History YMMV / FinalFantasyRecordKeeper

** The sprite work is ''fantastic''. Even games up to the UsefulNotes/PlayStation3 era, their enemies are recreated in SNES-type graphics as 2D sprites with 16-color palettes. The result is some of the most detailed and defined sprite work of the entire franchise.

*** Even the old Retailiate strategy got phased out, as [[SerialEscalation stronger and stronger]] [[BonusBoss Bonus Bosses]] get introduced, and the damage output of Retaliate, Drawtaliate (using Draw Fire to force enemies to attack the Retaliate user), and Advantaliate (combine the ''Advance'' AssistCharacter, which skyrockets attack power in exchange for crippling defense, with Retaliate, and even the wimpy WhiteMage can hit the damage cap with basic attacks by attacking the Retaliator) can't keep up; on top of that, many bosses are starting to gain skills and attacks that outright NoSell Retaliate, making the strategy less and less useful. Amusingly enough, the introduction of new abilities, Legend Materias and Soul Breaks has actually made the Retaliate strategy useful again under specific circumstances: if you have a party consisting of characters with Legend Materias that allow them to start the battle with Haste and no cast time on their first three actions, access to a Cloud USB Roaming Warrior or have it natively and a way to buff your party's Attack and critical damage, you can combine them to do massive amounts of damage to anything that doesn't wipe out your party before you're done setting it up, which admittedly doesn't take very long thanks to the large number of instant turns.

** [[BonusBoss Boundless Nemesis.]] A boss that [[GuideDangIt requires near-memorization of its attack patterns]], has abilities that reduce party members' ATK (thus making the battle ''hugely'' biased towards mage parties), and is ''completely'' unwinnable without a specific effect only obtainable from certain Soul Breaks—and the two uses of a Roaming Warrior won't last the battle. Players are split on eagering anticipating and preparing for the challenge or being off-put by the heavily-LuckBasedMission nature of the boss.

** Trying to do multiplayer fights with other people is an exercise in frustration. There's no way to communicate with them beyond stamps, and individual player lag means they may not see it until its too late. This means that even when you have three competent teammates with good characters, they probably won't be able to cooperate very well and will step over each other's toes in casting things like healing, buffing, and so forth. On the upside most multiplayer battles are fairly easy, but the BonusBoss 350 battles pretty much require players to plan and communicate outside the game.

** ''V'' has Bartz's late father Dorgann Klauser and his comrades Xezat and Kelger. BonusBoss Famed Mimic Gogo also got to be made playable, particularly surprising because he was added before [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI the other Gogo]] that is much more prominent than him.

** Over in Japan, [=DeNA=] took a most-wanted villain survey. There were the usual suspects - [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII2 Caius Ballad]], [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII the Cloud of Darkness]], [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyII the Emperor]]... and in second place, ''FFV'' BonusBoss Omega.

** The sprite work is ''fantastic''. Even games up to the Playstation 3 era, their enemies are recreated in SNES-type graphics as 2D sprites with 16-color palettes. The result is some of the most detailed and defined sprite work of the entire franchise.

** The Witch ability class was introduced around the same time as, and designed to synergize with, Chain Soul Breaks, as they have low power but deal multiple hits to increase the chain count quickly. Then for months afterward they were forgotten, with only two 4✩ and two 5✩ abilities in two elements each, and when they eventually got new abilities, they were just stronger versions of the four they already had before so Witch specialists could avoid PowerCreep. Given that the only other dedicated magic schools are Black Magic and Summon, there's plenty of room for a third magic school to offer strategic variance, but it wasn't capitalized on for Witches. When they eventually got a Fire-elemental skill, it was obviously just so Matoya could pull off her FireIceLightning focus properly, as no other Witch characters need or want Fire.
** Ability charge-restoring effects, nicknamed "Ether" by the playerbase. In a game where abilities can only be used so many times, you'd think effects to restore ability charges would be very valuable. However, the game's meta-stragegies have evolved in such a way that Ether effects aren't very useful. If the player has honed their abilities to Rank 5 and runs out of charges against a boss, the battle is either almost over or the party is just not strong enough anyway. That aside, Awakening Soul Breaks allow characters infinite ability charges, making Ether effects ineffective on them anyway. While there is some use for Ether effects with Sync Soul Breaks and higher tiers beyond that that don't give infinite ability charges, end-game content is still focused on beating bosses as quickly as possible, so characters likely won't run out of ability charges even if using Syncs. The only characters who would really want or need Ether effects are Summoners, since Summon abilities have fewer charges than others, but most top-tier Summoners ''do'' have access to Ether effects in some way, so there you go.

*** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'' as a whole gets little attention, since the game was already winding down to its final content additions when ''Record Keeper'' was just coming out, and ''XI'' has always been a BlackSheep of the series. As a result the realm has very few representatives, particularly no villains. ''XIV'' is slightly better off with more characters than ''XI'', but it still missing several prominent characters (including members of the Scions) and has no villains, and its events are infrequent. Its overlooked status became more heightened in the early 2020s when ''XIV's'' popularity exploded, yet ''Record Keeper'' continued to give ''XIV'' little regard.

** Bartz. His schtick is that he specializes in [[FourElementEnsemble quad-elemental]] SpellBlade attacks, but at the cost of being a MasterOfNone with low power behind his hits and no way to easily get an elemental infusion save for Wind, which was a big deal for a long time with the metagame centering on infusions. In the Sync area and beyond, not only has this weakness been eliminated, but Bartz overcompensated -- he has a Glint+, Awakening, Sync, Arcane Dyad, ''and'' Dual Awakening for '''all''' four elements, as well as some generalist tools. In total he has almost 50 Relics, more than any other character, and among them has five Awakenings and four Syncs and Arcane Dyads, totals no one save for Onion Knight (who is also a quad-elemental character) can touch. This also means that Bartz will be featured on pretty much every ''V'' banner and a lot of element-specific banners.

** Onion Knight and Orlandeau. Some players like the fact that they're PurposefullyOverpowered to match their strength in their original games, while others dislike that they're far superior to numerous other existing characters, especially when many major [[TierInducedScrappy Tier-Induced Scrappies]] haven't received ''any'' attempt to make them worthwhile.

* TierInducedScrappy:
** The 'Core' characters are basically designed to be the worst characters in the game. They have terrible stats, shallow movepools (many of them can only use ''one'' ability type), and most of them have no Soul Breaks but their starting ones, which tend to suck.
** "Beyond" characters, consisting of characters from various assorted spin-offs. While what they have is often good when they come out, Beyond events are uncommon and it's rare for a pre-existing Beyond character to get new Relics, so inevitably no matter how good they are they'll be [[{{Power Creep}} Power Crept]] within a year at best, if not months.
** NonElemental abilities and characters. The end-game content is heavily slanted towards teams with an elemental theme, and abilities that don't have an element to slot into a team are undesirable -- compared to an otherwise identical ability with an elemental affinity, non-elemental abilities generate less Soul Break gauge (abilities generate more for hitting an elemental weakness), do less damage (they don't benefit from Magicite and Chain bonuses), and don't build the Chain count (which helps raise the entire party's damage output). Omega Drive and Neo Bahamut are the only non-elemental abilities that see any use and even then not a lot. As for characters, the only character who was ever built specifically as a NonElemental character was Noctis, who himself was a TierInducedScrappy for it until he got his Awakening and second Arcane Overstrike to give him elemental affinities.
*** In a similar sense, characters who focus in multiple elements but lack elemental infusion in them, like Onion Knight, Bartz, and Cidolfus. The 6* Magicite battles have unique mechanics that make elemental infusions much more effective to the extent they're practically required, so character that are very powerful without an infusion, or have an infusion but cannot refresh it reliably, suddenly become much less viable in 6* fights. Fortunately, most of them got methods of infusions over time, and the next wave of top-tier content after Magicites, the Dreambreakers, had no penalty for lack of infusions.
** Focused debuffers. Most high-level content over a 200 Difficulty feature bosses that are either highly resistant to stat debuffs or plain immune, so it will take multiple turns of stacking different debuffs on the enemy to achieve a noticable effect. While debuffers aren't ''entirely'' useless, they're generally undesirable over characters who can buff the party, can Imperil the enemy to an element the party can exploit, or just another DPS character who can make up the damage difference the debuffer would have provided. This status is even worse for characters who have abilities that rely on status ailments, because naturally most bosses are immune to all status ailments. Fortunately there aren't too many of these characters and many of them have been given other tools to avoid PowerCreep.
** In a downplayed example, certain types of Arcane Overstrike Soul Breaks, and the characters who have them. When they were first introduced, they either dealt three overstrike hits, or dealt 20 hits followed by one Overstrike hit. At the time this wasn't a big deal; a single overstrike attack that hits the damage cap deals 99,999, the same as 10 hits of 9,999, so overall both types did about the same damage. However, as more new tiers of Soul Breaks were added that let characters break the damage cap with their normal attacks, the 21-hit Arcane Overstrikes became much more potent, as if used under the effect of a Break Damage Limit effect, each individual hit could break the damage cap, allowing the 21-hit variants to deal ''far'' more damage than the 3-hit variants. While the 3-hit variants aren't entirely useless due to their individual hits having higher damage multipliers, generally it's preferred when characters have a 21-hit one. Telling, when Arcane Dyads were added, ''all'' of them do what is essentially a 21-hit Arcane Overstrike as their second activation.

