With a franchise this long-lived and this big, there are bound to be a couple rotten eggs infesting it.
- Final Fantasy VI: Pretty much everyone hates the spoiled rich kid at the Jidoor auction house who makes you waste your time, as the kid begs his father to buy him useless items like a scale model airship or a robot imp. This can happen up to ten times in a row. Especially aggravating if you're playing the Advance version and just want to get the Excalipoor already.
- Final Fantasy VII:
- Yuffie is an optional party member whose method for being recruited is convoluted in such a way that she's immediately cast in a bad light, requiring you to actively sift through random encounters until you find her, then inputting all of the right dialogue options. Getting even one of the dialogue options wrong results in her stealing your money and then running off, requiring you to do the whole process again. It doesn't help that during the whole ordeal she comes off as extremely abrasive and even after joining is clearly just tagging along so that she can rob you blind later. In the second town you visit after recruiting her (assuming you do so at the earliest possible opportunity) she runs ahead without you and robs the townspeople. Then there's the infamous Wutai sidequest "Yuffie Stole My Materia", which cannot be abandoned once it's initiated and can easily be initiated by accident. Yuffie steals the party's Materia and you have to head to Wutai, probably the single most confusing location to navigate in the entire game, to get it back. The sidequest ends with you having to save Yuffie from Don Corneo, the perverted pimp minor antagonist from the beginning of the game, by fighting Rapps, a boss whose move can kill a party member by one hit, thanks to Yuffie stealing the materia. While post-release media did a lot to redeem her in the eyes of some, her original game version remains controversial for some players, to the point that some treat her remake version as superior.
- Cait Sith is generally an annoying character, and despite being a mandatory party member contributes little to the overall plot. He pretty much just tags along (despite the active protests of Cloud) contributing nothing until right before the Disc-One Final Dungeon when he gets revealed to be a spy for the Shinra MegaCorp, which ultimately lasts for all of one dungeon before he performs a Heroic Sacrifice (which itself doesn't mean much since he's a semi-autonomous puppet being controlled remotely and his master just sends you a second puppet with identical stats and equipment and largely the same personality) so that the party can get the Black Materia before Sephiroth does and then joins the party in earnest while being (mostly) forgiven for being a spy. And then he continues to contribute nothing until almost the end of the game where he calls out Barret for being callous about the lives that were lost when Avalanche blew up the Sector One reactor at the very beginning of the game.
- Final Fantasy IX has Zorn and Thorn, Queen Brahne's Monster Clown Creepy Twins henchmen. They annoy a lot of players for their bizarre mannerisms and tendency to repeat each other constantly. They end up Not So Harmless Villains and provide a decent boss fight, but they can inflict Virus which will prevent you from earning EXP or AP from their fight, making it feel like a waste of time.
- Final Fantasy XI: The Chebukki triplets from the Chains of Promathia are three of the most annoying Tarutaru in the game. While they are necessary in the final confrontation against the Big Bad Promathia, many players felt it would be worth failure just to see them die instead.
- Final Fantasy XIII has Jihl Nabaat. She's a cold-hearted Jerkass that repeatedly stops to be petty to Sazh by torturing him about his son. She seems to be set up as a Hate Sink, but the game is a bit too successful on that score; she randomly Kicks the Dog when other villains are still trying to be secretive. Worst of all, another villain kills her before you fight her, meaning the player never gets a Catharsis Factor. She can be fought in the sequel, but only as Downloadable Content, which was too little too late for some fans.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- In A Realm Reborn, Alphinaud was widely hated by fans. He doesn't do anything but talk your ears off, and always in a condescending manner. He bosses everyone around without doing anything remotely productive. His "quests" generally involve going back and forth between locations watching him do things, with your presence there largely unnecessary. Alphinaud is even condescending to his sister Alisaie, talking about how her plans to uncover the truth of the past are silly, when what Alisaie's doing is clearly more important than Alphinaud's space-wasting. Subsequent expansions redeemed Alphinaud for the majority of players, such as Heavensward having Alphinaud directly admit that his behavior was out-of-line and that he needs to be better, while making him much more proactive and sympathetic. Even so, Alphinaud still has some detractors who want to see him turn evil just so they can kill him.
