really to blame never gets answered, partly due to being overshadowed by the healer losing her grip on reality and diving headfirst into necromancy out of grief.
    • It's left up in the air exactly how true the Dotharl Tribe's belief that their warriors are reincarnated as newly born members of the tribe is. The people of the tribe are confident they can identify the specific souls returning to them, while those not of the tribe are skeptical at best. We know that their beliefs are possible, because reincarnation is an established part of the setting, but also that they are definitely wrong on some of the particulars, as they believe only great warriors are reborn when in truth everyone is.
    • In the Rak'tika sidequests, it's never made quite clear if the "divine serpent" is truly the avatar of a protector deity sent to provide portents and guidance so the people can avoid disaster or it's a little worm critter and the 'guidance' it provides is people reading way too much into its actions and/or body. Even the narration gets in on it, stating that surely the positive outcome is the result on the unerring guidance of the divine serpent and it can't have all been coincidence... right?
    • The opening description of the level 80 Dark Knight job quest, "Our Closure" is "They will tell you you are one and you are two. You can choose." Naturally, then, the quest pointedly does not answer the question of whether Fray's Split-Personality Merge has completely integrated them back into the Warrior of Light, or if they're still separate people and Fray has merely gone dormant, going only so far as to explicitly deny that the "Esteem" summoned by your shiny new level 80 skill is them.
    • In the final area of Endwalker, Meteion at first explains that all of Ultima Thule's inhabitants are just shades living echoing lives of the final days of their worlds and giving her Despair to feed from, but at the same time, they show the ability to change, think and interact in ways that are far more detailed than the Amaurot shades Emet-Selch made. The shades reacting and defying the despair that signaled their original end and even finding slivers of hope after the plot's climax (Especially with the Omicron) raises the very real question over if they are truly long dead and passed shades, or if the Dynamis in Ultima Thule mixed with the party defeating the personifications of the race's despair has effectively resurrected members of each race in some manner. The Omicron tribe quest eventually seems to settle on the latter - though reconstructed through Dynamis, they are truly living again in a sense, much to the ire and frustration of the species who had crossed the Despair Event Horizon and were happy to die, only to find themselves back in the world, thus setting the plot of the tribe into motion.
  • Amulet of Concentrated Awesome: Soul Crystals are a type of Power Crystal which can automatically impart knowledge, power and abilities onto the holder just by having one, with more skills 'awoken' by level up and quests which test the player character's mastery of the job it imparts. Mostly, though, they are just relics that the developers don't like keeping around but can't abandon now due to the lore and extensive game mechanics built around them - that lore is a convenient excuse for how the expansion content jobs start at high levels, though.
  • An Aesop:
    • Heavensward: Telling the painful truth is a better choice than maintaining a comforting lie. In the Dragonsong War, both Ishgard and the Dragon Horde are each painting their own convenient narratives about what happened, leaving out key facts to push their own agenda. Ishgard is lying about how the Dragonsong War started, since King Thordan I attacked an innocent dragon in paranoia of what dragonkind could do to Ishgard, and stole this dragon's eyes as a source of power. This ended up becoming a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, as the dragons were now motivated by vengeance. Meanwhile, Nidhogg, the vengeance-fueled leader of the dragons, refuses to explain anything about why he's attacking and is punishing innocent Ishgardians for the crimes of their forefathers. Not only does this continue a vicious cycle of death and vengeance, but it's only when the whole truth is exposed and the ones pushing the false narratives are held to account on both sides that peace can be restored.
    • Stormblood: All people deserve to be free of oppression, but freedom is never going to come easily. As Raubahn puts it, "such victories are rarely won without sacrifice. But the prize is worth the price." For as much as Garlemald consistently tries to crush the hopes and dreams of Ala Mhigo and Doma, and as much as the people have just accepted oppression as their lot in life, it consistently fails to completely stop the clarion call of freedom when a Hope Bringer shows up to unite them. Ala Mhigo and Doma both have to struggle, start from precarious positions, forge uneasy alliances, and rely on hope against hope that a lot of their efforts will bear fruit. But when it does, the future looks all the brighter for it.
    • Shadowbringers: The past is the past, and you can't get it back. Trying to force things to be how they were is an exercise in futility. For as much as expansion Big Bad Emet-Selch pushed the idea that only his people deserve to exist, that was never his call to make. While wanting to go home and be reunited with his loved ones is an admirable goal, he must be made to accept that his time has up and that the world has moved on. Later in the same expansion, another Ascian named Elidibus keeps trying the same thing, only to be rebuffed because he can't even remember who he's fighting for. This also adds the aesop that you can lose sight of why you were going after a goal if your pursuit comes at the expense of your happiness.
    • Endwalker
      • Forge ahead. Hope is not weak, it is not foolish, and it is not wrong. Yes, We All Die Someday, and everything in the universe will one day come to an end. That's no reason to just give up and wallow in despair and misery. Even when things look really bad, "hope will shine again" if you keep pushing yourself forward, because it's the little things that make life worth living — the time with your loved ones, your personal triumphs, and shooting for your goals. That's where happiness is found, and only you can decide what that means for your life.
      • The first part of the expansion contains a Hard Truth Aesop that some people just can't be talked into changing their minds, even when sticking to one course of action is detrimental to them. When visiting Sharlayan early in the expansion, Alphinaud and Alisaie's mother tells the twins that some people just won't be convinced with facts or logic. This is exemplified when meeting some non-tempered Garleans, who treat the Scions like vultures who have come to pick clean what little they have left, accuse the non-Garleans of making everything worse, spitting curses at them, and doing everything they can to defy what they want. This fear and paranoia even gets Licinia and her little sister killed when they flee their safe haven, dying in the ice floe, because they had convinced themselves that the Scions were evil. Alphinaud starts to say that he should have said something else, but comes to admit that he can't erase oppression or lingering hatred all by himself, and he understands why the Garleans think so badly of him.
  • Anchored Teleportation: Teleportation spells work by converting one's body into aether and moving through The Lifestream towards an anchoring point in the physical world — in almost all cases, a mass of Aetheryte — and rematerializing at the desired destination. There is a special teleportation spell known as "Flow" that, in theory, would allow the user to rematerialize anywhere in the physical world without the need for an Aetheryte. In practice, however, the lack of an Aetheryte to anchor oneself at a desired destination means that the risk of becoming lost in the Lifestream with no way to return makes this spell too dangerous to use. And even if you manage to emerge from the Lifestream after using Flow, you run the risk of being permanently adversely affected, such as being unable to use magic or going blind.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: The truth behind the Forever War that has been plaguing Ishgard for a thousand years, suppressed by the church.
  • And I Must Scream: Discussed by Gyoryu, a member of the Seven-Hundred-and-Seventy-Seven, who wonders what it's like to be an effigy sacrifice.
    Gyoryu: Do you ever think about what it's like to be one of those dolls-to know that your fate is to die in agony as you are consumed by the flames, yet be unable to scream? No? I cannot be the only one...
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different:
    • In Stormblood patch 4.3, there is a brief instance where you get to play as Alphinaud while fighting off Garleans within the Burn. Every patch afterwards up through 5.55 so far has since featured similar.
    • 4.4 has you control Y'shtola while fighting the Azim Steppe tribes again.
    • 4.56 has Hien trying to fend off a reborn Zenos at the Ghimlyt Dark.
    • 5.0 has Thancred holding back Ran'jit on his own in the western half of Amh Araeng. The Role quests for each of the five job roles in 5.0 (Tank, Healer, Melee, Ranged, and Caster), as well as the wrap-up quest you can do once all of them are complete, also feature a brief interlude as one of the Warriors of Light from the events preceding the Flood of Light on the First.
    • 5.1 has Estinien escaping from Garlemald's imperial palace after Zenos assassinates Emperor Varis.
    • And 5.55 has the player control, in addition to themselves, G’raha Tia, Urianger, and Alisaie in sequence in four different battles against the lunar Primals.
    • 6.0 has G'raha, Alphinaud and Alisaie fighting against the tempered Garleans.
    • 6.35 has the most ridiculous one ever: playing as Godbert Manderville. And yes, he's as overpowered as you'd expect.
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes: A standard reward for most quests which you'll rely on for better armor if you're not planning to buy from shops or other players. Many of the limited time events also reward you with unique outfits that aren't exactly combat material, but are for showing off instead.
  • And You Were There: The Rising 2015 event features the Wandering Minstrel, the producer Naoki Yoshida's Author Avatar, helping you defeat various bugs, and then bring a shard from one of them to a small squad of Wandering Something or Others, all based on different members of the development team. The game than has you meet the actual Naoki Yoshida in what is implied to be an alternate dimension. Naturally, the two look identical, outfit aside.
  • "Anger Is Healthy" Aesop: The Dark Knight questline reveals just how much pent-up anger the Warrior of Light has over being taken for granted and suffering for their attempts to do good. Fray tries to teach the Warrior of Light to harness their repressed anger and feelings of indignation into power. The Level 50 quest reveals that Fray is in fact Esteem, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Warrior's unheroic traits as well as their own self-esteem and self-love. After the Warrior defeats Fray and reaffirms their desire to meet the challenges ahead rather than fleeing from them, Fray remerges with the Warrior, offering to guide their anger and fury against those who truly deserve it.
  • Animal Motifs: Every class has a certain animal that their PvP gear takes after. Additionally, after completing 200 end-game full party instances (such as Extreme mode primals, and raids like Binding Coil or Alexander) tanks get a mount fitting to the class' motif (bears for Warrior, lions for Paladins, panther-like Coeurls for Dark Knights).
  • Antagonist Title: Zig-zagged. Heavensward is revealed to be this, when the Heavens' Ward—the bodyguards of the Archbishop of the Church of Ishgard—and their leader, Archbishop Thordan VII, step into the Big Bad role. Later, after the Heavens' Ward is defeated the trope is averted. When the narrator of the events, Edmont de Fortemps, speaks of the uneasy peace and an unknown future that man and dragon face together, Edmont likens as going heavensward toward a better tomorrow, and hoping that future unborn generations will continue to do so.
  • Antepiece: Many of the harder bosses in the game will do attacks by themselves at first, which is meant to teach you how to dodge these moves. Later in the fight, the attacks will start being combined together. So you'll know where to stand for each attack, but the challenge comes in dodging two things at once that the game previously taught you about.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: There is a massive list of things that were fixed from 1.0 to 2.0, and it only grew as the game evolved throughout the expansions. So much so that it has its own section.
  • Anti Idling:
    • In instanced duties, if you go ten minutes without doing anything, you'll be kicked from the instance. "Anything" here includes moving, so it only kicks out people that have actually walked away from their keyboard.
    • Occasionally, as a temporary measure during severe Demand Overload (such as at the launch of a new expansion) a 30-minute AFK timer will be implemented — if you go thirty minutes in the overworld without doing anything, you'll be automatically logged out.invoked
  • The Anti-Nihilist: The central theme of Endwalker is about saying "Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!" and becoming one of these as the Warrior of Light. Hydaelyn sundered the Ancients' utopia, condemning them to lives of suffering and pain, so they'd learn to push on even when all seems lost. The final boss of the expansion is the Endsinger, an Eldritch Abomination and despair incarnate. The question of what meaning, if any, life has is the crux of the whole conflict between the Endsinger and the Warrior. Ultimately, the Endsinger is a Straw Nihilist who says that since We All Die Someday, nobody should ever live. The Warrior of Light and their friends in the Scions of the Seventh Dawn counter this by saying it's the little things that make life worth living. Even Zenos, a Blood Knight of the first order, says that one's life only has meaning when a person gives it one, leaving it up to each person to find their own answer.
  • Anti Poop-Socking: There are a number of features that attempt to make the game more 'casual friendly' and reduce the ability of 'hardcore' players to outpace those playing more casually or with less time to play.
    • 1.0 had Guardian's Favor: points could be spent, upon initiating a quest, to increase Discipline experience income until the objectives are complete. Burns out if used at every possible opportunity over more than a couple of days and has to be allowed to regenerate. This was replaced in patch 1.21 with an inn, where you get an experience boost from resting in a private room. Along with A Realm Reborn, this was removed.
    • 2.0 now has sanctuaries. Spending time (even while logged off) in cities, inns and safe zones builds up an EXP bonus, indicated on the EXP bar by a shaded section (blue if it's enough to last to the next level-up, a darker yellow otherwise).
    • Allowances for levequests (sort of randomized quests that can provide some easy chunks of EXP) are granted for every character in the same intervals. There are also daily caps on certain rewards and daily objectives.
    • The highest-end gear for any given time is limited by a weekly cap; raid levels can only be cleared for treasure once a week each, while smaller tokens provided by regular dungeons and content have a similar limitation. The hardcore crowd gets two (or more) ways to gear up, while casuals don't get left behind.
      • Previous end-game content also receives a massive reduction in cost and the previous Tomestones, which are used as end-game currency and rewarded from various high-end duties in small amounts, become obsolete. Except for Poetics, which has become universal for all old items that could be purchased with Tomestones. You can even exchange the obsolete ones for Poetics at a rate of one Poetics tomestone for every two of the one being phased out.
      • If gear or tomestones get obsoleted due to a content patch, the lockout and caps usually go away or get more relaxed. For example, to get a current raid tier weapon, you have to get 7 tokens (meaning 7 weeks minimum of doing the raid). But when the next patch comes out, that requirement drops to 4.
    • Patch 4.1 massively reworked the Veteran Rewards that were given to subscribers. Initially, players were forced to bear lengthy subscriptions to obtain popular costumes based off of previous legendary Final Fantasy characters, dealing with random trinkets along the way. 4.1 changed it so that the only Veteran Rewards players acquire through subscriptions are just those costumes, with them being given just for subscribing for the requisite number of days (e.g. the Strife gear is now unlocked as soon as you subscribe for at least 60 days of playtime, rather than only after actually playing for those 60 days), with previous Veteran Rewards purchased through Achievement Certificates (one gained for every 50 achievement points when you talk to the NPC who deals in them), allowing players to not be punished for unsubscribing for a time and allowing all of the veteran rewards to be acquired well before one year of playing (the last reward is at 330 days; the maximum amount of subscribed days at once is, as of 2021, 360, so one with enough money could get all the veteran rewards right away by subscribing for a full year of playtime).
    • Every player has a daily Cap of one hundred Duties; when this cap is reached, the player can't register for anything else until the following day. Most players will never even come close to hitting this cap — dungeons take a minimum of fifteen minutes to clear, with later dungeons taking up to half an hour. This isn't just to stop people from playing the game too much; it's also there to stop bots from running instances over and over to grind for items and/or Gil that can be transferred to someone else.
  • Anti-Trolling Features:
    • The game features a free trial option that imposes several restrictions. Part of this is to encourage people to buy a subscription to unlock every feature, but it's also to discourage trolling. The /shout and /yell commands (which alert a large number of players) are disabled outright, as is /tell (which whispers a message that only one player can see). Free accounts can't participate in any Player Versus Player modes. Free players can't create parties, join Linkshell groups, or send friend requests (though they can accept all three from paying users). Free accounts can't use the Market Board, can't use the Moogle Letter Delivery Service, can't join Free Companies, and can't trade items. Free players can't challenge any other player to the Triple Triad mini-game, nor can they be challenged by anyone. Finally, free players cannot log into the Lodestone, the official forum, or Companion phone app. These restrictions on free accounts means that there are very few ways for trolls to annoy people.
    • The chat options in the Crystalline Conflict PVP mode are a set of "quick chat" messages, No other chat modes — including typing messages or using items — are allowed. This was an express choice to prevent abusive language/trolling during play or post-game.
    • Kicking someone out of a Duty for no reason is explicitly against the game's Terms of Service. Repeatedly kicking people out of your groups could result in a suspension or ban if done too often on players who weren't doing anything wrong.
  • The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: The land of Norvandt on the shard known as the First faces constant attacks from the sin eaters after it was brought to the brink of annihilation by a disaster known as the Flood of Light. But almost all of the surviving settlements continue to strive for a better tomorrow. This is exhibited most strongly in the Crystarium, a vast and thriving metropolis where all are welcome and treated as equals. Even more notably, there are no instances of racism between mankind and what would be called "beast tribes" in Eorzea.
  • Apocalypse How:
    • Class 0: Eorzea has been ravaged by the fall of Dalamud and the awakening of Bahamut, but civilization bounces back in the five-year time span between the end of 1.0 and A Realm Reborn. In general, it's also been through several localized apocalypse scenarios of a similar scale, due to the below;
    • The various mirror shards of Hydaelyn can experience an aetheric imbalance that will cause them to merge back with the Source, resulting in a Class X scenario for those shards, completely destroying them in the process. Worse, each of those mergers also comes with an associated Umbral Calamity in the Source; these incidents usually wiped out at least one major civilization and kicked off a so-called Umbral Era. So far, the 5th, 12th, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 10th, and 7th shards have been Rejoined in that order, with the 7th shard's Rejoining being the most recent.
    • In Shadowbringers, the First was on the verge of a Class 6 due to the Flood of Light. If it wasn't for the intervention of Minfilia and the Warriors of Darkness, the entire world would have been consumed. Now only Norvrandt remains, but even with the Flood stopped, it's dangerously close to experiencing the aforementioned Class X Rejoining scenario due to the impending Eighth Umbral Calamity on the Source.
      • Speaking of which, we find out the Crystal Exarch comes from a Bad Future where the Eighth Umbral Calamity has happened. With the Flood of Light on the First causing an aetheric thinning on the Source, it causes the Garlean Empire's chemical weapon Black Rose to become extremely potent, spreading like a virulent plague and wiping out all life throughout the star. By the time the Crystal Exarch was sent back, Eorzea had suffered a Class 2 scenario with no end in sight.
      • The Ascians suffered a Class X as a result of their creation magicks running haywire and tearing their world asunder, followed by the summoning of, and subsequent battle between, Hydaelyn and Zodiark. When Hydaelyn dealt the finishing blow to Zodiark, it caused the world to be split into fourteen fragmented dimensions: the Source and its reflections, including the First.
    • In Endwalker, Fandaniel plans to restart the Final Days in order to kill everyone and himself, which would result in such complete devastation that nothing would be reborn, as the Final Days cause those that turn into Blasphemies to have their soul completely removed from the lifestream. And then it turns out that the real main villain, The Endsinger, is planning on doing an universal apocalypse by using the power of Dynamis to accelerate the Heat Death of the Universe so everything and everyone will be dead forever.
  • Arc Number: Each Legion of the Garlean Empire that is featured in a story arc is numbered after the previous Final Fantasy title it draws elements from.
    • The VIIth Legion of Legacy was lead by Nael van Darnus who succeeded in Project: Meteor, referencing Sephiroth's goals with Meteor in Final Fantasy VII. In Shadowbringers this Legion returns as the Legion behind the development of the iconic Weapon bosses from VII, now lead by Valens van Varro, an expy of Hojo.
    • Gaius van Baelsar leads the XIVth Legion and is the main threat for A Realm Reborn, remaining self contained.
    • The VIth Legion in Heavensward is lead by Regula van Hydrus, who is attempting to exploit the power of the Warring Triad, the same deities featured in Final Fantasy VI. In a little bit of a twist, Van Hydrus is based most heavily on General Leo Cristophe from that game, rather than Kefka Palazzo like many players expected following Nael's example.
    • The XIIth Legion, led by Emperor Varis's son Zenos yae Galvus, administers the conquered territories of Ala Mhigo and Doma, recalling the themes of foreign occupation and royal intrigue from Final Fantasy XII. Moreover, the emperor's son being its leader calls to mind the main villain of XII, Vayne, also being an emperor's son.
    • With the XIIth Legion taken by Zenos, Noah van Gabranth - an expy of Gabranth from XII - leads the IVth Legion instead. It remains to be seen how they'll reference Final Fantasy IV.
    • The number XIV bears even more special significance come Shadowbringers. Zodiark, and the world at large, was split into one 'Source', and 13 reflections of itself, as Hydaelyn's power is to divide... or, at least, that's what Emet-Selch and the other Ascians believe. And in the past, the Ascians had a Convocation of Fourteen, the 14th of whom is heavily implied (and eventually, confirmed) to be the soul that became the Warrior of Light.
  • Arc Words:
    • "Hear. Feel. Think." These are Hydaelyn's words to the Warrior of Light in A Realm Reborn, and they show up a few more times through the rest of the expansions as well. In Endwalker, when you fight Hydaelyn as a final test of your readiness to face Meteion, it's revealed that the full quote should be "Hear... the song at creation's end. Feel... the sorrow at hope's demise. Think... and find your way in the darkness." It's Hydaelyn urging those who can hear her to acknowledge the despair before for them, and learn to confront and eventually rise above it.
    • "For those we have lost. For those we can yet save." This crops up repeatedly throughout the Heavensward expansion, culminating in the Warrior of Light being able to say that this is what they will fight for near the end of the post-expansion patches, and still occasionally popping up beyond that. It becomes the Warrior's Survival Mantra, with the other Scions beginning to share in the sentiment. When the Warrior is going through some Heroic Fatigue, expect these words to crop up to keep them going.
    • 3.4 has "One life for one world." The Warriors of Darkness say this when trying to kill the Warrior of Light, saying that their death will save their world. When this is stopped, Minfilia (as the Voice of the Mother) goes with the Warriors of Darkness to their world to prevent any further damage, saying that "one life for one world" is a fair trade.
    • Shadowbringers gives us a more subtle one in the form of "weight", a word that constantly pops up in the different themes of the expansion, weight of tomorrow, weight of fate, and with the addition of the Dark Apocalypse raid the theme references the iconic song "Weight of the World", signifying both the horrifying duty of the Ascians to bring back their people as well as the weight of the duty of the Warrior of Light and the Scions who must now bring forth a new future and prove that they can live up to the legacy of the Ancients.
    • "Answer" in Endwalker becomes more and more prominent in the dialogue as the story goes on, tying into the theme of the meaning of life, the events that happen in Elpis, and of course, the song "Answers" which is a major Leitmotif throughout Endwalker. The phrase "Forge ahead" pops up a fair number of times as well, most noticeably in the chorus of the expansion's theme Footfalls, and is presented as more or less the, or at least the heroes', "Answer" to the aforementioned question about what the meaning of life is.
  • Armor and Magic Don't Mix: The science of aetherology explains that aether, the building blocks of the universe and the basis of magic, is easily conducted through cloth but faces resistance when trying to weave it through metal armor. This explains why mages primarily wear robes and other woven garments in combat despite the lack of protection.
  • Armor Is Useless: Depends on the job. Casters and other squishies can have plate or chain clad gear, but it doesn't give the armor stats it looks like it would. The Shisui fending set is literally just a swim suit, but provides good tank stats for its respective level, proving that cosmetics don't matter.
  • Arrange Mode: Hard mode dungeons are not so much a difficulty change as one would expect by the name, but a complete revision of the areas in question complete with new routes through the place and new enemies that were not present the first time around. Some job quests similarly take you through parts of dungeons and raids you may have once completed with slight adjustments to the layouts and enemies present.
  • Arrowgram: Inspector Hildibrand receives challenges from a mysterious thief as thrown cards that end up embedded in his forehead (as seen here). Since Hildibrand is Made of Iron, he barely notices and there's no lasting damage.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: On the First, all the dwarves (what the lalafells call themselves on the First) wear helmets that obscure their faces all the time, only removing them around close kin. To show your face outside of close kin is a serious taboo. So much so, that when one of the dwarves recounts the crimes of Lamitt, a Warrior of Light from the First, the fact that she exposed her face to outsiders in this way is considered far more heinous than bringing doom on the world (merely 'frowned upon' according to Giott).
