Final Fantasy XIV / Tropes P to R

Final Fantasy XIV
Tropes: A to C | D to F (Foreshadowing) | G to I (Gameplay and Story Integration) | J to L | M to O | P to R | S to U | V to Z

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• Pacifism Is Cowardice: Sharlayan has an extremely strict non-interventionist policy, its leaders declaring that the nation will only record history, not make it. This continuously baffles the Eorzean Alliance as time goes on, especially when the Garleans are knocking at the door.
  • Sharlayan refuses to help Eorzea against the Garlean Empire, deriding the Eorzeans as savages and barbarians for resorting to a war of defense. Louisoix and the Circle of Knowing left Sharlayan because they got tired of this Head-in-the-Sand Management regarding the crises going on around the world. Even when The End of the World as We Know It is upon them in Endwalker, the Sharlayans continue to remain Team Switzerland even though their nation will be in ruins too, much to the Eorzeans' bewilderment.
    Louisoix: To ignore the plight of those one might conceivably save is not wisdom—it is indolence.
  • Subverted in Endwalker, because the above stated pacifism stance from the high council of Sharlayan is revealed to be a ruse for what they're really doing: building a generational ship to save Eorzea from the Final Days. They can't divert any resources from that mission, and they also literally can't tell anyone about their plans due to a magical charm placed on them to protect the project. That said, they are still genuine in their stance that the world outside Sharlayan is filled with violent savages, and it takes some character development for Fourchenalt to realize that there is value in taking action, even if it involves violence, to bring about a greater good. Specifically, when the Warrior of Light finds a way to save their planet that would stop them from needing to flee.
• Palette Swap: Many pieces of gear are simply copied models of a different piece of gear with either a different color or some minor details added. Many pieces of gear can be dyed, changing the color but keeping the same overall design. Frequently, patches will add new gear which uses the same model as existing gear -- but the new gear will be dyeable. Also happens with many non-human enemies, naturally, such as the series staple flans. Chocobos can be fed to change their plumage colors, though they are further customizable with barding. Many monsters in the First in Shadowbringers are cosmetically distinct, yet functionally alike, variations of monsters in the Source.
• Panicky Expectant Father: In Shadowbringers, you can meet a frantic expectant father right outside of the Pendants. He then begs you to convince the midwife to let him back inside after he got kicked out of the room for his flustered behavior. It's all over by the time you get there, and the midwife is happy to report that both his wife and new daughter are safe and healthy. The Warrior is then asked to welcome the new child into the world as the Exarch's guest, both to diffuse the father's nerves and to give the family a story to tell in the future.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: During a main story quest, you talk to refugees in Camp Drybone who refuse to have anything to do with you. All it takes for people to think you're one of them is for you to change into a weathered tunic and pants, even if the rest of your equipment is the exact same as before.
• Parrot Pet Position: Certain minions, namely the the ones that are adorable animals, will sometimes take up this position on player characters' shoulders. On Lalafells, they become Head Pets instead because of how short Lalafells are.
• Patchwork Map: Legacy attempted to avert this, with larger maps given more realistic geography, but with the remake into A Realm Reborn, a lot of areas got condensed for the sake of travel convenience without as much regard for realism; this means, for instance, as of Stormblood a forest region (the Black Shroud) directly borders two distinct desert regions (Thanalan to the south, Gyr Abania to the east). The devs did try to make the transitions more seamless by making borders between zones have a mixture of both; for instance, East Thanalan is mostly a dry and arid desert, but as you head further to the east it starts to get more lush, with plenty of actual grass on the far side of Highbridge, and as you get closer to the northeast corner, where the zone transition to the South Shroud is, you start to even see large trees and, in a FATE around that area, mobs that normally only appear in the Shroud. Some of this is due to implications that the actual distance between areas even within a single zone, much less the transitions between them, is much larger than it appears in-game (e.g. there's an NPC in Western Thanalan who complains he's "miles" away from Vesper Bay, when it takes you maybe two minutes to walk there from his location), and other much more jarring cases are outright stated to be due to weather patterns and the like being knocked out of balance due to the fall of Dalamud, such as the eternal frozen snowfall of Coerthas being unnaturally restricted to Coerthas, letting it border two separate, temperate forests in the Black Shroud to the southeast and the Dravanian forelands to the northwest.
• Pawprint Stamping: Anden lacks opposable thumbs due to being transformed into a leafman a century ago. This means he has to sign all of his Custom Delivery documents with one of his leaves dipped in ink for a stamp. After being restored to his true form as a Viis, he starts signing his deliveries in the Vrandtic script.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: After "finding out" the Sultana has been poisoned, Teledji Adeledji arrests the player, orders the Brass Blades to arrest all the other Scions, and then starts mocking Raubahn about her death. Raubahn takes it poorly, given Teledji's constant political machinations and destabilizing actions, and kills Teledji. He would have killed Lolorito too, but for Ilberd's intervention. Few players would say that both of them didn't deserve it.
• Percent Damage Attack: The last enemy before the final boss of the Great Gubal Library hard version has an attack that cuts your current HP, MP, and TP in half.
• Perfection Is Static:
  • The world before the Sundering, more specifically the city of Amaurot was a genuine paradise. Disease and war were unknown as the people there could live for an age. Conflicts were settled largely through peaceful debate. But this place was such a paradise that few people saw the need to leave, resulting in a society that gradually succumbed to Creative Sterility. Those who didn't fit the mold of the average citizen often struggled, with Hermes wondering if he's the Only Sane Man or the only insane one for having concerns about his people's wanton and sometimes careless use of The Power of Creation.
  • One of the Endwalker expansion's recurring themes is the impossibility of perfection and the inevitability of change. In the final zone of the story, Ultima Thule, you encounter the remnants of numerous civilizations who pursued perfection at the expense of all else. The last of these civilizations, the Nibirun, achieved endless lives free of war, hunger, disease, and differences thanks to the Hive Mind they created. But without anything to drive them, they fell into indolence. When asked what exactly makes them happy now that they've achieved perfection, they went mad trying and failing to come up with an answer. They then collectively decided that there's Nothing Left to Do but Die.
• Permanently Missable Content: For the YoRHA: Dark Apocalypse raids, there were supposedly two sequences for the final epilogue depending on how people chose to support one of the two Dwarven siblings over the other. However, it isn't even possible to confirm if this is true as, as is shown in the statistics shown at the end, all servers on all regions ended up choosing the exact same route through their collective player bases' choices, making the other epilogue effectively nonexistent.
• Photo Mode: Called Group Pose that can be accessed through the "/gpose" command. It automatically loops the last emote or attack every player made; and allows camera angles, lighting and effects to be adjusted. Other players, NPCs and pets can also be hidden, and the UI can be removed.
• Pick-Up Group: One of Square-Enix's goals with FFXIV is to make these more probable and successful, thanks to the questing system used by the Duty Finder. The Duty Finder basically lets a player pick a quest, then wait for the game to find other players in proper roles to appear who are also looking to play the same quest. Patch 2.1 takes it a step further by adding the Party Finder feature, which allows players to create a party with specific roles and goals of their choosing, thus making it easier for people to find groups that cater to their needs.
  • Beyond dungeons and duty finders, higher level FATEs tend to work like this, especially ones with Notorious Monsters. Someone has to tank that thing's damage, which means someone has to heal the tank, meanwhile someone has to actually kill the thing... and there you have it. Sometimes it's an example of beautiful teamwork and camaraderie among people who have never seen each other before nor ever will again. Sometimes it's not so pretty.
• Pilgrimage:
  • In the side story "What Remains of a Knight", Archbishop Thordan explains Ser Vaindreau's absence from the Heavens' Ward as the elderly knight taking a final religious pilgrimage as part of a well-deserved retirement. In truth, this is a cover for Charlbert murdering Vaindreau on Thordan's orders after Vaindreau attempted to confront Thordan over the latter's dealings with Lahabrea.
