WARNING: Spoilers Off applies to this page. There will be unmarked spoilers below.
The Warrior of Light's knowledge of Y'shtola's blindness, and response to it. When the Warrior finds out from Y'mhitra, she asks them to speak to her about it and try to remind her not to push herself too hard. Based on the rest of the conversation, we ostensibly agree to do so. However, the requested conversation never actually takes place. This is literally the only time in the entire game someone has asked the Warrior to do something in good faith and they don't immediately turn around and hop to it. It gets even weirder when you realize that they'll apparently help complete strangers with all manner of drudgery without any sort of motivation beyond being a generally nice person, but will apparently indefinitely ignore a request made by one trusted adventuring companion to intervene on behalf of another.
From an out-of-universe standpoint, the reason the conversation doesn't take place makes sense because it's part of a sidequest. It would be weird to have Y'mhitra express concern about Y'shtola's eyes only for the Warrior to toddle on over and "warn her to take it easy" on a problem that may have already been solved, depending on when a given player actually does the quest. But that just begs the question of why the authors decided to tell the Warrior about it at all, since it results in a) Y'mhitra looking like a worrywart over a problem that isn't an issue anymore, or b) makes the Warrior look like an uncaring jackass who can't be bothered to make the minimum effort to prevent their friend dying a slow, painful, and above all unnecessary death.
How in Eorzea do those Ala Mhigan Skulls even use their swords? I can buy that their swords are kind of an exaggerated Khopesh, Falchion, or Scimitar. But the way they're shaped, there's no feasible way they could be drawn unless they are slid out from the side (like some Khopesh scabbards).
They don't seem to use scabbards for them at all, judging from in-game models. Might just be attached to their belts with straps. Either way their swords are pretty practical compared to the ridiculous swords used by the Wo L.
Considering that FF1's Warrior of Light and his three companions ended the time loop which erased what they did from history, how does the residents of Hydaelyn have the knowledge of his legend to make minions of him and two of his other companions, replicate his armor, turn into a primal version of him (which is why I'm not simply writing it off as easter egg stuff and bizarrely enough replicate his hair?
I don't have a straight answer but you're going tot have to ask Final Fantasy the same question because even when they stopped the time loop, the people still know enough about what happened to form legends around the heroes. My guess? They know it happened, they just don't know who was behind it and all they can do is make a guess on what they look like.
Based on Patch 5.3, its safe to assume that it was based on their recollections of Elidibus as the Warrior of Light.
Thats not really the case as most of this stuff came out way beforehand and Elidibus himself mentions the Warrior of Light as a completely separate character from the past in the lead up to him turning into him. The theory does hold up for the sword and shield however, as they are some of the few Wo L content to come out after Elidibus' transformation and are found in the extreme version of his boss fight.
I don't exactly understand the appeal of the Blue Mage. It is a class made for solo play. Fair enough, but you can only do content from ARR but now Stormblood. By the time you can unlock the Blue Mage, you have no need of anything from those zones. You can't New Game Plus them. On top of that, the game is highly soloable enough as is with the Duty Finder basically making it a drop in multiplayer. Finally, you have to use the party finder to unlock some blue mage abilities which... what? Doesn't that defeat the point of it being a class made for solo play?
In a word: novelty. Blue Mages go around and collect spells like how you could collect Triple Triad cards and certain people are into that.
I just discovered this now: You're allowed to take Blue Mages to treasure map dungeons which will level sync. Their overpowered spells can be helpful when you can't find eight people to do it with.
The Ascians make a big deal out of the short lifespans of the races of Hydaelyn, but if they really are so insignificant, it makes no sense for important figures like Lahabrea or Emet Selch to challenge the Warrior of Light to a decisive showdown with their lives on the line instead of, say, just delaying their plans for a century and waiting for their opposition to die of old age. Emet Selch tells stories of his time creating empires only to watch them fall, but the lifetime of one mortal is too long to wait? Of course, from a storytelling standpoint, if they did this there wouldn't be a game, but in terms of practicality, it makes no sense.
