Final Fantasy 14 data sleuth gathers more info on the game's script, finds Alphinaud is the king of yappers—though Wuk Lamat's in the top 3 after just 1 expansion
Data sleuth turn_a_blind_eye/Rise Narukami has just compiled some more information on Final Fantasy 14's mammoth script—with the help of chronicler Eriyu, who started attempting to digitally bind the game's thousands upon thousands of words back in May 2023, and has clearly made sterling progress since then. The results are interesting, to say the least.
In a comment explaining their methodology, Narukami states that they used a custom-compiled python script to pull the details out of Eriyu's mammoth document: «A significant portion of this effort was in the data-cleansing portion and deciding what edge cases constitute a word.
»For example, if I didn't pick up 'Bakool Ja Ja' as a single word, then 'Ja' would be considered a word, and would muddy the analysis by becoming one of the most common words. This is similarly true for titles like 'Lord' … There are some instances in the data I didn't catch as this requires manual review; but, I believe I caught most of them." Narukami then proceeded to snip most common words «such as 'It', 'You're', 'They've', 'Which' … since they would otherwise easily dominate the word count and are uninteresting.»
As for what the numbers turned up, surprising no-one, Alphinaud is the reigning king of yappers. From patches 2.0 to 7.1 (FF14 essentially «starts» at 2.0, because 1.0 was ill-fated and had to be rebooted), Alphinaud accounts for 7.4% of all words over the main scenario quest's 1,259,754 words of dialogue. That's 93,649 words total, 45,245 more than Alisaie, who follows behind at second place.
What drives the point home about some of Dawntrail's difficulty in prioritising its characters is how Wuk Lamat is in third place after just one expansion and two patches. Despite journeying with us since the patch quests of Heavensward, Alisaie has only 0.1% more lines in the game's script, and she's already more verbose than the rest of the game's ensemble cast.
As always when I bring up FF14's most controversial lion queen, I consider
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