Fashion Ninjutsu’s Patrons voted once more for this month’s Fantasia to feature a female au ra, and their support paid for the Fantasias necessary for this post. If you’d like to vote for future Fantasia Spotlights, consider donating to the site’s Patreon, which helps keep Fashion Ninjutsu advertisement free!
Players of every FFXIV race probably feel this way from time to time, but sometimes I don’t like playing a miqo’te. They were heavily impacted by 2.0’s Great Polygon Count Reduction, leaving their tails to clip through even their own racial starting gear or gear with actual tail slots. Throw in their wide stance interacting so strangely with the game’s cloth physics, and you get a recipe for a whole lot of gear awkwardness. Stormblood has only exacerbated the sorts of things that bug me about gear on miqo’te, since so much of the gear leans hard into the styles that tend to fare the worst on them. There’s a lot of Stormblood gear I may never touch for Alahra even if I like it!
But that does mean it’s a good thing that female au ra keep winning the monthly Patreon Fantasia poll! Since they were designed with the post-2.0 polygon count restrictions and reduced gear physics in mind, they tend to look better in most things than most of the game’s other races do. Their tails clip less often and less extremely when they do clip than miqo’te tails do, and their frames avoid the “wide angle” problem that female miqo’te and female hyur have, too.
Glamour Components (Required Level: MNK/SAM 60)
Weapon: Emperor's New Fists
Head: Scintillant Circlet of Striking (Colibri Pink)
Body: Ala Mhigan Gown
Hands: Scion Liberator's Fingerless Gloves
Legs: Orthodox Trousers of Striking
Feet: Leonhart Boots (Kobold Brown)
I didn’t have any idea what I was going to feature for this month’s Fantasia when I started, though. Normally, my first instinct is to do something with tank gear, since I so often have trouble finding armor that looks good on a miqo’te, but I’ve done that a couple of times now. I wanted to do something more interesting instead, and so it came down to Market Board browsing, as glamour so often does for me these days. The Ala Mhigan Gown jumped out at me more than anything else this time around, since its loose style actually looks fairly normal on au ra (and their tail angles work better with it than the miqo’te ones do, too).
Usually when I sit down for these things, I at least know what job or role I’m going to be aiming for, but this time I didn’t at all. Settling on the Gown narrowed things down a bit, though, knocking Dragoon, tanks, and Ninja from the running, since it seemed ill-suited to all of them. Beyond that, though, I experimented with a number of ideas, from long skirts to my more normal shorts and thighboots. Nothing really grabbed me until I hit upon the Orthodox Trousers of Striking, though. They’re not an exact match to the shade of the Gown’s default colors, but they’re very close, and they blend rather well between the white of the undershirt and the Gown’s light tan.
Since I was now solidly in Striking territory, I had to fish around for a solid pair of gloves. I wanted to keep the flowing character of the Gown in place for this one, so I needed something small that wouldn’t negatively impact the sleeves (which is rare for me!). The gloves from Lyse’s original Stormblood outfit made for the best fit, which was cool because I’d not found a use for them yet despite using her jacket extensively after I first picked it up. Options for shoes were limited, since I wanted the flare on the Trousers to remain visible, and of the few available choices, I settled on the Leonhart ones, which seemed to pair best with the Trousers to my eyes. For a final touch, I brought in the Scintillant Circlet, adding just a hint of pink to match the gown.
I liked the end result enough that I’ve actually kept it since switching back to miqo’te. While it doesn’t work quite as well on a proper Alahra, since the Gown hangs a little funny, I like the overall casual style of the look enough that I’m looking past that for now. I was also in need of a new Monk glamour, which I never got around to doing after last month’s Fantasia, so this one will do for now!
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