In Emet-Selch's case specifically, he doesn't do this due to a mixture of his growing disillusionment with the Ascians' plans and recognizing his old friend Azem's soul in the Warrior of Light. If he just waited for the Warrior to die of old age then Azem's soul would slip into the Lifestream and be reincarnated with a very slim chance he'd ever encounter it again, and he also wanted to see if the mortal races could prove their worthiness to inherit the world through the Warrior passing his chosen trial.
While they could do that, it would mean setting aside all there plans until the Warrior of Light is dead. Plans which are who knows how many years in the making. Plus being that it’s very difficult to kill them in the first place, they had little reason to try such a tactic. Though that being said each battle has a different reason why they didn’t just remove themselves from the fray:
In the Praetorium, Lahabrea believes that the Warrior of Light is too dangerous to let live, because the more powerful they become, the more powerful Hydaelyn's influence on the world becomes.
In our last fight with Lahabrea, he needed to stop us from stopping Thordan from bringing about the Eighth Umbral Calamity, so he needed us dead. Unfortunately for him we proved far stronger. Well, even that wouldn’t have been the end if Thordan hadn’t double-crossed him.
The previous post covered quite a bit of Emet-Selch’s reasoning already, but I would also like to add that he simply couldn’t, since he felt it necessary to learn all the secrets the Exarch possessed. Since he couldn’t simply transport him through the rift he had to settle for examining him in the First.
As for Elidibus, he wanted vengeance against us.
How could the Allagans keep the Warring Triad in stasis using only aether, when they needed an untold amount of dragons in stasis in order to do the same with Bahamut?
They weren't using the Dragons to keep Bahamut in stasis. They were sustaining and empowering Bahamut.
Exactly why did Fourchenault and the other Forum members think marching Thavnairian refugees straight through Garlean Territory was a good idea? Were the seas covered in Blasphemies that would have made a sea route too hard? Or were they hoping to pick up a few Garlean refugees along the way?
They weren't evacuating the refugees to Sharlayan, they were beginning the process of evacuating all of the people of Etheirys up to the moon, now that the Final Days were upon them. The ship they were intending to use was unfinished at that point, and the Tower of Babil was an alternative with no fuel requirements and the ability to instantly send people up there en masse, hence using it would speed up the evacuation significantly and save many more lives in the long run. It was a risk to be sure, but with the Garlean Empire in ruins and the Ilsabard contingent covering their exit, it was seen as an acceptable risk to take. They didn't bank on the Final Days coming to Garlemald as quickly as they did.
Here's the problem: why didn't they use the tower when they got there? The immediately left on airship. Did anyone besides the Scions knew the tower leads to the moon?
Of course they did, they were there to use the tower in the first place. But airships can't just land wherever you want, there needs to be space for them and docking facilities and stuff like that. So they landed as close to the tower as they could, tried to walk to it, ran into the horde of Blasphemies, and gave up on approaching the tower as too dangerous and went back to the plan A of only using their spaceship.
Why did the Empire's faith in Emperor Varis create the Primal Anima? What I mean is that their desperate prayer for salvation and leadership created an Eldritch Abomination that existed in perpetual suffering. Why was Anima created when a similar wish for salvation turned Louisoix into the Phoenix? Wouldn't a similar source of faith create a similar creature?
Because Fandaniel and Zenos performed the summoning. As shown with Titan in the heavensward the summoner decides a lot of the primal's goals and identity. Anima was also summoned into Varis' already rotting corpse and immediately hijacked by Zenos will. Anima's appearance as a rotting shackled mummy very much fits.
In Heavensward, how'd Kan-e-Senna get all the way to the Dravanian Forelands? Presumably she would have used an Aetheryte - but she would have had to have made quite a walk (or ride) to get there from Ishgard. (I think they imply that - because Kan-E-Senna mentions that the road was devoid of Dravanians.)
The same way the Warrior of Light and their party got there, on foot or on a mount. The game just omitted the necessary travel time.
Well, you can catch an airship from Gridania to Ishgard. From there it's Coerthas Western Highlands -> Dravanian Forelands. I'd guess she has a special chocobo or similar that's been bred for trips.