  • Art Evolution: Initially inverted from Legacy to A Realm Reborn, as the former had far more dynamic, motion-captured cutscenes throughout compared to the latter's use of generic lobby emotes and character animations over and over as a shortcut for many situations. However, with the patches following the ARR storyline and onwards through the expansion packs, cutscenes noticeably get a little more dynamic with time, characters become more expressive, and camerawork noticeably improves in quality. To say the brief fight between Raubahn and Ilberd is an Animation Bump would be an understatement.
    • This also occurs to character designs and player gear. Vanilla has fairly standard fantasy armor, pirate looks and the like, but then the Augmented Ironworks gear dabbles with fanciful Magitek armor designs, and similar post-game gear would step up the fancy. Now several years later by Shadowbringers, the classes have visually evolved into much more complex designs while the various story characters either got redesigned outfits or are introduced with far more visually interesting appearances from the get-go.
  • The Artifact:
    • invoked Producer Naoki Yoshida has gone on record as hating the system of classes advancing into Jobs at level 30, considering it an unnecessary stepping stone at best and a technical nightmare at worst, and has said that if it wouldn't have to lead to massive changes to the job stories (soul crystals, flow-breaking as they are, do at least provide a decent explanation for the player character becoming an Instant Expert at a new job, especially the expansion ones which start at or above level 30) and leveling experience as it is, he'd much rather players just start at their chosen job, something he's shown by having every post-2.0 class except Rogue start as full jobs instead of classes.
      • This has since been adjusted with the Stormblood 4.0 patch: it's no longer necessary to level an unrelated secondary class to 15 in order to obtain the Job. The primary class still needs to be brought up to 30, though, followed by the Job questline, which is part of why the (comparatively clunky) Soul Crystals are still a thing, the other being the rare quest that, in a possible double instance of this trope, requires a class specifically rather than a class or its advanced job (e.g. "Unicorn Power" can only be completed as a Conjurer, and not as a White Mage). 4.0 did add one incentive to playing as a class over its job, by replacing cross-class skills with role actions, of which a class could use every one once unlocked while a job had to pick a limited number of them, but then 4.4 undid that by letting jobs use every one of their role actions as well.
    • Likewise, gating jobs behind the expansion cities, thus requiring you to actually reach the content of the expansion in question, was done once and only once with Heavensward before the dev team realized how much it sucks for players to not be able to swap to the job they may have wanted to play at the first opportunity when reaching the minimum level for it. Stormblood, Shadowbringers and Endwalker all have their new jobs start in the 2.0 city-states so that if a player wants to change to a new job, they can do so as soon as they hit the necessary level. This is especially important since the experience for the MSQ has been getting buffed more and more every expansion for easier catchup - it's not outside of the realm of possibility for someone to be 10 or 15 levels higher than the start of the next expansion's starting level, and especially to reach the cap for an expansion's content well before they reach that point in the story.
    • One-handed wands and rods for Conjurer/White Mage and Thaumaturge/Black Mage, to be used together with a shield, were used in 1.0. They are used again in 2.0, but even halfway through 2.x's level cap they are shelved in favor of two handed weapons that give the user better stats overall. Because of this, shields on magic classes are also phased out - shields from level 51 onward simply aren't usable by anyone other than Gladiator and Paladin.
    • Even for Paladin, one-handed weapon and shields have been technically phased out. As of Heavensward, a sword and shield have equal cost to every other weapon by splitting it — a player needs to spend seven raid tokens for the Paladin's sword and three for the shield, while every other weapon needs ten raid tokens. Also, the sword and shield upgrade together, and as of Shadowbringers if a sword or shield drops, the other will always show up on the loot list. This ensures (barring rare circumstances like having two paladins in endgame content - something the design tries to make unappetizing) that a Paladin's weapons will always be at the same item level, instead of having a sword/shield that's weaker. Endwalker takes it a step further than that; all sword and shield drops have been completely removed, replaced with "Paladin's X Arms" coffers (X being the weapon set's name) that, when opened, grant both the sword and the shield to the player, with the same holding true for the glowing versions of trial weapons (with the coffer granting both now being the item crafted).
    • Resistances to elements and damage types were an element used quite a bit in 1.0, but are rarely used in 2.0 and later except for a few boss fights that use them to hamper the players, and there were mechanics involved to counter these. Come patch 4.2, elemental resistances have been removed entirely, including the elemental resistance screen in your character profile and all elemental materia. By the same token, which of the Twelve that the player picked as their character's chosen deity used to slightly change elemental resistances; after patch 4.2, it's purely for flavor text, and the choice of which god the character worships does not affect their stats in any way.
    • Crafter stats. Disciples of the Hand used to have a primary stat they worked off of, similar to the combat classes. This is still seen in the game, with the classes in question gaining whichever stat they worked off of at a higher rate than other Disciples, e.g. Armorer gaining noticeably more Strength than a Culinarian or Alchemist, but ultimately it means nothing, as your abilities as a Disciple of the Hand are now based entirely on the stats of your gear.
    • Attribute Points. A holdover from Legacy, you would gain a bonus point to put into any attribute when you leveled past level 10. However, because of the way the game works, putting it in any stat other than the primary used for your Class/Job was a waste of the point (e.g. a Strength-using tank like Warrior had no use for Intelligence to boost the strength of the magic attacks they don't have). Furthermore, since Summoner and Scholar share a base class in Arcanist and level up together, people who played one or both of them either had to split the points between Intelligence and Mind, giving them less of a bonus overall, or had to buy an item from their Grand Company to reset their points and adjust to avoid crippling themselves from one of their two possible roles. Come Stormblood, bonus attribute points were removed entirely in favor of the game automatically giving you stat points for whatever your class actually uses.
    • Aetherial gear are common drops in early dungeons, which differs from standard equipment by some randomization to their stats. This randomization ended up being so minor and such a non-factor in making them unique or worthwhile that even by the first post-release patch cycle, they stopped adding aetherial gear to the game, and it never drops in any non-2.0 dungeons. The only reason aetherial gear remains relevant in 2.x content onward is because they're treated as "Unique" items, which means they can be traded in at your Grand Company for seals once you're at Sergeant Second Class.
    • The PvP aspect of the game used to have its own materia. Similar to elemental materia above, it was removed in Stormblood and can no longer be acquired. Despite this, an NPC in the Wolves' Den keeps his name as "Storm Sergeant (Materia Provisioner)".
    • For the longest time, Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium were unique among dungeons in that they are the only ones in the entire game that required eight players, a requirement typically reserved for all subsequent trials and smaller raids. Both are also much longer than any other dungeon and rival some 24-player raids. As such, they tend to be very rarely revisited in comparison to all other dungeons. Starting with Heavensward, the finale of the MSQ has consisted of a normal 4-person dungeon followed by an 8-player trial. In Stormblood, a special "Main Scenario" roulette was added specifically for Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium, and the cutscenes for them became unskippable. To compensate for the length of these dungeons and their cutscenes, the roulette rewards for them are substantially greater than those of other roulettes. Patch 6.1 would eventually modify them to be more in line with the endgames of the expansions (reducing them to 4-player duties and separating the fight against the Ultma Weapon from the rest of the Praetorium) and slim them down considerably (much of the extraneous backtracking is cut entirely, and the cutscenes every thirty seconds are replaced with regular in-game text), leaving the only oddity that there's still a duty roulette dedicated to sending you to 2.0's endgame specifically.
    • Heavensward added the ability to fly on certain mounts in the new areas added in the expansion if you can find and unlock all of the aether currents in a map area after the story gives you an aether compass. This included a new mount roulette button specifically for calling on flying mounts, though there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of need for such a distinction when, out of over a hundred available mounts, less than a quarter of them are not flight-capable. Even your starting chocobo can be taught to fly after you get the aether compass, despite the twin facts that yellow chocobos are consistently presented across the series as being entirely flightless, and the game acknowledges this as the reason for also giving you a black chocobo which can - and that's not getting into the various other clearly-not-flight-capable mounts that can fly anyway, including the Magitek reaper acquired for beating 2.0 and several varieties of bear. Shadowbringers brought this to its logical conclusion by removing the separate button for flying mounts and added flying to every mount — except your starting chocobo, which, until another later patch, still only gained flight when you complete "I Believe I Can Fly".
    • Riding maps grant an extra speed boost to your mounts. They're difficult to acquire in any reasonable time frame (250 Allied Seals for one, when you can only get about 60 per day via regular hunts, or 10 Irregular Tomestones whenever a Moogle Treasure Trove event runs, which are easier to acquire but only allow for riding maps from one of the three main areas per event) but also easily worth the time and effort, since the speed boosts are incredibly helpful for getting around the ARR zones faster. They become significantly less so in the expansion zones, which added the ability to fly - both easier to get (simply complete the story in that zone, a few sidequests, and locate several aether currents, which can be done within a day) and even more convenient for travel (flying is still faster even with both riding maps for an area in pure speed and cuts out having to navigate around obstacles), but despite this riding maps remain an option for the new zones, and are made easier to acquire by giving you more chances at gaining seals (110 per day from the three daily mark logs). That said, Stormblood and on have made some effort to make them situationally useful, in part by cutting several map areas into two halves, one of which is visited early on and the other isn't unlocked (thus preventing you from getting all of their aether currents) until near the end of their respective stories, as well as making them a little bit easier to acquire (Stormblood's hunts uses the same Centurio Seals as Heavensward, so it's easy to grind out what you need if you don't already have a thousand burning a hole in your wallet; Shadowbringers and Endwalker locks them behind a new currency tied to the number of FATEs done in a region, which is more convenient to do in those cut-in-half areas). Come 5.3 and the riding maps for the ARR zones were made redundant in the same manner by backporting the ability to fly to those zones.
    • Race-exclusive gear. When starting as a new character, your character will have a set of clothes on their backs based on what race and gender you chose. This starter gear is the only set that has race restriction and is never used on anything else. To a lesser extent is gender-exclusive gear, which after an update now consists entirely of the starting race-exclusive gear, undergarments, and the occasional event or cash shop outfit (mostly summer-themed ones or outfits based on previous Final Fantasy protagonists). There's even an NPC in the three city-states who sells extra copies of the starting gear, and between the combined race and gender restrictions, the only reasons to do so are replacements after you change race/gender with a fantasia or multiple copies to dye them different colors.
    • Primal fights having a normal difficulty mode. Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda are all fought in the main story with only a party of four instead of the usual party of eight all future primal fights would have. The normal mode primals have very few mechanics compared to their harder versions, although they can still trip up new players. Hard mode primals were a thing in 2.0 mostly as a way to give players at the endgame new gear to obtain and also a requirement for players seeking to obtain their relic weapons. Patch 2.1 would introduce the extreme difficulty for primals which have become the mainstay ever since and all story based primal fights are labeled under "hard". The hard versions of Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda are the only primals that offer loot drops from that difficulty while all future hard mode primals would give nothing, leaving the extreme version to be the one that offers loot.
    • Inns were used as a way to build up rested EXP before ARR, allowing players to build up a buff for their EXP gains as long as they logged out at an inn. Nowadays, any city or major settlement is considered a sanctuary and is given the same rested EXP bonus. Inns are still in the game and have been used in cities appearing in the expansion packs, but they're not longer the only place that can give you rested EXP.
    • The ability to lock onto targets beyond just having them selected, so your character and the camera focus on them without being able to face other directions. This is a holdover from Legacy, where it was the only way to target. As of ARR it is not only unnecessary, it can be actively harmful, as locking onto a target means your character keeps facing towards the target no matter what, meaning moving away from them for AOE mechanics is done by a slow backwards-walk, and looking away for other mechanics is outright impossible while locked on.
    • Guildleves were a good source of EXP grinding since 1.0. By Heavensward, EXP from dungeons were given a huge boost while leves weren't. Levequests were made for the Heavensward zones, but most preferred to do dungeons for more EXP gains. There were also temple leves that made the quests slightly harder for better rewards, but said rewards weren't high enough to justify the cost of 10 leves just to start one temple leve. By Stormblood, levequests were completely omitted for battle classes, leaving only gatherers and crafters being able to use them.
    • Spiritbinding your gear was a great way to get materia in 2.0, but it was a bit random on which ones you could get. By the later 2.x quest lines, much less the release of Heavensward, materia was practically given away as quest rewards and methods of obtaining materia outside of spiritbinding increased significantly. That being said, spiritbinding is still in the game, mostly as a way to make materia to sell off.
    • Speaking of materia, patch 4.06 eliminated the requirement of carbonized matter as a catalyst in materia melding. However, certain job quests still task you with gathering grade 1 carbonized matter despite it no longer having any use outside of said quests. Said item was left in the game solely for that reason, too, as the higher grades were removed entirely.
    • The Binding Coil of Bahamut is the only raid series that doesn't have a normal mode. The Coil was made with only one difficulty in mind and is on par with most savage raids that came after it. The Coil did have its own savage version made for turns 6-9, which made it even more difficult, but it wasn't received well, thus no other turns of the Coil ever received a savage version. Likewise, when the Normal (8-man) Raid roulette was introduced, the Binding Coils are conspicuously absent from the roulette pool.
    • Scholar and Summoner are the only jobs that branch off from a class. On top of this, leveling up one of the jobs would also level up the other, so you'd have cases where a well seasoned Summoner could have Scholar at the same level and have no idea how to play that role. Back when attribute point bonuses were a thing, putting your points into certain stats for one job would carry over to the other. For a player that played both Summoner and Scholar meant that one of their jobs would always be gimped unless they reset their points every time. The developers went on the record saying that making the two jobs this way was a balancing nightmare and would be something they'd never repeat ever again.
    • In an interesting reversal to the one- or two-handed staves and wands issue above, gear that takes up multiple slots was used fairly often in 2.0. Casters would get cowls that took up the body and head slots while tanks got armor sets that took up both body and head or both legs and feet. It was quickly dropped post 2.0 due to how annoying it got for players that got better gear, but could not wear them until they had better gear for both slots their current equipment took up. It also made using said gear as glamours quite troublesome; nowadays, the only gear that takes up multiple slots anymore are cosplay outfits, like a moogle suit or Odin's armor, that tend to take up every slot other than the head (which gets a matching mask).
    • From 2.0 through the end of Stormblood, tank Jobs were given two different stances, colloquially referred to as "tank stances" and "DPS stances" (such as the Paladin's "Shield Oath" and "Sword Oath"). Tank stances would increase aggro generated from attacks while decreasing damage dealt, and DPS stances increased damage, but the damage buffs from DPS stances were never as significant as the aggro gained from using tank stances, or even the amount of damage lost from the tank stance, so even in content with more than one tank there was very little middle ground between tank players never touching their DPS stance or using it exclusively and forcing the rest of the party to more carefully manage their own aggro. As of Shadowbringers, DPS stances have been removed, so all tanks now only have one stance for generating aggro without an arbitrary debuff to their damage. In parties with multiple tanks, this means switching main tanks and off-tanks is simplified: all one needs to do is toggle their stance and let the new main tank take aggro.
    • Tactical Points (TP for short) were a resource utilized by non-magical combat classes in a very similar way to MP for magic classes, the key differences being a flat recharge rate of about 400 points every second or so, even in combat (barring status effects that negated it), and a universal cap of 1000. In practice, TP is a non-issue for single-target combos (you'd need to be fighting enemies for several minutes at a time, without any breaks in combat, to run out of TP mid-battle), but limits the usage of ranged and area-of-effect physical actions, forcing the party to use TP-recovery abilities on several occasions. Additionally, some classes utilized both MP and TP, like Paladins, Dark Knights, and Red Mages: these classes used both TP for physical attacks and MP for magic attacks, forcing players in those classes to manage two different resources, which could get difficult (particularly for Red Mage, which has no way to naturally regain MP outside of role actions or Ethers, but also couldn't rely on physical attacks for very long because they had much higher TP costs). TP was removed as of Shadowbringers, with physical weaponskills being no longer restrained by TP costs, while the spells now have a universal MP cost and MP is given a universal cap of 10000, rather than the cap and costs raising as your level increases. In addition, role actions that revolved around TP have been removed.
    • Even though a lot of abilities were removed from the game for player usage, enemies that used them will still use them. An example is the usage of Stoneskin, which was removed back in 4.0.
    • A meta instance revolves around the listed system requirements for the game. Most websites still list requirements which are much higher than what you actually need to run the game well, because they were devised back in the Legacy days, where the game was infamous for prioritizing graphical fidelity over just about everything else. A Realm Reborn would streamline the graphics quite a bit, to let more players with weaker hardware play the game and make console ports more feasible (Legacy was PC-exclusive, with a port to PS3 being indefinitely shelved until the A Realm Reborn launch), but many websites haven't caught up.
    • In general, armor with asymmetric Physical Defense and Magical Defense stats are no longer made, with all gear having the same amount of both, because there's no point when your choice of class has no bearing on what kind of enemies you fight for 99% of the story. While there's still in-game armor stronger against magic or physical damage, it's segregated into low-level irrelevancy.
    • The Deep Dungeon icon is fashioned after the map marker in Palace of the Dead used to indicate a beacon for reviving fallen allies. The symbol itself is from the ancient Gelmorran civilization that was repurposed by a necromancer with his magic. This symbol appears again in Heaven-on-High despite having no connection to Palace of the Dead or Gelmorra.
    • The A Realm Reborn quest "Druther's House Rules" includes a chicken egg in its rewards. The next quest, "Never Forget", involves an NPC whose Trademark Favorite Food is eggs, and originally required giving him a chicken egg. Patch 5.3 streamlined this quest by having you give him a "Fresh Chicken Egg" quest item instead, but the regular egg is still given to you.
    • The Wind-Up Sun and Moon minions give off light and don't move at all save for changing their elevation slightly whenever you use the poke emote on them, which was useful for players that wanted to take a snapshot of themselves and needed extra light. Later on, the group pose feature gave players the ability to add light sources, making the minions redundant.
    • Belts used to be a fully visible and glamourable equipment slot, before 2.0 made them invisible because of how they almost-invariably clashed with whatever you equipped them with. Several level 1-50 chest pieces from 2.0 which still use their old model from Legacy still have visible indentations around the waist where a belt is expected to appear. Belts still existing at all eventually became enough of an artifact that 6.0 finally removed them entirely.
    • If a new patch removes a job's action, it actually isn't removed from the hotbar if you assigned it to a slot. While you still can't use said ability, you can still keep a collection of artifacts around as long as you don't replace or remove the ability.
    • To some degree the Armoire has fallen to this, because save for storage space, the Glamour Dresser added in patch 4.2 is superior to it in every way imaginable. Whereas anything that can be equipped can be stored in the Glamour Dresser, the Armoire is limited to gear acquired from in-game events, preorders and veteran rewards, achievements, and artifact gear, but only the level-50 artifact gear specifically. It doesn't have any limits on how many things can be stored, but this is largely wasted because of the heavy restrictions on what even can be stored, compared to the Glamour Dresser, as of patch 6.2, allowing for 800 items. It's since been somewhat rescued by the ability to add items within it to glamour plates as well, but its restrictions still mean the Glamour Dresser is overall far more convenient.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • A lot of class quests would be much easier if the NPC companions you're meant to keep alive would just step out of the way of enemy attacks the way any sane player would. This gets ridiculous when said NPC stands there shouting orders such as "It's rampaging! If you value your life, stay out of its sights!"... while standing in the path of heavily telegraphed attacks again, and again, and again.
  • Artistic License – Animal Care:
    • The aquariums you can place as furniture and display fish in are way too small. This album shows off every fish in the game as of 4.36 in an extra-large tank — the extra-large fish just barely physically fit in the tank, and even the medium fish look a bit claustrophobic.
    • The Pasture in the Island Sanctuaries have animals you can capture and feed for material rewards, which you can improve by making them happier via feeding them different qualities of food. The license comes in when every animal, even the ones that are explicitly predatory like Ziz or Alligators will be happy to accept and fill themselves up on the available food, which is either made from apples or various crops you grow yourself.
  • Artistic License – Biology:
    • An early Ul'dah sidequest has you help a woman whose chocobo is being preyed on by a parasitic ladybug. Real-life ladybugs are predators, not bloodsucking parasites. Of course, real-life ladybugs aren't the size of a small dog either.
    • Due to an Ascended Meme, it's accepted as canon that all bears in Eorzea can fly. They don't have wings or anything, they just can.
  • Artistic License – Botany:
    • Crossbreeding plants in gardens can be counterintuitive as it can require completely different species of plant to get the desired result. One possible method of getting the coveted Thavnairian Onion involves crossbreeding Curiel Root (a type of parsnip) with Royal Kukuru (a type of chocolate bean).
    • There are numerous plant-like monsters that defy normal biology. For instance, morbols are a type of mobile, carnivorous plant with dozens of eyes and a putrid digestive system that allows them to debilitate foes with a Weaponized Stench. It's later revealed that they were designed this way by the ancients of the unsundered world who possessed The Power of Creation.
  • Artistic License – Cars: Lalafells are too short to reach the pedals of a car like the Regalia. So what do they do? Just stand on the seat and steer. Apparently the car just drives itself.
  • Artistic License – Engineering: Blacksmiths, armorers, and goldsmiths are able to fashion cobalt into numerous forms of weaponry, armor, and jewelry. In reality, cobalt alone is not only too brittle to make a good weapon or suit of armor, but it oxidizes when exposed to heat, releasing poisonous fumes that can be lethal with continued exposure. That said, cobalt alloys like the cobalt alloy ingot used to make Aesthete's crafting and gathering gear is a much more viable way of using cobalt in metallurgy.
  • Artistic License – Space:
    • Planets are consistently referred to as "stars", with the stars they orbit called "suns" instead.
    • The Mare Lamentorum's landscape is mostly identical to how the view from our own moon would appear, yet is treated as having an atmosphere in game, complete with weather patterns, which would normally obscure one's view of the stars.
  • Ascended Glitch: The Red Mage's entire rotation is built around abusing Dualcast the same way players did so in previous games with the class: casting weaker spells with a standard cast time to grant Dualcast, then using that to skip the much longer cast time on a much stronger elemental or healing spell. At the sufficient level, the class even gets a natural version of the Swiftcast + Raise combo thanks to this.
  • Ascended Meme:
    • During tier 1 of the Eden raid series, it quickly became a joke that the Warrior of Light had either a poor memory or even brain damage due to the fact that as part of the storyline, they summon primals from their memory, yet the summoned primals look very little like the source material (Leviathan having two heads, Titan having machinery on his back that lets him turn into an ATV, etc). At the end of the second tier, the WoL can comment that they never quite got the hang of primal summoning down, and Gaia responds that Thancred and Urianger seemed confused by what was summoned, and asks the WoL if they have memory problems.
    • The boss fight against Titan is a notorious sprout killer due to his Landslide attack, which will knock the player off the arena and kill them instantly. Even worse, until patch 6.1, players that died this way couldn't be revived and had to sit out for the rest of the battle. In the Eden raid series, Ryne asks the WoL what Titan was like, and one of their responses has them remembering the landslides with a deep sense of dread.
    • The "La HEE" that starts off the vocals for the Rak'tika Greatwood's daytime track, "Civilizations," quickly became memetic. Cue patch 5.2 and the Qitari beast tribe quests, where "La-hee" is enshrined as a word of power that can, at the very least, re-awaken old Ronkan dolls that hear someone speak it. Masayoshi Soken also referred to the song as "La-HEE" during the May 2021 Fanfest. Further, searching for "La Hee" (or some variation) on Spotify has the actual track (again, "Civilizations") show up as the top result.
