I'm a regular gym goer, but deep down I'm also a sweaty little gamer goblin who could easily sit at her PC for 18 hours grinding away in an MMO. Couple that with the fact I work from home, and it means some days I don't do a whole lot of stretching or exercise at all. Square Enix is clearly keeping track of all my daily activities, because it's just released an utterly bizarre exercise video composed entirely of Final Fantasy 14 emotes and action animations to get people away from their desks and doing some light movement.
"Eorzean Aetherobics" is a four-minute fever dream that's the brainchild of the community team. "You may be wondering 'why an exercise video!?' With many of us working from home during the last couple of years or simply preferring to stay indoors, we thought it'd be nice to have some simple and easy-to-follow stretches for short breaks during work or prolonged gaming sessions," a blog post from the team reads. "There may be plenty of other exercise videos already out there on the internet, but we felt that some of our Warriors of Light may be more motivated if we used movements and music from FF14."
There's both in-game characters and a real human demonstrating each movement in the video, starting off with some light stretching that pulls from each race's unique animations. It even incorporates some common traditions from the Final Fantasy 14 community, like how players will often use an emote or ability right before being frozen while fighting Shiva. Emotes like Cheer Wave—a regular occurrence in roleplaying nightclubs—get turned into warm-up stretches, and moves like blocking Susano's giant blade are repurposed into slight squats with arm stretches.
The blog post also includes some variances on the moves seen in the video—some to make the exercises a little more approachable to all fitness levels, and others that could provide additional benefits after sitting at PC all darn day.
I even gave some of the video a go myself and while you won't be seeing fitness influencers rocking the Yol Dance or Manderville anytime soon, I had a really fun time goofing around in my office with these moves. As someone who has busted out the Bees Knees dance IRL on more than one occasion, it's not my first time bringing Final Fantasy 14's copious emotes into the real world.
It's always fun to see the creative ways people can repurpose facets of games in ways I wouldn't have ever thought of, and after a few watches of the video I really warmed up to it. If you're deep in the Final Fantasy 14 trenches like me, give it a go before your next raid or dungeon.
