Revelations from Fan Festival 2016 Tokyo

[Anonymoose]

We'd probably be better off to accept that side stories are isolated and that they end. Our past experiences give us little reason to get our hopes up that we can take things with us when we leave. To the contrary, it suggests that there is meant to be an equilibrium between beginning and end. If an NPC existed prior, they'll probably return to that neutrality. If they were introduced in that story arc, they'll probably die, live happily ever after, or be "never seen or heard from again".

After all, these arcs are written individually. The creator of the Crystal Tower couldn't kill off Cid any more than the writers of the Main Scenario could be asked to shoehorn G'raha Tia into the Scions of the Seventh Dawn for the rest of the game. The sole exception might be if there's an agreement to borrow or take over something that's already over, but such things appear to be treated as exceptions rather than standards. Even Estinien and Nero keep on going out just as they came in.

But that cuts both ways. The chance that Yasumi Matsuno can throw a wrench into the entire rest of Hydaelyn is slim. He can't, like, sew Hydaelyn to the actual Ivalice in a side arc and walk away; they'd have to wall it off in a Holiday Event Bubble like Lightning or Shantotto, and I think the chances of that are slim, too. We can wonder how they'll do it, we can be anxious about how it looks until then, but it's way too early to, with zero context, spoil the hype or get acerbic. People have just as many fond memories of Ivalice as they had of Crystal Tower, and Crystal Tower didn't break the lore any more than the Floating Continent or Qiqirn.