    • A sort of rite of passage for newbie crafters that has been joked about for years is an early Goldsmith quest where the quest giver asks for a dozen copper rings. The only issue is that Goldsmith at that level has two options that are both copper rings. There's the "copper ring" accessory (plural "copper rings") and the "copper rings" crafting item (plural "handfuls of copper rings"). While the journal and quest tracker do specify "handfuls", the dialogue does not - nor does the actual crafting menu outside of the "You successfully crafted x" notification - resulting in many newbie crafters making a dozen copper ring accessories, not realizing that it's the wrong item until the game doesn't let them finish the quest. Multiple years and a few expansions later, during the Dwarven Beast tribe quests, one dwarf laments how due to her heritage, she was constantly being asked to craft things, including "copper rings. No, not those copper rings, the other sort."
  • Assassination Attempt: During Ishgard's transformative period after Archbishop Thordan's death and the truth of the Dragonsong War was revealed to the public, some people of Ishgard claimed the truth (that Ishgard's ancestors were the ones to start the war and the Church was hiding the truth) to be a lie perpetrated by Ser Aymeric as part of a coup. One such Ishgardian managed to stab Ser Aymeric in the abdomen with a knife thinking to slay a would-be tyrant. Ser Aymeric survived, but the event sparked an all-out riot in Ishgard.
  • Astral Finale: It appears to be a common theme in the final dungeon or boss of the main story line that some part of it takes place or has a backdrop of space or of the planet.
    • Endwalker, being the final arc of the first story and having a heavy astral theme, serves as one for the game as a whole (thus far). Additionally, the expansion's last zone, Ultima Thule, is the Metea's "nest" in the far reaches of the Sea of Stars, and is set against a brilliant cosmic background of red and purple. The final 6.0 MSQ trial takes place on a cosmic battlefield where the Endsinger hurls entire planets at you, and the Post-Final Boss fight against Zenos is similiarly set against a starry backdrop.
  • As You Know:
    • Justified, as the Warrior of Light is something of an up-and-rising adventurer with next to no personal context for the lands of Eorzean culture or the bigger picture. Factors of the world that are simply common knowledge are only usually elaborated upon or reiterated to make a point for the subject at hand.
    • This does reach a strange case with the "Return to Ivalice" raids; the characters offer summaries and explanations of the Zodiac Brave Story if the player asks, but do so by summing up the entirety of the plot of Final Fantasy Tactics as an in-universe stage play based off of historical events, inaccuracies aside and sans the Lucavi demons. Without these explanations, the story loosely uses this trope to summarize them quickly while expecting the player to be more familiar with the events than the Warrior of Light, to focus more on the theater troupe's personal quest and research.
    • The player can ask the guildmaster of each guild about who they are and what they do and they'll give a brief summary of what the guild is all about. The player can ask this even after completing the guild's questline and the guildmaster will still answer but will have some extra dialogue expressing confusion as to why a master of their profession is asking for an overview of that profession.
  • Attract Mode: The "End of an Era" cinematic plays if you sit at the title screen for a few minutes. Heavensward replaces it with a cinematic summarizing the story so far, through patch 2.55. Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker replace that with their respective trailers.
  • Auto-Revive:
    • Kuribu, the final boss of the Lost City of Amdapor (Hard), begins with two stacks of Seed of Life, which revives it when it's KO'd, effectively dividing the fight into three separate phases with their own life bar.
    • In floors 51 and beyond in the Palace of the Dead, the Pomander of Resurrection grants an auto-raise effect to the party, but it only revives the first player that is knocked out rather than granting the effect once to every player.
    • In Endwalker, you're given the unique opportunity to do a trial with a Trust party. If you do, you start off with three stacks of Willful, which will be consumed to save you from an attack that would otherwise KO you — instead you'll be stunned for several seconds while the NPCs heal you, mimicking the usual loss of control that comes with a KO. This gives you some much-needed breathing room, since normally when doing duties with NPCs, you instantly wipe when KO'd.
    • During Endwalker's Post-Final Boss fight with Zenos, you start with six stacks of Spark of Hope, which revives you if you're KO'd. Amusingly, the in-universe mechanism here is Zenos himself trash-talking you for the explicit purpose of igniting your soul so the battle can continue.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The Pomander of Resolution in the Palace of the Dead transforms you into Kuribu, an angel that can blast enemies with Divine Judge. The attack can hit multiple enemies and inflict stun, but the attack has to be "aimed" with a targeting circle and it's not too helpful if the enemies are moving too much. It also has a lengthy cast time of nearly 3 seconds (much shorter if you happen to have Haste) and you'll drop the cast if you have to move to avoid being struck by enemy attacks. While Divine Judge can do massive damage to dark and undead enemies, said enemies usually don't appear until around floors 91 to 100. But it's pretty much mandatory against the floor 100 boss, as it's the only way to destroy the ever-increasing horde of perpetually self-resurrecting undead minions.

     B 
  • Back for the Finale: The 2.5 Hildibrand quest chain, the final chain for A Realm Reborn features everyone you met during the prior chains appearing to assist in some form. From the initial quests comes Humphrey, the man who posed as a Warrior of Light, who has since joined the Sultansworn and introduces you to Phillice. Collector Durilda, thankful for helping mend her relationship with her daughter during the Treaty-Blade segment, gets a reluctant witness to give you information. Gladiator Avila from the Coliseum segment and Arabella, the lapis maiden of Costa del Sol, help you procure ingredients needed to save Hildibrand after he's been poisoned, only for it to turn out that his time among the zombies at the very start of the quest chain gave him Acquired Poison Immunity. Last, but not least, Hildibrand's Big Damn Heroes moment in the climax, in which he commands the loyalty of the zombies otherwise under the main antagonist's control, is backdropped by light shining from the head of old man Eleazar, just as it did at the end of the first questline.
    • The Heroes' Gauntlet, the final Shadowbringers story dungeon from patch 5.3, has many of the allies you've made over the course of the expansion return to aid you on your way back to the Crystal Tower. Even Hildibrand will occasionally make an appearance as an Easter Egg.
    • The Endwalker main scenario sees the formation of the Ilsabard Contigent, a massive force marching into Ilsabard that counts NPCs from every expansion and representatives from every corner of the realm among its ranks. The level 89 story dungeon, The Aitiascope, has spectral versions of Papalymo, Haurchefant, Moenbryda and Minfilia come to your aid, while some of the enemies are also past foes, such as Livia and Ilberd.
    • Late into Endwalker the scions are in need of materials, so Alphinaud proceeds to call in every favor he can get in contact with. An incomplete list of everyone who participates includes the C-list Scions in Mor Dhona, the Idyllshire treasure hunters, Garlond Ironworks and Nero, Hancock, the Four Lords, the Redbill Sky Pirates, the crew of the Prima Vista, and almost every beast tribe that had a major part in the story.
  • Background Music Override:
    • Riding music for mounts is a minor version, as it only does this for overworld areas when outside of combat - towns with their own themes that don't restrict you from riding at all still play their music - and there's a toggle option to turn it off entirely.
    • To emphasize that you're deep within enemy territory, the themes of the Garlean and Beast Tribe strongholds continue playing through battles.
    • The entire final area of Heavensward, Azys Lla, foregoes battle music. As do many of the later dungeons (earlier ones did not have any background music at all beyond a short intro piece, while a few hard mode ones used a Variable Mix approach) except for the boss battles.
    • Similarly in Shadowbringers, the final zone The Tempest, has a similar effect, making a heavy contrast with its very chill theme and the actual fighting.
    • Following that, in Endwalker, the final zone combines this with Evolving Music, initially staring with distant droning music that matches the otherworldly nature.
    • During the Lightning event, the FATE events she spawns with begin with their normal music, only to be replaced with "Blinded By Light", the battle theme from XIII, once she appears proper.
  • Backing Away Slowly:
    • Upon completing The Wanderer's Palace (Hard), the now-freed tonberries interrupt your victory cutscene to rush in and stab the defeated Mamool Ja boss that had been enslaving them. We don't see the act, but your character is visibly unnerved and one of your party members can be seen backing away slowly.
    • During the Hildibrand quests of A Realm Reborn, the Warrior of Light and Ellie desperately try to convince Briarden to get away from the crates laden with Nashu's explosives. But when Ellie tries to use the excuse that she feels a cold chill on the otherwise sweltering beaches of Costa del Sol, the oblivious Briarden decides to light a bonfire to stay warm. Both the Warrior and Ellie slowly back away once he lights up a piece of driftwood not far from Nashu's bombs.
    • In Il Mheg, one sidequest has the pixie Uin Nee request the Warrior trim the bushmen, mortals who have been irreversibly transformed into shrubbery by the pixies' whims. Upon the quest's completion, the pixie wonders what it's like to be a bushman and is about to offers to turn the Warrior into one, only for said Warrior to immediately start backing away.
  • Back Stab:
    • Attacking monsters from the flanks or behind gives you slight bonuses such as an increased critical hit chance or improved accuracy. Certain attacks automatically deal more damage if used from the correct position, and others may be less effective if used from the wrong position.
    • The Lancer and Pugilist classes (and their Job counterparts Dragoon and Monk) are the only classes in ARR to receive direction-dependent special attacks; however, all classes still receive the same small overall acc/crit boosts to all of their attacks by striking from the flank or behind. As a result of this, tank classes tend to need the highest accuracy stat to consistently strike their targets, due to the fact tanks are usually stuck attacking the front of the target.
    • The Rogue class introduced in patch 2.4 of ARR has two versions of this. "Trick Attack", which can only be used when they're using the "Hide" ability, deals an attack with 400 potency and increases the target's Damage Vulnerability for 10 seconds when used from the rear of a target (compared to just a 240-potency hit from the front). The other is "Assassinate", which can only be used against enemies below 20% HP, and has the Rogue quickly vanishing, then reappearing on the shoulders of their target before stabbing them in the neck with both daggers, and hopping back down to their starting position. Oddly, their former "Sneak Attack" ability was more of a face stab. Before it was removed with the release of Stormblood, the reasoning for Sneak Attack being enhanced by using it from the front was handwaved by members of the Rogue Guild - according to them, any half-decent enemy would expect a rogue to sneak up behind them and stab them in the back. Few, however, expect to see a Rogue appear out of nowhere right in front of them before stabbing them in the face.
    • Samurai from Stormblood has a more minor variation with the Kenki gauge, where the final hit in two of its three primary combos builds the gauge slightly faster if you hit the opponent from a specific direction (from the rear with Gekko and from the side with Kasha).
  • Badass Armfold: You do this when idle on the Slepnir mount. Also, your whole party does this during the victory custcene for the final Midas raid boss, while looking away from its exploding body.
  • Badass Family:
    • The Mandervilles. Hildibrand's kind of an idiot, but he's so tough he survived being shot high enough to reach Dalamud - and then being thrown back after it exploded, to say nothing of several other trips through the sky in this manner, including one that sends him from Dravania to the Far East. Godbert's so awesome as to be something short of a Physical God, and even he's terrified of his wife.
    • The Thaumaturges' guild is also run by a family of Lalafell mages, and their storyline heavily involves the one sibling of the seven who isn't badass.
    • Three generations of the Leveilleur family counts as this in various fields of magic: Louisoix (the grandfather) was an exceptionally powerful wizard, Fourchenault is a master of Sagacity (that is, the Sage class), Ameliance is a highly skilled Arcanist who can cast magic without a focus, and their children are also prodigies in various forms of magic, with Alphinaud taking from his parents as an Arcanist and Sage, and Alisaie as the lone family member who's a mage that's also skilled in close combat (as a Gladiator), eventually culminating in becoming a Red Mage that combines the two skillsets.
  • Badass in Distress: Despite their talents, there are numerous points in the story where the Warrior of Light has to be rescued by their friends and allies.
    • Near the very end of A Realm Reborn, Hydaelyn intervenes to shield them from the explosion by Ultima, sapping her of most of her remaining strength. Then Lahabrea manages to strike the Warrior down in their one-on-one duel, forcing Hydaelyn to spend the rest of her available energy to recusitate the Warrior and empower them to defeat Lahabrea.
    • In Heavensward, the Warriors of Darkness have the Warrior and their friends bound by Holmgang and helpless until Urianger intervenes, revealing that he'd been acting as a Double Agent for the heroes.
    • In the Omega questline, the Warrior is imprisoned inside a slowly shrinking electric cage by Omega and given an ultimatum that they must escape within three minutes or they'll die. But given that this cage is powerful enough to contain the likes of Bahamut and Shinryu, even they struggle to break free on their own. Alpha repeatedly tries to ram into the cage to break it, but it takes Midgardsormr utilizing all of his remaining aether to recreate his original body and crush the cage with his jaws to free the Warrior.
    • At the end of 4.5, the Warrior is wracked with pain when an unknown force tries to reach out to them, leaving them at the mercy of Elidibus possessing Zenos's body. Luckily for the Warrior, Estinien is on hand to deflect an otherwise lethal blow and carry the Warrior to safety.
    • This happens multiple times in Shadowbringers to underscore that the Warrior is not the Invincible Hero many people think they are.
      • Early on in the story, Ran'jit manages to defeat the Warrior and their allies during the battle to rescue Minfilia from Eulmore's clutches, requiring Thancred's and the Crystal Exarch's timely intervention to escape the Eulmoran general.
      • The Warrior succumbs to the corruptive effects of taking in the aether and Light of all five Lightwardens, slowly turning them into the ultimate Lightwarden for all of Norvandt. If not for Ryne's immediate intervention, the Warrior would have turned then and there.
      • In the final trial boss of 5.3, the Warrior is warped into the rift between worlds by Elidibus, who has become a primal in the shape of Norvandt's original Warrior of Light. Bound with magical chains and possessing no way back, the Warrior wishes upon Azem's crystal as the illusionary Hythlodaeus instructed them to. This conjures a shade of Emet-Selch to the Seat of Sacrifice that proceeds to summon the Warrior and their allies back into the fight.
    • This also happens several times in Endwalker to emphasize the escalating stakes.
      • In the duty, "In from the Cold", the Warrior is kidnapped by Fandaniel, who places the Warrior's soul inside the body of a nameless Garlean soldier while Zenos puppets the Warrior's own body to Camp Broken Glass in hopes of attacking the people there and riling the Warrior up even more. Despite being Brought Down to Normal, the Warrior manages to fight their way back to the camp even after taking mortal injuries and stop Zenos from attacking Alisaie and G'raha Tia.
      • At the end of the events of the Warrior's time in Elpis, the Warrior is bound in aetherial chains and left at the mercy of the villain trying to wipe their memory and prevent them from taking vital information back to the rest of the heroes. They're rescued when Venat breaks free of her own fetters first and attacks the villain, breaking his concentration enough to remove the rest of the aetherial chains. The Warrior is then whisked to safety thanks to Argos, Emet-Selch, and Hythlodaeus.
      • In the finale of the story, the Warrior is facing the Endsinger alone after teleporting the rest of the Scions to safety, facing what is likely a hopeless battle against a Physical God who can simply bombard them from a range they can't follow. That's when Zenos busts in while donning the form of Shinryu, granting the Warrior much needed assistance in the final battle against the Endsinger.
  • Badass Normal:
    • The Garleans, for all their technological prowess, are physically incapable of casting magic. For characters like the main Garlean villains, their fighting styles are pure and simple strength and technique as well as special gun-weapons. Even when you see Garlean soldiers harnessing what appears to be magic, it's coming from one of two sources: specialized weapons which veer into Magic from Technology (which only can use electric-aspect attacks), or drafted soldiers from magic-wielding areas like Othard or Ala Mhigo (which is where the tiny number of Lalafells and Miqo'te in their army come from).
    • From downing primals to doomsday mechs with mundane weapons, the hero often feels like this. Also, with a little help of the hero, non-Garleans have successfully fought back against the superiorly-armed Garlean Empire with inferior weapons, save their magic which barely levels the playing field at all; by the end of Stormblood, with the hero's help, they've managed to push back a potential invasion of Thanalan and kick out entrenched occupying armies from Ala Mhigo and Doma.
  • Badass Adorable:
    • The weapons dropped by Good King Moggle Mog XII have names such as "Murderous Mogfists" or "Malevolent Mogwand", and are some of the strongest weapons that can be acquired prior to earning hard-mode Primal, relic or Ironworks weapons. They also make a "kupo" sound whenever drawn, and look like this.
    • The Mogglesguard themselves aren't exactly far off from this either. Seeing a moogle with a sword, shield, and helmet shout "Defend the king, kupo!" is pretty much the pinnacle of the trope.
    • Lalafells in general, especially the second-in-commands of the Pugilist and Rogue guilds.
  • Badass Bookworm: Marjorie, the giver of the quest that sends you into the Temple of the Fist dungeon, is a Badass Bookworm in the making. She is a glasses-wearing scholar inspired by the lectures of Eric, the Ala Mhigan academic from the Monk job quests, to study the history of the monk organization the Fist of Rhalgr. Upon hearing about how you fought the spirit of an ancient monk master in the Temple of the Fist, Marjorie decides she must become a monk herself so that she may meet this spirit herself. As she leaves the man who unlocks the dungeon notes that he never met a monk like Marjorie and it will be interesting to see how far she can go.
  • Badass Fingersnap:
    • With their new abilities in Heavensward, bards do this after casting one of their abilities now. As they snap their fingers, the arrow they fired detonates into a dark explosion of magic.
    • Shiva snaps her fingers when casting Diamond Dust.
    • Emet-Selch favors finger-snaps whenever he does extensive aetherial manipulation, such as recalling Y'shtola from the Lifestream in the Rak'Tika Greatwood, or during his cameo in the Seat of Sacrifice.
  • Bad Boss: The Garlean commanders see their soldiers as disposable, and both Nero and Livia shoot their own troops dead at certain points in the story. The game explains that this is because the Garlean footsoldiers are conscripted from the most-recently-conquered nation to stem rebellion, so anything less than blind loyalty may be seen as a sign of dissension. However, this is sometimes subverted by certain Garlean higher-ups, namely Rhytahtin and Gaius.
  • Bad Future: The time period that the Crystal Exarch comes from in Shadowbringers. When Garlemald unleashed Black Rose on the Eorzean Alliance at the same time Norvrandt fell to the Flood of Light, it triggered another Calamity that killed most of the population and caused the survivors to fight each other on a dying world. 200 years later, the descendants of Garlond Ironworks combined technology from Omega and Alexander to modify the Crystal Tower so it could travel between time and dimensions, then sent it and the Exarch back in time to Norvrandt, just before the Flood of Light fully overtook that world, to avert the Calamity on the Source.
  • Bag of Holding:
    • Throughout the game, the player is tasked with stuffing some kind of increasingly large animal (or, in at least one case, a fishman) in a bag and bringing it to the questgiver. This gets relentlessly lampshaded by item descriptions and characters in-game, who wonder how the heck you can carry an entire caravan's worth of items in your unseen knapsack. When this reaches its logical conclusion with a sack that can hold a ten-ton dinosaur in it yet take up only one inventory slot, the key item tells you to just invoked try not to think too hard about it.
    • Several Pixie quests involve tasking the Warrior with collecting some inordinately large thing like an entire phooka or enough grass for an entire herd of sheep to graze on. Uln Nee enchants a sack, named "Nearly-Bottomless Sack" to hold these things.
    • The Magic Bucket minion contain an anecdote about its previous owner: a fisherman who wanted a magic bucket that would follow him on its own. But he abandoned the bucket after he accidentally unleashed a live Nepto Dragon into the marketplace, implying that the enormous sea serpent somehow fit inside the bucket.
  • Bait-and-Switch Boss:
    • Kugane Ohashi pits you against Yojimbo, who many players have already fought before in Kugane Castle. You only fight him for about a minute before he sinks into the floor and re-emerges as Gilgamesh, who's picked up many new tricks since the Battle in the Big Keep.
    • An entire dungeon was Bait And Switched in the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse raids. In 5.2 a small questline is added where the Dwarves speak of an upcoming carnival, making many NieR: Automata veterans anticipate The Carnival - an early and one of the most striking setpieces in the game. Instead 5.3 added The Puppet's Bunker as the next chapter.
    • Especially frequent in Savage raids, which tend to replace their final bosses with completely new ones as a reward/incentive for people to do the harder content.
      • The Deltascape 4.0 raid boss is Exdeath. On normal difficulty, it's a pretty straightforward fight with him. On savage difficulty, it seems to just be a harder version of the same fight, as expected. But when he reaches 60% health, he gets sucked into the darkness, only to break reality to return as Neo-Exdeath for the remainder of the fight.
      • The Sigmascape 4.0 boss is Kefka. As in Deltascape, the normal version is a straight-up fight with everyone's favorite Monster Clown, while the Savage fight replaces him midway through with his God Kefka form.
      • Alphascape 4.0 pits you against Omega itself, a second time, as it takes on human forms in one last desperate attempt to understand the Warrior of Light's incredible power. Again, the Savage version replaces this boss midway through, as they re-merge into a monstrous creature in one even last-ier and more desperate attempt to defeat you.
      • Eden's Gate: Sepulture has you fight a new version of Titan, who has Adaptive Armor and looks much different than on the Source. While its fight on Savage is difficult due to all the new tricks he'll use to trip you up, half way through the fight, Titan strips himself of his armor and fuses with the mountain range to become Titan Maximum. Then, near the end of that form's fight, he'll use Orogenesis to create a clone of Eden Titan that can only be targeted, and the two forms fight together to unleash hell.
      • Eden's Promise Verse 4 once more has you fighting the normal final boss Eden's Promise, which can best be described as an Ascian prime on steroids as an (unwilling) fusion of Mitron and Loghriff. However after surviving long enough, the party successfully unfuse Eden's Promise and kill Mitron... except it was too late and Gaia's memories of being Loghriff fully re-awaken just in time to see him perish. This makes her call upon her Ascian magic and Time Master powers and becomes a fight for your life against the true Oracle of Darkness.
  • Bait the Dog: Teledji Adeledji is presented in 2.2 as the one sympathetic member of Ul'dah's Syndicate, voting in favor of accepting the Doman refugees into the city and paying for their transportation to Revenant's Toll from his own pocket when that fails. Then 2.3 shows that he merely wished to exploit them to further his own ambitions, and he's actually a heartless schemer who will gladly jeopardize the stability of the Eorzean Alliance and put untold lives at risk in order to get his hands on Omega, an Allagan superweapon whose power eclipses that of the Ultima Weapon - his ploy to use the Domans was an attempt to get them on his side, all the while inciting what amounts to a race riot in Ul'dah.
  • Barrier Warrior: A popular setup for tanks in Legacy was to make use of Thaumaturge's Punishing Barbs and Stygian Spikes with Conjurer's Shock Spikes, which effectively deals equal damage as taken, restores MP for each hit taken, as well as deal lightning damage and stun the enemy respectively.
    • Thaumaturge and Black Mage get Manaward, a barrier that last 20 seconds and nullifies damage up to 30% of their max HP. As Black Mage is a Squishy Wizard job with limited mobility, this helps tank damage from mechanics that couldn't be avoided in time.
    • Prior to 5.0, all Healer jobs had access to the role abilities Protect (a Beehive Barrier for increased defense) and Eye for an Eyenote  (had the chance of reducing the attack power of enemies who strike a party member).
    • As of 6.0, Scholar and Sage are the "shield" Healer jobs, with many of their abilities focusing on nullifying incoming damage (as opposed to "regen" healers White Mage and Astrologian, who specialize in restoring lost HP after the fact). Scholar's Sacred Soil is a ground-targeted persistent barrier that reduces damage taken by 10% for any party member that stands inside it, while Sage's Kerachole is an instant-cast independent aoe buff on all party members in range that also reduces damage by the same 10%.
    • Astrologian has the ability Collective Unconscious. It conjures a protective sphere around the player which greatly reduces damage taken to everybody inside and grants Regen, but is dispelled if the Astrologian moves or performs an action.
