Final Fantasy 14 introduced Fashion Report in 2018 when it added Masked Rose and Kasumi to the Gold Saucer. This minigame challenges players each week to dress in accordance to certain themes, with the promise of Manderville Gold Saucer Points and boutique vendor rewards.
New weekly themes drop on Tuesdays, with Masked Rose offering clues related to his desired outfit. From Friday until the next theme change, players have four attempts at presenting their clothing in the hopes of scoring big. The more it fits the bill, the higher the score you receive and the more MGP you earn. Sounds pretty awesome, right?
Unfortunately, figuring out the clues isn’t always as easy as you’d think. That’s why the FF14 community is on hand to help one another, and no one does this better than Kaiyoko Star. This fashion-savvy Miqo'te has been helping to solve the weekly challenges since the very beginning, originally taking part in the contest to earn themselves a pair of Spring Bottoms, which are unlocked from Kasumi once you score over 600 Fashion Report points. The community's reaction to his work encouraged him to continue providing solutions for the weekly fashion challenge.
“I kept doing it to work on getting better in Photoshop originally, making infographics and trying to help others with it,” Star tells me. “Then I decided to make a Discord bot for it that would shoot out the answers when I tweeted, which turned into a Discord server and now is also my community server. Things kept compiling and growing.”
Star’s weekly process begins by sharing the theme and clues with his Discord channel. After checking for reused hints, he gets down to the nitty-gritty of finding the solution. "In the case of new hints, we have a group where we discuss the potential options to try out,” Star tells me. “Also, u/YakFuji posts a thread on r/ffxiv where players translate the hints in[to] other languages.” Infographics get prepped on Thursdays using the information the team has compiled, then on Friday, Star livestreams his six characters dedicated to Fashion Report in order to check guesses before creating the base 100 point solution.
“Next, me and u/c0ff22 on Reddit go through each of the left side slots to find which dyes are required for the week,” Star explains. “u/LittleDucky17 also tests new item options while we're working on the dyes.” This is how he creates the full infographic complete with easy 80/100 point solutions for players to use.
Even if the hints are old, allowing Star to easily identify which clothing was used last time, the work doesn’t end there. Omar O'marr, a friend of Star, looks to see if they can improve upon their previous solution. The work behind the weekly infographics usually takes two to three hours, sometimes more if there are a lot of new hints. Star explains that getting translations of the hints from other languages is the key to solving which clothing you need.
“I think between all the languages, at least one is pretty straightforward,” Star explains. Through this collaboration, new hints usually only take 15 to 30 minutes to solve. However, that’s not always the case.
“‘Drapes of Wrath’ for the body is probably the worst I can think of,” Star says. “It took us around six hours to resolve. I ended up running out of alts to use and getting four hours of sleep to come back to the community thankfully solving it. One of the big problems that led to it taking a long time is none of the languages pointed towards anything concrete and there are a ton of body pieces in the game that have cloth draping off of [them].”
Figuring out the dye options is one of the more time-consuming aspects of the weekly challenge. “There is a small trick to it but it's mostly brute force testing,” Star explains. “The rules to dye are if you have the right type of dye — black, white, red, blue, etc. — it's worth one point, and if you have the exact right dye it's two points. Once we know the one-point dye type, we can test the specific dyes of the correct dye type to narrow down which one gives two points. For example, if we gain one point from using 'Rose Pink' in the head slot, we know it's another red dye so we'll then keep testing other red dyes.”
Weekly testing and building infographics naturally changed Star's playstyle somewhat, but creating reusable templates has streamlined the process. Though this meant he could return to a more normal play routine, Star explains that he felt compelled to do more for the community.
“I felt a desire to fill that time with more things to work on,” he says. “The process of creating the Fashion Report infographics led me to fill that time making infographics for other content: Gold Saucer, Blue Mage, Yokai Watch, Patch Unlock infographics, making the Fashion Reporter discord bot, streaming and building my own community. [Fashion Report] led me down a path to looking at the game in a completely different way.”
The biggest problem with the Fashion Report minigame for beginners is that it doesn’t explain the point breakdown. “The Gold medal can be confusing because it ranges from six to nine plus points sometimes, and players get confused why they didn't get a max score,” Star says.
Star confesses his passion for fashion doesn’t extend beyond Eorzea, “I just really enjoy dressing up my cat girl.” You can find out each week’s Fashion Report solutions and keep up to date with Kaiyoko Star via his Twitter and Twitch channel.