I feel like at this point, it's a rite of passage to spend hours in a character creator, meticulously tweaking every slider, colour picker, and back-and-forthing between two voice options, their battle cries echoing in your skull for the next several hours… only to get into the actual game and realise you hate everything about them. It's an even more mortifying occurrence when it happens in an MMO, a genre that traditionally wants you to cough up a couple extra bucks for the pleasure of changing your character.
As someone personally guilty of forking out for an extra Fantasia just to make my Viera slightly more tanned, I'm very grateful to the change Final Fantasy 14 is making which will give Fantasia-heads a 60-minute grace period after using one. It'll be implemented with upcoming expansion Dawntrail, which is set to release on July 2 (with early access on June 28).
The change was announced during the most recent Letter from the Producer livestream, where director and producer Naoki Yoshida said: "You want to see your character in action in locations that you have gotten familiar seeing your character in, and we did receive a lot of feedback about how 'we want to make adjustment to characters afterwards.' So we are going to make it so that Fantasia, within 60 minutes of playtime—so if you log out, the counter will pause—if you want to make adjustments to your character creation you can do so within 60 minutes of using Fantasia."
It appears that those 60 minutes also continue to tick down while you're actively using the character creator for any subsequent changes, and Yoshida clarified that while you can dip back in and out during that hour time period infinitely, there's no manipulating the timer to reset each time you do. It'll also still consume the Fantasia if, for whatever reason, you decide to completely revert your changes back to pre-Fantasia status. So you've got a flat hour of playtime to log in, run around, decide if you're cool with how you look and, if not, you've got enough time to tweak things here and there.
It's a nice change, one that I'm sure will save some of my ever-changing pals a little bit of cash in the long run. Like I said, I too have been guilty of having some deep Fantasia-induced remorse, leaving me to pay double to revert what is often very minor changes. Not only that, but Dawntrail is giving everyone one free Fantasia via a quest—that's thanks to the graphics update which will see the game's races get a facelift—so it's perfect timing all round.
I'll definitely be storing that Fantasia in the bank for the time being, but it's good to know that when I eventually have a virtual identity crisis, I've got an hour to fix my mistakes. That's all the time I need.
