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

gamesradar.com:

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