Quote Originally Posted by Alleo View Post
I mean they say a lot that FF14 has nothing in canon to do with all the other FF (because people speculated that the shards are the FF worlds) but at the same time you take over whole monsters without changing them much, whole zones and names (and even NPCs that only have a bit of a different story ending) and then wonder why people still believe that we share a universe with them all.
The thing is, all FF games do this. A Behemoth is a Behemoth, a Flan is a Flan, a Chimera is a Chimera. The same six summons just keep getting used (Shiva, Titian, Rahmu, Ifrit, Leviathan, Bahamut). We keep having broody heroes getting mind-controlled (Kain or Cloud or Estinean). We keep getting people named Cid who give us airships. And yet none of the games are supposed to be happening in the same universe unless the creators say they are.

For me I have always been a bit skeptic about the amount of fanservice but at least felt that it was feeling more like these parts do fit in FF14 even if they are taken from other games. I could for example understand crystal tower without knowing about the game it came from. But SB was really heavy on fanservice. Both raids are not original and both are mostly just there for fanservice. We do not just have iconic places but also bosses, NPCs and the lore. And that imo is too much.
I have a hard time seeing the difference between the way the Crystal Tower raid was set up and the way the Return to Ivalice raid was set up. And if you take any look at FFIII, you'll find that the Crystal Tower raid follows the story-line of its last dungeon really closely like the Return to Ivalice raid follows it's story-line. I've never played either FFXII or FF Tactics and I have really good idea what is going on the Return to Ivalice raid because I like to go back and look at cut-scenes and re-read the quest dialogue. FFXIV does do a good job explaining what's going on in the Return to Ivalice raid so you don't have to be familiar with the source material for it to make sense.

What is different is that since the Crystal Tower raid series, the Allagans have had a two expansions worth of world-building done about them. The Allagans now feel much more grounded in the world then they did back in 2.0. When the Crystal Tower raid series came out, the main things known about Allag was that they were the ones who had created Dalamud and left a bunch of ruins all over Eorzea that were revealed when the Calamity happpened. Oh, and they really like their tech and weapons and didn't care a lot about scientific ethics. Why the Allagans were that way wouldn't come until the midpoint of the 3.0 expansion (Azys Lla and the Warring Triad) and even 4.0 (Ultima Weapon's impact on them).

They could have taken Ivalice as a place but put their whole new story in it. Or they could have a new zone and some iconic NPCs from 12.
I think it's too early to make this claim about Dalmasca and all the other Ivalice places until we see what the new zones of 5.0 are. The 4.4 and 4.5 patches are about where we will be going next expansion and while all signs point to Ilsabard, Ilsabard itself is huge. I can see them introducing Dalmasca in the 24-man raid series as a way to introduce us to parts of a place we will be going to in 5.0. It kinda reminds me of the treatment Ishgard got in 2.4 and 2.5, but that was in the MSQ, not a raid series. They could very well still put a new story in Dalmasca in a coming expansion. At the very least, we know Matsuno wants to get it out of Garlean oppression...

The same with Omega. Here 90% of the bosses dont even fit the world at all and next to some being old stories from Garlemald, they also dont even see it necessary to give them any ground in the lore.
To be fair, this is even pointed out in-game by the raid itself. Hardly anyone in-game has any idea who the bosses are and Omega all but says it doesn't really matter what you are fighting so long as he gets his combat data. What you are fighting in Omega has no impact on the lore of FFXIV until O11 when we see Omega's version of Midgardsormr.

Again... FFXIV is supposed to be the FF theme park. If it's not obvious to the majority of people who play the game that something isn't a reference (whether that be to one game or a concept from a bunch of games) the dev team doesn't think they're doing their job right. FFXIV is basically the dev team creating a creator-approved self-insert fan-fiction game about other Final Fantasy games. Sometimes it leans more heavily on the self-insert part, sometimes it goes more for the fan-fiction part. SB leaned a lot more on FFXIV being a fan-fiction then on it being a self-insert. Only time will tell if the next expansion goes the other way.