Quote Originally Posted by Shirobi View Post
There is no difference. The devs have made this clear. An "Eikon" is just the word used by the allag for the extremely powerful primals. You might call a souped up street racer a dragster, but its still a car. Just a very fast car.
That's pretty much how I took it when I read it too, but some people seem to be expressing the opinion that the Eikons are somehow fundamentally different from the other Primals. Personally, I don't think the Allagans or Garleans would distinguish one from the other, except, maybe, on a scale of how annoying they are to deal with.

The dev's made it clear that the Garlean's adopted the word "Eikon," so we can assume they were using the whole, "when in Rome" attitude. Especially because the Dev's stated that they used it as a derogatory term. This, also, would likely be an adopted attitude towards all Primals that they inherited from Allagans. After all, I think it's pretty clear that the Allagan's did not worship any Primals, nor did they fear or respect them. We're talking about a race of people who created weapons with the singular purpose of decimating Primals (ultima and omega weapons), managed to capture and seal Bahamut, and went so far as to continually summon him so they could siphon off his power uing a legion of suspended animation torture victims.

in the end, I think your metaphor for it is an accurate interpretation and is somewhat proved by the notion of Extreme Primals. The lore is that each Primal's incarnation can be stronger or weaker depending on the method of summoning and the amount of supplies used; yet, no one refers to Titan as an Eikon when he hits the steroids. It's not like they graduate out of one level of godship into another. It's just that some Primals, like Bahamut, are more threatening or difficult to handle. (I don't think we can include Odin in this list, as, at the time of the Allagans, he would have still been just a man).

That being said, there are some deities that I would say do not fall into the "Primal" definition, but they're the really big ones like Zodiark or Hydelyn (Sp?).