I love FFXIV, do you?

If you've played FFXIV, you know that your job class is your identity. It's not just what you queue up as. It's who you are in Eorzea. I've watched people give up party composition, give up optimal runs, give up their entire guild before they'll switch off the job they love. I've seen summoner mains refuse to touch anything else. I've watched dragoon players turn down raid spots rather than reroll. And I was the same way, because I was a black mage and I wanted to cast meteors and watch gigantic spells come down from the heavens while my Miqo'te leaned back like the most badass cat girl ever. I played black mage through every patch where we were terrible and squishy and couldn't stand still long enough to get a cast off, and I loved every miserable second of it.

That kind of obsession with your job class doesn't really exist the same way in other MMOs. Not in World of Warcraft, not in Guild Wars 2, not in Elder Scrolls Online. FFXIV players are just built different when it comes to identity. And the gear is a huge part of that, because if you are not dressed well in that game, people notice. You've got belts on top of belts, capes on top of capes, pauldrons on your pauldrons, sashes that aren't holding anything up but look incredible anyway. This is a game that literally crashed at launch because the potted plants in Ul'dah had too many polygons. That is the level of extra we're dealing with, and the community matches it in everything they do.

But the actual job class icons in the game are flat. They're fine. They do the job. And I think that might even be intentional, the same way ambiguity in a JRPG like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest lets the fan fill in what they want to see. But once I started thinking about what those icons could look like if they actually matched how people feel about their jobs, I could not stop myself.

I started with the black mage because that’s my main. The icon is supposed to be a meteor, but honestly it never really looked like one to me. So I made it look like an actual flare meteor coming down, the kind of spell that makes you lean back in your chair and feel like you just ended something. The bard I built diamond aesthetics into the frame because the community always loved that look, and I spent a lot of time making the lyre shape feel delicate against the bow so you could feel the difference between the song and the weapon just by looking at it. The dancer became ethereal cloth draped over metal, light enough that it looks like it's still moving. And the dragoon looks like it's soaked in blood from the jump. Not all the way up. Just far enough to tell you the kill was clean and they were already gone before the target hit the ground.

The dark knight I spent the most time on. I kept going back and forth trying to make it feel magical and dangerous without losing the silhouette that people already know, and I think I finally got it to a place where it feels like something a dark knight would actually carry.

The white mage might be the prettiest one I made. I worked lilies into the design because white mage magic comes from nature, and I love that the lilies make it feel alive even as a small charm. The summoner, I could not help myself. The hat was just sitting there being boring. So I tucked the three carbuncles into it because they belong there. When I looked at the samurai icon, which is the hilt of a katana, I immediately thought sakura. That cherry blossom aesthetic is so deeply tied to how the class feels in play, the precision of it, the ceremony, that it just needed to be there. And then I got to the machinist. When I first really looked at that icon I kind of laughed, because what even is it. It looks like a blob. Is it a lightning bolt. What is that shape hanging out at the bottom. I had to sit with that one for a while and figure out how to make it actually look like a firearm, something slick and agile and powerful, something that felt like it could actually shoot. I'm really proud of how that one turned out because it went from being the one I understood the least to one of the coolest looking charms in the whole set.

I also redesigned the warrior, astrologian, red mage, blue mage, scholar, monk, ninja, paladin, and gunbreaker.

Every one got the same treatment. I kept the original outlines from the game and then I went in. Added intricacy on the inside of the designs because FFXIV gear is intricate down to stitching on a belt that nobody will ever zoom in on, but the developers put it there anyway, and I think that energy deserves to exist in the icons too. I matched the colors to each job class and made the gold look like actual gold, warm and shiny, not the flat dollar color from the game UI. Even the narrowest, most minimal icons have something happening inside them that rewards you for looking closer, because that's what FFXIV does. It rewards you for caring about the details.

These are acrylic charms, and one of the things I love about the vendor I use is that the art is printed on the inside of the acrylic. So even when the surface gets scratched up from being clipped to a bag or tossed on a keyring, the art underneath stays perfect. It won't peel. It won't fade. I've left some of these in my car in the Florida summer and they've come out completely fine. The vendor produces a lot of official Japanese anime peripherals, and the quality is why they cost what they cost. I would not sell something I wouldn't buy, and I wear these on my own bags.

Wearing something like this out in the world is a different kind of flex than throwing on a football jersey. Everybody knows what NFL gear means. But clipping a FFXIV black mage charm to your backpack and walking into a restaurant, most people have absolutely no idea what they're looking at. And that's the whole point. It's fan-coded. It's gamer-coded. You don't have to explain it, you don't have to justify it, and when another Final Fantasy XIV player spots it from across a coffee shop, you both just know. It's the low-key version of walking into an anime convention decked out in your best gear. The version you can take to dinner with the people who would absolutely tell you not to wear that. Your keychain still knows. Your bag still knows.

I genuinely love this game, even during the years where I didn’t play it. Being a black mage is a big part of who I am. It's in the way I write my characters, the way I think about magic, the way I think about what it means to commit fully to the thing you love even when it costs you something. These charms are my way of celebrating that, and the feedback I've gotten from fans has been exactly what I hoped for. Not that I changed the designs. That I brought out what was already there.

Clip it on. If you know, you know.