    • From Stormblood and onwards, each tank has at least one ability that protects themselves as well as their allies. The "Rampart" role ability is shared with all of the tanks, Paladin gets a party-wide mitigation action in "Passage of Arms", while the Warrior's "Shake It Off" was repurposed to provide the same effect later. Dark Knight has "The Blackest Night", which not only protects themselves or an ally, but grants a free cast of "Edge of Darkness" or "Flood of Darkness" and their later upgrades. Gunbreaker has "Heart of Light" and "Heart of Stone", and their weapon action "Brutal Shell" generates a shield when used in a combo.
    • Dancers get the Shield Samba ability, which creates a red, flower-like barrier on both themselves and nearby party members. It lasts just 15 seconds but reduces any damage taken by 10%.
    • Red Mages have Magick Barrier, which reduces magic damage taken and increases the potency of healing effects used on nearby party members.
  • Battle Ballgown: Some of the higher-level tank armors qualify as unisex versions of this, such as the Valerian Terror Knight's set, or the Orthodox Fending set, combining heavy armor plating with long, flowing skirts.
  • Battle Theme Music: Where to even begin. There are six regular battle themes, one for each major area and one for dungeons. Then, there are at least three different boss battle themes, four different guildleve themes and the behest theme, not to mention the instanced dungeon theme, beast tribe stronghold theme, a different theme for each Primal battle, and special themes for certain quests such as the lunar transmitter fight or the final job quest.
    • Special mention goes to Gilgamesh who has not one but two variations of Battle on the Big Bridge during his second fight.
  • Beach Episode: The Firefall Faire event rewarded the players with swimsuits and special wallpapers with their characters posing with their new gear. This news was announced with screenshots of female Hyur and Miqo'te, and a Roegadyn, sporting the new outfits on the beach.
  • Because You Were Nice to Me: An interesting version occurs at the end of "Every Little Thing She Does is Magitek", when the captured Magitek Armor "Maggie", recently given sentience by replacing its servomechanism with a mammet heart, comes to life and fixes the kink that beleaguered Cid, Biggs and Wedge after Cid and the player defend it from Imperial soldiers coming to retrieve it.
  • Beam-O-War:
    • The final boss of the twenty-four man raid Dun Scaith engages in one with the raid alliance; the raid must output enough damage to eventually force the boss's attack right back at him.
    • Near the end of the Dragonsong War questline, a spectacular beam struggle breaks out when Shinryu's Protostar and Omega's Delta Attack collide.
  • Beef Gate: Any given area in 2.0 can be accessed by a character of any level, even endgame areas filled with 40+ enemies like Northern Thanalan and Mor Dhona. Since quests and equipment are level restricted and exp rewards from higher level FATEs and enemies are scaled down, the most practical reason one would have to run through higher level areas is to get from Gridania to Ul'Dah or vice versa for their regional classes before airship/ferry travel is available.
  • Beehive Barrier: The effects for a lot of the defensive spells/abilities such as Protect feature a tessellating hexagonal motif.
  • BFS:
    • For a class that uses one handed swords, Gladiators and Paladins like to use some rather large bladed ones, such as their relic Curtana.
    • Odin of course brings Zantetsuken, which players can get a version of their own by earning Odin's Mantle. The blade appears in a flash of light whenever drawn, and is about as long as the player character is tall.
    • Dullahan (haunted armors) and Magitek Colossus type enemies carry enormous swords. In the Colossus case, they're basic attacks are cleave attacks which hit whoever is standing right in front of them.
    • Dark Knights wield these types of swords as their primary weapon, with said swords being at least as tall as the person wielding them, if not slightly bigger.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Do not tell Yda her visor can be changed for something more fashionable. In the wake of Moenbryda's death, and even in the throes of grief and trying to be cheerful for the rest of the team, the first thing out of her mouth after returning from an errand is how she really despises that flower lady in Revenant's Toll for suggesting she change her visor...
    • Disobeying Livia's orders, questioning Gaius near her, or insinuating there's anything wrong with Garlemand. She shoots one of her own men - even though she's perfectly happy with the torture and murder of most of the Scion's rank-and-file - not because he was going too far in stabbing a corpse, but because he disobeyed a direct order.
  • Big Ball of Violence: This is how the showdown between Zo Ga and Gi Gu at the end of the Kobold beast tribe quest series begins, complete with cartoon-like sound effects. However, after one insult too many gets directed at Gi Gu (from his lover, no less, though she was only trying to help), he steps up his game and puts Zo Ga down.
  • Big Boo's Haunt: Haukke Manor.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Can be invoked by you or any other player when a battle seems to be lost, only for someone else to come in and save everyone.
    • Also invoked at the very end of the main story. The magitek armor that you converted to your side comes rushing in to aid you in escaping the impending explosion after you beat the Final Boss.
  • Big Fancy House: The Levellieurs live in an enormous estate that a foreign visitor initially mistakes for the Studium, Sharlayan's equivalent to an Ivy League university. In fact, the estate is so vast that Fourchenault can remain completely Locked Out of the Loop regarding Ameliance's foreign exchange student project. A Hannish girl, Miladeen, can eat meals, sleep, and study at Levellieur house as well as go to and from school with Fourchenault none the wiser.
  • Bigger on the Inside: Alexander from outside is already very large, no doubt about it, but its insides are the size of at least a small city. Justified in that Alexander is a reality warping primal.
  • Bilingual Bonus:
    • For Japanese players (and other non-English speaking players), the lyrics in the boss themes tend to be this as nearly all the songs are in English despite being a Japanese game. The boss of 4.3 partially inverts it by being the first boss theme to contain any Japanese lyrics, which is fitting since it's sung from the perspective of Yotsuyu, who is from the game's fantasy equivalent of Japan, but even it has English lyrics as well. And each theme tends to explain the motivations or background of the boss being fought, so understanding them is definitely a nice bonus.
    • Kugane Ohashi, the final trial of the Stormblood Hildibrand quests, has a surprise for players who followed the questline. "Ohashi" is Japanese for "big bridge". Early in the battle, Yojimbo reveals himself to be none other than Gilgamesh, turning the trial into a second "Battle on the Big Bridge".
  • Bird Run: Ninjas do this while their weapons are unsheathed. Most do the "arms swept back" variant, while Lalafells do a flat-out arms-extended version.
  • Bishōnen Line:
    • Zigzagged in the second and final battle against Nidhogg in Heavensward. His first form just has him as a dragon fighting the party, and during the second phase he takes on a form that resembles Estinien with several draconic aspects. But during the final phase of the fight he returns to his dragon form, albeit with bright red demonic-looking features.
    • Played straight with Omega in Stormblood. Alphascape 3.0 has players fight Omega itself in its iconic robot form, while the next raid, Alphascape 4.0, has players fight against the core of Omega, which takes the form of both a strikingly handsome man and a strikingly beautiful woman. Justified as Omega is stumped at how a supposedly weaker lifeform as the player can best it in battle, so it decides to try adopting a humanoid form like the player character and fight them on equal footing.
    • Also played straight in Shadowbringers with Innocence, Vauthry's One-Winged Angel form: halfway through the battle, he transforms from a Fat Bastard into an otherworldly beautiful angel.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • At the end of Under the Moonlight (v4.3), the prisoner exchange is successful, but Yotsuyu is manipulated by her brother Asahi into recovering her traumatic memories and going on a rampage as the primal Tsukuyomi. When the Warrior of Light stops her, Asahi beats her to death and reveals he purposely sabotaged the exchange to reignite the war between Doma and the Garlean Empire. Asahi gets his just desserts when Yotsuyu kills him with her dying breath, and she dies at peace with herself. And then the Scions learn an Ascian gave Asahi his orders.
    • The YorHa raid series ends like this. The Machine invasion of the First is defeated, but the villagers refuse to forgive Konogg for indirectly causing the invasion to begin with, causing him to leave the village in dejection. This, however, only makes the villagers more angry, as they wanted him to stand trial for what he did. The chief calls them out for blaming and pushing their problems onto him, and admits that they're all at fault for this. By the time the Warrior of Light tracks Konogg down in Eulmore, he's already left with Anogg...or what he thinks is her.
    • At the end of Endwalker (v6.0), the Final Days are averted with the Endsinger defeated and, reverting into Meteion, seemingly dying with her hope rekindled after reading the Warrior of Light's memories, and Zenos perishes after engaging the Warrior in one final duel. However, both Zodiark and Hydaelyn are dead, ending their millennia-long conflict, and with the deaths of the rest of their kin, the Warrior of Light, as the bearer of Azem's soul, is now the last living Ascian on the Source. Meanwhile, having ushered in lasting change with a cure for tempering, the creation of the Grand Company of Eorzea, and the improvement of relationships with Garleans, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn publicly announce their disbandment, though they vow to continue to work from the shadows to solve the world's problems and reunite if another threat emerges. Finally, Meteion's fate is called into question when the Warrior sees a two-tailed Bluebird of Happiness that looks like her bird form flying through Revenant's Toll as, in the distant past, a white-robed Ancient implied to be Elidibus prepares to do battle with a threat dwelling below Elpis.
  • Bizarre Gambling Winnings: Eorzea Encyclopedia III reveals that Merhyde challenged the former proprietor of what is now known as Merhyde's Meyhane to drinking contest and won, earning herself the deed to the tavern that now bears her name.
  • Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Gets completely bonkers with the Au Ra. Most of the races of Eorzea don't feature that much difference between the sexes save for maybe a bit of difference between male and female Roegadyn, but the Au Ra run with this horse: the men are fully half-again as tall as the women and have well over twice as much body mass, as well as far more prominent facial scales and much more imposing horns. Even their animations are wildly different, with the men being very aggressive in their body language and the women being far more demure and delicate. While the men are clearly draconic, the women could very easily be mistaken for midlander Hyur, if not for their (much smaller) tails.
  • Black-and-Gray Morality: The Monetarist faction of the Syndicate, one of Ul'dah's chief political groups, especially during the Legacy story line. To them, everything was about profits or costs, even whether to form an alliance with Limsa Lominsa and Gridania prior to the fall of Dalamud. At least one member flat out voiced it would be better if they actually bribed or allied with the Garleans as a possible expansions of trades would open up. Additionally, one quest, secretly given by Raubahn through an trusted Immortal Flame member, tasked the player with stopping a Syndicate member's plan to release dangerous animals into Little Ala Mhigo's refugee camp, as a sort of underground gladiatorial battle for the amusement of corrupt betters.
    • Events of "A Realm Awoken" show that the reason why there was no Teleport Aetheryte built at the Vesper Bay base of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn was specifically because the Scions refused to become their lackeys, hoping to put a financial squeeze on the Scions. And while "Into the Maelstrom" shows that the Syndicate does have some viable concerns, profit is still a key factor to them. Worse yet, a fair number of them are trying to overthrow the reasonable and kind Sultana, and have already bribed and corrupted significant portions of the Paladin order sworn to defend her, and trying to assassinate the ones who won't be bribed.
    • 2.3's "Defenders of Eorzea" reveals that the one Syndicate member who supported letting the Domans stay in Ul'dah planned on using them and the refugees from the wars with the Garleans to stir up riots between them and Ul'Dah, to get a bill through that would let him claim large portions of the Carteneau Flats. Why? Because Omega Weapon is there, and he wants it, as it's rumored to be stronger than even Bahamut! And because he's using various loopholes, despite committing blatant treason, he can't be arrested for it.
    • 2.5 Part 2, shows that with probably the sole exception of Godbert Manderville (who is seen using his money towards good causes, such as paying for the gifts as part of Eorzea's Christmas Expy, the Starlight Festival, and building the Gold Saucer to create jobs and housing for refugees and the poor). The rest of the syndicate has absolutely zero qualms of seizing power by any means necessary and takes a happy leap into the abyss. Poisoning the Sultana, framing the Scions and Warrior of Light for her death, seeking to split the Eorzean alliance, killing innocents, and forcing the survivors of the Scions, and adventurers to flee for Ishgard is all just business for power and fortune to them.
    • From 3.0 onwards, they get hit with a big case of Lighter and Softer. With Teledji Adeledj dead and the assassination of the Sultana revealed to having been foiled by Lolorito Nanarito, the Monetarists are let off the hook...at least for a while. In 4.0, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn meet a man named Hancock in Kugane; an aid of Lolorito's who offers to help them in their mission to stop the Garlean Empire. After the events of patch 2.5, none of the Scions overtly trust his motives, but they realise it's better to play on Lolorito trying to compensate for what happened during the Bloody Banquet than reject such well-funded help. By the end of their time in the Far East, Hancock is treated as a trustworthy ally.
  • Black Comedy: Lampshading the endlessly-repeating nature of FATEs, one quest-style FATE in the Central Shroud involves a woman whose boyfriends have been eaten by Lindwurms on the way back from fishing so many times that she can't actually remember their individual names anymore.
  • Black Mage: The Thaumaturge's advanced job. Gives access to some rad-tastic spells (including Flare) and considered among the best class in terms of pure damage output. You can also get their iconic Final Fantasy outfit, which is pitch black with only some purple decs here and there and hides the whole body, save for the right eye (the left is hidden by an Eyepatch of Power).
  • Blade Lock: Halfway through the fight with the primal Susano, he will melt into the water only to arise as a giant the size of a building with a BFS to match. One of the tanks must get under it and interact with a special prompt to stop it with their own weapon in a Press X to Not Die sequence lest the sword come down and wipe the party. The rest of the party must then shatter Susano's Ame-no-Murakumo before it crushes the tank. Susano will then do this one more time before the phase ends and the fight resumes.
  • Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Zero's preferred curry blend is searingly hot even by the standards of the Hannish people, a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to India that loves its spices. It's so spicy that one patron with a sensitive nose instantly faints when he catches a whiff of it. A braver patron who digs in has his face turn red, sweat pouring down his face, and steam coming out of his ears. Even the Warrior of Light, a One-Man Army who throws down with gods on the regular, can remark that their life flashed before their eyes while eating it. For context, if the Warrior of Light eats the milder curry, they get a temporary buff at rank I for how spicy it was. If they eat Zero's blend, the buff is rank XXII.
  • Blah, Blah, Blah: The Monk job unlock quest has the character forced to put up with an arrogant historian who has hired the PC to replace his monk bodyguard who probably left for the same reason. Half of the historian's unwanted dissertation is replaced with <blah blah>.
  • Bleak Level:
    • The final area in Endwalker, Ultima Thule, is a hodgepodge of areas stitched from the memories and echoes of the dragons, Ea, and Omicrons at the nadir of their civilizations.
    • The first level 90 dungeon, the Dead Ends, takes place in yet more worlds on the precipice of collapse.
  • Blue Means Smart One:
    • When you first meet Alphinaud and Alisaie, they're dressed in matching blue outfits out of place in Eorzea, marking them as being from Sharlayan, a nation of scholars. They're also the youngest graduates of the Studium, Sharlayan's finest college, at sixteen years old. They each possess a wealth of knowledge of diplomacy, aetherology, and magic, but not to the extent of those who have spent additional time to earn their archon's mark.
    • The uniform of Garlond Ironworks, a company staffed by some of the greatest magitek engineers in the world, consists of a blue doublet and slops in contrast to the black and red worn by Garlean soldiers. The Ironworks' engineering expertise proves invaluable to the heroes as they save Eorzea time and again.
  • Bluffing the Murderer: At the climax of the Scholasticate questline, you get Lebrassoir to confess just by mentioning your Echo ability. As it is well known in Ishgard by this point that the Warrior of Light saw the true past of Ishgard using the Echo, the culprit — not knowing that you don't have any control over what you can see via the Echo — assumes you have already seen anything and spills everything.
  • Body Horror: In Sastasha hard mode, the pirates inside have been horribly mutated. The standard goons have had their heads turned into jellyfish and some beg you to kill them. The consorts have been mutated into naga, and Captain Madison has been mutated into a ten-foot tall Cthulhu-esque squid-man. At the very end of the quest, an NPC states that this is the logical conclusion of aether infusion, and in their case, it was most likely Leviathan punishing them for failing to hold Sastasha the first time. Naturally, the revelation that something like this can happen disturbs everyone involved. (Everyone previously thought that level of aether exposure was akin to radiation poisoning in the real world - it'd simply kill you outright after making you violently ill.)
    • In Shadowbringers, we're treated to the sight of Tesleen being turned into a Sin Eater. She starts vomiting solidified light aether, leaking it from her eyes, and finally transmogrifies into a twisted monstrosity with an all-too-human face.
  • Booby Trap: Some dungeons have traps that will sic monsters on you. Treasure chests that you find outside of dungeons via treasure maps will also unleash monsters on you the moment you interact with the box.
    • Also incredibly common whenever you interact with objects for any quest. Though depending on the quest objective its not much of a surprise. Some objects are also surrounded by a purple aura which triggers monster spawns when you step into instead, but that's even less of a surprise after the first time.
    • Expect several of these to spring on you when traversing the Deep Dungeons. There's a chance that silver coffer you found is actually rigged to explode in your face, taking out a chunk of your HP by the percentage instead of a fixed number. Careless players can and will die to these if precautions aren't taken, which can lead to a run-ending Total Party Kill. Heaven on High from Stormblood introduces trapped portals that spawn in the big 4x3-block rooms, which will spring if stood in for long enough.
  • Book Ends: The very first song a player hears, Answers, plays during Bahamut's escape from Dalamud and the lyrics speak of the chaos and tragedy his release and attack creates over Eorzea. The final theme that plays for the battle with Bahamut Prime in the Final Coil uses the same song. And given what you've learned of Bahamut's torture at the hands of the Allagans, the lyrics to it now fit him and dragonkind better.
    • Applies also for 1.0/Legacy players. On their first log in, a meteor shower appears and they hear a ghostly version of Answers. The end of 1.0 ends with the End of the Era cut scene mentioned above, of meteors raining down from Dalamud and Answers playing.
    • In the CGI trailer for the original Final Fantasy XIV (where the story began), the "Meteor Survivor" is shown being a Gladiator outside of the Echo vision (though he is an Archer during the vision). The trailer for Endwalker (where the story concludes and a new one begins) shows him as a Paladin, a job variant of the Gladiator.
    • The 2.0 storyline (For new players at least) opened with the player entering their chosen starting city on a chocobo-drawn carriage. The finale in patch 2.55 ends with them leaving Ul'dah via chocobo carriage, fleeing to Ishgard to seek asylum after being set up by the monetarists, framed for murder, and the scions having held off your retreat.
      • Another example concerning the 2.0 storyline itself, before the patches, is that the first cut-scene upon making a character is them in an ethereal realm, encountering a hooded figure, where the pulls out a shining version of their job's relic weapon to fight. The cutscene after defeating the Final Boss of 2.0 has the player character encounter Lahabrea in the same realm, and by using the wills of Hydaelyn and the allies up to this point, pulls out the same weapon to finish off Lahabrea.
      • Another bookend involving carriages is when you are riding into your town of choice at the start, a man you are riding with asks you why you became an adventurer, with you being able to choose between Power, Fame, or Wealth. In the ARR patches, at one point you are riding in a carriage with the Doman refugees, and their kids ask you why you became an adventurer. You get to choose from the same 3 options as at the beginning.
    • The final bosses of Heavensward's first and final story dungeons are both griffin themed. The first dungeon, Dusk Vigil, has an actual griffin as its final boss. The final dungeon, Baelsar's Wall, has the Ala Mhigan revolutionary who goes by the title of "The Griffin"
    • The beginning of your tenure in Ishgard began at the battle for the Steps of Faith, and was also your first way into Ishgard. And the saga of the Dragonsong War comes to an end in the same place, with Nidhogg meeting his ultimate end on a destroyed section of the bridge.
      • Speaking of the final battle against Nidhogg, the eye that Hraesvelgr loans to Nidhogg to start the Dragonsong War one thousand years prior is the same eye he loans to the player to defeat Nidhogg and end the war.
    • 2.x story ends with 2.5's Before the Fall, with the actions taken by Ilberd and the Monetarist forcing the Warrior of Light and remaining Scions to move to Ishgard, due in part to Ilberd's desire to free Ala Mhigo at all cost. 3.x ends with 3.5's The Far Edge of Fate, with Ilberd launching a rogue assault on Baelsar's Wall and his summoning of Shinryu, which forces the Alliance to take action by activating Omega and launching the liberation of Ala Mhigo before the Garleans launch a retributive attack against Eorzea.
    • 3.x's last dungeon is echoed by 4.x's last dungeon, as both feature military attacks to take back Ala Mhigo. The key difference being that in Baelsar's Wall, you're on the offensive, and mostly on your own (the forces attacking the Wall are Ilberd's forces disguised as soldiers of the Grand Companies). But in the Ghimlyt Dark, you've already taken back Ala Mhigo, so you're on the defensive, and are helped by the full might of the Eorzean Alliance.
    • The very first Main Story Quest in Shadowbringers begins by talking to Tataru in the Rising Stones. The last Main Story Quest (for 5.0 at least) is completed by, again, talking to Tataru in the Rising Stones.
    • The story of A Realm Reborn properly starts with you boarding an airship and the people of your starting city waving goodbye as the Final Fantasy series' main theme plays. Endwalker's end credits feature you and the Scions aboard an airship returning home with the same theme playing, this time with the entire world watching after your success.
    • The first Trial in Endwalker is a fight against Zodiark in the core of the moon. The final trial in Endwalker is what's essentially Zodiark's reincarnation in the core of the Thirteenth's moon.
  • Bonus Dungeon: Each expansion has an optional raid series that consists of 12 bosses that are essentially trials, except they tend to be more complicated and involved than the standard primal fight. The real bonus dungeon however is the Savage version of said bosses. They all tend to be rather difficult with more strict mechanics and a hard enrage, meaning you have to kill them within a time limit. Completing them gets you the best gear available for the content level along with possibly a special mount, but otherwise is completely optional and have no story elements to them, unlike the normal versions of the raid. The Binding Coil of Bahamut however does not have a Savage version; it only has one version but is challenging enough that is basically the Savage version to begin with. It was too hard for many players who wanted to experience the story line, which is presumably why future expansions have a Normal difficulty (though tends to be harder than any MSQ trials) to distinguish it from Savage, and allow anyone to enjoy the story.
    • Each expansion also contains a second raid series that are more properly like raids from other MMOs, a dungeon with a series of bosses that are faced with 24 players instead of the standard 8. While not as difficult as any of the Extreme or Savage fights, they do tend to be punishing to players who don't know the mechanics.
    • Technically speaking most of the 4-man dungeons don't have to be completed to progress the Main Story. Cutter's Cry, Aurum Vale, Pharos Sirius, Dusk Vigil and all the Hardmode version of various dungeons are examples of this. However they make great leveling spots and the level 50-60 ones all give out Tomestones.
  • Bonus Feature Failure: The Atma relic weapons are statistically the exact same as the Zenith relic before it, only with the glow removed and the textures getting new colors. Considering that the items needed to make an Atma weapon only come from Random Drops, Atma weapons are underwhelming. It isn't until you go to the higher tiers for your relic that the weapon will actually improve. You can choose to ignore the relic weapons entirely and go for suitable alternatives.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • The Conjurer's Cure spells. When playing as the healer in the party, 95% of your actions will be nothing but spamming Cure spells on your party. However, constant healing is what will keep everyone alive.
      • That said, by the endgame White Mages have enough individual healing spells to make things a bit more fun. But then going right back to this trope, most damage you'll do soloing as a White Mage will come from spamming Holy constantly, which does excellent damage in inclusion to being AoE and stunning the targets that are hit, which can serve as a form of damage mitigation in itself.