- Minfilia has a pleasant demeanor as the leader of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. But she doesn't do anything to save Eorzea from threats besides telling the Warrior of Light to solve the problem for her. She's Ms. Exposition and prime to give Info Dumps, which makes her come across as long-winded. The item text on her "minion" item reads "unlike her 'real' counterpart, this doll actually accompanies you on your adventures." Minfilia's "Pray return to the Waking Sands" became a meme among players due to how much she says it, and how you always have to make a long trek to said Waking Sands whenever she wants to talk to you. English players developed a particular dislike for Minfilia due to a spotty English dub performance — her VA attempted an untraceable accent and had the emotional range of a dead fish, meaning that a resident Ms. Exposition became painful to listen to. The developers took notice; Minfilia left the Scions in Heavensward, was absent for all of Stormblood, and her appearance in Shadowbringers had Minfilia permanently leave the story. Ironically, the Heavensward quest-chain had a much better vocal performance due to a new voice actress from the mass cast change due to recording moving from Los Angeles to London. This made anglophone fans even more angry, as there was a rallying cry of "why couldn't we have gotten that actress in the first place?" towards Square Enix.
- Solkzagyl, one of the central characters of the Paladin questline, is despised for being Unintentionally Unsympathetic. He wasn't too bad in A Realm Reborn, where he's set up as the Arc Villain only to turn out to be Good All Along and working from behind the scenes to take down corruption in Ul'dah. But then came Heavensward, where his character traits came forward in the worst way. The questline starts out with him killed by a criminal organization and you work with his pupil to find a stolen sword Solkzagyl was tracking down. As it turns out, Solkzagyl had not only already found the sword and faked his death, but said pupil's only purpose in the scheme was to be defeated by the Warrior of Light to restore the sword's power. Not only that, but Solkzagyl notes that his pupil doing as well as he did surprised him. Solkzagyl also goes on and on about the importance of the oaths a paladin takes and that they must go unbroken, but remarks that he abandoned his own oaths to investigate the criminals quite often. What's more, the discovery of his faked death, despite the story claiming only one other person knew the scheme, includes members of the organization attacking anyone who comes near them. This gives the implication Solkzagyl worked with the group that's murdered numerous paladins just to power up a sword. And he's presented as the Big Good of the storyline throughout all this. Instead of a clever Trickster Mentor, fans saw a lying hypocrite who used an aspiring young paladin as a pawn for the sake of a single sword. The backlash against him was so bad that he was completely removed from the Stormblood Paladin quests, which instead focused on the characters from the Gladiator storyline.
- Ran'jit, The Heavy of Shadowbringers, is considered the low point of an otherwise excellent expansion. He's a Recurring Boss from Eulmore determined to protect the Minfilia of the First, ostensibly because her power is needed to keep the Sin Eaters in check. However, many of his elements didn't work as intended on the writers' part. Ran'jit is powerful in a way that is never given an explanation during the story, he's unlikable from a motive and personality angle, and there was little given reason for either trait. All of this is topped by being Unintentionally Unsympathetic for extreme actions that he justifies with transparently-thin excuses, including bombing the Crystarium and getting innocent people transformed into Sin Eaters. Instead of a Well-Intentioned Extremist, fans saw a Knight Templar who veered headlong into Lawful Stupid. Ran'jit is also disliked from a gameplay perspective, with the second fight against him in particular being a huge sticking point. You have to play as Thancred, the fight goes on for way longer than feels necessary, and a slight screw-up means doing it all over again. The final fight with Ran'jit is a carbon copy of the one with Thancred, just with the Warrior of Light. This means Ran'jit gets less challenging as you keep fighting him instead of more challenging, which doesn't even give a Catharsis Factor for beating him. Finally, Ran'jit barely impacts the narrative besides shepherding the Warrior of Light to a single location in spite of how much focus he gets. If Ran'jit is ever discussed on fan spaces like the game's subreddit or the official forums, it's almost certainly going to be about what a shame it was that he wasn't written better or that he's one of the worst parts of the Shadowbringers story. While other villains have had multiple Call Backs since their departure, Ran'jit hasn't been so much as mentioned in-game since the initial release of Shadowbringers due to how poorly-received he was as a character.
