Revelations from JP Fan Fest (January 2024)

[YianKutku]

Where the in-game footage we've seen of Tuliyollal (and most other areas we've seen) and Solution 9 visually differ is that the former look like lived-in places. There's all sorts of things scattered about, there's crates and pots, even bottles and food, everywhere. It looks very natural, fitting with the theme of the areas. But S9 looks barren by comparison, like the hyper-efficient cybercity it looks to be. It doesn't look like a place where people live, but rather a place they would live.

I don't know if that makes any sense outside of my head, but outside of this singular piece of concept art we have (which has tables and chairs and bottles and venues and whatnot), there isn't much evidence of living things there that we've seen, and that makes me wonder about the very specific signage.

To be fair, YoshiP did say they had to remove all signs of whatever people might be present in Solution Nine. And yeah, the parts of Solution Nine that we've seen look kind of like the commercial district, rather than residential or anything that gives any hint on what daily life is like there.

So I'm kind of withholding speculation on that particular aspect so far. I am kind of speculating on why there's so much neon signage, which I've never seen outside of fictional cyberpunk works, mainly because in RL people do need proper lighting. As in, having lots of neon signs is also realistic, but not having only neon signs.

At this point the speculation I have is entirely Doylist, and rather obvious to everyone: it's intended to evoke the cyberpunk aesthetic, and considerations on making it look "realistically lived-in" are secondary at the moment.

[MikkoAkure]

And yeah, the parts of Solution Nine that we've seen look kind of like the commercial district, rather than residential or anything that gives any hint on what daily life is like there.

The buildings in the video thumbnail with the green windows that are shorter, look to be made up of long blocks, and are packed next to each other look very reminiscent of residential buildings in Tokyo or other crowded cities.

After watching the video again, right next to them is what looks like a park with trees and little waterways.

[Iscah]

I don't know if it's due to CG cinematic limitations, or if it's somehow significant, but I did notice just about every (humanoid, non-Scion) NPC in the cinematic trailer was wearing either voluminous red robes that remind me of what Gogo wears (both in the original FFV and FFVI, as well as the BLU instance in FFXIV), or a white shirt with suspenders that have a zillion shared models among crafting gear.

I noticed it because it was common to the point of looking like some sort of uniform, so I wondered if this is a uniform. Maybe indicating "people from Yok Tural" and "people from Xak Tural"?

I would be more inclined to chalk it up to the animators having been given limited reference material for background NPCs with a side of "everyone from a beastman race gets the same outfit".

That said, the robes seem to all have red shawls but the colours underneath are more varied and it just looks like it's a traditional garment rather than any sort of deliberate uniform. The other white-shirt people could be, but it still seems a bit weird and just as likely to be lazy background.

Speculation is all we have for the next few months, though. They only gave us the barest bits and pieces. It is fun to guess and then see if you are correct. Solution Nine is just more interesting to talk about than a beach vacation with a side plot of political intrigue, or gods help me, taco cat. Dawntrail had been pretty lacklustre in what it had revealed so far, so people just sorta latched on to it. I say let em have their fun.

I disagree that it's any more interesting - in either case we have very little to go on, and I don't really like speculating about it beyond what we've actually been shown, so Solution Nine is one of those "so wide open that it seems simpler to not pursue it".

So much of the speculation seems to be along the lines of stating things more definitely than the reveal put them, like saying for certain that nobody has been aware of the city before this just because it hasn't been mentioned before, or - very popularly - being convinced that "an aetherial imbalance towards lightning" is an unquestionable sign that this entire city must have come from the shard that fell to the Calamity of Lightning thousands of years ago, when actually it's an entirely natural and common phenomenon on Etheirys for a region to be aspected to one element or another.

All sorts of things are possible, but assuming the wildest options are the best explanation - or worse, someone portraying an assumed fact as confirmed true when they're actually mistaken, but nobody fact-checks - is just setting up the fandom as a whole for massive disappointment.

In fact, I'd also point out one of the other figures on the poster: That unknown miqo'te on the right. If he's a suncat (with that skin tone it could go either way) he's possibly also got a societal claim to authority, as a Nunh. And if I were to guess anything about him, I'd wager he might be the equivalent power player from Solution Nine; he's the one newcomer on the poster with a noticeably 'non-primitive' outfit.

If he is culturally a Seeker (which I'm not particularly expecting or not) then I don't think he would be trying to make a claim equal with the Mamool Ja. This might be personal interpretation (I don't think there is a definite source for it) but my impression thus far is that Seeker tribes have their own system of laying claim to territory that operates separately to any other ruler. Like, if all of Thanalan is technically under Ul'dah's rule but the U tribe claim their corner of it and maybe only recognise the borders of their territory as being where they come up against that of another Seeker tribe. But overall we don't have enough examples of where the tribes all are to understand how the system functions.