    • The Paladin's Sword Oath stance. It allowed a second auto attack while the stance was active. While usually scoffed at, compared to the other DPS stances for Tanks, it actually had the highest overall damage gain, since auto attacks against a mob make up roughly 30-40% of a Tank's damage.
    • The new Tank Stances in Shadowbringers are typically considered this: they increase emnity generation and have no negative side effect unlike the previous Tank Stances, which gave the Tank a debuff to their DPS. This overhaul came at the cost of DPS stances, which were removed altogether, making Tank Stances a very simple but functional on/off switch.
  • Boss-Altering Consequence: Variant Dungeons are special dungeons where the final boss you face, and certain mechanics are determined based on your choices while exploring. For instance, in the Sil'dihn Subterrane, you'll face Silkie as the final boss of the dungeon if you take the left path, but whether or not it uses its Eastern Ewer attack depends on whether or not the puzzle leading up to it was solved correctly.
  • Boss-Arena Idiocy:
    • Many examples. But the most glaring one is the All-Seeing Eye, the first boss of Dzemael Darkhold. He would be impossible to beat if he picked a room that wouldn't conveniently had crystals all around that take away his invincibility.
    • Garuda, meanwhile, can potentially invert this into Player Arena Idiocy - there's a set of stone pillars that you need to duck behind to avoid getting one-shotted by her powerful Mistral Song attack, but the pillars will take damage and eventually be destroyed. If she's tanked too close to the pillars, her area-of-effect attacks will hit and destroy said pillars, leaving you no cover. The pillars simply being present on the battlefield also weakens Garuda's special attack, Aerial Blast.
  • Boss Arena Urgency: The final boss of the dungeon Amaurot, an Eldritch Abomination called Therion, has an ultimate attack that covers the entire arena except some tiny little outcrops on the edge. However, every time it executes this attack, one of those outcrops shatters and falls into the abyss, and if you take too long to kill it, you can run out of them.
  • Boss Bonanza: The Ultimate tier fights are essentially one long Boss Rush against multiple bosses from a certain area of content all jammed together into a single fight. They are also the hardest fights in the game, as the name implies.
    • The Unending Coil of Bahamut features a fight against Nael deus Darnus, Twintania, and Bahamut, one after another. Then they have to fight all at once, before the party finally faces off against Bahamut Prime.
    • The Weapon's Refrain has you face off against Garuda, Ifrit, and Titan one after the other, then a transition phase against Lahabrea (which is more of a puzzle than a proper fight), after which you fight the titular Ultima Weapon, who summons the three primals you fought throughout the fight.
    • The Epic of Alexander begins with Living Liquid, the infamous 3rd fight of the first tier of Alexander Savage, then proceeds to Brute Justice AND Cruise Chaser at the same time. Then you fight Alexander itself, with Brute Justice and Cruise Chaser giving backup to it. Upon defeating all 3, they fuse into Perfect Alexander, the final phase of the fight.
    • Dragonsong's Reprise is this trope up to eleven. It starts out with Sers Adelphel and Grinnaux, Ser Charibert, King Thordan, Nidhogg in Estinien's body, and finally Nidhogg's eyes. Then it rewinds all the way back to Ser Charibert, but this time you need to also save Haurchefant from his Heroic Sacrifice. It then proceeds to an even more powerful King Thordan, Nidhogg and an enslaved Hraesvelgr, and finally, King Thordan fused with the two great wyrms.
  • Boss Subtitles: Introduced in Shadowbringers for all dungeon, trial, and raid bosses. And much like the Trope Codifier The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the final boss averts this and is simply introduced without unnecessary fanfare as Hades.
    • As with Shadowbringers, the final boss of Endwalker averts this and is simply named The Endsinger.
  • Boss Remix:
    • The final boss theme of A Realm Reborn, "Ultima", is a remix of "One Blood", a cutscene track that plays primarily when a Primal is being summoned.
    • Several of the battle themes in Heavensward, the final one included, quote "Dragonsong". The same can be said for non-battle themes, though.
  • Both Sides Have a Point: The entire war between the Dragon Horde of Dravnia and Ishgard falls into this. The Dragon Horde, lead by Nidhogg, want revenge for the Ishgardians betraying and killing his sister Ratatoskr all to take her eyes and gain power, something all agree was a terrible Kick the Dog given Ratatoskr was an advocate for humans. However, because Dragons have longer lifespans and can maintain all their memories, Nidhogg is consumed by a desire for vengeance and will do anything to achieve it, even having a Forever War with the city just to let them suffer, all while bullying the other Dragon Hordes. Meanwhile, the people of Ishgard betrayed and killed Ratatoskr for her eyes, but once that first generation passed, the people were lied to about why the war began and thus have lived through the Dragons attacking for many decades now, to the point where their leader has been able to hide the truth of the war from all but his elite guards. While the people of Ishgard caused the conflict, by the time the expansion rolls around, there are so few who know the truth that now an entire nation is suffering for something out of their control and thus have lost many innocent people over something they had no part of. The key to resolving the war is for the player to take out those causing the Forever War and let both groups approach each other on equal footing.
  • Bottomless Magazines:
    • Eorzean technology limits them primarily to the classic iron ball shooting cannons (with Ishgard using specialized versions that mount 4 barrels, and another high powered one that launches huge metal lances at dragons), and twin-barreled musket pistols. Yet, aside from a very short recast time (less than 3 seconds) on the quad cannons when they're used, not a single person is ever seen reloading these guns. The Garleans have entered what seems to be pre-modern gun tech (revolvers primarily) which is a bit more justifiable, but even they seem to not be constrained and shoot way more rounds than the typical revolver can hold. The one person who has ever averted this was Gaius with his arm grenade launcher/cannon, during a cut scene in 1.0, and that was only because it was a signal flare round to a nearby aerial gunship to fire an explosive round at the Circle of Knowing members that were fighting him.
    • Back in 1.0, anyone using ranged physical weapons (Gladiators' throwing daggers, Marauders' throwing axes, Lancers' javelins, Pugilists' chakrams, and Archers' arrows) had to buy stacks of ammo, much like in Final Fantasy XI. However, with 2.0, Yoshi-P and the team felt this was unfair (especially to Archers, who had to buy ammo to even attack at all) since it made some classes much more expensive to play than others. In response, among the other changes from Legacy to A Realm Reborn, all ammo was removed from the game, giving Archers Bottomless Quivers that come automatically with their bows, and the melee classes had their ranged throwing attack turned into a high TP cost attacks where they throw a weapon or shield at the enemy, before quickly returning to them with no negative effects (except Pugilists, which lost their throwing weapon entirely).
    • Justified for the Machinist. They have a device on their belt called an aetherotransformer, which converts the latent energy in the air into ammo for their gun. This is and was still used to justify things that shouldn't be possible, including weapons that are clearly breech-loading, single-shot designs loading three specialized bullets at once (before the reloading skills were removed) or being able to fire automatically to hit multiple enemies with one weaponskill, to say nothing of the various other things you can fire with your guns, up to and including turning it into a flamethrower.
    • In the 1.0 Limsa Lominsa starting cutscene, a sailor repeatedly fires a flintlock at a monster as if it was a revolver. Anyone with a tiny bit of gun knowledge would know that is physically impossible.
  • Bottomless Pit: The fight against Titan introduces this, and is a recurring hazard that appears in several other fights such as Leviathan's and Ravana's. In the mentioned cases, the arena initially has railings that prevent this, only for them to get destroyed at some point to keep players alert. Sometimes dungeons feature this, such as the fight against the Demon Wall at Amdapor Keep, with the bottomless pits on the sides. Get knocked off the edge and it's an instant KO for you, with some extra downtime for your body to respawn back to the arena so you can get revived. Naturally, the bosses can pack moves with insane knockback to throw you off the arena.
  • Bows and Errors: Bows are always holstered while strung up and quivers worn on one's back rather than one's side. In addition, several attacks involve the use of Multishot to hit a wider area or fire multiple homing arrows at once, though these are justified by the use of magic in tandem with archery.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: There are a variety of weapon glamours, mounts, titles, etc. that have no practical purpose but are a pain in the butt to get, so they show off that you worked hard to get them.
    • Savage gear is often a good example of this, but is Zig-Zagged in practice. Getting it helps make reclearing Savage go more smoothly, but once you have it, generally there isn't much to use it on. Unless you're aiming to take on the relevant Ultimate Trial, it's going to fall out of use for the next tier as any raider worth their salt will just buy/craft the next crafted armor tier to boost their ilvl higher. At least it sure looks fancy, especially being dyable, making it one of the reasons raiders keep their depreciated gear. It also gets you a headstart on the early parts of the next expansion, being higher in item level for the first few dungeons.
    • Ultimate-tier weapons, which are only obtained by clearing an Ultimate raid. These weapons have the same substat distributions as the Savage-tier weapons from the same patch, but have one extra materia slot, making them marginally stronger. Still, it won't be any use whenever the next Savage tier drops, since the item-level standard is naturally going to increase. And if you're good enough to clear an Ultimate raid, which is designed to be the most difficult content in the entire game, you definitely don't need to be any stronger. But wearing the Ultimate-tier weapon as a glamour will clearly show to everyone around you that you completed one of the toughest fights in the game.
    • The relic weapons of each expansion feature ornate designs, special glowing particle effects, customizable stats, and the highest attack ratings currently available at that point in the game... but not by much. While they are an Infinity +1 Sword, the relic weapons are essentially time sinks and trophies that are only slightly stronger than Savage Raid gear. It's telling that veterans generally recommend people hit the level cap first before going back to make one, as gear bought with Allagan Tomestones are just ever so slightly inferior to the relic weapon of all but the most recent expansion.
    • The Astrope is the biggest timesink for mounts in the entire game, even if you're doing everything right. The mount itself is a two-seater Winged Unicorn, and it's designed to look suitably majestic. To get this mount, you have to go through three steps, each of which is going to take ages to do. First, you have to become a Battle Mentor. You do that by getting thousands of commendations from players, getting at least one DPS, Tank, and Healer class to the maximum level each, and complete one thousand dungeons and raids. Once you do that, you have to unlock the Mentor Roulette, which requires clearing all of the normal and Extreme-level content up to the beginning of the current expansion at least once. Finally, you have to successfully complete a duty in the Mentor Roulette two thousand times. Queueing up for this roulette pairs you with people who have been waiting the longest to queue into something, and it could be anything from an entry-level guildhest to a synced Extreme raid. And if a new expansion comes out while this is happening, the requirements for being a Mentor and opening their Roulette will change; you only keep the number of times you've done the Mentor Roulette. You've got to re-apply to be a Mentor and clear all the now-previous expansion's content to open the Mentor Roulette once more, meaning you've essentially got to start all over again. It could literally take years of playing the game before you finally unlock the Astrope, it doesn't do anything that any other two-seater mount can't do, and you could earn other multi-seater mounts with much less of a time investment. But if you do manage to get the Astrope, you have definitely earned it.
  • Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
    • The Gold Saucer has a specialty on watered wine and wined water according to one NPC that works at the place.
      "The Manderville Lounge offers a variety of specialty drinks, including wine, water, watered wine, and a Gold Saucer original — wined water."
    • In the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse Epilogue quest, "Whence the Heart Leads," while looking for a sign that Konogg is in Eulmore, you'll find a Bourgeois Merchant selling some items.
      "I've got gold! I've got jewels! I've got gold-plated jewels!"
  • Bread of Survival: Invoked—Sharlayan's greatest food scientists have spent decades trying to develop the perfect emergency ration for use in the event of a food crisis. The scientists decided to focus their efforts on making bread due to it being relatively easy to prepare and stuff full of nutrients. The problem is that each iteration of this bread is increasingly nasty, culminating in panaloaf, which induces nausea and retching upon consumption despite being incredibly nutritious to eat. The Faculty of Medicine quests involve Debroye's quest to make the bread palatable because Living Is More than Surviving. Later on, Flagustert argues in favor of Debroye's bread because focusing solely on nutrition would inspire nothing but misery, whereas delicious food inspires hope during the worst ordeals.
  • Breaking Old Trends: Each post-expansion patch comes with the release of a new Trial. The usual pattern is that the x.1 patch Trial is an Extreme version of the expansion's Final Boss, the x.3 trial is tied to the Main Scenario, and the other trials are all tied into a separate Chronicles of a New Era questline. The post-Endwalker patches initially follow this with 6.1 featuring the Extreme version of the Endsinger, but 6.2 ties the trial to the Main Scenario, with the implication that the rest of the post-Endwalker Trials will be the same, much like the post-A Realm Reborn Trials.
  • Breaking the Fellowship: Endwalker ends with the Scions of the Seventh Dawn breaking up and going their separate ways, though they promise to reunite if another big threat ever emerges.
  • Breather Episode:
    • In Endwalker, after the extremely grim Garlemald area and the Wham Episode of Zodiark's death and the re-starting of the Final Days, the rest of Mare Lamentorum is exposition and meeting the Loporitts.
    • Endwalker has a few of these really, which is understandable due to its otherwise rather bleak tone. The second one occurs after the first outbreak of Blasphemies in Thavnair, during which you watch many people die or get turned into horrible monsters, the latter of which comes with the extra horror of learning that anyone who is turned into a Blasphemy experiences Cessation of Existence, their aether simply ceases to exist which precludes returning to the Aetherial Sea for eventual reincarnation. After such a heavy arc, we get the much more light hearted, though very informative lore wise, trip to Elpis, a science lab in the time of the Ancients, which we get to explore with a pre-Sundering Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus, later joined by Venat, the woman who becomes Hydaelyn in the future. However, this becomes subverted when during the trip, we learn the cause of the Final Days, at which point the story becomes rather dark again. After this arc, we get one more true Breather Episode which is spent helping the scientists of Old Sharlayan finish the spaceship they have been working on in Labrinthos, a large portion of which is spent giving the Loporitts from the moon a guided tour of the place.
    • Dawntrail is a whole breather expansion after the events of Endwalker. The teaser trailer and keynote address of Fanfest 2023 refer to it as "sending the Warrior of Light on a summer vacation" after the Darkest Hour that was Endwalker. With the Final Days averted, the star saved, and Hydaelyn and Zodiark both gone for good, the Warrior and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn heading to the country of Tural for a much-needed break. The teaser trailer also shows the Scions enjoying the local culture (such as eating the food and asking about treasure maps), along with the Meteor Survivor approaching Tural with a big smile on his face. In the same trailer, Erenville notes that the Warrior seems to be "enjoying [him]self for once" as they get closer. The extended teaser also shows the Warrior of Light fighting in that expansion's Viper class against Gulool Ja Ja, a two-headed Mamool Ja. During this fight, when the Warrior and Gulool Ja Ja get into a Blade Lock, the Warrior can be seen with a big grin, indicating that he's clearly enjoying himself.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: There is an extensive cash shop of cosmetic items, but only three things you can pay for that have gameplay benefit.
    • You can pay two dollars a month for extra retainers, though you shouldn't really need more than the base two unless you have a tendency towards hoarding.
    • You can pay for "Tales of Adventure" books to skip the MSQ, up to the beginning of the most-recently-released expansion. For instance, buying "Tales of Adventure: Heavensward" would complete the MSQ quests for both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, putting you at the beginning of Stormblood and unlocking everything you would have completed as a result of finishing the MSQ of those two expansions. However, these books don't level up your character in the process.
    • Buying "One Hero's Journey" for any class will level a job to the starting level of the beginning of the most-recently-released expansion, give you gear approrpiate for that level, and give you items to sell in order to receive some Gil. For example, buying one of these books in Endwalker would level you up to level 80 for a chosen job and give you level 80 Tomestone gear, when the level cap in Endwalker was level 90.
  • Brick Joke:
    • The quest to first get into Sastasha is called "It's Probably Pirates". The quest to get into the Hard Mode version of the dungeon - 35 levels later - is called "It's Definitely Pirates". And in between the two is a completely unrelated main story quest in the nearby town... titled "It's Probably Not Pirates".
    • The very start of the ARR Hildibrand quest line involves reuniting with an amnesiac Hildibrand who is convinced that he's a zombie (since he was dug out of a grave) and had taught his "fellow" zombies to be gentlemen. This being Hildibrand, the lessons include a very distinctive pose. Cut to much later in the storyline, Hildibrand has been subjected to a zombie poison and gone missing, and the heroes are about to be slaughtered by a horde of ravening zombies... when the zombies start doing the Hildibrand pose. Turns out Hildibrand hadn't been zombified, the zombies had been Hildibranded.
    • Another one in the Hildibrand questline involves Enkidu. The description for the Enkidu minion you can get from ARR's "Battle in the Big Keep" trial describes how Gilgamesh first met the chicken: he caught it with the intent of eating it raw, but failed because it defended itself, so he made it his pet instead. Much later in the Stormblood Hildibrand line, after Yojimbo has been revealed to be Gilgamesh, he describes how, in his desperation while wandering the Far East, he was forced to eat Enkidu - successfully, this time. At least until Enkidu pops up out of nowhere at the very tail end of the questline.
    • Relatively early on in Stormblood, Alisaie mentions that during her off time, she found a pastry shop that was really good and promises to treat the Warrior of Light and Lyse to after everything is over. While doesn't come up again in-game, said trip is the subject of one of the Tales from the Storm. However, the Warrior of Light was running late, so the story is between Alisaie, Lyse, and Y'shtola. The Warrior of Light does make an appearance at the very end, though only briefly to allow players to insert their Warrior of Light in without any text changes, aside from a gender toggle on the site.
    • At the beginning of the Omega raid series, when Jessie meets Alpha for the first time, she is completely taken by how adorable he looks and immediately wants him to join Ironworks so she can monetize his appearance by selling mammets in his likeness. At the very end of the story, as a reward for saving the world from a horde of monsters to be unleashed by Omega, she gives you your own Alpha mammet.
    • At the end Shadowbringers' base story, you recieve a wind up toy of G'raha Tia from the researchers at Saint Coinach's Find, who you can show to the Crystal Exarch in the First, much to his embarassment. At the end of patch 5.3, you recieve another wind up toy of G'raha from the people of the Crystarium in honor of their Exarch, you can show it to G'raha back on the Source, where he says that they asked him whether he'd like to be commemorated on coins or in wind up toys. He said neither as both made him feel embarassed, but they went with the toys anyway. He takes it better the second time around.
    • In patch 2.5 of A Realm Reborn, Tataru becomes an Arcanist in an attempt to become more useful to the Scions. Her Carbuncle immediately disobeys her and flees. In Stormblood, she summons her Carbuncle during Soroban's training in the Four Lords storyline, only for it to flee again. In Endwalker, a sidequest in Labyrinthos ends with you finding her Carbuncle, having been shipped from La Noscea to Sharlayan. Normally, Carbuncles disappear after expending their given aether reserves, but Tataru's case is unheard of for any Arcanist or Summoner; hers was given a seemingly indefinite reserve of aether for it to last four expansions.
  • Broke Episode: In one of the Tales from the Shadows, Estinien ends up penniless in Kugane after getting dragged on a wild goose chase by Orn Kai to find the legendary dragon Seiryu (with the mission being extra pointless since Seiryu isn't actually a dragon but a powerful snake spirit). He is forced to become a greeter at a restaurant in Kugane as the owner believes that Orn Kai will attract business. When Tataru and Krile find him, Krile can barely stop herself from laughing at his situation.
  • Broken Aesop: Considering how large the game is and how many different plots have been added between the main quest, sidequests, and quests for individual classes and jobs, this was bound to happen.
    • One sidequest you can take from a member of the Conjurer's Guild involves you gathering ingredients for a ritual the guild will be soon performing, which involves killing various animals out in the forest and gathering parts from them. When you return with the ingredients, she compliments you for only taking exactly as much as you needed, and that recklessly killing random beasts will spell doom. From a purely monetary standpoint this holds up in regular gameplay, since it's rare for you to get gil from random ladybugs or living mushrooms, much less enough to offset the amount needed to repair your gear, and even defending yourself isn't strictly necessary, since not every mob in the wild is actively hostile (and even ones that are stop attacking you on-sight if you're ten or more levels above them). But on the other hand, several enemies do drop various crafting ingredients, which tend to drop at a much lower rate than whatever a sidequest is forcing them to drop (e.g. you'll only get boar skins off of one in every six or seven wild boars), and there are hunting logs for every starting class, which grant you much-needed experience bonuses by killing various animals just for the sake of killing them.note 
    • On the other hand, the same moral is brought up for the Botanist and Leatherworker class quests, primarily the latter, where it's mentioned that a specific animal was almost wiped out after people overhunted them for their leather. Thing is, these two classes are, respectively, a gatherer and a crafter, which are all you can do as those classes, and whatever animal you need to hunt or tree/bush you need to hit to get crafting ingredients invariably comes back after a set period or certain actions (enemies respawn on set timers, gathering nodes whenever you hit enough in an area or leave and come back to the zone in question), so there's nothing stopping you from spending hours on end gathering crafting materials until your inventory is crowded out, then actually using them to craft things and make a very hefty profit.
    • The Samurai 60-70 questline in Stormblood revolves around stopping a bloody rebellion because, regardless of whatever corruption may be present in the government, the rebels' methods would cause a much larger and even bloodier civil war that would hurt a lot of innocent people, and it's much better to work with the system to change it from within. A noble goal that would have fit with a then-ongoing trend of popular stories about rebellions against dystopias, but it's undermined entirely by the main story being all about inciting bloody civil wars against corrupt regimes, that the oppressed people of Ala Mhigo and Doma don't have any choice but to go to war against the Garlean Empire, and how they should be willing to do so at any cost. Making it worse is that when the Big Bad of the Samurai questline gives his reasoning for trying to start a civil war... everyone agrees. In turn, most of the people who say that the war would be bad are those who happen to have been born within privileged positions of Hingashi society, meaning they have all the reason in the world to not want to change the status quo because they're exactly the kind of people that are propping up what the rebellion wants to cut down.
    • Yotsuyu's post-Stormblood arc is supposed to be a tragedy showing that not everyone can be redeemed, and even those who have the chance at it will choose otherwise. It falls flat primarily because prior to the Stormblood postgame, she had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and while we're supposed to feel sorry for her being treated by the citizenry as if she's an irredeemable monster who should be put to the sword even as an amnesiac with the mind of a child, her actions as soon as she regains her memories prove them right, as she immediately goes completely off the deep end and channels a primal, thus sabotaging peace talks with the Garleans.
  • Broken Bridge: Heavensward has paths to other areas blocked off with a rockslide until you progress further in the plot, to which the blockage mysteriously vanishes - except for between Idyllshire and the western half of the Dravanian hinterlands, where a goblin will blow up the blocked path with bombs.
  • Brutal Honesty: During 2.55, when Alphinaud rages at the leaders of the Eorzean Alliance for not committing more than he knows they can to Ishgard's defense, Admiral Merlwyb lays a verbal smackdown on the youngster by pointing out in no uncertain terms that she puts Limsa Liminsa first, then the Eorzean Alliance, then Ishgard. Neither of the other Alliance leaders says otherwise, implying the same is as true of them.
  • Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon:
    • Warriors practice an art in which they tap into their "Inner Beast" to access incredible Super-Strength and stamina at the risk of losing control and attacking friend and foe alike. They wield war axes in combat, many of which have heads larger than their wielders' torsos, and fight with visibly less finesse than a Paladin and their more sensibly-proportioned one-handed swords.
    • Dark knights are vigilantes who murder corrupt and powerful elites that evade justice for their crimes. In contrast to the Knightly Sword and Shield and spears wielded by the Temple Knights, dark knights all wield a giant sword through which they channel their inner darkness and vengeful emotions.