  • At the end of Stormblood, Gosetsu leaves on a religious pilgrimage to offer repose to all the people of Othard who left life in suffering over the past few decades. To emphasize his resolve, he shaves his head, signifying his retirement as a samurai of Doma and a retainer in Hien's service.
  • Invoked in the Namazu Tribe Quest, "Pilgrim's Regress". Seigetsu the Enlightened sends the festival-goers with the Seven Hundred and Seventy-Seven on a pilgrimage to sites on the Azim Steppe of apparent cultural significance to the Namazu. Upon completing the quest, Seigetsu admits that he made it up and the sites he specified have no connection to the Namazu. When he gets a disapproving glare from the Warrior, he argues that the authenticity of the sites matters less than the spirituality the Namazu experience from such a journey.
• Pillar of Light:
  • These frequently appear in boss fights as orange columns surrounding a circle of energy, they're a universal marker for attacks signaling "Get into this attack to take a negligible bit of damage to yourself, or this will explode and do significant damage to everyone".
  • The confrontation between Omega and the newly-born Shinryu at the end of Heavensward's story concludes with their Beam-O-War unleashing one, with the backlash knocking both out of commission and sending the two crashing down on the far side of Baelsar's Wall in Gyr Abania, where they will be encountered in Stormblood.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Lalafellin Disciples of War. Just because they come up to your waist and look adorable in their armor doesn't mean they can't knock you on your ass just as well as a huge hulking Roegadyn or Hrothgar of the same discipline.
• Plain Palate: An adventurer at the Carline Canopy complains that Gridanian food is horribly bland, to the point that the water has more flavor. Despite this, Gridania employs its own culinarians in its marketplace and Mother Miounne is famous for her delicious eel pies.
• Planet Spaceship: Endwalker reveals that the moon is this. Hydaelyn created it as an ark to ferry the people of Etheirys to the stars in case the apocalypse couldn't be averted.
• Plant Mooks: A variation occurs in this game, where you can get special seeds which, when planted, produces a pet-like minion.
• Playboy Bunny: The female employees of the Manderville Gold Saucer all wear bunny suits. Player characters regardless of gender can purchase the outfit themselves for MGP.
• Play Every Day: There are several mechanics which reset each day — Duty Roulettes, beast tribes and certain other repeatable quests, Grand Company missions, the Mini Cactpot at the Gold Saucer, and a few other things. There are more mechanics which reset each week — raid rewards, tomestone caps, a different set of repeatable quests, Wondrous Tails, the Challenge Log, the Cactpot, and the Fashion Report. However, the developers have largely gone out of their way to avert this, as they don't want players to feel like they "have to" log in and play every single day, as confirmed by Yoshi-P in interviews. It's not that there's nothing to do every day; it's that the development team doesn't want the game to be a chore.
  Yoshi-P: It's alright not to play [Final Fantasy XIV] everyday. Since it's just a game, you can stop forcing yourself if it's hard on you to keep that up. Rather, it'll just pile up unnecessary stress if you limit yourself into playing just that one game since there are so many other games out there. So, do come back and play it to your heart's content when the major patch kicks in, then stop it to play other games before you got burnt out, and then come back for another major patch. This will actually make me happier, and in the end, I think this is the best solution I can answer for keeping your motivation up for the game.
• Player-Generated Economy: The market board is a place where players can post items to sell to other players. Items that are hard to craft, hard to find, just released with a new patch, or are in high demand tend to have their prices set very high. While it is entirely possible to survive on just dungeon loot drops or ignore the vanity items, if you want to have optimized stats or must have that ultra cute minion in your collection, then you better have the gil to spend.
• Player Tic:
  • Once the "D" waymark was added, it quickly became common practice for runs of Castrum Meridianum to spell out "C 1 D" at the spot Cid stands during the Magitek Colossus Rubricatus battle. This serves no practical purpose whatsoever, and is mainly done out of boredom while waiting for Cid to slo-o-owly get into position before the battle can start.
  • The "spite LB": After a duty is complete, any charge on the Limit Break meter is effectively wasted, so a healer or tank will sometimes cast their LB, as a pointed reminder to the DPS that they could have used it to end the fight faster.
• Playing the Family Card:
  • Aymeric, the Heroic Bastard of Archbishop Thordan, believes that his ties to Thordan could help him convince the archbishop to reveal the truth of the Dragonsong War instead of continuing the toxic status quo. But Thordan remains unmoved and has Aymeric imprisoned in the Vault. At the very least, Aymeric's assumption that Thordan would be conflicted about sentencing his son to die for heresy proves correct, buying time for the heroes to mount a rescue operation to free Aymeric.
  • Haurchefant Greystone is the illegitimate son of Count Edmont de Fortemps, born of the count's sole affair. While Edmont loved Haurchefant and wanted to raise him as a trueborn son, Edmont's wife objected, forcing Edmont to disown Haurchefant and deny him the family name. Edmont's guilt over the decision makes it hard for him to say no to Haurchefant's requests. This is what lets Haurchefant convince Edmont to take in the Warrior of Light, Tataru, and Alphinaud as wards of House Fortemps, letting them find refuge from Teledji's Frame-Up job.
  • It's revealed in the Dark Knight quest "Original Sins" that Ystride, the crazed woman leading the hunt for Rielle, is none other than Rielle's mother. In "Absolution", the heroes attempts to appeal to Ystride's ties to her daughter to convince Ystride to stop her mad pursuit. Ystride refuses, having disowned her daughter for being born with her father's heretical blood. Ystride then declares that she will never stop hunting Rielle.
• Please Wake Up: A kobold child named Ga Bu alerts the Warrior of Light and the twins that along with summoning Titan, the kobolds intend to sacrifice those against the summoning to further Titan's strength, Ga Bu's parents being among those prisoners. By the time the party reaches the Navel, it is too late, both of Ga Bu's parents are dead. Ga Bu desperately pleads with his parents to wake up, repeating that he'd come for them like he said.
• Plot Hole: When you begin the level 50 Culinarian quest, you're tasked with making a meal for Nanamo, who is the Sultanate of Ul'dah. This looks a bit odd if you happen to do the quest after she's assassinated in the 2.5 story line. Officially, this isn't a plothole, because FFXIV uses the standard MMO Hand Wave that older content takes place prior to newer content, even if the player does it out of order. Unofficially, there's a lot of content elsewhere that does take into account the status of other questlines when it would logically be relevant, making this stand out more than it would have otherwise. Ultimately subverted after a certain point in Heavensward, where it's revealed her death was fake all along.
• Plot Parallel: The events in Endwalker's level 90 dungeon, the Dead Ends, parallel the events of the entire game up til that point. The "sixth end", a race of seadwellers dying of disease, mirrors the Thirteenth and the First dying of Floods of Darkness and Light respectively; the "eighth end", a world torn apart by war, is reminiscent of Garlemald's war against the rest of the world; and had the Final Days not happened, the Ancients were heavily implied to be on a societal trajectory towards the same situation as the "seventeenth end", a race with Nothing Left to Do but Die.
• Plot Twist: The YoRHa raid in Shadowbringers pulls a big one on players. In the 5.1 questline, players are introduced to 2P, who seems to be the main heroine of the questline, with the boss of the Copied Factory being 9S, who players of NieR: Automata remember pulling a big Sanity Slippage-fueled Face–Heel Turn. The 5.3 questline, however, turns everything on its head: 2P is Evil All Along, being a Machine Lifeform copy of 2B, casting 9S in a completely different light as 2B takes center stage. The quest to unlock the Puppets' Bunker reinforces this with the name "Everything You Know Is Wrong".
• Possessing a Dead Body: Ascians can do this, in addition to possessing living people, as shown when Elidibus possesses Zenos after his death. It also ends up being an ability of Zenos' artificial Echo, as he is able to repossess his own body after chasing Elidibus away.
