Even Square Enix Is Chort-Posting Now

"Chort."

That's it. That's the entire post from the official Final Fantasy 14 account on X. No context, no hashtag, no marketing copy. Just the name of a patch 7.5 dungeon boss who has, in roughly a week, become the MMORPG's most beloved creature since that nameless glitched deer was spotted wandering the Coerthas Western Highlands last year.

For anyone who hasn't run the Clyteum yet, Chort is a voidsent boss with no spoken lines, no plot relevance, and a loot table that tops out at a pair of gloves. What he does have is a wide, immovable battle stance, the build of a brick wall, and a mechanic where he hurls his considerable mass around the arena like a bowling ball made of nightmares. He looks like someone crossbred a Witcher 3 monster with a professional wrestler, and the FF14 community has responded exactly the way you'd expect.

Jorts for Chort

The r/ffxiv subreddit lit up almost immediately. "Moments like this are why I play this game and love this community," one upvoted comment reads. Another player on X proudly declared they'd given Chort jorts, complete with a screenshot. Bluesky got appreciation posts. Someone made a Chort fancam that, according to PC Gamer's coverage, was looping on their writer's second monitor during the article. The whole thing has the same chaotic energy as the Mamool Ja baby obsession from Dawntrail, except Chort's appeal is even more inexplicable because he's literally just a big guy who rolls at you.

I love that Square Enix leaned into it with a single-word post instead of trying to turn it into some calculated engagement play. There's no "Which Chort moment is YOUR favourite? 🔥" poll, no merch announcement. Just "Chort." That's the correct response when your community collectively decides a random dungeon mob is their new son. Studios that try to manufacture this kind of moment always fumble it; Square Enix just let the joke come to them.

What makes Chort's rise so funny is the timing. FF14 patch 7.5 has plenty of actual, significant content for players to talk about. There are story beats, gear updates, and the Kefka ultimate encounter coming this summer. None of that matters right now. The community chose Chort. One fan on X pointed out that "chort" is the word for devil in many Slavic languages, which is fitting for a voidsent fought in a northern region, but I suspect most players latched onto him purely because he looks like he could benchpress a chocobo.

FF14 has always had this streak running through it. The game's community gravitates toward weird little guys with the same intensity other MMO playerbases reserve for parsing DPS logs. It happened with the Endwalker NPC that fans described as having "every disease," it happened with the blank-eyed Mamool Ja baby, and now it's happening with a boss whose entire personality is "wide and fast." If anything, Chort might be the purest version of this phenomenon yet, because there is nothing special about him on paper. He's a mid-dungeon speed bump. The community simply decided he rules, and that was that.

Square Enix's one-word post on the official FF14 account has already racked up significant engagement, which probably tells the social media team everything they need to know. Patch 7.5 launched with story content, system changes, and setup for the ultimate raid tier arriving this summer, but the thing people can't stop talking about is a round boy in the Clyteum who drops gloves.