* AuthorsSavingThrow:
** When Tidus's water-elemental OSB relic got a water-damage boost effect, many players cried foul because no other OSB relics had it; thus, existing OSB relics were buffed with realm synergy-exclusive elemental boosts.
** In the main series Flare, Holy, and Meteor, are often some of the most powerful spells in the game, but they're nearly useless in this game because they only deal one hit, and Flare and Meteor are non-elemental so they can't be combined with Elemental Infusion or Imperil effects to increase their damage. A 2017 update changed them to deal multiple hits, making them much more practical.
** In general, if the game ever has a service delay or some sort of glitch that impacts gameplay significantly, [=DeNA=] will post a notice to the effect of "we're sorry for the error, have a few Mythril as our apology." It's to the point that some players ''expect'' Mythril to be given out if they find such an error.
*** One of the most extreme examples of this came in the wake of the 2017 30th Anniversary event. The event had a 30 Relic Draw and a Crystal Tower Relic Draw, both of which let players pick a free bonus Relic from a list in addition to the normal draw. After a maintenence update in October changed the free Relics available, some players were unamused as they had been waiting to take their free Relic and wanted one no longer available, or had already taken theirs but would have preferred one of the new ones. Either way, it had also been specified that the available Relics ''would not'' change for the event's duration. [=DeNA's=] apology was to let all players pick ''two'' Relics from the lists, and the lists were updated to include the Relics from before the update while still having the ones from after the update. This placated most players just fine.
** The autumn Renewal Dungeons in 2017 made a whole slew of old events available for a limited time, so new players could catch up on what they've missed. Though see BrokenBase further down.
** With the game entering its fourth year, significant and sought-after gameplay balancing updates in the Japanese version hit the Global version sooner than they used to, instead of waiting for the same events and banners they came with which takes around six months. The most significant of these is the Daily Draw update which was released a good 4-5 months early.
** Magicites are a contested gameplay element because it takes a lot of LevelGrinding to get them to Level 99 and max out their stats through inheritance. This is not helped by the 3* and 4* Magicite bosses randomly dropping one of three Magicites, taking up more time as you need fighting them to get the one you want. The 5* Magicite bosses each only drop ''one'' specific Magicite shard, and the 3* and 4* bosses were latter buffed to drop multiple copies of their main reward, both of which severely cut down on the amount of grinding needed to farm all the Magicite you need.
** Since its introduction the mechanics for Brave Commands in Ultra Soul Breaks was seen as dismissable, as you started at Lv.1 and had to charge it up all the way to Lv.3 to get the most of these. The last week of November saw a Global-exclusive balance change that allows these Brave commands to start at Lv.2, meaning that it now takes less turns to prime a proper Brave Command and you even get some time left to unleash a second one before its effects expire, making Brave Ultras much more useful and reliable. Four months later, it was JP's turn of receiving the buff.
** Remember the ''FFXI'' Ultra Soul Breaks that never came out[[note]]Ayame and Zeid's Ultras, plus Prishe's first Ultra[[/note]]? The ''Queen of the Dance'' event that accompanies the ''FFXI'' Neo Torment ''finally saw those seeing the light of day in Global''. It took over a year, but [=DeNA=] finally gave ''XI'' their long overdue respect on that missing banner, after a long time of even denying the Realm Draws of those relics.
** The Record Laboratory is essentially this in gameplay mechanic form: it's a permanent feature that allows you to use newly-added Lenses that are gained from clearing events, Record Dungeons and getting duplicates of equipment you already have from Relic Draws to directly select a vast majority of older Soul Breaks for your characters, including Unique, Super, Burst, Overstrike and Ultra Soul Breaks as well as a Legend Materia Relic (usually their first one, but some have their second one when their first one is outdated enough to not meaningfully contribute toward their role in the current meta, such as Paladin Cecil's first LMR that boosts his Defense with every hit taken when a good number of enemies have defense-piercing attacks and Knight abilities that require high Defense to deal maximum number of hits are in the minority, so his selection includes the LMR that lets him start the battle with Holy Infusion) without having to rely on RandomNumberGod. While the selection might be somewhat outdated, it's still an extremely useful way to get old Soul Breaks for dungeons like Torments, for general use, such as the much-praised Edge's Eblan Doppelganger or simply to give characters an extra boost to their main offensive stat via mastering old Soul Breaks they don't possess yet.

** The game has a small pool of options for magical Wind damage. For the first three years of the game there was ''no'' 5-star Wind-elemental Black Magic command, meaning the only ways to do respectable Wind-elemental magic damage were through Summons, Ninjutsu, and the 6-star Black Magic Meltdown, which is a one-of-a-kind command. This fortunately was fixed eventually with the addition of the 5-star Tornado and 6-star Chain Tornado as Black Magic spells. As for Wind mages, there's only a handful -- the Emperor, Onion Knight, Barbariccia, Terra, Fujin, Ultimecia, Alphinaud, and Wedge, and some of them didn't exist in the game's early years, either. By contrast, physical Wind characters are all over the place and almost every realm has at least one.