• Post-Adventure Adventure: The events of A Realm Reborn kick off five years after the Seventh Umbral Calamity, a cataclysmic event where the Eorzean Alliance and adventurers collectively referred to as "Warriors of Light" tried to stop the Garlean Empire's attempt to flatten Eorzea via Colony Drop. Instead, the elder primal Bahamut emerged from Dalamud, inflicting indescribable damage to the entire continent and permanently changing weather patterns during his rampage. The story begins with the Player Character, either a fresh-faced adventurer looking to make a name for themselves or one of those selfsame Warriors of Light transported into the future, making their way to one of the Eorzean city-states and exploring the land forever changed by the Calamity.
• Post-Final Boss:
  • Lahabrea is the post-final boss to the Ultima Weapon for the 2.0 story line. Until the encounter was reworked into a one-time solo instance in patch 6.1, his attacks were not too threatening and the party was given the blessing from the mother crystal, which granted them boosted power and HP regeneration. Compared to the Ultima Weapon, Lahabrea was a total joke - it wasn't unusual for the mid-fight dialogue to last longer than the actual fight, players draining his health in 15 seconds and then sitting around or even dancing for another 15 waiting for all the dialogue to finish.
  • Rosalinde acts as this for the Heavensward Rogue/Ninja class questline. She's the Big Bad from its beginning, but she's more of a Non-Action Big Bad, content to let her Dragon Redway handle actually fighting the heroes until the level 60 quest at the end, where she cuts short his attempt to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here and then fights you herself, which comes out to a bog-standard fight against a Marauder NPC with less health than Redway had and no unique mechanics other than a one-time use of Holmgang to pin you in place. It comes off less like a natural progression of the storyline and more like a quick fix to get rid of Rosalinde so there are no loose ends left by having her survive.
  • From a narrative perspective, Tsukuyomi serves as this to the Stormblood expansion, compared to Nidhogg who was essentially the Final Boss of the Heavensward storyline. Compared to King Thordan for instance, who narratively is more of a Climax Boss in the Heavensward storyline, the battle against Zenos as Shinryu definitely concludes the main storyline of Stormblood, with the patches 4.1-4.3 essentially wrapping up most of the loose ends, with Yotsuyu as Tsukuyomi and her brother being the final Stormblood plot thread to tie up before 4.4-4.55 set up the next expansion, just as 3.4-3.55 set up Stormblood. Shadowbringers zig-zags this with Elidibus as while narratively he's the tying-up-loose-threads boss, difficulty-wise he's on par with Hades/Emet-Selch. Not helping is that Elidibus is hinted to be and then properly set up as the final boss for Shadowbringers, while Tsukuyomi comes out of literally nowhere as an amnesiac Yotsuyu very suddenly regains her memories, goes off the deep end, and summons a Primal.
  • In Endwalker Zenos steps up after helping you defeat the Endsinger, willing to go to the quite literal edge of existence for the rematch. For a reason you get to pick, the Warrior decides it's time for a final showdown. While Zenos has a few hard-hitting and tricky to dodge attacks that will shave off most of your HP, he doesn't have a significant amount of health, your HP regen is cranked to absurd levels, and if your HP gets depleted, you have six stacks of an Auto-Revive buff (though phase 2 always starts with Zenos one-shotting you, so it's really more like five).
• Power Creep: While thankfully averted in most ways, it still has happened over the course of the game's life in other mechanical ways:
  • Because the stat(s) and damage output of max level player(s) often doubles over an expansion's time as being "Current", this means the next expansion has to feature higher number(s) in order to encourage players to use the gear. Fortunately, newcomer(s) are often given a set of gear that increases their stat(s), and other duties oft scale their stat(s) up and down
  • Power Creep has also had an effect on lower level content too. Content from past expansion(s) will scale the player's stat(s) and level down. However, the scaling skews high, meaning players are technically approaching the duties with stat(s) that are on the higher end of things, especially if they are a higher level (ie approaching level 50/60 content at 80/90) and are using raid-tier gear. This is one reason players often pay less attention to mechanic(s) in A Realm Reborn content since they would be approaching it with optimised gear and can sometimes even just burn down the boss. While there is a way to turn the scaling to a much higher level, players must approach it with a premade party.
  • Inside the special zone, the Bozjan Southern Front, there are 3 duels that can be accessed by players who clear the boss fight that spawns the duel without taking any avoidable damage and then win the lottery for the duel. These duels are of Savage difficulty and tend to have many one hit kill mechanics and require certain abilities just to clear. However, with the release of Delubrum Reginae, multiple new skills were added that were a lot more powerful than what could be obtained in the Southern Front. Particularly, the Flarestar ability is a Do T that is extremely powerful and can absolutely chew through even the duel bosses' healthbars (the first duel, being a robot that is extra weak to magic, can die before the attack that requires having Manawall equipped JUST from nothing but Flarestar and your standard attacks). However, when the sequel zone Zadnor was released, it's duels were balanced around these new powerful skills existing. Not only are they no longer Game Breakers, they can feel outright mandatory to beat the DPS checks on the new duels.
  • Because of the exponential growth for stat(s) from A Realm Reborn to just Shadowbringers, Endwalker brought about a stat squish in order to make dealing with this easier. Tank(s) had to keep generating Enmity as part of their job, but they could generate so much that it actually caused an integer overflow and thus they suddenly would lose their aggro.
• Power Crutch:
  • Mages all require a focus for their magics in order to utilize their powers to their fullest extent. Be it a conjurer's cane, a thaumaturge's wand, an astrologian's star globe, an arcanist's book, or a red mage's rapier, trying to cast a spell without a focus is said to be like trying to cook without fire. But the Ascians are powerful enough to cast magic without any apparent focuses to speak of. Emet-Selch, one of the Ascians' leaders, can perform enormous feats of magic with a snap of his fingers, demonstrating his mastery as The Archmage even among the Ascians.
  • Soul crystals are each an Amulet of Concentrated Awesome in which the experience of previous holders of the crystal can be passed down to the next, enabling the newest holder to learn at an accelerated rate. But in the case of the Mhachi black mage soul crystal, it's essential for an aspiring black mage to use magic safely, as black mages channel so much aether to cast their spells that doing so without extremely strict training and/or a soul crystal for guidance will simply incinerate the would-be mage from the inside out.
• Power Crystal: In the original version of the game, big ones called 'aetherytes' recover your HP and MP and let you start guildleve quests, small ones are elemental and used for crafting. In A Realm Reborn, the aetherytes are now used exclusively for travel, large aetherytes for teleporting directly to and smaller aethernet crystals for more convenient travel within a city that houses an aetheryte.
• Power Floats: Several spells — among them the Teleport and Return spells, White Mage's Holy, Glare, and Stone IV, Astrologian's Collective Unconscious, and the Summoner's Deathflare and Limit Break Teraflare — cause you to float while you're casting them.
• Power Glows: Relic weapons pulse with a light that increases in intensity as they are upgraded.
• Power Incontinence: The Palace of the Dead can potentially turn you into this if one of the floor effects is Amnesia, which disables your Job/Class abilities (spells and weapon skills still work). If you're in a certain stance, such as Sword Oath or Cleric Stance for example, you'll be locked in those stances and you can't undo it until the next floor or if you find an item that can dispel enchantments.
• The Power of Love:
  • A 1.0 Gridanian questline involved a woman, Fye, making a ritual mask for her brother, Dunstan, who has been claimed by the Elementals as a Wildling for transgressions against the forest. No Gridanian knows if saving a Wildling is possible, and further events over the course of the quest raise the risk that Dunstan might die in the attempt. The Ritual of Clensing works, however, and according to Brother E-Sumi, it was Fye's love for her brother that made the difference.
