Final Fantasy XI: Easter Eggs And Pop Culture

I had an idea to put together a video listing off some of the easter eggs you can find in this game and I'm keen to hear which ones I've either not encountered or missed. It can be in-game or beyond in other media, or even in-jokes which the developers took a shining to. If you don't want to go through the video these are the ones I found.

• King of Hearts Breaking the Fourth Wall

• Job Emotes (Monk, Ninja, Black Mage)

• Avesta and the Avesta Bangles

• Science Fiction References in Automaton Names

• Brave Hero Glenn

• Ulhuadshi

• Drill Sergeant Rongelouts

• Highlander Lizard

• Dances with Luopans

• Taisaijin

Going to go watch now. Sounded good as your were talking about it in the LS Chat the other night.

One of my favourites is the BCNM "Charming Trio". You fight three leeches, Prune, Pepper and Phoedme. The title and enemy names are references to the TV show Charmed about three witches named Prue, Piper and Phoebe. I was always curious if this reference made any sense whatsoever to Japanese players!

That's a really good one actually, it never occurred to me to check BCNMs for references like that.

There's also "Kindergarten Cap"

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kindergarten_Cap

There's a reference to the first Pokémon opening:

I wouldn't be so sure about the reference to Goku and Dragonball, it seems a very very generic aura/powerup shared by a gazilion of anime/characters etc, but I can't rule it out either I guess.

I can pretty much rule out the Naruto/Jiraiya reference though.
The "charater riding a giant frog" is a famous archetype of japanese culture/mythology.
It's not FFXI referencing to Naruto, both are referencing to the same thing rather.

Also, unless SE said something about it and I missed it, I seriously doubt Avesta Bangles are dedicated to Avesta (the player). It's simply a reference to real world mythology, like 99% of items in game?
The "Avesta" is one of the plentiful sacred books of the zoroastrian religion/mythology.
The character "Angra Mainyu" takes his name from that very mythology as well, and he's the one dropping the Avesta Bangles, so it's pretty clear this has nothing to do with Avesta the player.

The game is full of things like this in how they choose the names of monsters and items, but I wouldn't call them "easter eggs" now, would you?


I wouldn't call a reference the one from the Geomancer Quest.
Taking a previously "useless" item and giving it a new role/purpose whenever a new quest/expansion/whatever is released happened many times in this game.
Plus, I'm pretty confident developers had no clue that a small part of the FFXI western community was calling Voidwatch "logwatch".
Keep in mind they refer to japanese players and I seriously doubt they were calling it that way.


Good job on the others you listed though :-D

Meh, they're all close enough. it doesn't matter if it's not the original source they reference.

The only one that's really debatable is Avesta. Are the bangles named after the mythology of which Avesta also happens to share the name, or is it legitimately in reference to the player, not the name. The world may never know. It's like if I named my first character Ridill and then they made fafnir, obviously the sword isn't tribute to me, it's just a famous relic that I stole the name of first.

Also the fact that there is only one such item in the entire game "designed as tribute to a player" makes it look mostly coincidental. While Avesta might be the (most) famous, they would've surely come up with more than one such item in 20 years for another player.


Oh, they knew, absolutely.

While you may be right, I don't think this rules it out completely. Almost everyone I know who played back in the day knows about Avesta, and I'd be surprised if SE wasn't aware of him. They could have known about the player attached to the name, and put the RDM stats on the bangles as tribute.

I think it does completely rule it out. It's the same exact paradygm used for 99% of the items and monsters in game.
If this does not rule it out, then anything goes and at that point it becomes kinda worthless even making a list of references and discern between legit and worthless ones.

It's just players who want to see a reference to Avesta (the player) there and are forcing their hand, it's been like this for years and people at this point are just simply in denial, if you ask me lol



Seen in other terms, it's Avesta (the player) who probably named his character after Avesta (the book).
So we could say it's a similar situation to the Naruto/Jiraiya one.
Both the player and the game are referencing the same thing: the book.