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Most if not all of the guildmasters for the Disciplines of the Hand. Severian (alchemy) and Beatin (carpentry) are probably the most notable in this regard. The Warrior of Light can be played like this in their dialogue choices while still being the hero of the world.
  • Butterfly of Doom:
    • According to Urianger in Shadowbringers, the Warrior of Light going to the First was literally the only thing that stopped the Empire from ending the war then and there with Black Rose.
    • The Dragonsong's Reprise features an alternate timeline scenario where the Warrior of Light saves Haurchefant, but ends up making things worse; without Haurchefant's death to motivate them, the Warrior of Light stalls their chase of Archbishop Thordan and initially spares him when he begs for mercy, which bites Coerthas in the ass big time; the primal King Thordan uses the dual eyes of Nidhogg to enslave the entire Dravanian horde, Nidhogg enslaves Hraesvelgr for a Dual Boss battle on the Final Steps of Faith, and then Thordan consumes both wyrms' eyes to become Dragon-King Thordan. Of course, this is a What If? scenario presented by the Wandering Minstrel who is prone to exaggerating and fictionalizing the Warrior's tales to make a more compelling narrative, but it casts a dark light on the Warrior of Light's character, suggesting that Hauchefant's death was a Necessary Evil for the Warrior to lead the world to salvation.
  • But Thou Must!:
    • Right at the start of the game, a local citizen in your starting city will call upon you and direct you to the Adventurer's Guild. It's impossible not to listen to them, as the game will outright restrict your movements if you try to leave. After properly introducing yourself to the guild however, you become free to go wherever you please, even if it means not pursuing the main questline at all (though it is the only way to unlock most of the game's content).
    • When you reach the end of the Zodiac quest, you're told that there's only a 1.4% chance that melding the relic with the materials you gathered will actually work and you'll lose the relic if it goes bad.note  You have the option to continue or to back out, but saying no will have Gerolt call you a spineless wimp for backing out and he has your relic worked on anyway.
    • The majority of dialogue options is basically a variation of "Yes, I will help you", though there are many reply choices that are basically sarcastic quips while still agreeing to help the person in question. Shadowbringers, especially the line of quests involving Anogg and Konogg, has the Warrior of Light frequently lampshading their inability to disagree, with the best example probably being the YoRHA: Dark Apocalypse quest "On the Threshold", where when asked whether you'll continue helping, both options make fun of this:
      Option A: Oh, I'm sure I won't be given the choice to miss it.
      Option B: How charming that you continue to pretend to care about my opinion.
    • At the end of Endwalker, after helping you defeat the Endsinger, Zenos asks you one more time for that rematch he's spent the past two expansions hounding you for. To show his Character Development, this time he says that he's giving you the option to walk away if you want to — but the game doesn't let you take him up on that, and you'll fight him no matter what option you pick.
  • Bystander Syndrome:
    • The entire nation of Ishgard has consistently refused to help the Eorzean Alliance when they've needed them the most. When Dalamud was threatening to fall, Ishgard stood by and did nothing. In the aftermath of the Calamity, the Empire picked up the pieces and threatened Eorzea once more; and once again, Ishgard ignored the Alliance's pleas for help. In patch 2.4, it's revealed that the reason Ishgard will not aid the other city-states is because A) they can't spare any soldiers since they're too busy fending off dragons, and B) as far as they're concerned, as long as they're not attacked, whatever happens beyond their borders is not their problem (which also explains why they allow the Ixal to roam free and even set up a permanent settlement of their own at Natalan, since it's Gridania that they threaten, not Ishgard). It's only when they get the news that Shiva was summoned that the higher ups begin to reconsider their stance.
    • The leadup to Endwalker focuses on the Sharlayans' tendency towards the same. In fact, their reluctance to intervene in Eorzean matters is so extreme that the Eorzean Alliance by and large pretty much took it for granted that the Sharlayans could not be depended on, and Master Louisox is actually looked down upon by the Sharlayans for his heroic actions during the Seventh Umbral Calamity. It's only out of desperation upon realizing that the Final Days are coming that the Eorzean Alliance forces the issue, causing Forchenault to show up as an envoy...and tell everyone point-blank that they have no intention of offering their assistance.

     C 
  • Call-Back: Dozens, even in storylines outside the Main Scenario.
    • There's numerous points where the dialogue options involve quoting someone you have met in your travels. For instance, the Warrior can quote either Emet-Selch or Haurchefant while trying to convince Quintus to accept humanitarian aid from the Ilsabardian Contingent.
      Quintus: Even now, you still... Why go to such lengths? What is it all for?
      Warrior: Because even the bitterest adversary may one day see reason. / On the coldest, blackest nights... meager though it may be, we must share the warmth of the fire.
    • One of the major ones is in Shadowbringers where the Crystarium has the Crystal Tower at the heart of the city, one that looks suspiciously identical to the one back in the Source. The Warrior of Light can ask if there's anyone within the Crystal Tower, only for the Crystal Exarch, the city's leader, to sidestep around that question because he was that lone occupant.
    • The first cinematic cutscene the player experiences in the Endwalker expansion is a shot-for-shot remake of the introductory Limsa Lominsa cutscene from the original (1.0) release of the game.
    • In Endwalker's patch storyline, after you beat the dungeon in 6.1, Y'shtola summons a set of familiars using an incantation that wouldn't be out of place in a Magical Girl Anime, which deeply embarasses her. In 6.5, upon beating the final boss of the storyline, she summons one again, this time with a far more in-character incantation. She mentions modifying it before subtly threatening the Warrior of Light and Estinien with what amounts to "Forget what you saw the first time, or else."
  • Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
    • As did Vana'diel before it, Eorzea measures things in ilms, fulms, yalms, and malms, which seem to be equivalent to inches, feet, yards, and miles, respectively. This is also done with weight, as in "An onze of prevention is worth a ponze of cure."
    • Lightning is referred to as "Levin" (an archaic word for lightning), while Thunder and Electricity keep their normal wording. This is notable because it changes Ramuh's title to "The Lord of Levin", which may confuse people at first, and lightning storm weather effects are referred to in the in-game coding as "Levinstorm".
    • Each of the orders of animals are referred to as something ending with "kin". You have Beastkin (mammals), Scalekin (reptiles), Cloudkin (birds), Wavekin (anything from the water), Vilekin (insects), Seedkin (living plants like Treants or Morbols) and Forgekin (any kind of inanimate object made animate, like golems, mammets and automatons).
    • Demons are called Voidsent. This is because they are, quite literally, sent from the Void, the Void being an Alternate Universe where darkness overpowered light and consumed all.
    • Similar to the Voidsent, the Angelic Abominations that plague Norvrandt in Shadowbringers are called Sin Eaters.
    • Crocodiles are furred reptiles with an upper jaw that opens in two. Interestingly, a monster that resembles a real world crocodile exists which are called sarcosuchus.
  • Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit":
    • In addition to various monster examples: all the playable races, not just the Hyur, but the Elezen, Miqo'te, Rogaedyn, Lalafell and Au Ra as well, are called "human" in the game's earlier publicity.note  However, since launch, the convention seems to have become "the spoken", "sentients", or "mankind" instead.
    • There are also numerous examples of animals that have little in common with what we normally think of. For example, Pelicans are green, wingless birds, eight feet tall at the shoulder, with razor sharp beaks and long, hooded necks. They also spit a paralyzing neurotoxin. Lampshaded in the quest, "Toxic Avengers".
      Pelican Poison: Contrary to popular belief, pelicans are highly poisonous creatures that spray their victims with a powerful neurotoxin created in a tiny gland hidden below their tongues.
    • Played with the above-mentioned sarcosuchus, named after a real life extinct relative of the crocodile, which resembles real life crododiles more than the actual 'crocodile' enemies do.
  • Calling Your Attacks: One that is really easy to miss, but during the final battle against them, Omega decides to simulate humanity as best it can, with all of its imperfections and illogical choices. During the battle, this includes calling out the name of one of its attacks to see if it increases its effectiveness.
    Omega M/F: <blip> Evaluating necessity of vocalization component. TREMBLE BEFORE MY COSMO MEMORY!
    Omega M/F: Reproducing vocalization. COSMO MEMORY!
  • Came Back Wrong
    • This is a recurring theme about resurrection (or at least narrative resurrection, as opposed to resurrection as a gameplay mechanic) throughout the story.
      • Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard) has Edda using dark magics on the head of her fiancé to bring him back to life, only for him to come back as a monster. Edda doesn't mind it at all due to her crossing the Despair Event Horizon.
      • Heavensward reveals this to be the fate of the Elder Primal, Bahamut. His sister Tiamat reveals that he was slain by Allagan forces, and in her grief the Ascians offered to bring Bahamut back - as a primal. He did come back, but as a "shell of his former self." To this day, Tiamat punishes herself for her choice.
      • The Qaylana ananta's matron beckons Lakshmi to bring her dead daughter back to life. While the body is restored, it is absent of the soul, effectively leaving her brain-dead.
    • In Heavensward, Y'shtola and Thancred are both hit with this. Y'shtola used the spell Flow in order to teleport herself and Thancred away from the Brass Blades and Crystal Braves. But since the spell was infamous for its poor usage, the two didn't get out of it unscathed — Thancred made it out on his own but lost his ability to use magic, while Y'shtola had to be dragged out by conjurers and lost her eyesight, and the spell she uses to see is slowly killing her.
  • Camera Lock-On: You can have the camera focus on a specific target or player instead of yourself, for easier tracking. This is an artifact from 1.0, when it was the only type of targeting, and is almost never useful, but occasionally looks kinda cool.
  • Can't Argue with Elves: With Dragons actually - ironically, the elves are on the side of people who can't do the arguing. Hraesvelgr's pain always seems to trump everyone else's whenever you talk to him. Though it is true that the Ishgardians are the ones who originally started the war, almost everyone currently living is completely unaware of that due to the lies they had been told all their lives, and they have all lost loved ones too in the war against dragons. And though even Ysayle is furious at Hraesvelr's hypocrisy in giving Nidhogg one of his eyes, ultimately she is the one who has to apologize to Hraesvelgr and vow to make up for the sins of the past. And when you come to him later on for his help against Nidhogg, you can't bring up the fact that both sides have lost a lot in the war, you just have to convince him that your side will do better. It's telling that the only person who raises an argument that actually sways Hraesvelgr is Midgarsomr, another dragon.
  • Cap:
    • All class levels are capped to level 50, with each respective expansion increasing that by 10 (currently up to 90), and Allagan Tomestones (currency earned in dungeons and raids to purchase high level equipment) are capped to 2000. Additionally, there's a weekly cap on the most valuable tomestones of the season where players can only earn a maximum of 450 tomes, which prevents players from obtaining the endgame gear too easily. If you played the free trial prior to patch 5.3, you were capped at level 35 instead; after that the free trial was expanded to cover all of Heavensward, with a cap of 60.
    • It isn't merely combat gear and the associated end-game currency that comes with a cap. Starting with Heavensward there are Crafters' Scrips and Gatherers' Scrips, currency for end-game Disiciples of the Hand and Land. Like tomestones, there are two types of scrip available at a time, and you can carry no more than 2000 of each.
    • In general, each new iteration of an end-game raid begins with a loot cap (typically limited to one roll per player per week), that is then lifted shortly before or upon release of the next stage of that raid.
      • This was also the case for the higher-level Binding Coil of Bahamut, with the added restriction of loot chests becoming fewer in number with each successful clear by parties composed of the same (or mostly the same) players that'd previously cleared it between each weekly rollover period. Until the loot restrictions were lifted, this ultimately meant that not all members of a raid would even have a chance at gear week to week. This also applies to other savage raids that were introduced later.
    • There are also caps on the maximum level players can be in duties and FATEs, with the Level Sync mechanic temporarily lowering the level to it. This also affects your equipment, downgrading their stats to an appropriate level for the duty in question, and locks out abilities (but not role actions) learned at levels beyond that limit.
      • In a later 2.x ARR patch, an overall item level sync was instituted on most story and level 50 dungeons. While a player's level and character stats were always synced down, the stats on weapons and gear still applied. Thus, most content listed as a Hard Mode proved not to be quite so hard at all, and nowadays virtually all dungeons and trials at or below a level 50 character requirement will see equipment stats reduced to an equivalent 110 gear level.
    • Retainers: You can only have two without paying extra (and if you do pay, you can still only have up to eight), and their class level, if assigned one, is capped at the player's level in that same class.
    • Zones have a hard cap on how many players can be in the area at the same time. If the zone is full, no one can enter it until other players leave. Alleviated somewhat by the use of instances of high-traffic areas like Mor Dhona and most places introduced in a new expansion, so if one instance is full you can try entering a different instance.
    • Consumable items and crafting materials had a cap of 99. Stormblood would increase the cap to 999 — except, arbitrarily, for Shop Fodder, which retains the old cap of 99note .
    • Damage output is capped to 999,999, which can only be reached through ridiculously powerful logo actions to overkill elementally-disadvantaged monsters in Eureka, though a handful of enemies in Stormblood can also inflict this much damage. Shadowbringers bumps up the cap to 9,999,999.
  • Cassandra Truth: In one questline in the Peaks, the Warrior escorts Berehta, an aging woman who has never left her hamlet of Coldhearth, to the trading town of Ala Ghiri. She calls it the grandest town she's ever seen. When the well-traveled Warrior tells her that they've visited cities ten times the size of Ala Ghiri, she thinks they're pulling her leg. In the same questline, the Warrior learns that Berehta's son, Erart, is Faking the Dead as part of his actions as The Mole for the Ala Mhigan Resistance, believing that there's no place for him in Ala Mhigo after all the horrible things he did to maintain his cover. While he asks the Warrior to keep it a secret from Berehta, the Warrior can try to tell her that he's alive, only for her to say that of course Erart is alive in their hearts.
  • Cast from Hit Points:
    • No actual player abilities (except for Blue Mage) do this, but conjurers have a quest line where they have to help their guild deal with a healer prodigy who only wants to focus on healing, not the elemental part of their repertoire. Only it turns out, healing spells either have to be powered by the natural world or the caster's own life force. This killed her mother who believed borrowing the power from nature was exploitative, and you have to convince her not to follow the same suicidal path.
    • Blue Mage can learn "Wild Rage" from the Spectral Berserker in the Hero's Gauntlet dungeon, which deals big AoE damage for no MP, but with the cost of half of the Blue Mage's max HP.
  • Catch-22 Dilemma: In Shadowbringers, the only way to rid the First of the excess Light is by killing every Lightwarden, which cause their corruption to glue itself onto the nearest living person, transforming their slayer into the next Lightwarden. At first, the Warrior of Light seems immune to it and is able to return night to the sky. But Y'shtola and Ryne discover that the Warrior has been unwittingly been absorbing the Light instead of neutralizing it. By the time they kill Innocence, the Warrior is turned into a Lightwarden so strong that they bring Everlasting Light to every region in Norvrandt. Releasing it is not an option, but holding it in will inevitably transform the Warrior into a nigh-unstoppable monster. This is finally subverted when Ardbert gives them the strength to use all of the Light to form a Blade of Light to throw at Emet-Selch. The Ascian's incredible Astral-aligned aether is able to cancel out the excess Light, killing Emet-Selch, curing the Warrior, and saving the First.
  • Catching the Speedster: The Magna Runner boss of Castrum Abania is a high-speed magitek weapon that cannot be harmed while it's zooming around the arena. To defeat it, the party must take command of the cannons at the edges of the arena to bombard it and disable its engines while it preps its next Speed Blitz attack.
  • Cat Folk: The Hrothgar race, introduced in Shadowbringers. As large and burly as male Roegadyn, but with fur, claws, and heads like large cats such as lions or tigers.
  • Cat Girl: The Miqo'te race. Think Mithra from Final Fantasy XI, minus the characteristic noses (though they can be added during character creation), with more slender ears and tail variation, and a different culture. Also, unlike the Mithra, playable Miqo'te aren't all cat girls - male Miqo'te were made playable at the same time female Hyur Highlanders and Roegadyn were due to fan outcry.
  • Cat Ninja: A Miqo'te with the Ninja job class is literally this. If we're talking characters, V'kebbe from the Rogue's Guild is a good example too, since the Rogue class is a prerequisite for Ninja.
  • Caustic Critic: Some of the Discipline of the Hand guildmasters. Geva (Leatherworking) and Gigi (Goldsmithing) in particular. If not the guildmasters, there is almost guaranteed to be another guildmember NPC to fill that role.
  • Central Theme: Each expansion in Final Fantasy XIV has a central theme that defines the main story.
    • A Realm Reborn: Responding to tragedy. The entirety of Eorzea is still reeling from the 7th Umbral Calamity and how the country should rebuild itself, as well as how to honor the lives lost in said tragedy, is one of the main ideological points of conflict throughout. Even for non-Legacy players this theme is still at play once the Waking Sands gets invaded and many of the Scions die. But the best demostration for this is after the fight with Gaius where the leaders, who mostly wanted to ignore the mention of the Warriors of Light due to how painful it was, either swear to not let the tragedy repeat or redeem themselves and ensure to not let another Warrior of Light behind after being forced to do so in the Battle of Carteneau.
    • Heavensward: The Cycle of Revenge. The expansion examines how easily it is to fall into vengeance, how it twists someone into a monster, and how hard it is to make amends, forgive, and move forward. Ishgard and Nidhogg's Horde have been entangled in a war for hundreds of years with each side commiting more and more atrocities to each other in the name of vengeance. While at first the Dragons are made to be the bad guys, it's soon revealed that Ishgard provoked them into a war with a horrible and unprovoked attack, but even then the game makes it clear to the player that any moral high ground the Dragons may have had has been lost for centuries, with Nidhogg doing the same thing to Estinien as was done to him. The only way for both sides to move on and find peace is for them to accept the blame, either convince or outright eliminate those who still want to fight, and accept that neither side is a monster.
    • Stormblood: Justice and mercy. While the heroes, especially Lyse are willing to do anything to defeat The Empire at first, the communities of Ala Mhigo and Doma are not so eager because of all the suffering they have endured every time they've tried to free themselves. The most crucial part of Lyse's Character Development is understanding that aiding those that need it comes first and while the story does emphasize the importance of justice through one of the most despicable villains in the form of Zenos yae Galvus, it also introduces villains that at first seem just as evil but turned out to have been victims of circumstance that may not have turned out that way if someone had showned them kindness such as the Skulls, Fordola and Yotsuyu.
    • Shadowbringers: Dealing with loss. In the world of the First, basically everyone has lost something near and dear to them due to Sin Eaters roaming about killing everyone they can. Thancred has to come to terms with the loss of his surrogate daughter Minfilia, complicated by the fact he has to protect a young girl who is her reincarnation but isn't really her. Ardbert is struggling with having lost not only his entire world but the companions he fought with for a long time who sacrificed themselves when he was unable to, and various characters that you meet all have lost loved ones. The heroes are constantly hounded by an elite martial artist, General Ranjit, who has become bitter and broken from raising multiple generations of previous Minfilia reincarnations as both apprentice and daughter, only to see them die trying to save the world every time. We even learn that the Ascians themselves are driven by loss. They summoned Zodiark into existence to save their civilization Amaurot from a mysterious entity that was destroying the world. However, due to the living sacrifices Zodiark was requiring, a faction of the Amaurotians summoned Hydaelyn into existence, and her striking down of Zodiark split the world and all the souls of those who lived on it into 14 pieces. The 3 remaining "true" Ascians: Elidibus, Emet Selch, and Lahabrea do everything they do to bring back the world they lost.
    • Endwalker:
      • Hope and despair. The main conflict is The Final Days are coming and there is nothing to stop it, driving the despair that people start to feel. However, the Scions being what they've been through, they've always been able to surmount what anyone would seem as impossible, creating hope that the conflict can be averted.
      • Death. Every major villain in the expansion is motivated by death in some way. Fandaniel sought to kill himself and drag all of existence down with him as a final act of spite towards the Ascians for bringing ruin to his beloved Allag, Meteion was so broken by seeing countless worlds suffer and die that she came to believe that death was a mercy compared to a lifetime of suffering, and Golbez's drive to invade the Source is motivated by a desire to give his people a chance to finally escape the Void's cycle of resurrection and be allowed to finally die in peace.
  • Chainmail Bikini: While averted with almost all gear in the game, the Coliseum equipment definitely fits into this trope. It's worth noting that examples of this trope apply equally to both men and women; if it looks like a chainmail bikini on a female character, it'll look like that on a male character. According to Word of God, these were a throwback to 80s fantasy tropes.
  • Chaos Architecture: There is something odd going on with Fortemps Manor. The side of the wall with the fireplace has windows that suggest light is shining from outside but if you check the exterior of the house, there is a windowless balcony instead.
  • Character-Driven Strategy: The NPC Triple Triad players often have decks modeled around their personalities. For instance, Gegeruju's decks are filled with high-rarity cards of beautiful women, owing to his expensive tastes as The Hedonist. However, he's a complete novice at the game and thus tends to play very poorly, as he'd simply purchased the cards because he was told they were the best money can buy. If he loses, he'll try to buy the Warrior's deck off of them rather than figuring out his own shortcomings as a player.
  • Checkpoint Starvation: Ultimate raids are designed to be the toughest Superboss content in the game. Part of this difficulty comes from the fact that there are no mid-boss checkpoints for all but one of the Ultimate raids; it has to be done all in one go. If you get a Total Party Kill at any point during the fights, you have to start all over again. The one exception is Dragonsong's Reprise (Ultimate), which features a checkpoint after the first phase of the fight. But there's no checkpoints after that one, and it's only after the first of eight phases, so this one checkpoint isn't much help.
  • Chekhov's Classroom: In Endwalker, when the Scions try to question Montichaigne about what he knows about Sharlayan's secret project and what they know about the Final Days, Montichaigne explains that he's been magically sworn to secrecy about the subject. When asked how this is possible, Montichaigne takes the opportunity to hold an impromptu lesson about magically memory blocks (while also retroactively explaining how everyone got amnesia after The Calamity). In particular, he brings up that such memory blocks could be erased after death when the soul returns to The Lifestream, but such that such knowledge would proabably not help since the Lifestream would also wash away any memories the deceased would have, along with the obvious fact that the person who knew would be dead. This knowledge comes up much later when Hythlodaeus, after he, Emet-Selch and Hermes were wiped of all their memories of the past few days, and thus their knowledge of the coming Final Days, brings up that they'd all remember what they forgot when they've all "returned to the star". It's the Warrior of Light remembering this that gives them the idea to use Azem's magic (combined with the last of Hydaelyn's magic) to temporarily bring back Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch to help in the climax.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Final Fantasy XIV uses this trope a lot. Part of the appeal of the story is literally spotting all of these.
    • The finale of the Hildibrand story has an absolutely epic one. You remember those Zombies you found Hildibrand teaching the finer points of being gentlemen? Upon hearing that their "overlord" was at risk of dying for good, they go and help him stop the phantom thief's plot to start a Zombie Apocalypse by reminding the other mindless thralls of their benevolent leader. Ellie's reaction when she sees the zombies closing in on your party doing Hildibrand's signature pose is to scream and fall over.
    • The main story has a big one in regards to Ishgard. Around the 2.0 story line, you're told that Ishgard is completely closed off to outsiders and they refuse to let anyone visit them. By 2.55 you're branded as a fugitive in Ul'dah due to you being set up for assassinating Nanamo and the other city-states won't let you seek refuge with them. Alphinaud then realizes he can use Ishgard's xenophobia to his and the player's advantage by requesting asylum, knowing that Ishgard owes them after they had gotten help dealing with Shiva and the dragon horde.
