Quote Originally Posted by ellohwell View Post
Why did they need two leviathans though? Just because they have time to make two, doesn't mean they should act on that impulse.

There are two reasons I can see: The first reason being that the original leviathan was way too difficult to animate and they didn't know how to implement a workable battle against such a creature. The second reason is to do with plot. The sea serpent may in fact be something different than Leviathan altogether, a literal red herring.

If you watch the "The Making of a Realm #2" where they talk about the monsters, Shinya Ishida (Motion Designer) says:

"Each movement of the serpent's fins was animated separately, which was quite a trying process."
I presume the old "Sea Serpent" model required a lot of work to animate, which is quite odd considering the advances in physic engines (I don't even know if FFXIV has one ) which would make each fin animation natural and easy to generate. I don't know how they couldn't foresee how this could be a major problem when implementing this creature in an actual combat scenario when it was quite obvious by the way they were talking about it prior to launch that the serpent took so much time to animate by keyframes.

If that is the case, Yoshi-P's team probably had to create a new concept and model which could be used as a Primal fight in the future and that is the image which was presented to us in the reveal of FFXIV 2.0.