See also; they are "Avesta Bangles" and not "Avesta's Bangles"

Minor difference, with big implication

Or it's both. They put in the item to reference the book, and made the stats to reference the player. Not mutually exclusive.


It may be generic now, but remember Dragonball is from the 80s, and a LOT of the stuff that uses it is referencing Dragonball.

You really want to see that at all costs eh? lol

Referencing directly to a player by using his specific name is something really unusual.
Even Blizzard (who notoriously referred directly to existing players multiple, multiple times) always changed the names when they did that. The most famous example of this is "Leeroy Jenkins" who, after being referred to in items descriptions and quests, actually became a real NPC eventually.

SquareEnix has a very different style when doing these things, they're usually more subtle and more generic.
To my experience they never referred to any existant player because, simply, it's not their style.
Even if they were to do it, it would probably be a different type of thing and they would (even if just slightly) change the name.

Putting a "red mage like item" and imagining that SE did that to honour Avesta, the famous player, is a wonderful thing to think of, I thought about that myself when they first introduced the item simply because the only Avesta I knew about was the player and I had no clue about the Zooroastrian stuff.
As pretty as this story is, it's simply not realistic, period.

But you can keep believing whatever you want to of course, not like it does me (or anybody else) any damage.

For the Geomantic Founts questlines, it is possible to unlock all the founts after starting the first quest. Upon doing so, Anastase, the NPC quest giver, will comment on your clairvoyant/prescient abilities upon starting the second and third quest.

Note: Quwi Orihbhe is Anastase's helper in Rabao; she also claims that she can see into the future.



EDIT: comments are upon starting the 2nd/3rd quest; not finish.

Another BCNM name is "Operation Desert Swarm" after the real life Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s.

Most of the Adoulin storyline missions are filled with memes.

FFIX and FFXIV's quests, missions and events are full of pop culture references to the point of oversaturation. No matter what your interests are, you're bound to recognize some and laugh at the silliness of the English localization team.

Apoclypse "Nigh"? "Iron" Contra affair? (that one almost killed me, it's a FATE in FFXIV) The list is too long, and I think it only got out of hand in FFXIV.

BCNM Whom Wilt Thou Call?
And Ghostbuster~esque mob names

Yeah, they had fun with some of the Assault names referencing movies. "Marids in the Mist" (Gorillas in the Mist) is another one, as well as perhaps my favorite bit of silly FFXI localization "Desperately Seeking Cephalopods" (Desperately Seeking Susan).

The Aht Urghan "Three Men and a Closet" quest is also probably a reference to the movie Three Men and a Baby. Someone on the localization team during the Aht Urghan era really liked their 80s-90s movies!

Adoulin quest "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is either Hemingway or Metallica.

The english translation team loves doingpop culture references while naming stuff.

most assaults have play on names of movies ect


Lets stop the stupid Avesta myth tho

Probably if you wanted to list every quest name in XIV that is a reference of some sort, you would just list every quest.



This is from a screenshot that I took of a cutscene from a while ago, and I'm 99.9% sure that it's a Seinfeld reference.

Literally everything in this game is a reference to something else. It's riddled with it. Many of them are play on words, like the BCNMs "treasures and tribulations".

One of my favorite BCNMs is Taurassic Park, where you fight 5 Tauros (which look like dinosaurs before they created tojil).

To go even further, Jiraiya in Naruto is based on a character in Japanese folklore of the same name

CLEARLY Metallica!

I didn't notice it until someone pointed it out but the Black Mage Emperyan armor set bears a huge striking resemblance to Vivi when he's in "Trance" mode.

Pretty sure just under where you highlighted they reference the wiki.

"Extra dimensional force where information is contained for everyone to see" lol

Regarding Avesta, you can always ask on forums directly, wastes of human DNA like koji fox should know.

Only thing I never understood was the English naming convention for GKs. Half of them are named wrongly, always bugged me so much (they're almost all references but a good half is completely butchered for some reason).