MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 can be daunting to most players since there’s so much to learn when it comes to delving into a new and expansive digital world. For newcomers joining an already well-established MMO with many expansions, it can be even harder to hit the ground running. That’s where the likes of The Phookas come into play.

The Phookas are a group of dedicated players who create stunning infographics, video guides, online trackers, and more — all with the aim of helping the FF14 community. I met with the creative minds behind the group — Yunalesca Homura, Night Crescent, and Hitomi Nishitani — to talk about their work and how The Phookas came to be.

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The team has been playing since the launch of A Realm Reborn in 2013, but only recently began creating guide content in July, targeting the booming number of ‘sprouts’ — that’s the cutesy term for new players in FF14 lingo. In the past few months, the player base for the game has exploded, causing Square Enix to hold stress tests and limit character creation. That means there are a lot more inexperienced players who might need a helping hand to get their Warriors of Light on the right track when it comes to saving Eorzea.

“We had the idea because of the influx of new players to the game and wanted to try and help them,” Homura tells me. “We tend to focus on resources which new players need most — they're inspired by our own in-game experiences with sprouts and questions on the novice

Final fantasy 14 The Phookas guide group

While The Phookas also create endgame guide content, some inspired by the team’s own natural progression in the game, Homura explains that it’s the beginner guides that have been the most well-received by the community.

“FF14 is very different from other MMOs in the way it handles global cooldowns and abilities,” Homura explains. “It also has some unique quirks that people need to learn over time, for example slide casting and understanding that it's safe to run into orange AoE markers once they disappear, even if there's a scary animation. We've also seen lots of sprouts not getting their jobs after level 30 — Square needs to work on that system, it made sense in 2.0 but now it's hard to explain to people why it is the way it is.

“Since it's so unique, many people also have trouble understanding that they can get all jobs on the same character and that they do not need multiple characters,” Homura adds, highlighting one of the biggest differences that FF14 offers over its competitors, with most MMOs restricting players to one job role per character.

The team works together as well as with the community to come up with new ideas for guide content, before working on gathering data, screenshots, footage, and the other assets they’ll need. The video content is the most time-consuming, as it requires gathering the raw footage, creating voice-overs, and then assembling it all together to create a polished final video.

Their website includes an impressive Quest Tracker, thanks to Homura and his software development experience. He plans to incorporate more fan-requested trackers in time, such as for minions, mounts, and Triple Triad cards. “We'd like our website to eventually become the center for a lot of FF14 related tools and information,” he tells me.

When it comes to the infographics, Crescent is responsible for creating these and she often live streams her progress so that the community can weigh in with suggestions. Unsurprisingly, these well-crafted infographics have gone down very well with players as they present lots of information in an easy-to-digest format.

Final Fantasy 14 The Phookas infographics on egi glamors

The community’s overwhelming response on the likes of Twitter and Reddit proves just how appreciated The Phooka’s work is. “It has been incredible — we've seen a lot of support, our Discord server has grown to 2,000 members within a few weeks,” Homura says. “Sometimes we get some nitpicking or negative comments, but they help us improve our future content and the vast majority has been overwhelmingly positive.”

“It’s actually nice to see all positive feedback and people really learning something new from the graphics and guides,” Nishitani adds. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 14 since the original launch in 2010, and the infographics even taught me about one of the basic aspects in the game — Egi glamours. “I'm glad we can even teach 1.0 players something,” Homura jokes.

Undertaking such a large project to help the community has changed the team’s playstyle considerably. And even when they do get to play through stuff for themselves, Homura admits the guide content is always on their mind, “While we're doing things, we always think about whether people would need a guide for it.”

With the new Endwalker expansion on the horizon, The Phookas have plenty of plans in the pipeline. The team aims to balance out playing through the new content while still creating content.

“The website is an ongoing project — one of the features we'd like to have before Endwalker releases are Aether Current maps, since everyone will need those at the start of the expansion,” Homura says. “We have a lot of projects planned and we'll release them soon enough.”

The Phookas regularly show updates and work in progress projects on their Patreon, and you can also keep up to date with them via their Twitter.

Next: Final Fantasy 14 Community Spotlight: Stellazzio Virtual Theatre