    • The Carpenter questline in Heavensward starts with you returning the haft of an Ishgardian spear found in the Shroud to the son of its former owner. The spear itself is largely forgotten as you help said son attempt to reclaim his family's honor by crafting him weapons with which to bring down the dragon Nguruvilu, but it comes back in a big way at the end: it's found in the debris of a trap that failed to snare the beast, proving that the man's father did indeed die a noble death in combat and revealing that Nguruvilu still has a weak spot in his hide where the spearhead was embedded.
    • The Stormblood Blacksmith questline starts with a Doman woman coming to learn from Eorzean smiths, but she is so haughty that she spends most of her time critiquing everyone. It is not until the guild leader has you and her compete on a commission to make a sword for an elderly retainer (the one from the Heavensward questline) that she begins to learn something (you win the competition as she crafts a very ornate but big and heavy sword while you create a simple but small and lightweight sword that a more feeble man could wield). During the final quest, her father has another competition where the two of you have to craft a sword for a samurai lord. Remembering her lesson from earlier, she crafts a simple but light weight sword that a retainer untrained in combat could easily swing. Unfortunately, as the sword is for a samurai lord, not a retainer, your more ornate and complex katana is the one that wins. However, her father sees that she is considering such details now and agrees to take her up as an apprentice, something he didn't want to do before.
    • The ability to swim indefinitely gained in the Ruby Sea of Stormblood is mostly forgotten about by the end of the 4.0 storyline after you've used it to sneak into an old chamber in the Lochs of Ala Mhigo, with any use for it after that point being relegated to sidequests you can freely skip. Then comes the end to Dohn Mheg in 5.0, where the party gets washed away in a huge flood that would have drowned the now-Warrior of Darkness, if not for their ability to breathe underwater.
    • The Crystal Tower was originally conceived by the Allagan Empire as a means to draw in and capture enormous amounts of energy. G'raha Tia takes advantage of this functionality at the conclusion of the 5.3 storyline in order to seal Elidibus.
    • When preparing to go to Ultima Thule the Scions are all given teleporters where activating one will trigger all of them and return the entire group to the ship. They are told to use them when they encounter danger but since the Scions aren't the run and hide types, the devices go unused and quickly forgotten about. When the Endsinger is about to kill the Scions with a devastating attack, the Warrior of Light activates their teleporter then drops it, sending the Scions to safety while they fight the Endsinger alone. And when the dust finally settles and the Warrior is dying from their fight with Zenos, their own teleporter makes a reappearance and returns them to the ship so the Scions can pull them back from death's door.
    • During the MSQ storyline that takes place between Endwalker and Dawntrail, Zero is shown to be a Gladiator in one flashback, but she gets assaulted by several memoriates and can't fight them all off. In the present day, she's a Reaper. She becomes a Paladin right at the very end of the story, when she's learned to place her trust in others, and having absorbed a substantial amount of light aether from the First.
  • Chekhov's Gunman:
    • The merchant in your transport, the man you always first talk to after making a character in ARR, comes back in a big way. He helps get you away from Ul'dah after being framed for the assassination of Sultana Nanamo, literally the entire game from his first appearance. It's such a big callback that he even gets a voice actor during it.
    • A questline near the very start of Stormblood has you going to a nearby village to recruit for the Ala Mhigan Resistance. However, the Empire's oppression of the people, combined with recent events nearly decimating the Resistance, have broken the spirits of the villagers, and even after putting in a lot of effort, all you have to show for it is one new recruit. Said new recruit shows up near the very end, and reveals to the heroes an infiltration route they can use to sneak into the Ala Mhigan Quarter and open the gates from the inside to let the Resistance in.
  • Cherry Blossoms:
    • Though they're actually peach blossoms, these appear around the cities as part of the 'Little Ladies' Day' celebrations, presumably playing off the upcoming Girl's Day festivities in Japan.
    • The Lancer class' attack 'Chaos Thrust' has those pink petals erupting everywhere as you flail that spear. The upgraded version 'Chaotic Spring' ramps this up with a more prominent display.
    • The Pugilist class skill 'Fists of Wind' has a swirl of pink petals when you activate it.
    • The Samurai's Sen mechanic draws from the three traditional Japanese symbols for the seasons. Naturally, one branch of attacks releases pink petals.
  • Chiaroscuro: Particularly dramatic moments tend to be underscored by increased lighting contrast.
    • Two of the most notable examples go all out with the trope, painting the scene as basically a black void with the lit parts almost pure white. This change happens when Archbishop Thordan looks upon the Warrior of Light in abject horror in his final moments and when Hades breaks the White Auracite spike, then makes one last rush towards the Warrior of Light and the Scions.
    • Sometimes it's Played for Horror instead like with the close-up of Ilberd's lifeless body post self-sacrifice, lit only by Nidhogg's scarlet eyes.
  • Children Are Innocent: During the 2023 Valentione's Day event, you can watch various NPCs talk about what they love onstage in front of a crowd. One of the possible events for those who have completed Endwalker involves Aenore and Clemence from the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. As usual, Aenore talks about her obsessions with the Boulder brothers, talking about how the greatest love to her is "brotherly love", as in she wants both brothers to love her, as she breaks down into tantrum onstage. Clemence quickly tells the audience to ignore Aenore's moaning. Astrid, the young MC for the event notes that even though Clemence told everyone to forget what they heard, she admits she doesn't really understand what Aenore was talking about to begin with.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: In 1.0, you were able to recruit a Path Companion who would assist you on solo quests and act as your voice during cutscenes. They stopped appearing in the story shortly before the fall of Dalamud and are simply not seen again in 2.0 as their function has been taken over by the Chocobo Companion.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
    • King Moggle Mog and Shiva are summoned as primals, and greatly expand the definition of the term "primal" since they never existed as primals previously. Mog and Shiva's existence came about because, as Yda had put it, their subjects prayed and believed in them a lot until they became real. Shiva is a notable case since, unlike Mog existing from a legend instead of being a real figure, she was a living person many years ago, but she returns as a primal due to Iceheart and her heretics fully believing that Shiva siding with the dragons was the right choice and envisioned her as such. Overall, the same principles apply to these two as to Eorzea's five recurring primals- Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Leviathan, and Ramuh- in that sufficient prayer and vast quantities of aether will summon them into the world.
    • Also comes up in the Manderville storyline as Gilgamesh ends up accidentally summoning his old friend Enkidu in primal form by merely wishing to see him again near a couple dozen cases of crystals.
    • Heavensward ultimately explains that all primals are essentially run on this. They're constructs fueled by desire and prayer and tremendous quantities of aether and crystals. Ysayle the Lady Iceheart—who manifested Shiva in patch 2.4's story—approaches the elder dragon Hraesvelgr, who loved the original Saint Shiva, and declares herself Shiva's reincarnation, using her primal summoning as proof. Hraesvelgr completely shuts down this line of thought, declaring it as no more than the product of Ysayle's fervent belief and desire.
    • The Heavensward main story concludes with the ultimate example of this: Archbishop Thordan VII and his twelve Heavens' Ward bodyguards create and manifest the primal Knights of the Round, the original King Thordan I and his Knights Twelve, who have been worshiped by the Church of Ishgard for centuries.
    • This is the in-universe explanation for how fantasias, potions which allow you to re-create your character's physical appearance, work - they drink the potion and subsequently change appearance, including their race and even gender, because they believe hard enough that their appearance has changed. The Reveal in Shadowbringers that the Warrior of Light is a reincarnated Ascian puts this in a rather different light, as Ascians are known to be able to shape their bodies to suit their desires.
  • Class and Level System: Of the Final Fantasy Tactics "one character can play whatever class they want at any time" variety, with aspects of a Point Build system. At the start of Legacy's service, it featured a "physical level" that determined extra stat points and whatnot, on top of each individual class level - this was later disposed of in favor of basing everything off of each individual class.
    • Unusually, crafting and gathering professions are classes as well, complete with their own "weapons" and a lot of equipment with bonuses to either.
  • Clear My Name: Inverted with a Garlean centurion named Baut. A man who joined up with the Garlean army to win citizenship for himself and his family, he possesses a sense of decency that his fellow soldiers do not, forcing the soldiers occupying Ala Ghiri to stop abusing the civilians and trying to make the people's lives as comfortable as he reasonably can under Garlean rule. He becomes so beloved that once the Alliance retook the city, he fears that those same people would be charged with being Garlean sympathizers or worse, start a bloody riot to protect him. He then charges the Warrior of Light to help him smear his name in order to convince the people that he's not worth protecting.
  • Cliffhanger: The 3.1 quest line ends with Urianger entering an alliance with Elidibus while a third party watches (judging by the red trimmed boots shown likely to be Alisaie), and the revelation that Yda and Papalymo are still alive and planning a new offensive against the Empire.
  • Climactic Battle Resurrection: In Endwalker after having gradually sacrificed themselves to influence the dynamis which composes Ultima Thule, the Scions are resurrected with the helpful intervention of Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus, just in time for the final dungeon.
  • Climax Boss: Interestingly, from a narrative standpoint in Heavensward, the Knights of the Round serve as this despite the fact they are the final boss of the expansion. Narratively, the story is only about half over by the time they are taken care of, and almost immediately after, Niddhog possesses Estinien and returns to be the true Big Bad of the Heavensward storyline.
    • Every x.3 patch after ARR features a trial that serves as the final boss of an expansion's story. This doubles as a climax boss as even after that an expansion isn't actually over and uses the last two major story patches to instead begin another build up to the next expansion. Patch 3.3 has the resurrected Nidhogg, Patch 4.3 has Tsukuyomi, and Patch 5.3 has the Warrior of Light, Elidibus' primal form. Endwalker, being the end of the story arc around Hydaelyn and Zodiark, has what could be considered multiple climax bosses given the rapid escalation of the story. The first of which being Zodiark himself, later in the story comes Hermes, then finally Hydaelyn herself.
  • Colony Drop: The climax of the 1.0 storyline revolves around plans by a wayward Garlean legate to drop the lesser moon of Dalamud onto Eorzea. Atypical of how this trope typically plays out, Dalamud does not actually impact Eorzea, but the devastation unleashed by Bahamut upon breaking free from inside Dalamud is no less catastrophic.
  • Color Wash: The game has a slight gray tint that dulls out the colours of the whole game.
  • Combat Breakdown: The Warrior's final duel with Zenos in Endwalker goes from them using their finely honed techniques and abilities to disarming each other and just slugging it out until they're both on the floor from their wounds and exhaustion.
  • Comeback Mechanic: The Frontline PVP mode has mechanics in place to make it so every team still has a chance to come back and win. Getting a KO on an opponent gives your team points, while the KO'd player's team loses points. How many points each value is worth depends on the map, but it's a consistent mechanic across the entire mode. Secondly, the team that's in first place will have each member's Limit Break gauge fill 25 percent slower, while the team that's in last place will have their limit gauges fill 25 percent faster. Thirdly, the Battle High mechanic rewards players for getting KOs and staying alive with buffs to damage and healing. However, every player can see anyone's Battle High rating, and getting KO'd will cut a player's Battle High rating in half, so you can aim at higher-profile targets if you want to. Finally, the Seal Rock and Onsal Hakair maps make higher-value objectives more likely to spawn the more time passes in the match, and the number of simultaneous objectives that spawn will also be reduced. The latter is done to force teams to fight against each other instead of just running out the clock.
  • Combination Attack:
    • This is how a Limit Break works in-universe. Every party member's actions build up the party's Limit Gauge. When a Limit Break activates, the other party members will raise their arms up as though freely giving some of their power, while the initiating member channels the combined energy to use the Limit Break. Additionally, the Melee DPS and Magic DPS limit breaks have their damage calculated by the entire party's attributes and gear.
    • During the ending of 2.0, when Lahabrea is defeated he and the player are pulled into the crystal realm where Hydaelyn brings the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and the leaders of Eorzea together. Super charged by the crystal's light they all strike Lahabrea all at once to finish him and free Thancred. It's the one moment in the entire story where Lahabrea goes Oh, Crap!.
      Lahabrea: (after being forcibly expelled from Thancred's body by the Player's Weapon of Light attack) "What?!" (looks up, and mouth opens in fear as he sees Hydaelyn's crystal form, the Player, Scions, and Leaders of Eorzea glowing with aura's of pure light. They shout a battle cry and charge at him together) "The Light! It binds them! They are too many!"
  • Comically Missing the Point: In the lead-in to the Kobold beast tribe quests, despite the extremely insulting tone of a captured kobold's description of the 789th, the Red Swallows assume he's describing them as the "worst" as in "most dangerous." As quickly becomes clear when you encounter them, if you didn't pick up on it earlier, he meant "worst" as in "least good" — incompetent, lazy, cowardly, least good.
  • Comic-Book Time: It's unclear how much time passes in Eorzea from the beginning of A Realm Reborn to the finale of Endwalker. It could be anything from a few months to over a year. The most explicit mention of passing time happens in the Save the Queen storyline's field notes. Lyon's second fieldnote explictly states that half a year passed between being imprisoned by Gabranth and raising a mutiny against him. Then, three more months passed before he delivered the IVth Legion's head scientist Sicinius to bounty hunters. So for that particular storyline to continue, the better part of a year will have had to have officially passed. And this doesn't even begin to get into yearly seasonal events where NPCs can potentially recognize you from previous events in previous years.
  • Comm Links: Linkpearls are used just like in FFXI. You also stay in contact with NPC organisations with whom your character is signed linkpearls ones given you by their representatives.
  • Common Knowledge: In-universe, the nature of the Echo as a power that allows the user to obtain glimpses of the past is well-known. What isn't well-known is that this power cannot be activated on command, working spontaneously and seemingly without warning. This becomes essential for Bluffing the Murderer in the Scholasticate questline, as the Warrior, Theomocent, and the other students trick Lebrassoir into confessing to framing Archombadin by claiming that the Warrior has already seen his actions through the Echo.
  • Common Tongue:
    • Every sapient race on Hydaelyn seems to speak a common language understood by all. Even far-off countries like the Garlean Empire, Hingashi, and Doma all speak the same language as Eorzea. However, references to other languages, such as Hingan and the ancient language used for Roegadyn names, are mentioned. Numerous dialects have also sprung up in Eorzea and beyond (i.e. the brogue common among native Lominsans and the goblins' Buffy Speak-laden gobbiespeak).
    • That said, while many people are able to communicate with people from other nations perfectly fine, others struggle to express themselves in the Eorzean dialect. Oboro and Musosai, a Doman and Hingan respectively, both muddle their phrases while trying to speak to Eorzeans. Musosai refers to the continent as "Heir's Eye" and calls the Yellowjackets the "Mellow Packets", while Oboro and the other Domans consistently refer to chocobos as "horsebirds". Other people from the Far East, such as Hien and Yugiri, have no such issues, but it's justified in Hien's case as he was given an Imperial education during Doma's occupation.
  • Complete-the-Quote Title:
    • There's a quest about halfway through the main storyline titled "All Good Things", referencing the saying "All good things must come to an end." Having just triumphed over Titan, you return to the Scions' safehouse to report in person. And you find the aftermath of a brutal Garlean attack, with only one survivor who hangs on just long enough to tell you what happened and where to go. Worse, the Garleans were there specifically looking for you.
    • The last quest of the 2.5 storyline (and, by extension, of A Realm Reborn) is titled "Before the Dawn". Given all the horrible things that have happened by the time you get there, it's easily the Darkest Hour of the story.
    • In Shadowbringers, the solo duty "When It Rains" sees the Crystarium soldiers desperately trying to fend off a Sin Eater horde, while you and the Scions rush out to try to save them. There's nothing you can do to save about half the soldiers in the field. The following cutscene featuring Ardbert is just as heartbreaking.
  • Complexity Addiction: The climax of the HW Paladin questline heavily features this. Your mentor from the previous questline, Solkzagyl, fakes his own death after beginning to train a new pupil. He leaves clues (and pieces of his armor) lying around Ishgard for said pupil to find, leaving the pupil to deal with his grief and anger about his master's death. Eventually Jenlyns, another ally from the ARR storyline shows up and Solkzagyl reveals himself to be alive and well. The whole thing was a set up so that Solkzagyl can make a worthy opponent that will revive the power of the royal blade of Ul'Dah that he was sworn to protect even though simply training his pupil (and you) likely could have produced the same result. Jenlyns says what the player is likely thinking:
    Jenlyns: Of course, it's so simple! ...Wait, no, it's not. It's needlessly complicated.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
    • Triple Triad returns from Final Fantasy VIII and you can duel NPCs in the world to win cards. However, only you are required to abide by the deck construction rules — you can only have only one "rare" card out of five (with rare defined as "2 stars or higher" at the beginning, increasing to 3 or 4 stars as you collect more cards), but NPCs will use whatever cards the devs felt like giving them despite their collection being in the single digits.
    • A minor one occurs in 3.4 during the fight against The Warriors of Darkness. After beating them up for a bit, the leader uses Holmgang on your entire party while the player version only allows one target to be affected. This ends the fight and triggers a cut scene.
    • Aenc Thon's ultimate attack forces you to walk a tightrope path across an illusion of a Bottomless Pit. If you run this dungeon with your Trust party, Thancred will declare that the illusion wouldn't fool a child and skip most of it with Rough Divide, while Urianger will teleport across with Manaport. Try something like that with your gap-closers and you'll just fall in.
  • The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: When you feed your chocobo snacks in order to get its feathers to change colors, the game will say "X's plumage will change in Y hours." This is only a half truth. What the game doesn't tell you is that you have to keep feeding your chocobo until you get the message "X is growing new feathers!" and only then will its feathers change colors in the stated time frame. A patch changed the plumage message to say that there's a possibility that your chocobo's feathers will change in X hours, but once again, it's still a half truth.
    • The NPC that is in charge of the relic quest lines post Zenith also plays the trope straight for the Atma portion. After beating the RNG and acquiring 12 Atmas, taking them to the NPC has him infuse your relic weapon with them, making it an Atma weapon. Said NPC boasts about your relic having newfound strength, yet an Atma relic gains no stat boosts at all, making it just a Zenith relic with a different coat of paint. Even worse, it will be given a higher item level despite being completely identical stat-wise.
    • The end of the Zodiac questline is a rare benevolent version of the trope. After getting the required materials, you are told several times that you only have a 1.4% chance of successfully converting your relic weapon to a Zodiac weapon and you will lose your weapon completely if the process fails. The success rate will always be 100% and the drama about the low chance is the developers making fun of how ridiculous the steps for the relic had gotten.
  • Coincidental Accidental Disguise: In the 1.0 Blacksmith quest, you aid Mimidoa in tracking down a siren who is said to be behind the disappearance of sailors. It turns out to be a dance party.
  • Continuing is Painful:
    • Zig zagged. Being knocked out leaves you with two options: return to your home point/start of the dungeon or wait for another player to revive you. Being revived lowers your strength, dexterity, intelligence, and mind by 25% (Weakness) for a bit but gets you right back into the action. Returning to your home point or the dungeon's entrance does not leave you with any penalties other than the damage to your equipment and possibly wasted time, but you must travel back to where you were before you were defeated. In the case of dungeons, returning to start while your party is fighting a boss will leave you locked out of the boss room until the fight is finished. However, if you're knocked out again while under the Weakness status, getting revived again puts you under the Brink of Death status, which lowers your stats by a whopping 50%.
    • Getting knocked out in the Eureka instance puts you on a 10 minute time limit to be revived or you're automatically returned to the starting point with a hefty EXP loss and a potential to actually level down. The loss is higher at higher levels.
      • A similar punishment is used in the Bozjan Southern Front with Mettle, which is the Southern Front's equivalent of EXP. Getting knocked out in itself will reduce your Mettle slightly, while returning to the starting point will reduce Mettle drastically. However, it is not possible to rank down from Mettle loss (though ranking up isn't automatic either; you have to report to the Resistance Commander every time you've gained enough Mettle), so after reaching the rank cap loss of Mettle is not a concern.
  • Continuity Cavalcade:
    • The Twinning in Shadowbringers is the culmination of a number of previous plot arcs, with the common thread being the involvement of the Garlond Ironworks. It reveals how exactly the Crystal Tower was able to come to Norvrandt: the Ironworks of the Bad Future took Cid's notes and research on Alexander and Omega to enable the tower to traverse through time and space. The dungeon's music even emphasises this, with its main theme combining the Crystal Tower theme and Omega's theme eScape with the bass line from Alexander's Rise, and the final boss's theme being a rock cover of Locus, the first boss theme from the Alexander raids.
    • Early in Endwalker, a volunteer contingient is formed to march into Garlemald as part of a humanitarian mission and part to stop the machinations of the Telophoroi. The scene that introduces them is a crowd shot featuring, among the characters named and voiced in the main storyline, characters from the various Class and Job quests, such as members of the Marauders', Thaumaturges' and Pugilists' guilds and your partners during the Bard, Dragoon, Scholar, and Machinist quests. If you've completed these quests, talking to them independently will have them all reference your past exploits together.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • During the Warrior of Light and Aymeric's dinner towards the very end of Heavensward, the Warrior of Light will stare for a while at the butler who is preparing tea for them, with Aymeric oblivious of what is causing this reaction. Considering that the last time the Warrior of Light had a private meeting with an important figure led to an assassination attempt through poison, their reaction is rather understable, and many players share their sentiment of wariness.
    • They also make a point of refusing wine that's offered, probably due to getting knocked out by a spiked drink at the first peace conference in 3.2.
    • In the Manderville questline, Hildibrand gets launched into the sky by a weapon just like what happened to him in 1.0.
    • When the Scions travel to Sharlyan, a cutscene plays that's pretty much the first minute of the opening intro of 1.0 if you chose Limsa Lominsa as your starting city.
    • One of the player's tasks in the ARR Blacksmithing questline is to forge a sword for Greinfarr. If the player has done so before doing the Stormblood Alchemist questline, when F'lhaminn introduces Greinfarr to the Warrior he will mention they are already acquianted and is still carrying the sword they made for him.
    • The Heavensward Armorer questline has the Warrior go to other guilds to ask the guildmasters for advice. If the player has completed a respective guild's questline, the guildmaster will have some commentary on them branching out into another field.
    • Cid comes along with the powerful Enterprise, which is outfitted with a way to penetrate aetherial winds with corrupted crystals. It later gets upgraded into the Enterprise Excelsior after the Enterprise is damaged trying to get into Aysz Lla
    • The Ishgardians have an airship of their own, but have to call Cid in because they can't get the damn thing to work.
    • You come into your own thanks to Cid called a Manacutter, which is designed the same way as the Enterprise, just smaller, though until patch 5.3 backported flying into the ARR areas, it only actually worked in Ishgard and later realms because it required a buttload of mana.
  • Contrived Coincidence: There are five separate battles in which the Warrior of Light restores the normal day/night cycle to a region which has been bathed in eternal light for over a century. All of these fights conveniently take place during what would otherwise be night in the normal day/night cycle, thus allowing the subsequent post-battle cutscenes to show the sky transitioning to a star-filled night sky, and avoiding the anti-climax of the post-battle cutscenes showing the eternal daytime turning into...normal daytime.
  • Cool Airship: Quite a few, befitting a Final Fantasy game.
  • Cool Sword: Players and NPCs both carry around quite a few unique pieces of works. Thankfully, if there's a design you like, you can most likely glamour it onto another weapon so you don't have to worry about losing it.