  • The head chef of House Durendaire says that the secret ingredient in making any meal hearty and satisfying is love and attention to all the details, especially when preparing comfort foods like a traditional Ishgardian beet soup. He freely admits how cheesy that sounds, but given how he's considered Ishgard's preeminent cook, he probably has a point. This is ultimately what wins the Warrior of Light the Dellemont d'Or. Rather than simply trying to wow the food critic with flavor, the Warrior carefully selected a full course meal that would take the diner's every need into account.
• Power-Up Food: There's numerous types of food available to get (from soups, to breads, to cookies, and more!) and all of them give temporary stat boosts and boosted EXP for half an hour. Food is a common quest reward and the Culinarian job allows you to make your own food.
• Power Up Letdown: In the Save the Queen storyline, you can purchase unique Resistance armor sets. Said sets can be augmented by either obtaining a rare drop or from spending a lot of a certain currency. Said armor once augmented can later be upgraded to the Law's Order armor set if you have the unaugmented version of that set plus the augmented version of the original Resistance armor plus an item that only drops from a savage difficulty raid. What does the augment do exactly? It gives a haste buff that works within all Save the Queen related content, increasing your skill and spell speed. This is pretty nifty for some classes, such as Black Mage. However, it's actually something of a nightmare for other classes as even though having faster GCDs sounds like it would be universally great, many classes optimally want to hit a specific GCD range, no faster and no slower, to make sure all their skills line up properly. With the speed buff, their GCD speed can push them out of proper skill alignment which can cause DPS loss overall. So for those classes, they are better off skipping the haste buff entirely. Though at the least, the second augmented set can at least be dyed different colors for glamour (the first can be dyed regardless of whether it's augmented or not).
• Precursors: Most of the current civilizations of Eorzea and perhaps other nations outside of it have a history of being descendants of a civilization from a long time ago or building on top of a preceding cilization. Doesn't help that Umbral Calamities tends to make recordkeeping of the achievements of past civilizations difficult as time goes on.
  • The Allagans. If the Binding Coil of Bahamut is any indication, the Allagans were far more advanced than even the Garleans, who are currently the most advanced civilization known in present day Eorzea, or other civilizations that existed during the Allagan's era. They are nowhere to be found in present day, at least for now, due to a massive earthquake caused by their emperor Xande's attempt to fulfill a Deal with the Devil, but remnants of their technology and history still remain.
• Prestige Class: Patch 1.21 added a "Job System" on top of the already implemented Disciplines. Jobs are more streamlined variants of the game's base classes that can equip skills from less jobs at once, but have stronger equipment and job-specific abilities to compensate. Current jobs Call-Back to the job classes of the various Final Fantasy games — bar the Bard, a hybrid of the traditional party-buffing singers and distance-fighting archers.
  • In Heavensward, the new Jobs, Dark Knight, Astrologian, and Machinist start at level 30 and require players to complete the entire A Realm Reborn storyline from base game to Patch 2.55 to unlock.
  • In Stormblood, the Jobs, Samurai and Red Mage, both start at a high level 50. However, unlike the Heavensward Jobs, the trainers are in Eorzea proper, and you're capable of becoming them as soon as you finish the Praetorium. A later patch also adds Blue Mage as a "limited class".
  • Shadowbringers adds two new Jobs, Gunbreaker and Dancer. Like with the Stormblood Jobs, their trainers can be found within Eorzea, and both classes start at level 60.
  • The trend continues with Endwalker and the level 70 starting Sage and Reaper. Sage playd with it a bit; it starts in Limsa Lominsa, but its job trainer eventually sets up base in Idyllshire, which requires you to reach Heavensward in order to progress.
• Pretext for War: The Garleans love using this trope to justify their aggression against Eorzea. Even if the city-states themselves aren't complicit in summoning Primals, the Garleans see this as weakness and an inability to bring order to destructive, chaotic elements that could threaten the world, and thus it's up to the Empire to conquer the lands and bring peace to them. They love this pretext so much, that when they lose control of Doma, a Garlean agent is instructed to purposely set up their own summoning ritual in an attempt to make Doma look guilty, justifying continued aggression so Garlemald can take back control of the region.
  • Ironically, this whole pretext is revealed to be a lie designed by the Ascians, who secretly founded the Empire as a tool to cause further Calamities. Not only do the Asicans actively aid beast tribes and rogue elements such as the Ishgardian heretics and the Ala Mhigan rebels in summonings, but they falsified the truth behind the Burn to make it look like it was a result of excess aether consumption by Primals. It was in fact caused by Allagan tech; another evil empire the Ascians had a hand in. With the Garleans effectively brainwashed into thinking the rest of the world are primitive savages who need to be conquered to stop the world's destruction, this allows the Ascians to fuel a Forever War between Garlemald and the rest of Hydaelyn's inhabitants... allowing for more opportunities to cause Umbral Calamities.
• Primal Fear: After completing the main story Shadowbringers and the crafter quests in the Crystalline Mean, a new quest unlocks which reveals that the children of the Crystarium have had difficulty adjusting to the return of real darkness to the world, seeing monsters and other terrors in the shadows and generally being afraid of the dark. To help them out you turn to the various crafters you've helped and they create a series of various night lights for the kids to use and enjoy, as well as put on a fireworks show.
• Privateer: Merlwyb appears to have invented this in Eorzea, talk about the town in Limsa Lominsa indicates that the pirates now work for her and are ordered to prey on Garlean ships, and this is part of why Merlwyb is so powerful.
• Progressive Instrumentation: In Ultima Thule, the music starts out as a droning buzz in the background, only to gradually begin to add more instruments with each sacrifice the Scions make, culminating in the addition of lyrics as the area's balance shifts from despair to hope.
• Promoted to Playable:
  • Of sorts with two mounts. Twintania and the ADS, boss enemies in the Binding Coil of Bahamut, can be summoned as mounts you can ride on. Twintania even retains her signature dive bomb attack, which you can use purely to show it off.
  • Oppressor, Brute Justice, and Cruise Chaser are major bosses in the Alexander raids. They become palyable in the Rival Wings PVP mode.
  • And near the end of Stormblood and into Shadowbringers, this is taken in a whole different direction for an MMO: the game begins giving you occasional solo duties where you play as other NPC heroes (primarily the other Scions), who use limited variations on jobs to fight: first on the list is Alphinaud (Arcanist/Scholar), followed by Y'shtola (Conjurer), and then Hien (Samurai). Going into Shadowbringers, you have the chance to play in various instances as Thancred (Gunbreaker/Rogue), Estinien (Dragoon), Alisaie (Red Mage), Urianger (Astrologician), and G'raha Tia (a hybrid Black/White Mage). In some flashbacks during role quests as well, the various Warriors of Light from the First are briefly playable too.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Amalj'aa were revealed to have originally been this in the A Realm Awoken patch. While most of the Amalj'aa are serving under Ifrit's influence, the rest of the race live a warrior lifestyle where they only fight people that try to get in their way and they live and die by the ways of a warrior in order to maintain their honor. The problem being... Ifrit's taken a good ninety-percent-plus of the Amalj'aa at this point, and the PWRGs are a tiny minority at this point, which is a fact they deeply lament, and is the reason the survivors now refer to themselves as the "Brotherhood of Ash". The tribe are also open to taking in people who are not the same race as long as they uphold the tribe's values.
  • In fact, the only way to gain access to them as a Beastmen quest faction is to have defeated Ifrit, a storyline boss fought at Level 20 approx. during the 2.0 storyline. By doing so, you prove not only that you are a very capable fighter, but also that you can go toe-to-toe with him and those who serve him.
• Pseudo-Santa: There's the Starlight Celebration, with a snowy-bearded captain of a group of Ishgardian knights who led efforts to shelter thousands of orphaned children from the Coerthan winter in defiance of Ishgardian law. He snuck these children into the barracks in the jackets of the soldiers' scarlet uniforms. The children saved by this man grew up to pay this kindness forward, wearing similar uniforms to distribute gifts to children on the coldest week of the year. The captain and his knights have since been mythologized as the Saint of Nymeia and "the Saint's little helpers", bringing presents to children and ferrying their hopes and prayers to Nymeia, goddess of the stars and fate.
