Alright, redownloading the 2 hour long download time for the game fixed the issue. A couple of points to note:

For players:
If you zone in or join a dungeon and find your client constantly crashing try making a new character, preferably on the same server. If you can create the new character and the game works fine you may have corrupt game data- it's a pain in the ass but uninstall FFXIV and reinstall it, should clear up the problem.

For FFXIV staff:
Forums- I know you guys have a ton of error requests every hour of everyday but if someone submits a report and finds it tagged "duplicate" some follow up on where the in-progress or resolved bug report would be nice instead of simply dumping it in a place where it won't be answered with zero input from the guy that put it there. This would increase customer satisfaction and reduce some of that workload from redundant reposts of guys needing answers that they aren't getting.

Client- A repair feature would *really* help the process of redownloading data as I'm certain this was caused by a temporary loss of connection during the game data download causing the file to corrupt. Add a feature that segments the data and can assess if any of those segments are corrupt- I was playing for weeks without issue until last night when something magically went wrong, and having two hours of downtime downloading everything over again is both insanely wasteful and leaves more chances for data corruption to occur in what was previously fine.