FINAL FANTASY XIV Online News

There is now an official manga featuring Final Fantasy XIV characters as anime high schoolers. As promised, it's here in time for Christmas, but you might have a difficult time reading it if you're not fluent in Japanese. Luckily, some fans are already breaking down the plot so we English-speakers can enjoy a little taste.

The manga features Alisae and Alphinaud as its principal characters, as broken down in Aitai Kimochi's explainer blog. They're first-years living in a shared house (called, naturally, the Rising Stones) with Y'shtola, Thancred, and Urianger. The first chapter has the twins running late for school and, naturally, your typical high school manga hijinks ensue.

Zenos pops in as the sneering popular kid, flanked by flunkies Asahi and Yotsuyu. The chapter-ending cliffhanger has Principal Tataru popping in to challenge the students of light and darkness to gather points in various school activities. That starts, as you might expect, with a sports festival. You can get a much more detailed breakdown at the link above.

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It's been a tough month for Final Fantasy XIV fans. While the Endwalker expansion has launched to universal praise, the ensuing server congestion has led to digital sales and the much-memed-upon free trial being temporarily pulled. Not long after one meme fell, though, has another now joined it: Square Enix has fixed Endwalker's low-poly grapes.

In FFXIV's 6.01 patch notes, the developer explains that Labyrinthos' grapes were looking a tad blocky as the polygon count was lowered to alleviate system memory usage in the area. While that's certainly appreciated, it meant that Labyrinthos' grapes didn't look quite as nice as those found in the Crystarium. That just won't do, you see, so Square Enix has bought graphical parity to both sets of fruit.

It's been a tough one for the community. The purple slab of grape became a beloved community meme for both those who managed to get into Endwalker and others who were scouring Reddit while sitting in the queue. One meme imagines the low-poly grapes as Hydaelyn's crystal form, whereas another imagines it as an orb truly worth pondering. To think, you might've even be able to taste the low-poly count if things hadn't changed.

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Final Fantasy XIV players haven’t had it easy these last few weeks. The sheer success of its Endwalker expansion resulted in lengthy login queues and server errors. It’s become so popular that Square Enix have temporarily stopped selling the game, taking its Starter and Complete Editions off sale. All the while, some low-poly grapes stayed static in the breeze. Jagged, delicious, minding their own business. Until their blockiness was papped and thrust into the public eye. Memes ensued and the grapes became the talk of the town, so much so that they’ve been smoothed out in the latest patch, much to everyone’s dismay.

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The first raid for Final Fantasy XIV's new Endwalker expansion is coming this week along with update 6.01. Fans will have to survive eight hours of the MMO being offline for maintenance but when it's back up they'll be able to try out Pandaemonium at last.

The first Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker raid release time is December 21 at 2:00 AM PST / 5:00 AM EST / 10:00 AM GMT / 7 PM JST, which is the same time as update 6.01 drops. Before that, the game will be offline for a full eight hours of maintenance - not that many will notice, that's about average for queue times since the Endwalker expansion launched.

As previously confirmed in the last roadmap, when the 6.01 patch drops on Tuesday it'll give access to the first high-end raid for the Endwalker expansion - Pandaemonium, or specifically the normal difficulty of the raid's first tier, Pandaemonium: Asphodelos. Two weeks from then on January 4, 2022, the Savage difficulty will drop with version 6.05.

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