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Data sleuth turn_a_blind_eye/Rise Narukami has just compiled some more information on Final Fantasy 14’s mammoth script—with the help of chronicler Eriyu, who started attempting to digitally bind the game’s thousands upon thousands of words back in May 2023, and has clearly made sterling progress since then. The results are interesting, to say the least.
I Analyzed All The Dialogue from ARR 2.0 to Dawntrail 7.1 from r/ffxiv
In a comment explaining their methodology, Narukami states that they used a custom-compiled python script to pull the details out of Eriyu’s mammoth document: “A significant portion of this effort was in the data-cleansing portion and deciding what edge cases constitute a word.
“For example, if I didn’t pick up ‘Bakool Ja Ja’ as a single word, then ‘Ja’ would be considered a word, and would muddy the analysis by becoming one of the most common words. This is similarly true for titles like ‘Lord’ … There are some instances in the data I didn’t catch as this requires manual review; but, I believe I caught most of them.” Narukami then proceeded to snip most common words “such as ‘It’, ‘You’re’, ‘They’ve’, ‘Which’ … since they would otherwise easily dominate the word count and are uninteresting.”
As for what the numbers turned up, surprising no-one, Alphinaud is the reigning king of yappers. From patches 2.0 to 7.1 (FF14 essentially “starts” at 2.0, because 1.0 was ill-fated and had to be rebooted), Alphinaud accounts for 7.4% of all words over the main scenario quest’s 1,259,754 words of dialogue. That’s 93,649 words total, 45,245 more than Alisaie, who follows behind at second place.
What drives the point home about some of Dawntrail’s difficulty in prioritising its characters is how Wuk Lamat is in third place after just one expansion and two patches. Despite journeying with us since the patch quests of Heavensward, Alisaie has only 0.1% more lines in the game’s script, and she’s already more verbose than the rest of the game’s ensemble cast.
As always when I bring up FF14’s most controversial lion queen, I consider Wuk Lamat to be a symptom of Dawntrail’s major scripting issues, not the cause. Wuk Lamat hogs the spotlight not because she’s a terrible character, but because the story leads struggled with characterisation on the whole, with several missed opportunities, such as Zoraal Ja confronting his father’s shade and Krile uncovering the mystery behind her birth, happening offscreen for reasons I will never be able to fathom. Channelling all critiques towards a single character, though, rather than the writing room, strikes me as counterproductive and a little silly—and obviously, directing any sort of hate towards anybody is inexcusable.
On a lighter note, there are some other fun stat points this exhaustive analysis turns up. Urianger’s most-spoken words are “tis”, “thou”, and “loporrits”, which is adorable. Estinien is reliably Nidhogg-brained, and Thancred cannot shut up about his totally-not-husband Urianger.
The overall stats are interesting, too. FF14’s main quest is equal to 1.4 combined total works of Shakespeare and has over 2,491 unique characters. Also, Stormblood is longer than The Odyssey—so if you’ve played all of the MSQ, you’ve got no excuses to skimp on your classics like I have. It really does hammer home the epic scale of the MMO’s story when taken as a whole—and, while I have plenty of criticisms of Dawntrail’s overall narrative, these stats do give me a whole new appreciation for how gargantuan of a task it is to put a story this big together.
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Kurt Indovina
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