Void Ark: Confirmed to be a relic from the War of Magi?

[myahele]

I wonder if Ferdiad will play a role in the next installment? After reading abit of lore regarding Scatach I know that she has a fortress of shadow (that tower?) and she's involved with Cu Calain and Ferdiad

I'm sure unleashing her will be bad and she's atleast more powerful than Diabolos and the Voidsent responsible for unleashing the Tonberry plague. But she's no Cloud of Darkness. Not even Xande could control her

[Fenral]

I wonder if Ferdiad will play a role in the next installment? After reading abit of lore regarding Scatach I know that she has a fortress of shadow (that tower?) and she's involved with Cu Calain and Ferdiad

Final Fantasy has typically depicted Cu Chulainn as seen in the particular episode in which he was turned into a horrifying, shapeless monster. It's an incident that has pretty much nothing to do with the actual legends surrounding him. Cait Sith is an unrelated figure, but also Irish in origin. Since no actual plot seems to be taken from Irish Mythology, I think it's safe to write it off as clever theme-naming at this point. Echidna, however, is Greek, and also just happens to be the one boss from FFIII's World of Darkness that didn't make it into the CT series.

Digging into the Irish mythology some more, Cu Chulainn and Ferdiad were foster brothers trained by the warrior woman Scathach, each with their own unique strengths, sort of like the hypothetical invincible spear and unbreakable shield. Stuff happens, they are of course forced into a duel to the death from which neither can back down from, and it looks like Cu Chulainn defeated Ferdiad by thrusting his spear Gae Bolg into Ferdiad's... Riiiiiiiight. I defy anyone to convince me that that's not a metaphor. (There's a reason people call it the "Gay Bulge.")

[Zohar_Lahar]

When I went into the Void Ark today, I wondered how exactly Cuchulain, an Irish mythological hero, got turned into this thing in Ivalice and Eorzea.

[Cilia]

Is it weird that the biggest revelation I took from Void Ark is that... Ivalice Espers aren't happening?

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

Dude, my map said "Ivalice" last I checked... oh, wait, no it didn't, so we don't have to follow Ivalice mythos.

See, this is why I highly recommend against trying to use other games as frames of reference for in-game mythology. They don't have to line up with the series' legacy. Belias can be an Elder Primal here and Cuchulainn can be a Voidsent. End of story.

(Please remember this is just going on current knowledge, and as always, the answer to any "Is it possible..." question is "Yes it is!")

[Balipu]

So far between Cait Sith, Cuchulainn and Scathach this was very Irish.

[Nalien]

See, this is why I highly recommend against trying to use other games as frames of reference for in-game mythology. They don't have to line up with the series' legacy.

Oh I know, it's just the same issue people had with Diabolos and Fenrir... Summons turning into nothing more than bosses, a mid-boss in this case... Diabolos at least had potential for a return, and return he did, though Fenrir is still overwhelmingly disappointing... Voidsent at least have the advantage of, well, being Voidsent, though I'm not sure how they scale compared to Cloud of Darkness, but Diabolos is at least less disappointing now.

Main reason I'm fairly excited for Void Ark is the potential for new Voidsent lore, because frankly we don't really know anything about them... We probably know more about Primals at this point... Would be quite nice to know more, considering they're basically a mirror of Primals at this point... Both drain aether... Bother are summoned unto Hydaelyn... Both fill their ranks with a large number of past summons... Only difference is Primals give us Thordan as a reference to Knights of the Round, and Voidsent give us... Meh... I'm hoping there is potential for specific Voidsent to make a return, because if Atomos' time has passed... Damn that's disappointing... They could all be Trials in their own right, but instead they're "wasted" on 24-man level content...

I could actually see Belias being a Voidsent at this point... SE was probably just being lazy when they gave Ifrit-Egi a coat of purple paint, but I'm certainly smelling something up with that now... There's nothing particularly wrong with either being Voidsent of course, it's just Voidsent have (so far) been handled in a fairly lackluster manner, IMO. I'm certainly not going to ignore past titles when speculating, only using this games lore is certainly more likely to be right, but I find looking at the past titles for cues to be far more fun. Certainly, any initial disappointment of Cuchulainn being a throw-away boss fight is currently being replaced by a fair amount of speculation in my head... Oh the implications this might have...

[Fenral]

Dude, my map said "Ivalice" last I checked... oh, wait, no it didn't, so we don't have to follow Ivalice mythos.

But there is an Ivalice on the map of Hydaelin. Somewhere.

[myahele]

This is a different game and we probably should not think summons from previous FF will have the same degree of importance as they did in previous.

Take a look a hecontonier, in one game it was one piece that could destroy the world and in this game it's a mere mob (or was it a boss?)

[StarDrake]

I suppose the simplest explanation is that the Allagans didn't know nearly as much about the Void as they thought they did, but I'm still kind of confused at where Scathach fits into the Void hierarchy if we're still meant to think of the Cloud of Darkness as the undisputed top.

I actually don't think she ever was. If you go back and read the quest text carefully, it is very careful about calling CoD a high-order Voidsent, not the highest-order Voidsent. I've imagined ever since the introduction of the "orders" concept that there's a fair bit of jockeying for even higher position at the very top. Scathach is probably a being roughly on order with CoD.

Agreed that the Mhachi apparently forgot about things the Allagans never knew, though. Which is refreshing, it's good to see that one old civilization didn't have a monopoly on knowledge.

5. Seems like the Mhachi won and started the war, afterall. The predicted and prepared for the great Flood/umbral era. Would have survived had it now been for them losing control of the Voisent

Uh, not quite; nobody "won" the War of the Magi, because the Elementals got fed up with sentient life as a whole and tried to bury the world in water. That's why the Ark exists at all; the Mhachi were going to try and ride out the wave. One does get the sense the Mhachi were ultimately getting the upper hand via completely unrestrained brutality, though, when you piece all the Sixth Umbral quests together into a whole, which is another element that may have driven the Elementals to do what they did. Indeed, we even now have confirmation of something I've suspected for a while now: the use of void magics, and especially their use as a weapon of total war, had a corrosive effect on the Mhachi culturally and morally, and those who tried to stem the tide of their society's collapse were ultimately silenced. Makes you wonder where XIV's Shatotto fell on the spectrum...

[Kotori_Southburd]

so what differentiates a Voidmage from a Blackmage, if any?