Revelations from Patch 5.5 (Part 1)

[Anonymoose]

Time to be cheeky, and also time to misunderstand Japanese!

I was confused by this at first because I thought I went deeper into it here than I did, lol.

When magitek was first defined in FFXIV, it felt counter-intuitive then because it didn't correlate with FFVI in precisely this way. What Thancred says is more in line with FFVI, but also the opposite of what we were told then, which also felt weird then, but now is what we understood to be the truth, lol.

In FFXIV, because Garleans couldn't use magicks, they were using strictly ceruleum combustion engines to re-create any effects magicks might otherwise have. Garlemald called it magitek because it triumphed over, not replicated, magicks. It didn't do the magicks for them, it replaced the need for them at all by mimicking the outcomes with technology. (For example, pulling down the moon and calling it "meteor" or flamethrowers to replace firagas.)

This was one of the early distinctions between Allagan aetherochemical clockwork and Garlean magitek; it's why Ultima was "not a true magitek" and why even Nero couldn't get Allagan designs working again without gutting the aetherochemical components and replacing them with ceruleum engines.

The logical explanation is that Garlemald has just ... overcome this hurdle ... and has aetherochemistry in their magitek now. I mean, they have chimeras and the resonance machine, right?

But either way it made Thancred's comparison send me into a momentary place of, "Wait, is that right?" because for more of history than not, that was exactly the opposite of what we were told it did, lol.