<p>Base isolation technology has significantly advanced infrastructure protection against moderate and severe seismic activities. Consequently, it gained considerable attention over the past with new systems and approaches developed to improve its applications. Nevertheless, the literature still lacks a new literature review paper that summarizes and discusses previous findings on multi-stage friction pendulum bearings (MFPs), which offer heightened energy dissipation at the expense of increased complexity. Accordingly, this study performs a bibliometric analysis, summarizes and discusses key findings related to MFPs, and explores the balance between enhanced energy dissipation and the complexity trade-offs in MFPs with increased effective pendula. Besides, it briefly reviews the evolution and current state of MFPs and highlights their capacity to mitigate seismic vibrations through a combination of sliding and rolling friction modes. Moreover, it discusses the improvements in the hysteresis behavior of MFPs that led to better energy dissipation and smoother loading and unloading processes in structural engineering applications. Furthermore, the study describes the critical trade-offs between the complexity of MFP analysis and design and their superior energy dissipation capabilities.</p>