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As Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker expansion enters its final content stretch ahead of Dawntrail’s highly-anticipated release this summer, Yoshi-P and his team at Square Enix have decided to commemorate the legacy of the decade-long arc of Hydaelyn and Zodiark with yet another incredibly impressive statue for players to collect. Furnished once again by the adept hands of those at Meister Quality, this bust features none other than Zodiark and Hydaelyn themselves, the two all-powerful entities at the center of the epic clash between the esteemed Warrior of Light and the Ascians.
As amazing as it looks in the photos on Square Enix’s product page, and as surreal as it feels to potentially get the last noteworthy piece of merchandise from Endwalker, there seems to be hesitant divide amongst the player base over it. One would initially think it’s entirely over the very hefty price tag of $360 USD (before taxes and shipping), which makes it the priciest FFXIV statue released to date. The hilarious irony of these figures is that they’re often referred to by the game’s community as “expensive emotes with a free statue included”, because the Meister Quality statues always come with an exclusive in-game emote as a bonus for ordering it.
Hands down probably the most popular example of this, which actually ties in to the truth behind the player divide over the newest statue, is the “Omega Simulations” emotes that were obtained when purchasing the Meister Quality Omega figure back in late 2020. This statue became the most infamous in XIV’s entire lineup (which dates back to Shiva in ‘A Realm Reborn’), for both good and bad reasons.
First off, the design of the statue itself was an immediate hit among fans, who clamored to the Square Enix merch website to get their pre-orders. It cost $229.00 USD, which was indeed costly but the quality of the statue seemed entirely convincing and justified for many. Not only that, but it came with a pair of very attractive in-game emotes that allows players to have their characters mimic the classic poses of both Omega-M and F from the iconic Omega raids released during the Stormblood expansion.
Not only are they flashy and stylish, the emotes are “persistent”, meaning that they don’t end until the player moves their character. On top of being a very rare type of emote, this made for some very enticing new afk poses that had people floating midair all over the place from Limsa Lominsa to Eulmore.
However, while the emotes were an absolute hit with the community and remain some of the best ever released for the game, the same surprisingly couldn’t be said for the statue itself.
Those who were a part of the initial pre-order wave for the Omega statue, and were undoubtedly thrilled when their delivery finally came, instead found themselves saddled with a physical product that didn’t remotely meet expectations. While other statues such as Shiva and Ultima the High Seraph all came out as exquisitely fantastic as intended, Omega fell far, far short.
As pointed out by these photos from ‘tuxed0mat’ on Reddit, the focal point of the problem (as seen above), was the facial design. While the initial product photos from Square Enix depicted pristine expressions of the characters, the final result was something borderline horrific, particularly from the view of anyone who collects figures like these. People took to Reddit and other forms of social media to show what they had paid over two hundred dollars for, which turned out to be crudely drawn at best, something you’d sooner see on a $30-40 dollar figure.
It was a first if there ever was one, and the avalanche-level backlash prompted a thorough and sincere apology from Yoshi-P and Square Enix for the severe lack of proper quality control over this particular figure in the XIV series. To make up for it, they sent a replacement statue to everyone who had initially placed an order at no extra cost. However, many of those who received their replacements still complained that the original problems still weren’t fixed, as the facial design was slightly better, but still didn’t justify the cost.
This brings us back to the newly released Zodiark-Hydaelyn statue, which went up for pre-order late last week. Along with its record-breaking $359.99 price tag, it includes yet another exclusive in-game emote called ‘Sundering’ (i.e. – Ballroom Etiquette – Apocalyptic Charades).
This allows your character to wield the sword brandished by Hydaelyn herself in an incredibly flashy show of, well, sundering strength, before floating back down and hovering with the sword in hand. In fact, it’s actually quite similar to the Omega emotes of yore. However, in a very sad turn of events, this emote is strangely not a “persistent” one, as your character simply drops back to the ground afterward. What the heck, Yoshi-P??
Not only that, this particular emote is NOT account-wide for some reason, which understandably has people absolutely baffled. That is a first for this type of product, and we do hope it doesn’t set a precedent going forward with figures released for Dawntrail.
Beyond that, however, the main source of hesitation expressed among players on Reddit comes from the sticker shock mixed with the proverbial burn caused by the Omega statue catastrophe. With a more than $100 increase in price, some people are wringing their hands on whether to pull the trigger this time. The statue itself is a nearly foot-tall statement piece, there’s no doubt about that.
There’s apparently still plenty of interest regardless, as the statue has actually since sold out on Square Enix’s US website. As of this writing, it’s still available for pre-order for those in the UK.
The statue is due to ship for everyone just under a couple months from now in March, so we’ll see at that point if the fears are justified, or if opening up the wallet that wide is well worth it.
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Stephanie Watel
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