In that bridge that leads to Ishgard, the bottom is so filled with Aether (Wind and ice? Or water I think?) that no mortal could survive such conditions - hence why it was Elidibus to get the Eyes of Nidhoggr. But... there are support pillars from said bridge going down into the abyss. Is there a ledge or something (just before the concentrations of aether become too harsh for any mortal) that the pillars are on? I can believe that.. but how'd anyone get down there to build such a thing?
If you take a look at the overworld map (not the best metric) you'll see that the bridge is a series of smaller bridges built on smaller rocks so you have an idea on what they were going for.
So... where's Pashtarot? Gaius apparently had the masks of Altima and Deudalaphon - so between all the other Ascians in the Convocation, that just leaves Pashtarot left unaccounted for. What happened to him? Is he in the same place as the minor Ascians like the masked Mage and Travanchet?
Unless Gaius had access to auracite, it's unlikely they were permanently killed. Yoshida has said that there will be future content with the remaining Ascians.
So if an Ascian is sundered, do they technically "die", or do they just get "reincarnated" and this process makes them skip the reformation? And if that's the case, when Emet-Selch implants the memories into the reincarnation, is he implanting their genuine memories or are they skewed in some way? (ie Zodiark's tempering, Hermes's "Make everyone forget" spell.)
Sundered means split into 14 pieces. The Unsundered (Selch, Eldibus and Lahabrea) find the sundered versions of their comrades and unlock all their memories of their past as an Ancient and past lives they've lived. And as seen with Amon/Fandaniel, they don't always side directly with their Ancient self or beliefs.
How did Nael van Darnus die and why did Eula assume his identity?
Lorebook says the original Nael died in a poorly managed mission arranged by their father. Eula went mad as she could not do anything to heal his wounds and murdered their father and people she think were responsible for his death. She also has an unhealthy obsession with her brother, not in an incestuous way, so she assumed his identity to bring honor to his name.
I've seen people ask why Venat didn't use the Echo to show Emet Selch and the other members of the conclave what happened with Meteion. My interpretation was that they wouldn't have believed her because they didn't like the implications, but is there more to it?
Too big of a risk for the Butterfly of Doom? Showing them the source of what was to come could mean that everyone put their energies in trying to prevent Meteion's song of oblivion at the source, but being unable to reach her source, they'd waste time and resources and thus be unable to recover from the Final Days when they did strike. While the future of Etheirys isn't ideal, it still exists and thus can fight back. To take an alternative action would have been a gamble with too great a risk of losing.
Memories can be altered as Hermes proved. Venat was also in the facility when Kairos triggered: So they could argue that it screwed her mind especially badly. Venat also was seen as an oddball by most Ancients; having completeled her duties, yet refusing to return to the star. If she suddenly claimed the end of the world was coming without proof, people would probably believe she had just finally fully lost her marbles. Which is why she recruited people she already knew like the Ancient the Watcher was wrought from. If they wanted to know her intentions, which the echo doesn't provide, perhaps they could do the "ascian fusion" with her, but Lahabrea would oppose it on principal after what happened with him and Athena. Anyone believing her after said fusion would be seen as "corrupted" by her "madness".
So when an Ascian possesses a dead person, do they heal anything that would kill the body? Zenos slit his throat and Asahi was impaled (Albeit without even so much as breaking the skin) yet when Elidibus and Fandaniel are using their bodies, they're no worse for wear.
Evidently so, since if Zenos was walking around Garlemald with his throat slashed, one would imagine that more people would have believed the truth of him being possessed by Elidibus.
It's not common (or even semi common) knowledge that Ascians can possess dead bodies around the time of the Post Stormblood quests, right? Because since Ascians can easily possess dead bodies, obviously the dead should be cremated so they won't get perverted by Ascians.
It's not a common knowledge, no. Spreading word about immortal, powerful and body-hopping sorcerors would create more panic and paranoia that its worth. Also, since Ascians are perfectly capable of possessing the living, as Thancred can personally attest, cremating bodies will only increase the likelyhood of some unfortunate soul having their body stolen and perverted.
