Fan Fest Lore Revelations [Spoilers]

[Draginhikari]

I kind of saw the whole 'Become the Warrior of Darkness' coming for quite awhile. Though, I don't think it was really that hard to guess given what we've been told previously during past events. Personally, I image the likely scenario is that solution is likely do with mastering both of the powers or Light and Darkness in order to find a solution. Of course the course question is "What does it mean to be a Warrior of Darkness?" Primarily the status of Warrior of Light seems to come down to the fact that we wield the six crystals of light which represents each of the primary elements in the games lore. Is it a situation like in Final Fantasy 4 where there are equivalent crystals of Darkness or is it something else entirely? Is it a situation that requires a change of mindset or approach? Do we abandon the Crystals of Light that we already have or does something else happen to them? There are definitely far more questions then their are answers.

[Kusanagi7]

if we become dank warriors does this mean we will lose our blessing of light?

[Yuyuka3]

The part with Thancred played on me. As it was the "old" Thancred and not the current one. And in this patch the mystery voice kept talking about going to the past. So what if Thancred along with the other scions are from previous timelines? Thancred could be from the time when Amdapor fell, for instance. They could use the old "his memories were wiped" cliché. The little girl could be Min, but those of us who played v1 already know Min existed in Eorzea as a child and we see her father and such. I almost want to say the child is Hydaelyn and they have been keeping her safe from the Ascians, through time. Her current crystalline state could also be a protective cage of sorts. So many things to speculate on...

Yeah, that child being Hydaelyn is one of my theories, too. Maybe she incarnated into the world for... reasons?

[Vulcwen]

I kind of saw the whole 'Become the Warrior of Darkness' coming for quite awhile. Though, I don't think it was really that hard to guess given what we've been told previously during past events. Personally, I image the likely scenario is that solution is likely do with mastering both of the powers or Light and Darkness in order to find a solution. Of course the course question is "What does it mean to be a Warrior of Darkness?" Primarily the status of Warrior of Light seems to come down to the fact that we wield the six crystals of light which represents each of the primary elements in the games lore. Is it a situation like in Final Fantasy 4 where there are equivalent crystals of Darkness or is it something else entirely? Is it a situation that requires a change of mindset or approach? Do we abandon the Crystals of Light that we already have or does something else happen to them? There are definitely far more questions then their are answers.

The WoL so far has been avoiding to use the Echo in a specific way. Namely the power to influence the soul (which allows for possession). This is a power that is attributed to the dark. Maybe becoming the WoD means we finally get to use this part of the Echo as well.

[Iscah]

It all depends on what you, personally, have been fighting for and to whom you owe your allegiance. Personally, I don't have a problem with taking up the side of darkness as long as it's to save people. "Warrior of Light" is just a title, and my allegiance is ultimately to my own sense of right and wrong, not Hydaelyn.

That's the line of thinking that bothers me, though. It seems far too simple if keeping cosmic balance is a simple matter of saying "today there's too much light so I'm wearing my black spiky armour and wielding my dark powers instead of my light ones".

Q. After possessing a mortal, can an Ascian leave that mortal voluntarily? Or must they be forced out through death (or alternative methods like the Blade of Light).

A. Yes, they can leave voluntarily, and this and a bunch of other Ascian revelations will be prominent in the next expansion. (Also, dev answer was "Why not both?" leading me to believe they didn't really understand the question.)

I don't think "why not both?" was the dev answer, that's just Koji throwing in memes. (He even said something about the slides not making much sense to anyone who read them without actually listening to the presentation.)

He used the same meme when replying to my topic about the AST timeline.

Q. Is Aphinaud actually half Lalafell? (Included: a half dozen pictures comparing Alphinaud to Lalafell and young and grown Elezen.)

A. HAHAHAHAHAHA! (It was noted, they did not say, "no".)

If we really are headed for The Future, maybe we're going to see adult Alphinaud then?

Also that slide really needed a whole lot of red string lines and post-it notes on top of the pictures.

