The Debacle That Is Final Fantasy XIV Grows Ever Debacle-ier

When we last left the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, they had implemented a “fatigue” system so awful-sounding someone had to make a 5-minute video to try and explain it. Since then, Japanese players have been hating on the game for… well, sucking, but in two very specific ways. The first is that Square copied-and-pasted countless towns and environments. Now, obviously, some repetition is to be expected in any MMORPG, but savvy gamemakers re-arrange pieces to make seemingly all-new towns and castles and dungeons and such. Square, on the other hand, literally copied and pasted parts of the FF14 world, as the Japanese have proven here.

The other problem (and the more interesting one) is the increasingly likely possibility that Square Enix did not make Final Fantasy XIV. Then who did? Some cheap Chinese company, apparently. Japanese gamers were mystified at the game’s lack of katakana and hiragana alphabets, which Square Enix has used in every other FF game — hell, every Square game since the company began. Instead, the game uses solely Chinese kanji, which Japan shares with China. The most damning evidence is this:

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This is a picture of a Chocobo. It’s always been called a chocobo in every Final Fantasy game ever. The Japanese word for it is “????,” which is katakana and pronounced, you got it, “cho-ko-bo.” And yet in FF14, the Chocobo has seemingly been renamed to “??,” which is kanji that is pronounced “umatori,” and means, literally, “horse-bird.”

Yeah.

Horsebirds are exactly what a Chinese bootleg of a Final Fantasy game would call chocobos, except this is a real Final Fantasy game, really released by Square Enix. And there are plenty of other similar “new” words for classic FF items and monsters and such, which you can see here. If the company did ship out the game to the cheapest Chinese bidder, it would explain the language nonsense and cut-and-paste environments. Now –who’s still excited about paying a monthly fee for this? (Via Sankaku Complex)