In the wake of Hobby Japan’s unboxing video for the Standard Edition Deluxe boxed set, I will be doing a breakdown of the contents as well as some observations on the revealed tidbits gleaned from the video.

This video was a breakdown with their usual host (whose name I do not know because I cannot speak Japanese — if anyone knows and can tell me, I would greatly appreciate it!) and the designer of the FFXIV TTRPG, Naoki Yoshida (aka, Yoshi-P).

The first thing I noticed is that this box is HUGE!

The box appears to have a magnetic catch for thee lid and the inside of the lid has the cover art for the Standard Rulebook.

The top layer of the Deluxe set has the main attraction: the rulebook itself. Whilst this is the last thing covered during the unboxing video, as it’s the topmost item inside the box, I will be covering it here.

According to Square Enix’s official page for the FF XIV TTRPG, “The Standard Rulebook contains all the core rules you will need to create a character and play the game, alongside job information up to Lv. 60 for every job from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. It also contains three official premade scenarios: one Lv. 30, one Lv. 40, and one Lv. 50 scenario.”

The book itself looks gorgeous and the quality looks like it is in line with the amazing Encyclopedia Eorzea series: thick, matte art book style pages with amazing layout and color pallet.

Is this a ninja sighting?!

One of the things that struck me as odd was that Square says that the Standard Rulebook includes a gazetteer for the setting. This struck me as very odd because I would imagine anyone dropping this kind of coin on a game would already be familiar with the setting and possibly already own at leas one volume of Encyclopedia Eorzea.

What they didn’t say is that the Standard Rulebook contains what looks like dozens of detailed, key area maps of Eorzea! This is a horse of another color. It also looks like it may include details for notable NPCs such as the ones in the Starter Set scenarios.

Another very interesting thing is the blank character sheet. Since FF XIV will be a modular system, I find it interesting to see a kind of standard blank character sheet, instead of the landscape style ones they have presented thus far.

Jumping to the included scenarios, Yoshi-P accidentally opened the rulebook right to where there were some monster tokens!

Oh my, look at all those malboros and puddings! I am assuming this is for the final encounter of the series, which features a HUGE battle map. In fact, a good chunk of the maps provided seem larger than the 8×8 or 9×9 maps included with the Starter Set.

I am not a fan of the standard dry-erase battle maps due to the fact that they reflect overhead light and create blind spots. For an in-person game it may not be a big deal, but for online play, it makes it very difficult to see.

Sadly, even the standard battle maps are also highly reflective, which leads me to make my own hand drawn maps for online play.

This map reveal definitely brought out a whoah from me … I mean, that’s a LOT for four adventurers to cover!

CONCLUSIONS

This definitely got the hype going for me for the upcoming Standard Rulebook. Perhaps even more exciting is the fact that it looks like this will probably be available as a PDF as well — even the Deluxe set doesn’t come with blank character sheets, and nobody is going to carve up their book to get access to the scenario tokens.

Up next will be level 2 of the boxed set!