This custom Final Fantasy 14 controller uses real paint on a canvas to control the Pictomancer, you know, for the immersion

Final Fantasy 14's Pictomancer caused a bit of a hubbub when it was released alongside the expansion Dawntrail. I've only heard glowing things from my paint enthusiast friends about how it feels to play, but its damage has been noticeably higher than its fellow magic DPS competition, despite the fact it brings a raid buff to the table. It allowed a streamer to 1v1 Susano, though, so I'm not too upset.

Still—do you really get the proper feeling of artistry with the Pictomancer if you're not using an actual palette, canvas, and paintbrush to control them? Is a rotation really expressive if you aren't also simultaneously making a work of abstract art? Auteur SuperLouis64 has the solution to the problem by, well, letting you do just that.

Known for his harebrained custom controller setups, like a Scholar controller where you need to write in an actual book to cast spells, this thing takes it one step further by keeping track of which paints set upon your brush, then translating them into stored inputs (which can be repeated). This is achieved by a device on the brush which scans the selected colour to choose which spell is locked, loaded, and then cast by pressing down on the canvas.

This is, quite possibly, one of the riskiest controller setups I've ever seen, as SuperLous64 shares an image of their "duct tape build" where I can easily see a splatter of acrylic getting into the circuitry.

It's clearly just a work in progress—giving them access to the basic Pictomancer combo (which rotates between Red, Green, and Blue paint attacks) while using scanned colours for bigger spells like Holy in White—which expends white paint to skip the job's usual cast times, letting them dodge mechanics. I'm not sure how SuperLouis64 is going to actually move their Warrior of Light around with a paint brush, to be fair. When he played scholar, there was an analogue stick on the pencil, so there's probably something similar.

The biggest hurdle, in fact, might just be the physical mess of the whole operation. Dungeons in FF14 last for about 15-30 minutes, meaning SuperLouis64 is going to be rapidly muddying both his canvas and brush. Aside from accidentally getting paint on your circuitry (or monitor), I wonder if mixing paints too much will lead to mis-inputs.

Still, this thing rules—and, considering SuperLouis64 fully built out a Gunblade controller, as well as an Astrologian Yu-Gi-Oh duel disk, I'm sure they'll find a way. Now I just want to see Elden Ring bosses toppled with this thing—it's only a logical next step from the time-honoured tradition of dancing your foes to death in that game.