• Pun:
  • All of the achievement titles, FATE titles, or quest titles that aren't Shout Outs are puns, including some that are, such as "The Bear and the Young'un's Cares.
  • Each of the major cities has a network of Aetheryte shards to make getting around quicker and easier. This network is called the Aethernet.
  • The "Bomb Dance" is a modified version of the real world bon festival dance. It can be obtained during the Moonfire Faire, which is the game's equivalent of Obon.
• Punch-Clock Villain: There's a Garlean soldier who doesn't want to fight you and says he was forced to join the empire by his mother so that he could make something of himself like father instead of sitting at home playing cards all day. Naturally, the soldier is happy to play cards with you if you decide to challenge him. Similarly, there's another soldier who is so bored by his job with the empire that he'll also be happy to play a card game with you, but he'll refuse to play when it's not the right time, saying that his commanding officer could be watching him.
• Punctuation Shaker: Miqo'te. With the exception of female Keepers of the Moon, their names make extensive use of apostrophes (supposedly something to do with easy address while hunting) which follows a set of elaborate rules that are related to tribal affiliation, parentage and birth order. Ironically, in 1.0, player characters couldn't name their characters this way due to naming restrictions. A Realm Reborn remedied this.
  • In Shadowbringers, most entities related to the ancient Empire of Ronka have apostrophes somewhere in their names, from locations (Rak'tika Greatwood, Lake Tusi Mek'ta, Ox'dalan Gap) to the entirety of the empire's pantheon of gods (Ox'Gatorl, Ox'Charl, Yx'Lokwa, Yx Anpa).
• Punny Name: The track "Silent Scream" is literally an instrumental-only version of the song "Scream".
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: The Warrior of Light being either male or female has no effect on their stats whatsoever. Although races have a few (negligible) points of difference in starting stats, there is no stat difference at all between genders. There's a few pieces of cosmetic gear that can only be worn by men and some that can only be worn by women, but these are all at Level 1 and only for the purpose of glamours. And later patches have removed the gender lock on many of these. Also, certain flirtatious dialogue lines said by or to the Warrior of Light don't change based on their gender, such as potentially accepting the idea of marrying a female Au Ra in the Warrior job questline or the male Elezen Haurchefant commenting on the Warrior's physique with suggestive undertones.
• Purple Is Powerful: The Relic weapons have a purple background on their item icon, unique from the gray-green-blue scale of rarities. Relic Weapons, while require immense time and dedication to power up, are powerful endgame weapons that will last through the entire expansion they're released in.
• Push Polling: The Valentione's Day 2020 event offers the players a choice of three NPCs to vote for as the Emissary of Love, with unique cutscenes that would play at the conclusion of the event depending on who wings. However, Astrid is pushed as the blatantly correct option (existing ties to the event, the traditional color scheme, etc), as a result of which she ends up winning the election on every server in the entire game. The dev blog details What Could Have Been if Rodrigault or Bert had won.
• Puzzle Boss: While many bosses can be beaten with a good old fashioned smackdown, other bosses require methods beyond whacking them with swords over and over again.
  • The fight against Diabolos sees the boss with an ultimate attack that can almost instantly knock out anyone who gets caught in it. That is, unless the party can manipulate the correct pair of doors that will let them avoid the attack.
  • The second boss of Bardam's Mettle puts you under an "Out of the Action" debuff that makes it so you can't attack and can't cast spells. All you can do is dodge. Getting hit the by boss's attacks also doesn't subtract your HP. However, if you get hit twice in any of the three sections, you fail and get bound in place. If the entire party fails a section, you have to start over.
  • Savage and and especially Ultimate raid bosses are all examples on release. Unlike Normal raids, which feature straightforward and clearly telegraphed mechanics that rarely kill players even if failed, Savage and Ultimate raid mechanics tend to be untelegraphed and cryptic, requiring specific strategies to successfully resolve. Deciphering these mechanics and formulating consistent strategies to pass them is a significant part of world-first races. Most players who attempt Savage and Ultimate bypass this puzzle aspect by following a guide, but executing the strategies as a group while dealing enough damage within the fight's time limit is still quite difficult.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In the midst of 2.5's questline, Minfilia likens the Scions' recent travails to this. Primals, Dravanians and even Ascians have fallen due to their combined efforts, yet the beast tribes continue to summon, good men and women fell battling the Horde, and their own friend Moenbryda sacrificed herself to destroy Nabriales.
  Minfilia: This is the victory we have wrought, and it is as bitter ashes in my mouth.

Q-R

• The Queen's Latin: Even before the change to a British studio for the dub (between Realm Reborn and Heavensward) everyone who gets a voice speaks with a British accent. This gets various degrees of nuance, or lack thereof. On the one hand, Ishgard is based on medieval Catholic France, and as it has an Elezen majority, the major characters have incredibly French names. Most everyone you meet still sounds like a BBC newscaster (with the exception of Brume residents, who are Cockney). On the other hand, Ala Mhigans are all given Oop North accents to distinguish them from other Eorzeans.
• Rage Quit:
  • A shareholder who owned 1% of Square-Enix sold his entire stock portfolio for $26M, stating, "First thing in the morning tomorrow, I intend to instruct those who manage my precious Square Enix stock to arrange to sell all of it. To Square, thank you for the enjoyment of your products up until now, with the exception of this last one. Goodbye." The sale caused a dive in Square-Enix stock, though share prices recovered inside the day.
  • Square-Enix has done a commendable amount to stop rage quitting in this game. Players new to an instance, who might require some instruction and/or get the party killed, bring with them a bonus to completing the instance. Also, an instance cannot be abandoned until 15 minutes have passed, anyone that quits in the middle of a quest will get slapped with a 30-minute timeout preventing them from joining anything else, and fights against some bosses have a mechanism called the 'Echo' which boosts stats for every failed attempt.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Allagan technology holds up remarkably well millennia after the civilization's fall. It's lampshaded in Heavensward when navigating Azys Lla: after the heroes take a teleporter, the Guidance Node accompanying them helpfully points out that the conduit was last serviced over five thousand years ago, and that there wasn't a Teleporter Accident was nothing short of a miracle.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear:
  • Dear Gods, fashion in the first fifteen levels are eye-searing. Before a patch displayed gear colors, players can't tell what color an item will be before buying it/accepting it from a quest reward, and don't unlock the ability to dye armor in the first place until level 15, meaning they'll be stuck with some tacky color until then. However, if it's not the colors, then it's the type of gear worn. For example, it's possible for a mage player to wear a robe, a pair of tights, sandals, mittens, and a straw hat with a flower on it. Even if you have matching colors, they won't matter if you look ridiculous with the kind of gear you wear and it gets even worse when you get gear that can't be dyed at all; most of the unique gear are unable to be dyed. Thankfully, Patch 2.2 introduces Glamour, allowing players to change their gear's appearance to another piece of gear without affecting their stats.
  • Before its overhaul, patch 3.1's iteration of the Diadem can give out special Aetherial-rarity gear that have randomized glamours. These pieces of gear are strong, but if you forgot your glamour prisms, your best gear is more often than not a mishmash of glamour pieces. At least the appearance can be overwritten.
  • Parodied by the level 35 Weaver quest. You are commissioned to craft a perfectly tasteful linen shirt for a Lalafell in love... but his other sources give him a weird hat that allegedly makes him look smart, a subligar and no pants to show off his "chiseled miner's body", and armor boots and gauntlets for no other reason than that they were the most popular items in the store. The combination is... terrifying, really. Redolent Rose is not pleased to learn this.
