Why i think "Flames of Truth" was a weak way to explain the world's survival

Video in reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xOOFCltZuc [Final Fantasy XIV: Flames of Truth]

This video was released in 2015, two years after the launch of A Realm Reborn (and probably after Heavensward, though i can't be certain. Perhaps right before as well.) However, there is a gripe or two i have with the video, and one (i believe, at least) very legitimate plothole.

To go over my main gripe; this explanation (with Louisoix's sacrifice) felt very... how do i put it? Over-the-top, for lack of a better way to describe it. I feel like it didn't fit the tone of the game at all, and this is... PROBABLY due to being created after the original director, writers, so on so forth, were no longer working on the game.

But that's not to mention that this didn't have to be tampered with at all in the first place. It's stated that every Astral era (I believe the "golden" ages are the astral eras, correct me if i'm wrong) is ended with a cataclysm of sorts; this "end of the world" scenario is nothing new, so why did the world's survival have to be explained? It could have been written off as the world surviving like it always did. You could say that every cataclysm is prevented from destroying the world entirely, or that cataclysms aren't necessarily always of this nature, but we're given no indication for that! Many may assume, upon finding this knowledge, that this isn't a new thing!

Anyway, that's my rant just about over. Just something i noticed when watching Flames of Truth while looking at 1.0 gameplay and i thought i'd share it. I like ranting. But what do you all think about Flames of Truth?

Before I could offer any of my own thoughts, I'd want to ask for a point of clarification:

The video actually first released in October of 2014 as part of The Final Coil of Bahamut. The Rise of the Seventh Umbral Era story arc of 1.0 and the Binding Coil of Bahamut story arc of 2.0 are two sides of the same coin. Did you see the video outside of that context? I can see where it might read differently in that case.

As for the survival thing, an Umbral Era typically comes with such cataclysmic destruction that Eorzea is all but completely abandoned and civilization practically starts from scratch when the land begins to recover and the first people return. Louisoix's actions mitigated that, thus preserving the areas and cities that we were familiar with so they could be in ARR.

Remember from the early MSQ that NO ONE recalls what happened and what ultimately saved them from utter destruction. There was a lot of damage done, sure, but it pales in comparison to what could have happened. Most calamities are so severe that civilization practically has to hit the "reset factory settings" button. Entire cultures get completely wiped out. But this time, it just...stopped. The most that could be inferred was that Louisoix and the then-Warriors of Light had something to do with it, but as he was never found (only the broken remains of Tupsimati), and no one can remember a darn thing about the WoLs save their existence, the details were a complete mystery. Bahamut was there one minute and then just...gone.

We don't get that closure until Final Coil of Bahamut, where the scene is question is a visual of the events Louisoix is telling to his grandchildren about exactly what happened that day (per their request). Most of the revelations occur shortly before that scene in the Coil narrative, but the gist of it is Louisoix was able to transcend mortal limits and quite literally tear Bahamut a new one. The scene functions as a way to engage the viewer with "wanna watch an old guy beat the ever loving crap out of a dragon 1,000 times his size?"

You're probably missing all context, and on that assumption, I can see how you'd view it as a bit over the top. The price Louisoix had to pay is only alluded to for a few frames, as that was likely a massive spoiler at the time. THAT Bahamut was defeated and the day was saved was never in question, else 2.0's story of 5 years later wouldn't exist. But without coil, the casual player had no idea HOW he was defeated, and the cinematic uses flashy effects to basically come out and say "Loiusoix beat him up and took his lunch money. The End."

It's a hey this thing needs to be stopped because it's on a I hate everything rampage and it doesn't care that those who imprisoned him are long gone. Bahamut also seems to be able to easily enthrall things so if Loiusoix hadn't done what he did I don't know when or where he'd of run out of steam and energy. It also at least through the story of coil explain why the land didn't heal as well as it should have.

While Bahamut was a Calamity on a much smaller scope than, say Oha-Sok, that was because he was stopped within minutes of his release; had Bahamut been allowed to run rampart across Eorzea he would have likely destroyed all city-states, reshaped the continent and bled the land dry of Aether. That said, it was a very different scenario than those we know of: The earthquakes caused by the Crystal Tower just stopped; the waters brought forth by the Flood receded. Given that we don't know what plan the Ascians had for stopping Bahamut, if Bahamut HADN'T been stopped (bearing in mind that Omega was still dormant) we could have faced an extinction level event like the thirteenth shard.

So you kind of answered your own question by saying "cataclysms aren't always of this nature" :D From those we know of, Bahamut is a completely different thing altogether.

