Midgar in FF XIV, (Dawntrail spoilers)

As someone who wants a Midagr in XIV, I think it narratively works best on The Source. A Shinra-like would be a threat to The Source's lifestream, and as a consequence, the lifestreams of the surviving reflections, and thus higher stakes. I think XIV's Midgar could be a Garlean city, and hidden somewhere in Ilsabard or it could be hidden in Meracydia, and potentially have ties to Allag.

Given how SE uses and milks FF7, it's use in FF14 will signal the end of days (again), either the game will be so unprofitable as to call for desperate measures or so devoid of ideas that there's nothing left but FF7.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

That the same patch with that dungeon also features a trial with a train boss feels a little more than coincidental.

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That train boss is a summon from FF8 tho

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Originally Posted by Striker44

I've always seen Garlemald as just a straight-up FF6 reference. Empire out to conquer the continent, Magitek everywhere, etc..

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Correct. They weren't subtle after you get the Magitek Armor Mount and listen to the theme it plays when you ride it.

Garlemald's capital however certainly had more than a few references to Midgar (the Forum Solus park is clearly meant to reference Evergreen Park, the ruined playground in the Sector 6 Slums for instance). And there has been plenty of other FFVII place references scattered throughout the game already (Costa del Sol and Gold Saucer being the two big ones of course, and then there was Eulmore's design in the First thematically referencing Midgar with the elite living in luxury suspended above the destitute living in sprawling slums on the filth they discard.).

To be really honest though, I'd rather SE just kind of move on from direct place references and feature original locations again, with only the occassional fanservices reference, as it's kind of starting to get out of hand (I mean, I love referencing past FF games as much as the next FF fan, and Yoshi outright said when ARR was still in development that it was going to feature extensive fanservice referencing to the series' history, but it's now so widespread as to be coming across now as more just lazy game design on the development team's part).

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

Given how SE uses and milks FF7, it's use in FF14 will signal the end of days (again), either the game will be so unprofitable as to call for desperate measures or so devoid of ideas that there's nothing left but FF7.

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Yea, might as well have it 1:1 ff7 but made using ff14 asset (plus your WoL tagging along). Though honestly maybe that would be more faithful remake than ff7 "remake" trilogy.

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Originally Posted by SkankyRoe

That train boss is a summon from FF8 tho

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We already get heavily referenced ff8 in shb though. Must we have a ff8 based expansion still? :/

We've also of course had the weapons from FF7 in the Sorrow of Werlyt, which in the lore are associated with the Garleans. They are portrayed as this city of technology that want to do evil things, while suppressing the people who reside in their territories (sound familiar? Shinra suppress their citizens).

The resemblence of Garleans to other FFs is because really a lot of other FFs take inspiration from eachother, so that when we got the Garleans a number of other FFs had done something along these lines already.

We also have materia. I do very much wish we flat out had the materia system from FF7, but nevertheless, having materia formed from the surrounding aether and slotting it into our gear just to give stats has certain similarities to FF7's system if you think of things like HP Plus, MP Plus, Speed Plus, Luck Plus, etc.

We have the bike on the mog station, gear from veteran rewards, and FF7 inspires a lot of the jobs generally because Aerith/Aeris is your White Mage, Cloud is your Dark Knight, Cid is your Dragoon, Tifa is your Monk, Barret/Vincent are your Machinists, Yuffie is your Ninja. I... don't know what Red XIII is.

And of course, we have the Gold Saucer and something resembling its Chocobo Racing system.

There's almost not much more they can actually do other than giving us another shard where there's a company called Shinra that suppresses its citizens, but they've repeated this trope so many times, and it's still ongoing with the Garleans because we haven't explored all their territories yet. I'd like to hope they just do something more exciting, and most likely they will.

The only other thing they can do of course is have us fight Sephiroth but I really think that would be cringe. I feel like Zenos was the best version of that and they should leave it at that - it was a character with long hair and swords, that could not be beaten by anyone else, who was willing to bring about the end of the world just to satisfy their own desires, and had the capability to transcend the limits of their own flesh - sound familiar?

Midgar's technology is diesel, grime, material, engines humming, metal and rust.
Alexandria's technology is green and clean, abstracted, circuit boards, magic and holograms.
If they try to make the technology of the two cities contiguous, it would deteriorate the feel and tone that makes Midgar identifiable.

Personally, I don't wanna see as much as a rotary phone in my fantasy RPG for a while. I know high tech has a place in Final Fantasy, and Allagan stuff has never felt out of place, but Dawntrail took it a bit too far for me. I'm glad some people are enjoying it, but I'm so ready to move on.