The Warrior of Light being the same between Legacy and 2.0 is fine and all, but then it raises brows about a potential Continuity Snarl with your openings, which to Endwalker remain unchanged: a no-geared adventurer wandering in via caravan with no context for anything going on in Eorzea, having come to find their calling as an adventurer. The Legacy import opening explicitly has the character warp in and wander to their assigned city state by themselves instead. It creates the question of how Louisoux warping them five years into the future even lines up with non-Legacy characters being implied to have traveled quite far, unless we're supposed to just assume it's Laser-Guided Amnesia to themselves off-screen?
It does make sense when you go through Heavensward to explain it. Louisoux did a perfect cast of a variant of the Flow spell, the same one Y'shtola casts at the end of ARR to save herself and Thancred. The catch to that spell is that even a perfect cast of it requires an additional sacrifice of all affected. In Y'shtola's case it was her natural vision and for Thancred it was his ability to manipulate Aether. What was the Warrior's sacrifice? His memories.
Rowena, the ever growing wealthy merchant, sets up shop in Mor Dhona for all of 2.0. In 3.0, she is still there and somehow is also in Idyllshire at the same time!
Seems like 3.1 finally explains how, or at least gives Rowena a new way to travel. She has a mini aetheryte in her Mor Dhona shop, allowing her to travel between there and Idyllshire.
In a similar manner as Rowena, Urianger will always appear in the Waking Sands if you haven't completed all the quests to unlock A Realm Reborn's Extreme Primal trials. Even after the Scions move to the Rising Stones, when he's adventuring with the rest of the Scions, or when he's on the First with no way to get back to the Source. Even better, he's still in his old outfit from before Shadowbringers. Of course, this is explained as earlier content always happening before later content no matter your place in the story.
It is explained that the reason people are charged gil to use aetherytes via the Teleport spell is Eorzea's way of paying off the debt incurred to have the aetherytes rebuilt with wealthy businessmen from Ul'dah footing the bill. It is never explained (other than for gameplay purposes) why adventurers still have to pay gil to teleport in between areas that man has never set foot into, such as Azys Lla and the Churning Mists.
Teleportation may cause wear on the local aetheryte network in some way, even if no one else is there to maintain the destination point.
Most chocobo stations charge money for the obvious reason that the chocobokeep wants a fee. But when you find unattended stations in Dravania, the Warrior of Light leaves a fee there anyway — basically out of superstition.
So what exactly happened to the Allagans? Yes, there was an earthquake, but Hydaleyn must have many tectonic plates just as Earth does, which should mean that even a very violent earthquake wouldn't stretch across the entire planet's surface. And even if it did, the Allagans were a spacefaring race - the moon Bahamut was sealed in didn't create or get into its orbit itself. Anyone that can create a death star sized moon to hold an Elder primal must have the ability to create colonies (small moons, perhaps?) elsewhere in the star system Hydaleyn resides in. And as of patch 3.2, it is know that time manipulation/travel is possible. Did a colony of Allagans simply move to another time. To the current game's imminent future, perhaps?
It's possible that the majority of the Allagan Empire was localized in Eorzea or other smaller countries rather than a complete global superpower. It's possible such devastating earthquakes in a single continent that rivalled the Calamity would be enough to wipe them out. We know that they were able to launch Dalamund, but that doesn't mean the Empire had the means of colonized space travel (the captive didn't have to worry about food or water in this case).
It was actually confirmed that at one point they did control most of known civilization with the exception of Meracydia (though it is unknown if this included the New World). Perhaps the destruction wrought from Xande's pact with the Cloud of Darkness and the power from the Crystal Tower truly was close to an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
The official lore book goes into more detail on this. The Allagan Empire was in fact centered in Eorzea, but the entirety of the civilization was powered by the Crystal Tower, which among other things was a gigantic solar panel. The Empire bound Bahamut into Dalamud and sent it into orbit, with Emperor Xande's plan to use the primal's fire-aspected nature to more efficiently absorb solar energy, and then send it directly to the Crystal Tower. However the Allagan scientists did not properly account for the sheer amount of power that Dalamud could produce, and the tremendous force of the connection almost instantly created a power surge and massive earthquakes that would bury the Tower and much of the surrounding area. That which was not destroyed in the earthquake was left without power, its technology useless. The survivors of this calamity decided that rather than try to rebuild, they would destroy or hide what was left so that future generations would not succumb to hubris in the way that their own civilization did.