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Originally Posted by DrMaverick

PROBABLY due to being created after the original director, writers, so on so forth, were no longer working on the game.

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The team that designed and implemented the story that led to the near destruction of Eorzea at the end of 1.0 is the same team working on the game now. The original director and writers (at least the lead lore creator) had already departed/been replaced, as the current team was brought in first to see if they could salvage the game as it existed in 1.0. When they decided that shutting down that version and redoing the game was a better option, they then set about creating the story and events that would explain both the end of the world and how it survived.

When 1.0 ended, the shutting down of the server brought with it the End of an Era trailer...that trailer was the first 5 minutes and 35 seconds of the one that you linked, with the rest being revealed as part of the Final Coil of Bahamut, as Anonymoose mentioned.

While I don't have anything that would serve as definitive proof for this, I would not at all be surprised if the full version, including Louisoix kicking Bahamut's behind, was created back in 2012 before 1.0 had ended, and then they sat on the last 1/3 until it was the "right" time in the story to reveal the entire story.

If I recall correctly (and I may certainly be wrong; I started playing with ARR, and so all my 1.0 knowledge is second hand at best), Nael's machinations, the fall of Dalamud, and Bahamut's reveal were all part of the new direction under Yoshi P. (Did Nael even exist in the lore prior, or was the character created from whole cloth after the changeover?) A story I heard was that Yoshi P had asked the lore team what was up with Dalamud, and upon being told that Bahamut was inside decided that would be the perfect way to end 1.0 to pave the way for ARR.

As others have stated, though, yes, this cataclysm is unique in the amazingly low amount of carnage involved. Louisoix tapped into some dangerous resources to make it happen, and paid the ultimate price for it, but the results speak for themselves. They might have seemed over-the-top, but the circumstances definitely called for an over-the-top response; the Godzilla Threshold had been crossed, and thoroughly.

Nael was certainly around in the 1.0 stuff come up with before Yoshida was brought on board.

I do find it very interesting that while the 7th Umbral Calamity didn't hit the "factory reset button" of society for once, we're already seeing signs of the next Umbral Calamity. And it's been no time all compared to how long the other Calamities happen after the previous one. So I wonder if the next Calamity happening quickly is a consequence of the realm not being totally destroyed in the previous Calamity.

I'd put my money on the Ascians being completely put out by the comparatively low death toll and chaos from Bahamut and are "speeding up their timetable", so to speak.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

Nael was certainly around in the 1.0 stuff come up with before Yoshida was brought on board.

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What are the premises this assumption is based on?

Lol. And now you have me watching the 1.0 cutscenes again to make sure I didn't mix up what cut-scenes were in what patches...

I think it can't really be underestimated just how little plot there was before Yoshida and crew came on to take over the production of FFXIV 1.X. Back when it came out, there were huge complaints in reviews and the like about how the plot pretty much went nowhere. Rather than a linear plot like the rest of FFXIV, 1.0 was meant more as a purely sandbox, gameplay oriented experience. It's big ticket feature was levequests after all, rather than FFXIV 2.0 and onward which markets itself more heavily on bossfights and story. If you look at the Encyclopedia Eorzea for example, 90% of the 1.0 section is actually from the post Yoshida patches. There really just wasn't very much. Amusingly the period before the end of 1.X was apparently especially fun for the lore/story teams, since they could do more or less whatever they wanted given that the whole world was going to blow up, hence all of the kooky cults and other high strangeness.

Do Astral/Umbral eras don't just occur in Eorzea. It's planet-wide.

Also I suspect the Ascians have been banking on Hydaelyn stopping eachh cataclysm by re-balancing the depleted aether by absorbing a shard. In fact, they force her hand. I think the original cataclysm was meant to just be Dalamud falling.

Astral/Umbral Ears are probably planet-wide. The Umbral Eras definetly are. You don't get disasters on the scale they are described in the Lore Book and have them only be local.

Here's a write-up I did of all the Umbral Era effects earlier: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4824364

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

Astral/Umbral Ears are probably planet-wide. The Umbral Eras definetly are. You don't get disasters on the scale they are described in the Lore Book and have them only be local.

Here's a write-up I did of all the Umbral Era effects earlier: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4824364

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It does create the odd effect of the entire world being stuck in a disaster just because Eorzea screwed up. People in Othard or Meracydia or the New World were probably going "all right, what did those Eorzean idiots do this time".

