With Halloween rolling around, Final Fantasy 14 and its fans are quite in the spirit! There are cosplays, haunted houses, and, of course, the All Saints’ Wake quests to enjoy, plus the decorations around the major city-states and housing areas. The quests especially tend to be pretty cute, and hand out some great holiday loot.
However, this isn’t the only time of year that the game gets a little spooky. With the world of FFXIV being so massive, there’s plenty of room for things that are creepy, scary, or just sort of messed-up, if you think about it, in general. Maybe you manage to turn a lot of it around in the course of the game as an adventurer and Warrior of Light, but that doesn't make it any less unsettling to sit upon.
Here are some of the bigger eerie things that you get to explore during your time in Eorzea (and beyond).
Edda (Tam-Tara Deepcroft & Palace of the Dead)
The story of Edda is beloved by FFXIV fans for being a sufficiently messed-up ordeal from start to finish. Edda’s one of the adventurers you run into a few times as you progress the MSQ, and she seems to take the blame once her party’s tank, who also happens to be her lover, dies during an (off-screen) quest. The party, in deep turmoil, goes their separate ways as a result.
But it ends up being a pretty deep rabbit hole. She grabs his head, wanders throughout the land trying to gather supplies to learn to be a necromancer, and then pulls it off solid. But as one of your admirers, she wants your body (yes, YOU, Champion of Eorzea) to give her lover a strong second chance. Even once you kill her, sending her over the edge in Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard), it seems she’s only descended into the Palace of the Dead, where Edda Pureheart turns into Edda Blackbosom.
Infamously, until you beat her in PotD, there’s a small chance she shows up to haunt you in city-states. It’s a neat (if creepy) easter fans that delights (and creeps out) fans to this day.
That One Shadowbringers Scene
You know the one. You know, when you go to help Alisae at The Inn at Journey’s End. With the woman who seems really nice. And the Lightwarden. And then you see those two in the Holminster Switch dungeon? All-around messed-up time there.
Tempering & Its Implications
The whole act of tempering is severely messed up: one’s aether is entirely altered to match that of the being doing the altering. As a result, you’re willing to throw yourself into… pretty much whatever that wants you to do. And we know now, too, that the actual mind of the person is often trapped within the body as a result of it, so it’s often the case that the person knows exactly what’s wrong and literally cannot do anything about it in their tempered state.
Fandaniel’s Towers
Appearing after the MSQ of 5.4, the towers built throughout the world by Fandaniel aren’t just a poor sight for cursed eyes. He leverages the previously-described implications of tempering and pretty much launches them on a mass scale—and literally farms the tempered beliefs and aether of his victims. Don’t forget that moment when you saw literally dozens of Amal’jaa sucked into the walls in 5.5. And everything I described before, you know, about one possibly being trapped in one’s own body. Kinda messed up, really.
The Dusk Vigil’s Journal Entries
Part of the Heavensward MSQ, Dusk Vigil forces you to trek through a fallen outpost not far from Ishgard. It’s literally chilling, but wait until you read the journal entries laying around. While it’s not directly stated, the “survival tactics” of the soldiers left for dead there are pretty depressing. They just wanna go home, come on.
Mordion Gaol, a.k.a. “GM Jail”
If you’re in the infamous “GM jail,” you have much worse things to worry about than the ambiance. Mordion Gaol is an instanced location you’re sent to when you’ve been found guilty of a rules violation, where a GM speaks to you before your punishment is struck down upon you on the spot.
However, they set the ambiance pretty well for the context. The jail itself is plain stone yet dark, and when the GM appears, they have that same sort of “darkness” glow that an Ascian or the like would have. That’s really it; they speak to you via box text about the violation, and you’re most likely banned on the spot. At least they set the tone for your in-game doom, though.
Meteion’s Universe-Crippling Existentialism
Does existentialism ever keep everyone up at night? Apparently it’s such a universally terrifying thing that it literally destroyed universes just by being called into question. And let’s be real—that fact on its own is sort of scary. Imagine being so terrified of the end, whatever that means, that you’d allow your own society to collapse as a result. It just comes quicker. Entire planets collapsed under the weight of that. Really makes the late-night bedroom version of that crisis seem minor.
The good news is, if you need another outlet to help you handle that, Endwalker isn’t the only recent media to take a shot at it: Everything Everywhere All At Once handles it pretty well, with a similar but different outlook. It also more directly depicts some of the Buddhist symbolism behind that philosophy, though I won’t spoil more than that.
The Void Ark
As a recap, over 1,500 years ago, the Six Umbral Calamity was wrought upon the star as a result of the War of the Magi. It was waged between the Black Mages of Mhach, Nymian mages of Vylbrand, and White Mages of Ampadori. With their time coming to an end, Mhachi mages started to come up with solutions for their slow loss of aether and civilization. They found the solution in the voidsent, who, despite starving to death constantly, seemed to never technically run out.
However, the power of the voidsent grew too strong, after a holding coffin, cursed by design by the powerful Diabolos, opened and unleashed a voidsent queen. The voidmages responsible sacrificed themselves to keep it sealed and in the sky, and it’s been floating around since.
The Void Ark itself is sort of a terrifying sight—not because of the voidsent running around, but because you can see the remnants of the voidmages’ attempts to keep them literally imprisoned and enslaved for their powers. And now that we have a better idea of voidsent themselves being sentient and aware to some degree (and in a constant state of starvation), it’s a harrowing ordeal.
Minion & Mount Lore, Sometimes
There are a lot of really adorable and fun minions and mounts to collect in FFXIV! But also, some of them are just kind of messed up. For example, did you know that the Fatter Cat is basically just a floating lump of death? Like, it’s literally a corpse. The new Silkie, the cleaning mouse, isn’t actually alive at the body… that’s just a cleaning tool swung around by the actual living part of the creature, which is the puffy tail. And Drippy, the adorable familiar from Matoya’s Relic, literally joins you because it saw its older sibling beat up, so it’s joining you for… reasons.
You also learn that Varis zos Galvus spent a ton of time judging dog shoes, which essentially at this point, given what we know about this relationship, means he probably loves dogs more than his own son. That’s not creepy, maybe just sad, but there’s little more harrowing than familial neglect.
Il Mheg Lore (Just… Generally)
A great place to start with how creepy Il Mheg in general is, is the entire foundation of the Pixies, who are born of the souls of dead children with a little touch of corruption or tempering or… whatever. They get you into their figurative web by confusing you in their fog, and then keep you in by challenging you to riddles and challenges. And if you’re there too long, you become, literally, a leaf figure. Yeah, that’s what those things are. You’d better water them.
And that’s not the end of it, at all. The Fuath aren’t far from there, occupying Dohn Mheg, and their pranks are essentially aimed to maim or kill you, or even turn you into one of them. Part of the lore for a Wind-up Fauth minion says: “The first rule of dealing with the Fuath...is do not deal with the Fuath.” You’ve also got the Giant Beavers, who seem to transform you into one by pulling you in with your biggest desire. And that’s all just off the top of my head.
Basically, don’t just wander into Il Mheg unless you know what you’re doing. Or have a death wish.
What else gives you the creeps in FFXIV?