• Raised by Natives: Loonh Gah, a young female Miqo'te, is a part of the Brotherhood of Ash warrior tribe, which consist of nothing but the Amalj'aa lizard beastmen. It's revealed that Loonh, when she was a child, was caught in the middle of a kidnapping raid by a group of Ifrit-worshipping Amalj'aa that left her gravely wounded. The leader of the Brotherhood of Ash found her and gave her a choice; die or join their ranks. Loonh chose the latter and she was raised by the Amalj'aa since then, becoming a part of their tribe and a capable fighter. Loonh eventually runs into people from her old hometown who tell her that her parents are worried about her, but she scoffs at them due to finding the Amalj'aa a much closer family and that she also has very few memories of her birth parents to begin with. And then that is turned on its head when its revealed that the entirety of her village, including her parents, have long been Tempered, her mother in particularly is so mentally shattered by her Tempering that she genuinely believes a rock she found is an infant Loonh.
• Ramming Always Works: The climax of the Ixali questline is a showdown in midair between two airships. This trope is the natural conclusion.
• Random Loot Exchanger:
  • Mutamix is able to take five unwanted materia and transmute them into another materia that will always be different from the materia used in the process. In addition, transmutation has a small chance to create materia a grade higher than what was spent, potentially turning weaker materia into more valuable ones.
  • Upon reaching Captain rank with your Grand Company, you gain the ability to purchase "Materiel Containers" that contain a random minion or mount with Grand Company Seals. Given that unwanted dungeon and raid gear can be converted into GC Seals, this lets you turn that equipment into fun cosmetic minions or more valuable mounts on rare occasions.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: All of the Eorzean leaders (with a notable exception of Nanamo) are particularly skilled in battle. Even Kan-E-Senna is a gifted healer who takes to the front lines.
• Rare Random Drop: All over the place, especially in higher-end content. Cosmetic items like mounts and minions are particularly coveted, as many aren't guaranteed to drop every dungeon/trial run, and only one player will win the roll if they do.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: The Stigma Dreamscape dungeon ends with Jammingway convincing the reborn Omicrons to find a new purpose in reconstructing the other races in Ultima Thule.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • The entire 1.0-2.0 changeover — the game was failing, its top-level staff was replaced and it needed a complete rebuild, so the original 1.0 plot was thrown out in favor of the Seventh Umbral Era storyline featured in late 1.x and 2.0.
  • Yugiri is a tragic example of this trope. She noticeably disappears from the plot shortly into Heavensward, this due to her English voice actress being murdered. She reappears near the end of the post-Heavensward patches after a new actress was cast and the legal matters of the previous actress were resolved.
• Real Money Trade: It exists, but some of it is through third-party websites, and Square Enix is not happy about it. Simply put, if you're caught using one of these services, you're out of the game.
  • The lack of an Auction House in 1.0 was supposedly to combat the RMTs that plagued FFXI, but it threw the baby out with the bath water by preventing anyone from trading anything.
  • In A Realm Reborn (2.0), they changed the Market Wards, to the Market Boards to the game. And yet frustratingly, the RMT companies kept coming up with new ways to be obnoxious or to get around filters of the Special Task Force that was designed to get rid of them.
  • Heavensward (3.0) has a fairly steep requirement just to access the new city (Ishgard) and the new player hub (Idyllshire) - a player has to level to 50 then do all the storyline quests up to and including those released in 2.5 and beyond. For a genuine player, it's simply a matter of time until you get there. But for those creating characters for the purpose of advertising RMT, it's a serious hurdle — losing an account wipes out at least a month of work to get to Ishgard/Idyllshire that's difficult, if not impossible, to automate. For this reason, RMT advertising in Heavensward and beyond is outright unheard of. As of patch 3.4, RMT spam has gone way down, largely from Square-Enix adding a proper report button, accessed by right-clicking the offending person's name in chat. Previously, reporting RMT involved writing the trader's name, the message they sent, and the world you are in into a support form that was hidden away in the support desk window. Many weren't aware that it was even possible, and those that did never bothered since it was incredibly tedious, often taking long enough that you'd get more spam while you were typing everything down. With this very quick option, along with making it so free accounts can't do a lot of things to bug players anymore, RMT spam in XIV plummeted.
  • As of Endwalker (6.0), you can skip some of this, getting instantly to level 80 in a job and doing all the content up to the end of Shadowbringers. The only thing is, it costs quite a bit of real-world money to do this, as you have to both buy a story skip and a level boost. And you've still then got to go through a fair chunk of the story to unlock Radz-at-Han, which will involve levelling to around level 86. While this could be done in a week, there is still the fact you've spent fifty bucks and needed to grind for about a week to get access to both Endwalker cities (Sharlayan and Radz-at-Han). As before, a real player could do this without spending any more money in just a matter of time, but an RMT seller has to grind and sell around 20 to 50 million gil to break even for this money/time investment. So RMT spam in the expansion zones is as unheard of now as it was in Heavensward, as a ban on any account that's had this done puts the RMT seller back considerably.
• Reality Warper:
  • Primals on some level seem to be capable of this. A notable example would be the Tsukuyomi fight. The battle begins in the middle of an Imperial castrum, yet as the fight enters the final phase, the arena shifts into a wooden platform outside in the middle of a forest. Yet after she is defeated, you are back in the castrum.
  • The Shadowbringers MSQ reveals that the Ascians turned out to be an entire civilization of these, with their "Creation Magic," which was literally: "whatever you imagine becomes real if you want it to." This worked fine until something caused a mass panic, at which point all the subconscious fears of the Ascians started becoming reality — on a global scale.
• Recurring Location: Done for at least two dungeons; Halatali is revisited in 3.0 in the main story where you and several allies explore the dungeon to save a key character from his execution. 3.1 has the player revisit the Vault to rescue captive hostages.
• Recurring Riff: Each expansion weaves its main theme song through much of its soundtrack.
• Redemption Earns Life: It's implied that Paiyo Reiyo, the only member of an ill-fated party to show remorse for him treating the party's healer like shit and sending said White Mage down the path of vicious grief-driven insanity, was spared the last remaining party member's fate of becoming a zombie because he geniunely regretted his actions.
• Red Herring: In Stormblood, in the earliest leg of the player's time in Doma Yotsuyu comes upon a katana that she gives to Zenos which he later uses to turn red during the second Hopeless Boss Fight with him. It looks like it might end up becoming the MacGuffin for the expansion but it never does. The real ace is that they have Shinryu in stasis in the backyard of Ala Mhigo's royal castle.
  • The stinger in Shadowbringers sets up Zenos wanting to find and possess Zodiark to pit his strength against the Warrior of Light (with them potentially possessing Hydaelyn), hoping for an even more epic showdown than they had before, which leads to him in the patches working with Fandaniel to free Zodiark. In Endwalker however, Fandaniel instead hijacks the plan and takes control of Zodiark himself, not for the sake of an epic battle but to have him easily destroyed in a weakened state. This ends up leading Zenos to having an existential crisis, not knowing what to do with himself when the Warrior of Light finds him a less important threat than the end of the world itself, and their eventual confrontation is just done in their standard forms.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: In the Hildibrand storyline, Briardien, a detective who is basically an elezen Captain Ersatz of Sherlock Holmes, is introduced as the passionate Hildibrand's rival, and he does indeed wear a blue bliaud and have icy blue eyes, in contrast to Hildibrand's red rose motif and red eyes.
  • Alphinaud and Alisaie Leveilleur are fraternal twin brother and sister. Alphinaud is a calm, logical, and diplomatic Scholar. While Alisaie is a passionate, hot tempered, and brash Red Mage. In later expansions they even get blue and red outfits.
• Reduced-Downtime Features:
  • In Final Fantasy XI, to recover health, a player needed to hit a dedicated Rest button that recovered quickly, but you could do nothing else while resting and it made enemies more likely to attack you and interrupt it. In FFXIV, health recovers much, much more quickly than in FFXI, and without having to perform a specific action.