Further explained in Shadowbringers: aether imbalances on one of the shards cause the excess aether to spill into the Source world, amplifying associated disasters into full-blown Calamities. So if an excess of earth aether was poured into the Crystal Tower's earthquakes...
Why does the fake Inquisitor Guillaime even bother antagonizing the Scions? They have nothing to do with the reason he's there and if any group could possibly expose what he's doing and ruin his entire scheme it would be the Scions. It seems like he's taking a huge risk for very little reward and he could do a lot more damage by just letting the Scions do what they came there to do and leave without drawing attention to himself, or even help expedite their quest (which he's in a position to do) so they leave faster and do less damage to his cause and his allies. They want something from his allies, true, but it's something completely useless to them. Instead, he gets in their way, forces them into an alliance with his enemies, gets a lot of his allies killed and his plans blown apart, then dies, and his allies lose the thing the Scions were after anyway.
The second the Scions started snooping his plan was going to fail in the worst kind of Morton's Fork scenario: Let the Scions into the Stone Vigil and they wipe out the occupying Dravanians enough that Ishgard can reclaim it for both strategic and sentimental reasons (which ends up happening anyway), or give them access and tell the dragons inside to just let them go peacefully, which would cast a ton of suspicion on him... if they didn't just ignore it anyway, as it's made pretty clear that Nidhogg and his brood don't give a damn about the Heretics until they've become a dragon themselves.
In the Ivalice Raid storyline, we learn that Garlemald has a hand in covering up Ramza's involvement in the Zodiac Braves story generations ago since Ramza was a heretic to the church at the time. But why would Garlemald, an athiest state, try to cover up the actions of a heretic to a church? Probably mostly since the story wouldn't work without it, but it doesn't really make much sense.
It might be that the digging they did while considering making the records public knowledge lead them to (correctly) realize that he was not only a Warrior of Light but also very much closely connected to some very anti-Garlean Primal activity, likely leading to the Garleans (or Solus if he was directly involved) to continue the coverup so it didn't get out that a heretic was not only in actuality one of its greatest heroes but also a blessed of a Goddess the Garleans claim doesn't exist.
So here's what I don't get about the Four Lords quest line ending. If Suzaku has access to revival magic, why didn't she use it to save Genbu during the fight against Koryu, instead leading to Soroban to summon Genbu's spirit as part of a Fusion Dance?
Resurrective magic in this game seems to functionally be a magic defibrillator, so while Suzaku's powers could revive her adds (an extension of herself) and probably heal someone who was effectively dead, reviving someone truly dead is only the realm of necromancy. Even if her powers were that strong, it would be moot anyway because Genbu's body dispersed into Aether upon death so there was nothing to raise.
To kill an Ascian, and we mean Killed Off for Real, it requires distinct resources and specific means to accomplish that only the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and very close associates like the Scholars of Sharlayan are privy to. How in the world did Gaius, with no magic and only a Garlean Gunblade to his name, become the Shadowhunter by killing several of them as what amounts to a Badass Normal? The story doesn't even imply he has White Auracite or a means to produce a Blade of Light, either.
Most of the masks Gaius had were belonging to black-masks, the underlings who are implicitely (per the Summoner quests) not able to evacuate their bodies and die with them. While he does have a few red Overlord masks, there's never anything to say he permanently killed them, at best he most likely just drove them from their host bodies by killing them (itself a masterful display of skill and power).
When evacuating the people of Thavnair, why did the Sharlayan council think it was a good idea to march them straight through Garlemald?!
