Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker revived a decade-old meme while in development

At one point in Endwalker's development, most of Final Fantasy 14's characters were reviving a beloved community meme.

"Thal's bloody balls!" is, if you're unaware, one of the few versions of swearing in Final Fantasy 14. You're not exactly going to hear Thancred Waters or any other high fantasy characters outright swearing in Square Enix's MMO, so "Thal's bloody balls!" instead serves as a funky little line of frustration that characters can use for outbursts of rage. 

The line has sort of become a meme in the Final Fantasy 14 community over the MMO's many, many years. In fact, Square Enix localization veteran Michael Christopher Koji Fox revealed all the way back at FanFest 2014 how he came up with the now-infamous swear line during the original development of Final Fantasy 14, prior to its very first release in 2010.

As chronicled in the video below, Fox explains that he was looking to create a fictional swear line for Final Fantasy 14's characters with a real punch. He was tasked with naming the game's 12 gods and, with the challenge of creating a swear in the back of his mind, asked for one of the gods to be named "Thal" specifically so that he create the punchy line, "Thal's bloody balls."

Square Enix instead wanted the god to be called "Naldthal," which Fox didn't really think gelled with the "bloody balls" part. Thal was just the regular god of the afterlife, but Fox requested the name be split in two, thus creating "Nald'Thal" as we know them today: the double-aspect god with two distinct parts.

This was all in the pursuit of "Thal's bloody balls," which Fox succeeded in pulling off. However, there's another layer to this story. As part of the process for submitting Final Fantasy 14 for certification, text needed to be present at every part of the game where required, even if the text itself was merely a placeholder, and not representative of the final game. 

Fox had an extremely tight deadline for implementing all the dialog for the certification submission. So, rather than fill out all the dialog as it'd be written in the final game, he instead simply pasted "Thal's balls" basically everywhere. So in the certification copy of Final Fantasy 14, everyone is swearing. All the time.

Just last week saw FanFest return in Las Vegas, and Fox took part in a localization panel which you can see just below around the 6:58:00 minute mark. Fox revealed that, because ratings boards like the ESRB now want to see a copy of a game for rating earlier on than ever, he was again forced to put placeholder text in place of actual dialog, and you'll never guess what he chose as the placeholder words.

That's right: Thal's balls made a return! When Endwalker was submitted for certification, basically all the in-game dialog for the expansion simply read "Thal's balls," as several screenshots in the panel above attest to. Fox basically rehashed a decade-old trick to save time in development, and it was all based around a swear. 

Elsewhere in the panel, fellow localizer Kathryn Cwynar revealed that she actually pulled off a similar trick while localizing Shadowbringers. The developer had a wild amount of text to localize in just three days, so rather than plot it all out carefully as she went along, she instead blurted out a "stream of consciousness" in place of final text, one of which saw the player character saying "might die, but eh," which is a big mood. 

When Cwynar was going back through the text to edit it, she actually decided to leave in the placeholder text as final dialog, which is how we ended up with one of the most underrated lines in Shadowbringers. 

”Might die, but eh.” Best part of Shadowbringers to me so far. [spoiler] from r/ffxiv

Final Fantasy 14's Dawntrail expansion is slated to launch next year in summer 2024, and now we can't help but wonder what other sort of localization nonsense will be going on behind the scenes in the run-up to its launch. Until then, we've got Final Fantasy 14 patch 6.5 to look forward to in October, which will help set the stage for the new expansion.

Check out our best MMORPG guide if you're looking for something new to sink your time into before then.