The Seventh Umbral Calamity/Era really was weird, though. The actual Calamity was very localized, even if the pre-Calamity effects (eg aether drain) was presumably global. So to everyone outside Eorzea, everything continued more or less as per normal, minus one moon in the night skies.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Also I suspect the Ascians have been banking on Hydaelyn stopping eachh cataclysm by re-balancing the depleted aether by absorbing a shard. In fact, they force her hand. I think the original cataclysm was meant to just be Dalamud falling.

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I'm curious why so many people continue to think Hydaelyn is replenishing aether by re-absorbing a Shard. As far as I'm aware, there is no actual basis for this fan theory. The Ascians work towards a Calamity in order to break down the barrier between the Source and a Shard. The outcome may be the same, but the purported motive for the means is not. At least, not based on what I understand about Calamities.

People keep expecting Hydaelyn to follow the "benevolent diety/god was hiding something bad all along" trope when there still hasn't been any set-up for it.

We also don't know the mechanics of how a Calamity actually works. So there's much speculation about what is really happening in a Calamity and how it is really happening. And inevitably people wonder if that might be the thing Hydaleyn is hiding the makes her out to be not so great.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

People keep expecting Hydaelyn to follow the "benevolent diety/god was hiding something bad all along" trope when there still hasn't been any set-up for it.

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To be fair, SE loves that trope. The church/god almost always ends up being, if not actively evil, at least not as benevolent as it appears (we already saw it play out that way in Ishgard.)

While I agree that that's probably not the direction the story is heading in this case, I also wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being true.

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Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

I'm curious why so many people continue to think Hydaelyn is replenishing aether by re-absorbing a Shard.

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YouTube / Reddit speculation being repackaged as fact.

Yet for me the Hydaelyn/zodiark thing is following the Altana/Promethus story from XI with differences. As when Altana did her I'm sorry but I can't withstand your actions anymore she didn't create other copies and he did what he did post imprisonment because he was lonely, still a little mad, but also just wanted to hear her voice again. Creating the empty also took him a very long time and I can't remember if he started working on it right away or until he fell into a depression. Moose would be better at explaining and correcting anything.

Also it was said after she saved our bacon during our fight with ultima weapon she was weaker than she had been and that she wasn't getting much aether back like either A) something was clogging up the flow B ) something or someone was creating a blockage or C ) a little bit of both has been happening. That's one of the few things that got mentioned but hasn't been been brought up again. I want to say we learned this around when we went to the Anti tower. Hydaelyn comes off to me like a horse with blinders on where she's not aware of a lot of things just that she keeps on getting attacked. Like with the 1st shard to me if she knew that her champions were doing that great I'd like to think she'd of been like whoa you're going to screw up your world please slow down because I don't want you guys to end up dying just because you were that good at doing your job.

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Originally Posted by SannaR

Yet for me the Hydaelyn/zodiark thing is following the Altana/Promethus story from XI with differences. As when Altana did her I'm sorry but I can't withstand your actions anymore she didn't create other copies and he did what he did post imprisonment because he was lonely, still a little mad, but also just wanted to hear her voice again. Creating the empty also took him a very long time and I can't remember if he started working on it right away or until he fell into a depression. Moose would be better at explaining and correcting anything.

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My impression of the XI storyline is that while Altana and Promathea represented light and darkness, respectively, they were not adversaries. They were lovers. Their interactions with one another did result in a conflict, of sorts - exactly what was needed to generate the metaphysical wind that kept the Cloud of Darkness from encroaching on Vana'diel - but there was no enmity between them.

As for their parting from one another, Altana did not take any actions to separate herself from him - in fact, that's the last thing she wanted. Promathea was the instigator, and his action was, basically, to die. He didn't want to part from Altana, exactly, but he DID wish for self-destruction - the reasons why are never made clear - and succeeded. Possibly with the assistance of the Zilart; it was never clear to my what direct role they had, if any, in the upheaval.

After his death, Altana wept five tears, and those tears became the five player races. The beastmen, in turn, were born from Promathea, somehow (his blood, maybe?). For centuries, the conflicts between the Beastmen and the player races was enough to continue to keep the Cloud of Darkness at bay, but Promathea's death caused other problems - most notably, the Emptiness. Additionally, Promathea himself was on the verge of resurrecting within the body of one of the Aern of Tu'lia. This was something which, if it came to pass, would unmake the world at it currently exists - and, in at least one timeline, result in the destruction of everything but Promathea himself, in the form of the great serpent Shinryu.

At any rate, the FFXI cosmology is just as fascinating as the FFXIV cosmology, but I'd say there are far more differences than similarities!