It's my personal prediction that this dungeon is in THE FUTURE. In the next patch, the voice that's been stealing away the Scions' consciousnesses will succeed in doing the same for the WoL, and will take us to the Bad Future represented by the Gimlet Dark. We'll then run the dungeon, and be returned to our body in the past, having witnessed first-hand the horrors we need to prevent.

That's just a guess, however!

While I do think a timeskip is likely, I don't think the Ghimlyt Dark is part of it. Everything else suggests the "bad future" involves an excess of light, so the dark battlefield doesn't seem to fit with that.

It seems more likely to me that it's the tipping point at which the bad future happens.

Unless of course (why not both?) the Ghimlyt Dark is a vision of "Twin Doom A" and by preventing it we cause "Twin Doom B".

[Draginhikari]

The WoL so far has been avoiding to use the Echo in a specific way. Namely the power to influence the soul (which allows for possession). This is a power that is attributed to the dark. Maybe becoming the WoD means we finally get to use this part of the Echo as well.

I'd question if our character would be willing to make use of that particular power or even if they could. So far, the Warrior of Light has absolutely no control over when the Echo seems to want to activate, it just kind of does. The only thing the Warrior of Light in game has been shown to do is basically creating a shield of block tempering attempts by Primals. Everything else about the Echo seems extremely passive or not able to be controlled like the Ascians can.

[Cybylt]

That's the line of thinking that bothers me, though. It seems far too simple if keeping cosmic balance is a simple matter of saying "today there's too much light so I'm wearing my black spiky armour and wielding my dark powers instead of my light ones".

Isn't that what the Warriors of Darkness did, though? They still had their crystals and blessings of light. Light and Darkness in and of themselves have no will or command of the alignment and mental state of those who interact with them, they're more like the aetheric result of wide scale change.

Hydaelyn and Zodiark aren't so much the will of Light and Darkness as much as they are entities who happened to be aligned to those aetheric signals. Zodiark's problem wasn't Darkness but covetousness and consumption, and Ascians aren't spreaders of Darkness but Chaos to thin the veil between Reflections/Shards and cause Rejoining.

[Cilia]

I'm inclined to think otherwise because the JP directly references waiting for a "bearer of a crystal of light", which is not so uncommon that Zodiark would have had to wait 10,000 years for one. (Unless he's referring to the upgrade Middy gave us.)

Well... I suppose the lack of antiquated linguistics is a decent tell that the voice might not be Zodiark; Hydaelyn only speaks using more modern language when using Minfilia as a sock puppet, so Zodiark speaking "normally" wouldn't make a whole lot of sense either.

So... we're basically back to square one, able to do little more than shrug.

I'll admit I have since jumped from F/GO to GBF, since the content release timing got waaaay slow on the JP servers. Gilgamesh is "objectively" better than Scatahch because of Enuma Elish, but the latter gets more use from me because single target Quick is BS if you play it right, and good for farming gears. They both get powercreeped pretty bad by later Servants, so you probably shouldn't go ham. Scathach even manages to powercreep herself.



(PM system where?)

I know all 'bout 'dat mobage power creep; of the starting lineup in FEH only one unit (Hector) is still good, and he's upstaged by his limited-availability Valentines' and Legendary variants. I mean, any unit can be good given the proper build, but cf. vanilla Hector to the soon-to-be released Surtr... even with Distant Counter there's no contest.

Ahem. I will take your advice to heart and save my SQ for a good Rider (Drake or Ozymandias?) or Musashi (to replace the good but not stellar Mordred), since I already have a decent Archer (Tristan) and a good budget Lancer (Leonidas). I'm currently stuck in Rome, steamrolling everything because I ground a bunch of levels... not sure how far the NA server is right now, so I'll just sit tight.

I really shouldn't be starting mobage conversations on a board intended for the lore...

That's the line of thinking that bothers me, though. It seems far too simple if keeping cosmic balance is a simple matter of saying "today there's too much light so I'm wearing my black spiky armour and wielding my dark powers instead of my light ones".

