The Mog Blog

From the history of our gaming universe, F’d Up Moments in Gaming illustrates the uncalled and screwed up moments that makes us all wonder just why were video game developers that screwed up?

Let’s go back to a time, sometime in the middle of 2008. Square Enix updated Final Fantasy XI with a new set of content that introduces another monster (yes, another) which is considered unkillable at the time. A brave linkshell (a guild) decided to take on this terrible beast of a monster. What they didn’t expect was an 18 hour failed attempt that would ripple across the internet and be on press sites everywhere.

This was Pandemonium Warden, and yes this was pretty F’d up.

Rukenshin is an FFXI player who wrote two blog posts that detailed his experiences, one with commentary about how the news spread out and another with specifics about the fight. It’s definitely a great read if you played enough FFXI to understand the mechanics and haven’t already heard about this event.

As I stated, this sent a ripple throughout the internet among forum-goers and media websites. This prompted Square Enix to react to this by adding in some conditions to the fight that would turn him (and Absolute Virtue, the other unkillable monster at the time) into 2 hour battles at most. It would still take some time before the community took these monsters down, leaving it mostly to chance and abusing mechanics to get the job done.

Nowadays, these fights are rather trivial with the level cap increase and buffs that came from it.