[SPOILERS] Revelations from Patch 4.01

[Mysteltain]

Something to note: Exdeath doesn't die the same as O1-O3. He gets sucked into the void. That hints towards him being the ACTUAL Exdeath and not a simulacrum like the others. Means we might see Neo Exdeath later.

Also how does this tie in with WoD, since Cloud of Darkness is supposed to be the personification of the Void itself. The Rift from FF5 was just a fancy name for the Void, wasn't it?

But is it the actual Void from FFV? Since Omega quite literally imagined this whole damn thing up in the Rift (the FFXIV Rift that exists between Shards, which we have no confirmation of being the Rift from the rest of the series), for all we know his imagined Exdeath is drawing his power from an imagined Void that only grants him powers because that is how Omega perceives Exdeath powering himself up. Also, according to Yoshi-P, there will be a "Brute Justice like moment" in O4 Savage, so likely in that version of the fight Exdeath gets sucked into the Void and then gets spit out as Neo-Exdeath (or we get pulled in with him, who knows).

That's essentially the crux of this storyline: we are, quite literally, in a world created by a being that cannot distinguish between reality and imagination. He's taking legends, faerie tales, myths, etc. from previous civilizations (many of which are references to older FF titles) and making them manifest. So I'll throw my hat in with Moose, Cilia, Alleo, Nerisu, and Fenral and say that all of the bosses we encounter in Omega's Rift are of his own creation--which we know that he can do--and not ripped directly from the actual worlds of other FF.

I'm not a fan of the multiverse theory, because thinking rationally, since there hasn't been a consistent hand at the wheel since 2001, there's no way all these teams were thinking about anything beyond the current work. Some writers like Nojima feel differently, and try to link their worlds together (see the X-2->VII retcon), but those should be considered exceptions, and not the rule.

I think it's better to think of it as each game has its own multiverse containing the other games' worlds in some form, but those multiverses do not connect with each other. You have to consider the lore of the source game as well as XIV to determine the validity of the connection. For example, while it may be tempting to think of the fallen thirteenth shard as "the FFIII world" because of the Cloud of Darkness, her presence there in a different form of existence than she had in FFIII is what actually rules out the possibility of a direct link.

Another funny thing about our Void is that, when you talk to Unukalhai at the end of the Warring Triad questline and he reveals his origins, the story of how the 13th fell draws far more from the Ivalice Alliance games than anything in FFIII, what with the usage of auracite turning the heroes into aether-starved demons. So does that mean that FFIII and Ivalice are in the same world because of information in FFXIV!? *DUN DUN~*