"Time Skip" for 4.5 or 5.0?

[Anonymoose]

While that's one interpretation of the picture that's been painted for us so far, we probably haven't seen the complete teaser, yet; and it may be designed to leave us confused. Once again, I'm left fairly certain that that's Arbert's voice actor talking - which makes me question whether I ever should have discarded the concern in 4.4. (Either that or Alphinaud's voice actor sounds just like him while pretending to be older...)

But this whole thing is like a rogue planet just sped through my systemic understanding of the story and now everything is settling back into a new structure. Arbert himself told us not to fight for Light or Darkness, but for ourselves. We can't discard that already, right?

So if the 4.4 voice is sincere, Thancred's plan leads to direct conflict with Zelidibus and beckons a possible Calamity and/or Flood of Light.
"The laws of time and space will bend before me. Let me in."

If 3.0 and 4.0 are any precedent, the very beginning of the plot is reflecting in the very end of the expansion before it. So PLOT POINT #1 seems to be related to 4.5's dungeon, the catalyst for the "Eighth and Final Umbral Era". But then we see that there are new areas - areas that are not necessarily from a world post-Calamity or post-Flood - areas that we can presumably teleport to regular old city-states from so we can hand in our dailies.

So is it a localized disturbance? Do we too suddenly shift the balance in favor of the Light and have to push back with Darkness while still fighting for the preservation of mortals and Hydaelyn and our world? Or was Elidibus not the snake I accused (and continue to accuse) him of being all this time? How deep is our change in worldview? And why?

All of that we have a better grip on than these time shenanigans. Are we getting a message from a broken future about how to unwrite it into a stable loop? Are we going to change the game's own timeline? Are there branching worlds and timelines? Or is this all a bait and switch for something to do with Minfilia and the First? Are we using the FFXI approach to traversing a "doorway" into another time or dimension? Whatever is it, I just hope it doesn't cheapen the world we've fought for or the journey we've taken, which is always the risk when time shenanigans pop up.

[Mieck]

Once again, I'm left fairly certain that that's Arbert's voice actor talking - which makes me question whether I ever should have discarded the concern in 4.4.

One thing I think it does do (and, of course, this could just be a result of the edit / stuff we haven't seen yet, all those caveats, yadda yadda etc), is give us a little more of a steer on the attitude of the Voice speaker.
I was pretty firmly on the side of it being Arbert, but then I was drawn to the lines in cutscene 1 of MSQ "Prelude in Violet", where the Voice returns and hits the WoL with a repetition of lines already heard in the cutscenes for "The Call".

Only you... Only you...

Throw wide... the gates...

At the very least, in the English VA, I found the intonation insistent, and a little threatening. It seemed, along with the other text, that this could be someone / something entirely without our best interests at heart.


However, now we have the trailer for Edgebringers, and the Voice is back, asking (rhetorically) how long they've been waiting for the

one who stood against the storm. For the one they called the Warrior of Light

Taken in English alone, the form of words suggest the speaker is a being with what we would recognise as a normal concept of time. I don't think, with what little we can infer about Zodiark (comparing to Hydaelyn) that He is a being that would recognise our measures of time.

What's the trailer voice over like in the other languages?

[ScootPatoot]

Taken in English alone, the form of words suggest the speaker is a being with what we would recognise as a normal concept of time.

It does mention time, but I don't think that it's referring to the player character as the Warrior of Light.

In the trailer, we are witnessing memories in what seems to be an Echo vision. Whose memories are these? Personally, I think the one experiencing the vision is Arbert. That would certainly explain why we hear his VA in the trailer.

The Warriors of Darkness are from the First, a world which progressed parallel to ours, with small but significant historical divergences. Looking at the trailer, we see something similar to Kuribu featured. For us, that's simply a dungeon boss and nothing too big to overcome, but who's to say that it wasn't a larger problem for them as Light overcame their world?

Remember, they also were once Warriors of Light like us, and I suspect we're going to have to help them bring darkness to their world. They asked to return to their world to restore it, but it could be a larger undertaking: one that could affect all worlds.

Light, Dark, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you choose to use them.

[Mansion]

What's the trailer voice over like in the other languages?

In French, I would say that 4.4 MSQ voice and ShB teaser are the same voice actor.
But Arbert, I'm not sure at all. It is similar, but the tones are so different it is hard to tell. I've never been that convinced in English either actually.

The only major difference is that in English he says "the one thay called the WoL" and in French he says "the one they call the WoL"-present tense.