Well, a big problem I have with the whole "balance" shtick is that we still haven't seen any indication that it's tipping too far one way or the other (on the Source, our own world). Yes the Burn is a good illustration of what an aether-bleached (Light-flooded) world will end up like and yes we've been told time and again that primals drain the land's aether... but other than the unresolved aether readings from before Wilred was killed and the deaspected crystals Y'shtola found mirroring those from before the Calamity, we have no evidence anything strange is going on.

There are simply too many unknowns to figure out much at the moment (which was the intent).

[KageTokage]

The wording in the Shadowbringers synopsis implies to me that the WoL vs. Elidibus fight is just the start of the events that led to a calamity in another history (Presumably that of the first shard's), so I don't think things actually went bad until well into the campaign against the Garleans or after it was over. The dungeon being called "Borderlands: Gimlyt Dark" in Japanese makes it sound like it's where the Garleans are choosing to make an informal declaration of war by razing a Gyr Abanian settlement at the edge of their territory.

We do know that eliminating all of the Ascians is not in our best interests, which makes me wonder how they can be stopped without actually causing an imbalance since I doubt they'll just throw their hands in the air and give up once the empire falls.

[YianKutku]

To be honest, I was expecting to see discussion of that in this thread, as well! I don't know of any transcript, but I do recall three of them. (Two because they were the two questions I posted, and the third, because it was, er, memorable.) The following is the gist:

Yeah, I didn't take screenshots of most of the slides of the Lore Panel Q&A, because as Matt Hilton pointed out, anyone just looking at joke-y answers on the slides will be very confused.

Based on my half-asleep summaries on Discord (2:30am Keynote, then 6:30am Lore Panel) though:

• Garlean third eyes are hard like keratin.
• There will be more lore-focused side stuff like Tales Of/From The X on the Lodestone and the Postmoogle questline. At least, that's the plan.
• Raen lore is basically Hingashi lore. As in, the two are effectively equivalent. (In other words, no Raen-specific lore that isn't part of Hingan lore.)
• The two guards at the end of 4.4 are merely very high-ranking and thoroughly vetted for their trustworthiness and discretion, despite Koji Fox's attempts to create an overwrought backstory for them.
• Aetherially conductive inks in magical tattoos is totally a thing, and is used all the time. This is in the Lorebook 2, as part of the MNK gear examples.
• The last queen of Ala Mhigo (ie Theodoric's queen) is probably from somewhere in the Black Shroud, given that the critters in the Royal Gardens are variants of ones found in the Black Shroud. Koji Fox goes "more information soon", and implies that there's a pretty interesting story there.
• Aulus mal Asina is "dead", but nobody believes the lore team about character deaths anyway, so that can probably be amended to be "dead today".
• There are plans in the future to introduce more subraces of the playable races to NPCs, although players will probably just be stuck with the two per race we now have. (The "joke" answer on the slide was that a six foot tall Lalafell is now a possibility.)
• Koji Fox went into the history of the Padjals, but nothing we didn't already know, and I think the implication is that for now the Padjals we see are the ones that exist currently, and the total number that ever existed is "less than you can count on three Simpsons hands" (whatever that means). I could be mistaken.
• Alphinaud may or may not be half Lalafell.
• The known crew of the Galadion have Elezen names because there was a ship of Elezen adventurers that was in trouble, when the Galadion (itself fleeing Aerslant) happened by and picked them up. The Elezen were so grateful that they offered to join the crew and be navigators, and that's why while the story of Limsa Lominsa's founding involves Roegadyn on the Galadion, there were also Elezen there.
• Regula's real face (ie under his helmet) was never actually decided, dev-wise. Koji Fox jokes that it could be time for a new fan contest to fix that.
• Ascian hosts don't have to die for the Ascian to leave (although it's implied that it will take some convincing to accomplish this), and more information will be coming in Shadowbringers.
• Vampire myths exist in Eorzea in the same way vampire myths exist here in RL; there may not have been actual bloodsucking vampires, but the myth is widespread enough that that the concept gets applied to names like vampire plants and vampire bats.

Then they went into creating The Vegetarian.