To use the Tower of Babil to send them up to the moon without having to use their ship. It wasn't just evacuating them from Thavnair, it was beginning the process of migrating the world's population up to the moon, and having a working teleporter that can instantly send people up there en masse was a more attractive option than having to use a ship with limited capacity and fuel requirements, and that wasn't even finished by that point. It was a risk to be sure, but the Final Days couldn't wait, and with the Garlean Empire in ruins and the Ilsabard contingent covering their exit, it was seen as an acceptable risk to take. They didn't bank on the Final Days coming to Garlemald until it was too late.
One of Endwalker's biggest reveals is that the moon itself is a construct created by Hydaelyn to serve as Zodiark's prison, and then as an emergency ark to get the people of the Source to another planet if necessary; however, there is one problem: if you go to Elpis, and look up, you can see that there's already a moon. Since Elpis is pre-Sundering, it doesn't make sense for there to already be a moon, especially when it's explicitly stated that the current moon was created, not transformed by Hydaelyn.
Technically it's possible that the original moon got destroyed as part of the final days, considering that when we run through the Amaurot dungeon, we get a view of the planet which is clearly lacking a moon and shows a meteor shower of massive proportions going down on the planet. The original moon might have gotten destroyed during the original Final Days and Venat decided to replace it as part of her plan to stop Zodiark.
So the Omega quests in EW reveal that despite the base expansion saying giving in to despair is what causes a transformation into a Blasphemy... it's in fact entirely up to luck (which probably explains why Sharlayans weren't popping into monsters, can you imagine how many of them would turn into Blasphemies over getting a bad score on their A levels?). So the whole "be strong and never give up" thing was... bunk. So then what does that mean of the Ancients? Was there actually a chance for them to gain control over the rampaging magics? Was everything just the result of Venat jumping the gun in fear she would otherwise doom the entire planet if she didn't hurry? Also what happened to the souls of people who turn into Blasphemies? Y'shtola says they vanish, but then it turns out it's just Meteion's illusions obscuring them? 6.1 was very confusing, and it's clear the writers want to move away from the Hydaelyn/Zodiark arc quickly.
It has nothing to do with luck. The point this quest was making (or, rather, reinforcing) is that what helps us forge through the hardest of times is the support of people close to us, and sense of purpose. It pretty explicitly compares Khalzahl, who turned into a Blasphemy, with Djinabaha and Nashvan. The former, a fellow trader, admitted that he was too busy dealing with problems to fall into despair, while the latter, while he was at the time at the end of the rope due to having witnessed his child's death, nonetheless found the strength to endure thanks to Djinabaha's support. Khalzahl, on the other hand, has pretty much lost everything when Thavnair was closed off, and he had no one who could help him shoulder his grief. As for Ancients, the part about support is the most important, considering that, as was shown by Elpis, and also a short story about Hermes, when it comes to psychological support, their idea of it came down to "Just smile and don't think bad thoughts", which is a problem, to put it lightly.
That doesn't track. What kind of life did that kid have that even having his father present next to him caused him to despair to that level? The father being consoled AFTER doesn't change that nadir of despair at the time. The quest seemed to sever the tether of become a blasphemy from being a moral failing (what omega was looking for was a reason why they failed to resist, like his race did) to random chance if it affected you enough *at the moment* to the extent of turning.
There's nothing random about a child being afraid of all that's happening around them and falling into a state where they are succeptible yo becoming a blasphemy. Even a toddler who wouldn't know despair can fall into it. It's not a moral failing, it's a storm of negative emotions that person for one reason or another just can't handle.
6.3 Mentions that killing a voidsent in the Source is Permadeath... Why was the Nullstone needed for the Mhach alliance quests, since it was stated to scatter Aether and stated (if not heavily implied) to be necessary to kill them?
Assuming it's not just a plot hole, it's plausible that permadeath only applies to Voidsent who physically enter the Source through a large enough Voidgate, which are exceedingly rare and often only allow weak Voidsents like Imps and Bombs to fully cross over, and most other strong Voidsent (prior to 6.3) only enter with their soul inhabiting a vesselk. Diabolos was summoned by the Mhachi, who used a lot of vessels to help them in their mass-Voidsent summoning. Presumably, a Voidsent killed while its soul inhabits a vessel simply has their soul go back to the Void, while the Nullstone is capable of completely destroying a Voidsent even with that clause.