  • While travel in FFXIV was also much easier than in FFXI, there were complaints in the 1.0 version about how much fast travel cost, and the developers admitted that they made traversing areas to be somewhat tedious to encourage "exploration". They listened to player feedback when A Realm Reborn was released by making fast travel much easier to perform, adding new fast travel points that weren't there before, and also allowing the use of mounts for faster travel. Later patches also increased mount speed and, starting from Heavensward areas, allowed mounts to fly — and eventually even allowed players to fly on maps where it previously hadn't been available.
• Reformation Acknowledgement: Fordola is made a Boxed Crook following the liberation of Ala Mhigo from Garlean rule. Given her countless abuses as a Well-Intentioned Extremist attempting to drag her country kicking and screaming to prosperity under Garlean rule, the Ala Mhigan citizenry remain wary of her even after she tries to turn over a new leaf. Despite this, she willingly acts as a primal-killing weapon for the Ala Mhigan Resistance, going back and forth from her cell without complaint even with the Explosive Leash around her neck. But by the end of the Endwalker healer role quests, her actions have earned her enough trust to remove her strangulation collar. She then joins the Warrior of Light and the Ilsabardian Contingent in putting an end to the last blasphemy in Garlemald.
• Relax-o-Vision: One of the gathering-based Studium quest chains you can take involves helping a student, T'laqa Tia, with his research into aetherology. The reason he needs assistance is T'laqa Tia is very prone to aether sickness, such that he can't use any of the aether based transportation or teleportation systems the player makes liberal use of. When demonstrating just how bad he has it, the scene is replaced by a screen of himself in a field of flowers looking at a fairy as the dialogue makes very clear he's losing his lunch everywhere.
• Releasing from the Promise: Raubahn pledged his sword to Ul'dah's sultana, Nanamo ul Namo, and intends to keep to that oath, even as part of him would, come Stormblood, prefer to remain in the newly liberated Ala Mhigo. Nanamo, fully aware of this, ultimately releases Raubahn from his vow so that he may focus on Ala Mhigo, elevating Raubahn's son, Pipin, to his former position.
• Remember the New Guy?: In a world building example, there is a Hrothgar who says his ancestors were from Doma which implies that there is a Hrothgar population in Doma. The Hrothgars as a race were introduced after Stormblood and as a result, you don't actually get to see them when the party explores Doma.
• Remixed Level: The majority of the "hard" mode dungeons serve as this. New enemies populate the dungeons and the paths taken are either slightly different or are new paths entirely. Amdapor Keep's hard version has you going to the boss room of the previous version and working your way backwards.
• Replay Mode: The Unending Journey available in any inn room allows you to rewatch most cutscenes from the main story, minus a handful of unvoiced cutscenes. Some cutscenes from side quests and events can also be viewed, as can the opening cutscenes of many boss encounters. For those who don't want to visit an inn, the Unending Journey can also be made (or purchased from another player) for use in your own house, apartment, or Free Company room.
• Reprise Medley: Endwalker's main theme incorporates motifs and lyrics from Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringer themes to better illustrate it being the Grand Finale of the Zodiark arc of the game.
  • The theme for the first phase of the Final Boss of Endwalker, incorporates parts of the final boss themes of the previous expansions ("Ultima", "Heroes", "The Worm's Tail" and "Invincible") along with the Final Fantasy main theme in order to hammer home the idea that this is the Final Battle of the Myth Arc that's been running since A Realm Reborn.
• Rescue Romance: One Stormblood sidequest features one that goes both ways. Speaking with Kakalai, a soldier in the Immortal Flames, and Athala, a conjurer in the Ala Mhigan Resistance, reveals that both of them feel they saved the other from certain death after the rest of their units were wiped out by the Garleans. After delivering a letter from Kakalai and a flower from Athala, both of them realize their feelings for one another and vow to meet again once the fighting is over, with Kakalai planning to spend his next paycheck on a ring.
• Revive Kills Zombie: The mechanic is omitted from the game since healing magic cannot be used on enemies normally - trying to do so simply has the healing effect apply to the user. However, the final boss in the hard mode version of the Lost City of Amdapor can use the trope against your party by using Reverse on itself and then casting Cure III and Cure IV on you to deal damage instead of healing.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified:
  • In Heavensward, the heroes' efforts to reform Ishgard following the reveal of the Awful Truth that Ishgard's founders started the Dragonsong War by betraying and murdering Ratatoskr out of greed and fear are portrayed as unambiguously good. The worst of the revolution critics include "The Brothers of the True Faith", who are willing to kidnap and hold children hostage to try and press Aymeric intro rolling back his reformations. That said, Aymeric knows that the revolution was hardly bloodless and admits that he's still guilty of patricide by asking the Warrior of Light to kill Thordan. Subsequent patches show people with legitimate grievances with the new status quo, and Aymeric strives to address them as best he can while fulfilling his obligations to the Eorzean Alliance.
  • Zigzagged with the fight for Ala Mhigan liberation from Garlemald. The cell of the Ala Mhigan Resistance led by Conrad is portrayed as reasonable and good, striving to liberate Ala Mhigo as soon as possible while minimizing cruelty and harm. But the cell of resistance fighters led by Ilberd is shown to be unhinged at the best of times, with Ilberd sacrificing them all and himself to summon Shinryu solely to spite Garlemald and the Eorzean Alliance, his own countrymen be damned.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Ungust and a Traitorous Immortal Flames Soldier, who betray the Player Character and Immortal Flames to the Amalj'aa to be sacrificed to Ifrit, end up being sacrificed as well.
• Rewrite: In Stormblood's Return to Ivalice raid questline, an important plot element is that people's emotions, desires, etc. are comprised of what's called incorporeal aether, a variant of the aether that makes up one's soul, and this incorporeal aether influences aetherically sensitive objects like auracite and can be detected by aether monitoring equipment and so on. Early on in Endwalker, the player is treated to a literal lecture on how things like thoughts and memories are distinct from one's aether and not comprised of aether at all. The reason why this change occurred is fairly obvious, as later on the plot hinges on Dynamis, a power that is fueled and directed by emotions but is incompatible with aether. Obviously that wouldn't really work if, as previously stated, emotions are aether.
• Rhyming Wizardry: Y'shtola recites a rhyming incantation in Endwalker to create a pair of nixies as part of an experiment. Given that she developed the ritual as a girl, she's terribly embarrassed by the cutesy nature of it.
  Y'shtola: From ocean rise, and cloudbanks form, from mountain spring and rainfalls storm, from river flow and life be born... [spins around and in a cutesy voice] Water, water froth and foam! ?
• Riddle for the Ages: The final area of Endwalker raises the question of what in the worlds happened to the denizens of Ostrakon Hena, called "The Nekropolis" — the place appears to have been a thriving bar or cafe, and every sign shows that it was well-populated, but when Meteion found it, it was completely empty, with not even spirits or corpses left behind, and there's not a scrap of evidence explaining what happened in between. To compound the mystery, the area looked as if only a few weeks have passed according to Meteion.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Naturally, the series' monster/creature staples like the moogles, chocobos, and tonberries are present and are cute as ever. There's also the namazu beast tribe that are basically chubby walking catfish with big goofy eyes and a perpetual smile.
  • Spriggans, little black fuzzy things.
  • The lambs around La Noscea are the most adorable little buggers you'll ever violently slaughter.
  • When minions aren't Ugly Cute, they're this.
• Ring Out: Several bosses have this as a mechanic against the player:
  • Titan's battle has the party on top of a rocky spire that gets smaller throughout the fight while Titan himself has one attack that causes massive knock back. Get caught in the knock back and you'll plummet to your death.
  • The fight against the Demon Wall has bottomless pits on both sides of the walkway and it approaches the party every so often to make the battle arena smaller. Demon Wall also uses a high knockback attack that can potentially shove you off the walkway if you happen to be facing the boss at a wrong angle.
  • The extreme version of Leviathan has no guardrails on the platform and the boss himself will rock the platform to make you slide to one side. Slide off the platform and you'll quickly drown.
