Revelations from Fan Festival 2016 Tokyo

[Enkidoh]

Ivalice by comparison is an absolutely beloved setting that has only grown more popular over the years with the rise of one of it's major original inspirations ASOIAF/GOT becoming a global phenom and making people go/look back on it with even more appreciation.

The first Ivalice set game was actually a spinoff though (FF Tactics), and was more clearly based on real-world history (the 50-Year War and the Lion War being obvious expies of England's Hundred Year War and the War of the Roses), given a fantasy spin. FFXII's story was, rather more more modern, it had a very similar concept and narrative to Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope, only with chocobos and in Ivalice, and FF Tactics Advance was not even a 'true' Ivalice game insomuch it was more that it used the old trope of "real world children discover some mystical artifact that sucks them into a fantasy world and they have adventures" and thus the 'Ivalice' in it wasn't even a 'real' place.

I haven't played Tactics A2 though, so I can't be the judge of that, other than I heard it had a similar scenario to the first Tactics Advance game. Vagrant Story doesn't really count as Matsuno didn't even plan on having it as an Ivalice-set game originally (it was originally planned to be the first game in an entirely new series), only to be retconned into Ivalice later.

So saying George R.R. Martin's pension fund series 'inspired' the Ivalice games is like saying H.G. Wells inspired George Lucas to make Star Wars. Sure there are vague concepts that are shared in those works, but they're common tropes of the genre and hardly 'created' by the earlier work. I'm really sorry if it seems like I am attacking you here, as it's not my intention (and I have to admit I do love FFT and liked FFXII even though it was a deeply flawed game). I just wanted to show that the Ivalice games were not as directly inspired by recent middlemen but by general ideas and concepts that are standard to the science-fiction and fantasy genres in general (and even real world history). But I digress.