Quote Originally Posted by Fenral View Post
I thought Eorzea was Africa and Meracydia was Australia. Ilsabard is Europe (which means yes, Garlemald is there), while Old Sharlayan is the British Isles.
People keep repeating this and there's really no resemblance to it besides the very loose shape of the continent and the fact that there's something between it and "Asia".

Turn your map of Europe sideways, maybe gather in some of northern Africa, and you've got a much better analogue. Norse-themed dragons in the northwest, large island nation off the west coast, peninsulas and islands off the east coast, Turkish-inspired Gyr Abania in the northeast. (This also explains why Eorzea's climate seems out of whack if you put too much thought into it, with Gyr Abania being well north of its apparent influence and seeming like it should be on the latitude of Ul'dah rather than Coerthas.

Meanwhile, though the Eorzean map seems loose in its real-world equivalent (whatever it is) Othard is more tightly overlaid to Asia, down to the mountain ranges – except Russia is missing.

If you assume the Bay of Yanxia is the Yellow Sea and cut a line from South Korea to Mongolia, the northern borders of Mongolia and Kazakhstan seem to follow the same shape as Othard's northern coast. It gets vague after that – the northern inlet seems to be the Caspian Sea but also covering some real-world dry land.

But the key thing is, Russia isn't there, and it's not attached to Eorzea either, so I'm expecting that it's been pushed off sideways to become Ilsabard, along with the remaining parts of the Middle East.

Also the few real-world things we know to be from Meracydia (aloe and sesame) are from Africa.