The anime series Pop Team Epic keeps referencing Final Fantasy 14, but the producers wanted to make a joke so obscure that even the developers thought it was too much.
If you’re not familiar with Pop Team Epic, each episode is basically a collection of surreal skits and rapidfire jokes – think if WarioWare was an animated series and you’ll probably have a good idea of what to expect. Someone on staff is clearly a fan of Final Fantasy 14, because the recently concluded second season of the show continues to make absurdly specific references to the critically acclaimed MMORPG.
Take this one for example. Entering a pitch-perfect recreation of the FF14 intro, we see the Pop Team Epic leaders embark on a grand adventure through an epic fantasy world – until they find the Manderville Gold Saucer and spend so much time in the game’s robust mahjong- tournaments that they start ignoring linkpearl calls from Minfillia back at Waking Sands.
Or how about the floor sommelier check, where one of the characters licks the floor to try to tell the difference between the Titan EX and Titan (Hard) raids. After a successful guess, we go straight into a reference to the twinning.mp4 meme (opens in a new tab), which – ok, look, I really don’t have room to explain twinning.mp4 here. Just trust me referencing it is the mark of a true blue FF14 fan.
As you might have guessed from all the very specific references and music usage, Square Enix has signed off on these skits, but as revealed in the latest Live Fantasy 14 letter, it was an idea that was too vague for developers to go with on – a look from the developers themselves.
pop_team_epic_x_ffxiv_rejected_idea from r/ffxiv
In the rejected sketch, which was shown as part of today’s FF14 live letter broadcast, anime characters such as director and producer Naoki Yoshida and community manager Toshio Murouchi appear exactly as they do in a typical live letter to announce a totally fake new job called Sky Belly .
Yoshida (the actual person, not the comic) rejected the idea because, as translated by fans in the unofficial FF14 Discord (opens in a new tab), “it’s NOT FF14! My appearance has nothing to do with the game!” It seems that Yoshida really prefers that your cross-media FF14 references stick to the game itself.
As part of today’s live letter Final Fantasy 14 patch 6.3 release date was confirmed for January 10, along with some details about what’s to come Paladin rework.