  • Corrupt Church: From the first moment you see them, it's clear that Ishgard's Holy See breeds their soldiers to be paranoid, mindlessly patriotic Knight Templar, and the Dark Knights exist in lore because the clergy are above the law no matter how reprehensible their deeds. Additionally, you learn midway through Heavensward's story that Ishgard were the ones who started the Dragonsong war. The reason? Sheer envy over the longevity of dragons, and they accomplished that through an unjustified murder of Ratatoskr, which drove Nidhogg insane with grief. In the present day, the current archbishop, Thordan VII, intends to use Nidhogg's eyes and an Allagan-made floating landmass with primals sealed in it to turn himself into a primal of King Thordan and bring the world to heel.
  • Corrupt Cop: While all of the military and law enforcement units have a few cases, the Brass Blades are a particularly bad case of this. several questlines deal with Brass Blade officers who are either taking bribes or even directly responsible for crime or carrying out illegal jobs for Syndicate members(If you start in Ul'Dah, an attempted shakedown is the first thing that happens in your game). In the Samurai questline, one such Blade commander is even covering for a moneylender who sells his indebted victims into slavery to said officer.
  • Cosmic Horror Reveal: Shockingly, Endwalker becomes this in a very NON-Lovecraftian way. The main antagonist was a hivemind of familiars of the man who would go on to become Fandaniel, tasked with exploring the cosmos to meet those on other planets to learn what their reasons for being were. However, on every planet these familiars visited, any civilizations they found were either destroyed or on the verge of their end. And those that may have had a chance were accidentally influenced emotionally by those familiars who were horrorstruck at the destruction they found elsewhere into destroying themselves as well. Plunged into despair by their findings, the familiars decided that there was no meaning in existence and the only mercy left would be to end all life, causing them to begin their plans to end all life on Hydaelyn, or rather Ethyris as it was originally known.
  • Cosmetic Award: Minions, small cute (or Ugly Cute) critters that follow your character around and do absolutely nothing. Some of them can be bought from shops, others are rewards from quests and FATE events.
    • You can also earn pieces of gear for earning certain achievements, but they have terrible stat boosts and are more for looking pretty/showing off by glamoring them over actually useful gear than to be used in combat.
  • Cosplay: Iconic outfits from past games are common rewards. The Lightning Strikes event rewarded players with Lightning's and Snow's outfits, the Labyrinth of the Ancients rewards tanks with the Warror of Light's armor, Setzer's gear can be obtained from the Gold Saucer, and the Veteran Rewards for subscribing for certain periods of time include outfits such as Cloud's from Advent Children, Firion's, Zidane's, and Squall's.
  • Costume Evolution:
    • Enforced throughout the 3.0 MSQ. As missing Scions are found and brought back to the fold, Tataru uses her theretofore newfound sewing expertise to make them new outfits. Thancred instead already arrives wearing a new set of clothes that he acquired shortly before he was found by the Scions. Urianger defies it later on when posing as a mole for the Warriors of Darkness; he goes back to his old Scion robes after it's all said and done with a simple response of "I rather like my outfit".
    • In 4.0, after Lyse reveals herself as the late Yda's younger sister, Tataru also whips up a new outfit for her. Later on, after becoming the leader of the Ala Mhigan resistance, she changes into a traditional red Ala Mhigan dress; the same one shown in the expansion's opening animation.
  • Costume Porn: Armor that's unique and/or high leveled, such as the AF armor or the stuff gotten in dungeons like Copperbell, Brayflox and the Crystal Tower tends to be really pretty and detailed to the stitch.
  • Could Say It, But...:
    • In one Lominsan sidequest, the merchant Dodozan says he can't give you the name of his client after he asks you to help him track down a cask of stolen ale meant for said client. Customer discretion and all. He then tells you to go away before his cough gets worse... hissing out "The Bloody Executioners" between coughs.
    • During the Ixal Beast Tribe quests, Tataramu is thrown back into his Gilded Cage by his father. While the Warrior of Light could easily solve this by barging in the front door as a One-Man Army, Tataramu instead asks the Warrior to go to Templeton for a non-violent solution. Templeton responds to Tataramu's plight by saying that he couldn't possibly help. He certainly wouldn't suggest slipping a potent sleeping potion into the guards' wine to put them into a Forced Sleep. He repeatedly winks at the Warrior for good measure before handing them a bottle of the drugged wine.
  • Counter-Attack: Certain special attacks only become briefly usable immediately after evading or blocking an attack, such as the Pugilist's Haymaker or the Gladiator's Shield Swipe. Certain abilities can be used to temporarily increase your chances to evade/block, which in turn makes these attacks temporarily more available.
  • Covers Always Lie:
    • The cover art for patch 5.4, Futures Rewritten, has an Ascian on it that appears to be Lahabrea based on his mask. Lahabrea does not appear in the patch though another Ascian named Mitron does appear in the raid's storyline, though his mask is different than Lahabrea's.
    • Due to a communication error between the marketing department and the development team, Hraesvelgr is depicted as an antagonist fighting the Warrior of Light in both the launch trailer and one of the covers for Heavensward. The one and only time he fights the player in the actual game is as the final boss of Sohr Khai, and even that's only as a test to see if they have the skill to fight Nidhogg.
  • Cowardly Lion: During "Facing Your Demons", the final Thaumaturge Class Quest, the Thaumaturge Guild's masters rally together to face the threat of the voidsent Mormo to save their brother Cocobusi. While all five of them have had to muster their courage to take on a fight they were uncertain to win, one in particular is nicknamed Cocobygo "the Craven" during the duty in which you fight Mormo. Cocobygo, however, is the one who acts as tank for this fight. He's trembling and stuttering the whole time, but he keeps Mormo attacking him over the others.
    Cocobygo: <trembling> I-I will keep Mormo focused on me!
  • Crazy Enough to Work: One of the storyline quests is specifically named this. It's immediately obvious as to why.
    Maerwynn: So, all you need to do is search for the golem, slay it, claim its heart, and use it to bait the spriggan. Oh, and do remember to rub the soulstone against a sufficiently large concentration of amber, say, Amberscale Rock in the Central Shroud. Short of petitioning a mage versed in golem magicks, that is the only way I know to dispel the enchantments woven into a true heart. Eh? Why are you looking at me like that? I had relations with a thaumaturge once, if you must know.
  • Crapsaccharine World: Most of Eorzea is a World Half Full as it heals from the Calamity, but at first glance the Twelveswood, with its few beastmen issues (including one of the only friendly tribes), plentiful resources, and low crime is far better off than the rampant corruption of Ul'dah and the bloodthirsty pirates of Limsa Lominsa. But it turns out that it's that way because the Gridanians have to be at the beck and call of The Elementals, Obstructive Bureaucrats who work on a mentality completely incomprehensible to normal people. In return for free access to the Twelveswood's bounty, the Gridanians have to enforce very harsh laws (poaching is a death sentence, regardless of the circumstances one is driven to it for). You also learn that the conjurers have to petition to heal civilians, as one of the random NPC chatter around Gridania implies they're going to let a twelve year old die of sickness because the elementals said so, and you see a similar situation with the Ala Mhigan refugees during the main quest. There's also far more racism towards the Duskwight Elezen than in most other regions of Eorzea, and the Elementals only just "tolerate" mortals. It's implied that their leader and the "brain" of the Twelveswood, known simply as the Great One, is completely intolerant of the spoken and has to be soothed back to sleep with conjury to prevent him from sending the wildlife to completely raze Gridanian civilization.
  • Creator Cameo: Yoshida, the game's director, appears as the Wandering Minstrel for a few quests and is mainly used afterwards as the means to unlock harder versions of trials you already endured (he also regularly appears as himself, along with the rest of the staff, for The Rising event). One of the levequests in Northern Thanalan is an ahriman named Fernehalwes, who is named after English localizer Koji Fox that goes by the name of Fernehalwes on the official forums and has his avatar as the same type of monster you see him in within the game.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: The entire culture and lifestyle of Ishgard is built around their endless conflict with the Dravanians and little else. For example, Sharlayan Astrology maps the heavens to predict the futures of anyone and learn healing magicks. Ishgardian Astrology, a bastardized version of the Sharlayan art, exclusively focuses on the Dragon Star, to predict Dravanian activity.
    • This proves to be a source of some conflict in 3.2, as one of the reason the peace treaty with Hraesvelgr's brood of dragons is so controversial among Ishgard is because of their war-focused society and the fact that if the war ends, it will dramatically change their fight-loving and honor-seeking ways. Aymeric eventually solves this by calling for a "Grand Melee", a competition of Ishgard versus the Grand Companies of the other three Eorzean city-states, proving that they don't need to fight dragons to keep their honor and warrior's pride, and helping the transition to an army meant to fight people other than heretics with Ishgard rejoining the Eorzean Alliance.
  • Critical Hit: Happens naturally through random chance, though there's a stat that is dedicated to increasing odds of it happening. Damage that is a critical hit will have a distinctive *PING!* sound effect and a "!" appears next to the damage number. There's also a critical hit for healing. The critical hit mechanics were changed up in Stormblood by introducing Direct Hits, which are mini critical hits that happen more frequently than a normal Critical Hit and is signified by a slightly larger pop up text. It's possible to have both a Critical and a Direct Hit to occur at the same time, which is signified by a "!!" and is very strong when it happens.
  • Crosshair Aware: Area-of-effect attacks will be signaled by a large area on the ground that turns a different color (typically orange, but it varies depending on the boss and the location of each fight). A player must stand in an area other than this color in order to not be hit by the attack. Realistically, there should be no way that the Warrior of Light would just know where to stand when a boss uses a move, but it makes the game less frustrating. Later, harder boss fights will start using different boss tells, with the area-of-effect markers showing up less than a second before the attack goes off. These bosses require that the player pay attention to the unique "tells" of the boss rather than focus on the ground due to the markers showing up too fast to react to, even if they can see the area that the attack fires off in before it happens.
  • Crossover: A recurring theme is for characters from other games to "invade" in some way for monthly events.
    • Prominently featured around the game's launch was "Lightning Strikes", promoting the latest entry in the XIII series by having Lightning cameo, and giving players a set of her (or Snow's, for males) gear.
    • Next came Burgeoning Dread and Breaking Brick Mountains, the first involved everyone's favorite pint-sized sociopath, Professor Shantotto. The second involves fighting Brick Golems from Dragon Quest X.
    • While the Crystal Tower is a big reference to Final Fantasy III, almost all the bosses are alternate versions that fit into Final Fantasy XIV's lore. The exception seems to be Cloud of Darkness, whose status as an undying entity that lives within the void between the Final Fantasy universes means that it's likely, though unconfirmed, that this is the same one that appeared in Final Fantasy III and Dissidia Final Fantasy.
    • Not to forget, of course, Gilgamesh is back.
    • 2.4's Hildibrand quests have Ultros making an appearance. Apparently the Thaumaturge's Guild accidentally summoned him.
    • A handful of cosmetic items feature the likeness of the slimes from Dragon Quest.
    • Though nothing has shown up in Final Fantasy XIV as of this writing, Square and Sega have revealed a crossover event between XIV and Sega's Phantasy Star Online 2. Currently, PSO has received costumes and a special boss fight against Odin.
    • Between July 26th and October 3rd of 2016, a Yo-kai Watch event ran, allowing you to get several of the Yo-Kai as minions and weapons themed around them for the original and Heavensward classes. It came back in September 3 to November 1, 2017, but in an unaltered state, not granting new weapons for the Stormblood-introduced classes, and then again from August 19 to December 8, 2020, this time with four new Yo-Kai and four new weapons for the Stormblood and Shadowbringers classes.
    • The 3.5 update on January 17, 2017 brought along with it a GARO event, which ran for almost three years before eventually ending swith Patch 5.1 on October 29, 2019. It returned for Patch 6.1 on April 12, 2022, with new gear for Gunbreaker and Reaper.
    • The Omega raid questline for Stormblood has players crossing paths with the famous superboss first introduced in Final Fantasy V. In the alternate dimension where the quests take place, players contend with a number of other bosses throughout the series, including (but not limited to) Exdeath, the Phantom Train, Kefka, and Chaos.
    • An August 2018 event features the Rathalos from Monster Hunter: World (well, the series in general, really).
    • After the world of FFXIV crossed over into Final Fantasy XV, April 2019 brings the event "A Nocturne For Heroes", which sees Noctis crossing over from Eos into Eorzea, contending with Niflheim Magitek Armors and an alternate version of Garuda. Players can also drive around in the Regalia Type-F, the first mount that allows four people to ride at the same time. It reran from September to October 2021.
    • The alliance raid called "YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse" is based on NieR: Automata, the first part of which released with patch 5.1.
    • 6.51 introduces Fall Guys in the form of the Blunderville, a colorful lobby that houses courses straight from the Blunderdome, containing a slew of in-house gimmicks to make you stumble around like a fool. Participating in Blunderville lets you win Manderville Gold Saucer Fame (MGF) for prizes unique to the collaboration. Prizes include furniture based on the Blunderdome's courses, the Bean itself and a Pegwin as minions, the Rhiyes as a mount, Bean-themed glamour items, and the game's iconic Crown. While the crossover event is limited-time, the show itself will make returns at irregular intervals after the initial run.
  • Cryptic Background Reference: There are a lot of things that are mentioned but not explained in-depth, though as the game is an MMO a lot of these became fodder for later additions. One of the biggest is the Dragonsong War, the thousand-year battle between the society of Ishgard and the Dravanian Horde, of which there are hints of in the original game with Ishgard's focus on fighting dragons but which never really gets explained until the Heavensward expansion suddenly focused very heavily on it, the truth behind it, and how the people of Ishgard ultimately react to that truth and its end. To give an idea, there have been, as of the initial storyline for A Realm Reborn, seven Astral Eras and seven Umbral Eras, but the only points that really have any in-depth explanation are those that the players actually got to play through, that being the end of the Sixth Astral Era (the Legacy content cycle) through the Seventh Umbral Era (the five in-universe years between then and the start of A Realm Reborn) and into the Seventh Astral Era (everything since the end of 2.0). The only other points that have any sort of real description to them are the ends of the third and fifth astral eras, respectively a massive earthquake which destroyed the Allagan Empire (whose legacy is explored in the Binding Coil of Bahamut and Crystal Tower raids as well as everything from Azys Lla from the end of Heavensward) and the War of the Magi ending when it triggered a world-wide flood (leading to the Shadows of Mhach raids and relevant to the storylines for the Scholar and Stormblood's Red Mage).
  • Crystal Landscape: The land of Mor Dhona is mostly crystallized due to an event known as the Battle of Silvertear Skies where the Garlean Empire moved to dominate the land of Eorzea with their flying super-dreadnought, the Agrius. Not long after the invasion was started, it was ended when the Keeper of the Lake, Midgardsormr, summoned an army of dragons with mutual destruction of both parties. Over the next five years, the fuel used by the airships and the bodies of the decaying dragons caused the land to crystallize and large crystal structures to emerge from the ground.
  • Cue the Sun:
    • Inverted with Shadowbringers. The parallel universe world of The First is bathed in eternal light. The night-time sky has not been seen in over 100 years. As the story progresses, the Warrior of Light can restore the normal day/night cycle to various areas on the First by defeating the Lightwarden residing in those areas. After the fight, the post-battle cutscene shows the eternal daytime replaced with a star-filled night sky, to the amazed and joyous cries of the locals, most of whom have never seen the night sky.
    • The symbolism is made almost explicit at the end of Endwalker. The climax takes place in Ultima Thule, a place ruled by dynamis, i.e. the dominant emotions. Since despair is Meteion's motivation and weapon, the area is dark and forboding. But after beating the Endsinger and restoring hope to Meteion, she changes her song of despair and oblivion to one of hope and renewal. The change is marked by a light on the horizon that resembles a rising sun, symbolically both in-universe and out a new dawn for the world.
  • Culture Clash: A recurring theme in Stormblood is the clash between differing cultures and sensibilities, inevitably leading to conflict when the two sides can't come to an understanding.
    • At the Azim Steppe, Gosetsu is shocked when the Dotharl leave the body of one of their fallen hunters for the wolves, confronting the leader of the Xaela tribe about it. When she explains the tribe's belief in reincarnation, Gosetsu slights her further by declaring the idea that a baby could be the soul of a fallen warrior returned to be "madness".
    • Im the Blacksmith storyline, Sekka comes to Limsa Lominsa's Blacksmiths' Guild in hopes of learning how to forge the finest swords in the world. She's aghast when she finds that the guild is more focused on fulfilling orders and commissions than a goal or an ideal in their craft. She soon tries to impose her beliefs on the rest of the guild, even challenging the Warrior of Light to a smithing contest to prove herself right. She winds up losing due to being overly focused on showcasing her skills rather than fitting the sword to the client, humbling her and making her more open to Brithael's gradual and laissez-faire style of learning.
    • In the Weaver storyline, Keimei, the heir to a famous fashion brand in Kugane, finds himself taken with the styles of Eorzea and resolves to bring them to Hingashi. He commissions the Warrior of Light to weave dresses in these styles for his favorite geiko, Kotocho, to show off in festivals and special gatherings. He and Kotocho are met with both praise and scorn for violating long-held traditions as Eorzean standards of beauty and style are introduced to an entirely new continent.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle:
    • The Warrior Of Light in the Shadowbringers trailer is on the receiving end of a curbstomp by an angelic Sin Eater. Nothing he tries damages the Angelic Abomination until he switches his class to the darkness-aligned Dark Knight. He then ends the battle in two hits.
    • Likewise in the Endwalker trailer. On the Moon as a Paladin, he blocks the attack of a Terminus beast and effortlessly kills it with one single swing of his sword.
    • Narratively, the Warrior of Light is often on the giving end of these.
      • The Warrior's first battle with Fordola is rather easy by solo instance standards. Fordola herself is alarmed by how strong the Warrior is and calls for a retreat when it appears that Castellum Velodyna has fallen. This makes the subsequent fight with her as a newly created Resonant Super-Soldier much more poignant, as she's far more formidable with a version of Krile's Echo and the Blessing of Light.
      • In the Stormblood Monk quests, the Warrior is lured into an ambush by the Corpse Brigade, who swarm them with dozens of armed men and mages. The Warrior beats them all back single-handedly, only getting some assistance from the rest of the Fist of Rhalgr in the last leg of the fight. And this is after more than ten hours of the Warrior's own Training from Hell regimen.
      • Downplayed in Endwalker. In the second phase of the final battle with the Endsinger, the Warrior of Light is empowered by the prayers of the Scions wishing for their victory over despair. Alarmed by how they're using dynamis against her, the Endsinger frantically swings at them in predictable patterns as she gets pushed back and ultimately defeated. However, as the description for the Extreme version of her fight says, the Warrior is deeply unsettled by the thought of fighting the Endsinger without the Scions' timely aid.
      • The main recurring reversal of this dynamic is with Zenos who, regardless of how well you actually do in the instance, leaves the Warrior at death's door in the majority of his scripted battles.
  • Cut and Paste Environments: Previously, the game had enormous expanses of land that re-used some assets to fill out the space—while all MMOs do this to some extent, much ado had been made about this game's usage, which sometimes recycled entire topographical features, most infamously the Black Shroud being made up of several identical winding pathways leading to identical clearings with identical streams. The dev team listened, and in ARR, all zones have been split into 3-4 smaller zones with far greater variety and landmarks. The Novice Hall training ground, however, does recycle the map asset used for the Wolves' Den PvP with the only difference being all the walls are removed.
  • Cute Bruiser: Examples pop up quite often, especially Lalafell and Miqo'te. The second-in-command of the Pugilist's Guild is a definite example being both a tiny adorable Lalafell and an effective user of Good Old Fisticuffs.
  • Cute Little Fangs: A trait of the Keepers of the Moon Miqo'te.
  • Cute Monster Girl: Roegadyn aren't monsters, but the men are big, burly giant-like folk that resemble The Incredible Hulk. The women, by that token, are Amazonian Beauties that resemble She-Hulk. The Auri ladies, meanwhile, are much, much more obviously this, with the men being nearly as tall as Roegadyn and Elezen, with fierce facial features, but the women are as small and delicate as a Miqo'te. For the record, Roegadyn and Auri men aren't ugly by any stretch of the imagination, just more "monstrous" in a way.
  • Cut Scene: Surprising for an MMO, this game has a lot of these. This is nothing new to players of FFXI, however, aside from the presence of voice acting in some high quality cutscenes, they are more prevalent in ARR (though the game isn't fully voiced).
  • Cutscene Incompetence: The player character is always going to suffer from this no matter how many enemies they have slain or if they have the best gear at the time something happened to them. If the player character is in a cutscene, then any fighting that happens in said scene will be carried out by NPCs while the player character merely watches or gets out of the way. Any attacks that hits the player character in a cutscene will always connect (sometimes it doesn't work, depending on the circumstances) and if the scene calls for it, the attack will either knock them out or weaken them. This is made glaringly painful at the end of 2.5 where the player character is arrested for killing Nanamo and when they're freed, they escape instead of fighting their pursuers. On a technical standpoint, the trope is used since the dev team can't exactly make cutscenes be different from each other based on what class the player is currently using and it's also to avoid the issue of scenes of characters getting hurt or killed being nullified by the player being a healer.
    • The player character's cutscene passiveness can also lead to a number of major Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? moments, with two of the biggest being Gaius van Baelsar in ARR, who is allowed to casually walk away from his loss leading to two more boss fights, and The Griffon in Heavensward, who is allowed to monologue for several minutes after losing while he recovers the strength to enact his plan which required him to die anyway.
    • That said, this is turned around in at least one case, where a male Miqo'te trying to become his village's Nunh asks you to help him get better at fighting to overthrow the current Nunh. The cutscene fades to black as you presumably get ready to spar with him, and when it fades back in it turns out you defeated him effortlessly.
  • Cutscene Power to the Max: Generally avoided, but the Futures Perfect quest cutscene is a perfect demonstration of the trope with all kinds of acrobatic moves and unavailable spells that makes one wish they could actually do half of what's done there.
    • The intro trailer for 1.0 was also heavily criticized for featuring player analogues doing all sorts of things players themselves couldn't hope to do - up to and including a few abilities which were meant for players at the time the video was made but removed by the time the game went live, such as the "En[element]" line of spells for Conjurernote .
    • Played straight with most NPCs later on. In cutscenes they can take down enemies in one or two hits apiece, but when that same NPC is fighting by your side later they seem unable to take down a single mook without your help.
  • The Cycle of Empires: And HOW! The Empires seemingly rise with each Astral Era, and then have their fall marked by an Umbral Era, often started by their very own actions.
    • The Allagan Empire rose via technological skills back in the 3rd Astral Era that surpasses modern Eorzea, even the Garlean Empire. Unfortunately, after building the solar energy-collecting Crystal Tower, they began to become decadent. In a desperate ploy, their chief technologist, Amon, experimented in cloning and bringing back the dead to revive Emperor Xande, the first Emperor of the Allagans. It worked, but Xande, having felt the pain of death itself, decided that all life was fleeting, and thus, it would be better to cast it all into the nothingness of the Void by striking a blood pact with the Cloud of Darkness. A failed experiment involving Dalamud triggered a massive worldwide earthquake that buried all of their civilization.
    • The ancient civilizations of Amdapor and Mhach were amazingly skilled at White Magic and Black Magic, respectively. However, in their pursuit of ever more powerful magics, they began studying ways to overpower each other, sparking off the "War of the Magi" that drained the planet of much of its aether, and weakened the barriers between Eorzea and the realm of the void. White and Black magic have become largely forbidden ever since. The disaster also helped to create the art of Red Magic, as survivors of the War banded together to help rebuild and focused on ways to cast magic without using the planet's aether.
    • Shadowbringers reveals that this cycle is by design. The rise of both Allag and Garlemald, and possibly other major empires of Hydaelyn's history, was engineered by the Ascians with the express purpose of destabilizing the world before causing enough damage to trigger a Rejoining with their fall.

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