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Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

I'm curious why so many people continue to think Hydaelyn is replenishing aether by re-absorbing a Shard. As far as I'm aware, there is no actual basis for this fan theory. The Ascians work towards a Calamity in order to break down the barrier between the Source and a Shard. The outcome may be the same, but the purported motive for the means is not. At least, not based on what I understand about Calamities.

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Ascians call Calamities "Rejoinings". It's implied that the aether is drained from the land in one aspect to bring about a calamity, and then during the Astral Era. The ascians want to return the world to its original state, probably by rejoining the shards to the source, e.g. combining the aether pools of each shard back into the source to rejoin the lifestream into one entity or some such.

Gah, what I ws trying to say is at the general sense they're simular in that you have two gods that for however long did fine co-existing until the male in both stories went and did/said something that resulted in a separation of the two. Of course in XIV we don't know yet what the reason was. Then post separation horrible things end up happening which at least in XI seems to have taken a long time for that to get to a point where intervention was needed.

One of the big differences is Altana didn't interact much if at all with the world yet everyone knows about her and says she's good which she is but the only time we get to really talk to her and learn why she doesn't is when the player becomes a god and gets told dems the rules. I mean obviously it's not going to end the same way because we already beat up Cloud of Darkness.

I do wonder though with Bahamut who's plan it was to have Tiamat do a summon and then have that summon get imprisoned. Like was that a back up plan if the cause an earthquake plan failed? Did our robed friends go oh crap the empire isn't getting the results we wanted and we forgot about Midgardsorm what the heck are we going to do to cause another calamity? They seem to be very thoughtful in how they go about getting the ball rolling except now it kind of feels like their timer is about to reach zero to the point where their "leader" has gotten rather impatient. I do get that part of this is the devs needing to have something to allow them to change the world with an in game reason behind it, but they seem to have be come sloppy recently. Or at least seem like there is some urgency on their end.

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Originally Posted by YianKutku

It does create the odd effect of the entire world being stuck in a disaster just because Eorzea screwed up. People in Othard or Meracydia or the New World were probably going "all right, what did those Eorzean idiots do this time".

The Seventh Umbral Calamity/Era really was weird, though. The actual Calamity was very localized, even if the pre-Calamity effects (eg aether drain) was presumably global. So to everyone outside Eorzea, everything continued more or less as per normal, minus one moon in the night skies.

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I found it strange in Stormblood how there's little mention of Great Flood in the Far East. No surviving arks or legends like in Eorzea.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Ascians call Calamities "Rejoinings". It's implied that the aether is drained from the land in one aspect to bring about a calamity, and then during the Astral Era. The ascians want to return the world to its original state, probably by rejoining the shards to the source, e.g. combining the aether pools of each shard back into the source to rejoin the lifestream into one entity or some such.

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That's not entirely accurate, and nobody's really sure what exactly happens, but our understanding of it thus far is:

Calamities (Rejoinings) happen because too much aether is drawn out of Hydaelyn, breaking something (a dimensional barrier separating a shard from the Source, most likely).

Hydaelyn does not eat a shard to maintain Her aetherial state. In fact if one takes Matoya's Crystal Eye (an ancient Crystal of Light) into account, She has gotten objectively weaker over the ages as a result of the Calamities. If She were eating shards to maintain Her stability and present strength, this wouldn't be the case - She would be at roughly the same power level she was to begin with.

Calamities seem to be designed to weaken Hydaelyn and return Zodiark's fragmented aether to Him - at least enough to wake Him from His slumber, since with the Void on the 13th (and partial on the 1st) all of it simply isn't available.

Taking Varis' speech in the 4.5 trailer into account, the whole "return the world / mankind to its original state" thing sounds very much like the (in)famous Human Instrumentality Project from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Whether this is the truth or not remains to be seen.

Remember that the calamity was not only caused by Bahamut but everything that happened at once, the Battle for the Cartenau, the fall of the lesser moon which had Bahamut in it, Bahamut itself, and massive amounts of aether running thourhgt Eorzea in the attempt to Summon the Twelve, which resulted in the birth of Phoenix and the havoc of Voidsent across the land throught the rejoining. Bahamut was just one of the many things that happened that day, the video isnt to explain how Eorzea survived, but how we all gave birth to a primal, Phoenix. The world survived because... well, after destruction comes rebirth (in real world history too, life isnt that easily erradicated is it). The realm had reborn. Its all very thematic.

As for the Varis speech in the trailer, maybe he is talking about a world before Hydaelyn and Zodiark started their eternal struggle. Who knows! Im very much hyped for the expansion's finale.