  • The battle against Ultros and Typhon is a non lethal version of the trope. Typhon will sometimes try blow players off the ring and anyone who gets pushed out of bounds will be stunned for a few seconds and are unable to use any abilities. If the entire party is shoved out of the ring, the party loses the fight. If a player happens to be knocked out and falls out of the ring at once, the healers won't be able to revive them due to the knocked out player being considered out of bounds. Luckily, players can jump back into the ring if they are shoved out.
  • Ravana borrows a page from Titan's playbook in the final phase of his boss fight: he takes out chunks of the fence around the arena, and periodically does an AoE knockback on the party. If your back isn't to one of the fence sections that's still intact, you go flying over the edge. Oh, and more pieces of the fence break off as the fight wears on.
  • Bismarck joins the fun, though with very, very few mechanics to exploit this aspect of the arena. At least in the Hard Mode version. In extreme, players who were comfortable standing on Bismarck's back until they were flung off will find that Bismarck wised up and will now toss them off into the limitless blue instead.
  • The final boss of the grand melee event will create a ring of fire that acts as a barrier. He will gladly cause massive knockback to you to push you towards the fire, causing damage the longer you stay in the fire.
  • Sephirot's fight takes place on a circular spire and when he grows massive for phase 2, he can use attacks that will shove players back and off the edge if they're not careful. The design of the fight was also made by the same person who designed the Titan fight, so there's some similarities.
  • Sophia's fight also takes place in an arena similar to Sephirot's fight. Unlike Sephirot, players who are knocked off will be brought back to the arena and can be revived.
  • The battle against Ozma takes place on a donut shaped structure that leaves very little room to move around. Like with the Sophia fight, falling off will kill you, but you will be brought back to the arena with your party to be revived.
  • If one isn't careful, they can fall off the arena in the fight against Lakshmi. This is through mere player accident or Divine Denial, which can wipe you literally off the floor if you don't use Vril. This makes it necessary to use it; but even with Vril you take a slight knockback, so if you're too close to the edge...
  • The final boss battle in Stormblood is against Shinryu, under Zenos' control. The fight has it where in both phases you and your party can fall off the platform. It doesn't help that Shinryu has access to Tidal Wave and other knockback skills to blow you away. And to top it all off, he'll start breaking one of the eight squares in the three-by-three platform you fight him on in Phase 2
  • The battle with Suzaku has a hole appear in the center of the arena. Unaware players can make the mistake of accidentally falling through the hole approaching Suzaku. Thankfully, your body will be put back on the arena, allowing you to be revived.
  • As of Shadowbringers, it's pretty much a given that almost all boss encounters that require an 8-person Full Party—and even many that only require a 4-person Light Party—are going to utilize this mechanic, either by putting the arena on a high platform or surrounding the area with spikes, flames or some other obvious perimeter hazard that inflicts instantly lethal damage on anyone who steps out-of-bounds. On Savage and Extreme trials with mid-fight checkpoints, some groups will even intentionally kill themselves with these out-of-bounds areas on completing the first phase of the fight, in order to start the next phase with all ability and item cooldowns reset.
• Robot Buddy: Late in the 2.0 story you procure a suit of magitek armor and unintentionally give it sentience by replacing its damaged magitek core with a mammet heart; it grows attached to you and performs a heroic sacrifice at least twice before still coming back in the ending to help you Outrun the Fireball when what's left of Gaius' base is collapsing.
  • The Guidance Node in Heavensward also counts, to the point where Wedge sends you on a dangerous mission into an ancient Allagan museum full of still-lethal "exhibits" to recover replacement parts for her.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies:
  • This is how the 1.0 version of the game ended, both in the lore and on a meta level; with version 1.0 of FFXIV being widely criticized and performing poorly, Naoki Yoshida decided upon being appointed the new head of the dev team to scrap the entire game and start from scratch. This resulted in the Calamity, the apocalyptic event that would serve as backstory for the game's 2.0 relaunch.
  • From 2.0 onwards, most bosses, especially trial and raid bosses, have attacks that require players to fulfill certain conditions (such as killing spawning enemies) within a limited amount of time to survive. Failing to fulfill these conditions will, in almost all cases, result in the entire party being wiped.
• Running Gag:
  • Lalafells are the favored food of numerous monsters, as many, many FATE and item descriptions make sure to point out.
  • A level 15 story quest set around Aleport leading up to the first dungeon, Sastasha, is titled "It's Probably Pirates". A level 42 quest that takes place in the same area is "It's Probably Not Pirates". Patch 2.4 introduces the quest to unlock Sastasha (Hard) in Aleport — "It's Definitely Pirates".
  • A minor one involves you eavesdropping on Thancred contemplating what he'd like to do with whatever woman he's spying on at the time, with him getting shocked that you were standing there listening. Eventually he says the two of you need to talk about your habit of sneaking up on him.
  • As the story goes on, the Warrior of Light will react in horror whenever the people they meet get involved with Rowena's House of Splendors. When the Domans mention working with her, the WoL can sincerely say that they'd rather make deals with voidsent, and when the Warrior of Light sees them in Eulmore in Shadowbringers, their first reaction is a silent Oh, Crap!.
  • In Shadowbringers, the Warrior of Light seems to catch the attention of a rather irate-looking shoebill stork. While at first it shows up in reasonable places, things start getting strange when it shows up at The Tempest, which is an air bubble at the bottom of the sea which it probably shouldn't be able to reach. Then it drops as a minion from Amaurot, which it definitely shouldn't be able to reach. Regardless if you get the companion pet or not, it'll keep showing up as an Easter Egg for the rest of the expansion until 5.3's MSQ is finished, where it takes to hanging out near your inn room in the Crystarium, eventually making itself at home on the table and even eating the sandwich the Crystal Exarch left for you! Then in Endwalker, the shoebill shows up 12,000 years in the unsundered past, which it absolutely shouldn't be able to reach. None of the researchers present in Elpis recall making it, simply assuming it was a creation of one of their fellows. Its thoughts are also so inscrutable that even Meteion, a creation designed to be The Empath, can't get a read on what it is and where it came from.
  • The constant Lampshade Hanging of the WoL’s Heroic Mime status throughout the main story quests, often by snarky dialogue options. Shadowbringers' NieR: Automata questline adds onto it by giving the player several chances to point out, when they're asked to pick a response to another character, how it never makes any difference what they actually pick.
  • Throughout "Somehow Further Hildibrand Adventures", the characters end up batting around various dangerous items like sports balls, from bumping a lit bomb around like a volleyball to the Warrior of Light slam-dunking a coblyn into an enemy's charging laser.
  • During Margrat's custom delievery storyline, she initially doesn't realize that Theopauldin had commissioned the Warrior of Light, savior of the entire planet, to make something comfortable for her to sit on while she does her research. She is initially shocked and horrified about what she had such a powerful and important person doing and is angry that Theopauldin "neglected" to tell her, but quickly gets over it as she asks you to help with the other scientists' generally mundane requests (one person asks for cat toys to entertain the cats they are researching, another asks for miniatures of monsters to study for weapon and armor crafting, etc). Just like Theopauldin before her, Margat "neglects" to tell the other requesting scientists who you are, so when they realize the "gleaner" who helped them is one of the most famous people on the planet, they in turn are horrified at what they've asked of you and run off in embarassment.
• Rule of Three: Many quests will have you doing something three times in succession and it's usually lampshaded and Played for Laughs.
• Russian Reversal: The quest "In the Sylphlands, Treasure Hunts You" references this trope, as the sylphs task you with discovering the reasons behind numerous adventurers leaving the Sylphlands half-dead after coming across tresure chests in the woods. A special Glamour Failure-inducing bomb reveals that the tempered sylphs are masquerading as treasure chests to attack unwary adventurers.
• That Russian Squat Dance: Part of the dwarves' signature lali-hop dance involves crossing your arms and kicking your legs out in front of you in a manner identical to the Hopak dance.