My personal guess is that he's from Shaaloani since he's wearing a fantasy version of an old western duster complete with a cravat which feels rather archaic for a cyberpunk city and would fit in more with the wild west theme.

Given the trend for giving secondary-important characters recoloured job gear, I'm guessing that he's wearing the MCH job gear.

Most Miqo'te do not seem to follow the traditional culture anyway. The U and M tribes living out in the wild seems to be the exception to the rule and the number of Miqo'te living in Ul'dah are so small that they're filed under "others". Most Eorzean Sun Seekers are from Limsa Lominsa and we've also had multiple examples of Miqo'te living in nuclear families with a mom, a dad, and children together.

What are the "multiple examples" of nuclear families? The closest that I can think of was the R tribe siblings from the Moonfire Faire quests - and even then, while there's certainly no reference to Seeker culture in the way they phrase it, I think it could still be wrangled (if you were inclined to get the quest narrative back on track of the game's own lore) that there's an urbanised version of traditional culture in place and that the R tribe nunh died several years ago and the new nunh is quite young, leaving a lack of father-figure to replace the lost one.

Anyway, even if the Miqo'te living in cities have abandoned the tribe structure totally, we still can't definitively say that it has been abandoned everywhere because we just don't see enough of how and where people actually live. There could be Seeker tribal villages all over La Noscea and Thanalan but we just don't see them in the condensed version of the world that gets shown in the game.

...Estinien is just off, doing gods know what alone.

So, unfounded speculation time: Shtola/Urianger/Thancred were hired by a 3rd party, while the WoL/Alisaie/Alphinaud/Krile/Raha came at the behest of Wuk Lamat, and Estinien just got here in his wanderings, somehow. Completely unrelated to everything. We'll just find him hanging out with the local hunters.

If there are three parties hiring Scions, then my expectation is that Estinien is the odd one out and just coincidentally there doing mercenary work.

[MikkoAkure]

What are the "multiple examples" of nuclear families? The closest that I can think of was the R tribe siblings from the Moonfire Faire quests - and even then, while there's certainly no reference to Seeker culture in the way they phrase it, I think it could still be wrangled (if you were inclined to get the quest narrative back on track of the game's own lore) that there's an urbanised version of traditional culture in place and that the R tribe nunh died several years ago and the new nunh is quite young, leaving a lack of father-figure to replace the lost one.

Anyway, even if the Miqo'te living in cities have abandoned the tribe structure totally, we still can't definitively say that it has been abandoned everywhere because we just don't see enough of how and where people actually live. There could be Seeker tribal villages all over La Noscea and Thanalan but we just don't see them in the condensed version of the world that gets shown in the game.

The R tribe siblings from the Moonfire Faire quests mention living with their mom and dad when their dad was alive, Ranaa Mhigo moved to Radz-at-Han with her family and her dad changed professions from hunter to merchant, Zhloe had to take care of her sister after both their parents died together, T'kebbe arrived in Idyllshire with both her parents before they died, and R'ashaht (Storm Commander) lived with both her parents. There are several other Miqo profiles that mention a "family" but I don't count because "parents" plural are not mentioned.

Even taking into account the condensed world, I don't think there's that many Miqo'te in Thanalan since "Miqo'te" doesn't even show up on the Ul'dahn census while they do on Ala Mhigo's.

[Vyrerus]

The elongated hexagonal buildings remind me of Solaris from Xenogears. Which, of course, took its name from a Soviet film from 1972 by the same name.

In the film, a researcher from Earth travels through space to find out what's happened to the three man crew of an observation station that orbits the planet Solaris.

Solaris is seemingly a planet that is nothing but ocean. No islands. Nothing but swirling seas.

Upon arrival to the observation station, the main character finds that one of the researchers has killed himself, and the other two are not mentally well. They ramble at him about seeing their dead children as giants wading through the seas of Solaris, only to awaken to them on the station as they were in life.

They tell him that if the same happens to him it is extant phenomena and not his mind playing tricks.

Well it happens to him. He awakens to his departed wife by his bed side.

In the end he and the other scientists determine that Solaris is alive, and that it is reading and interacting with their brain waves/thoughts. Creating people from their memories. They elect to rig a transmitter to transmit the main guy's brainwaves into Solaris while he concentrates on sending a message to, "Stop making people from our memories."

This gets things to stop, but causes islands to start forming in Solaris's oceans.

-----

Now it'd be quite the stretch to say they'd reference this old Soviet film, but it has influenced Square developers before, so I wouldn't put it past them. Maybe it's not simple cyberpunk at all.

There was also some theory in the film that the recreations of people from their memories were emanations composed of neutrinos, and that they could be destroyed with a tool known as, "The Annihilator."

I suppose we have seen art of something called, what was it? The Eliminator?

Ehh... My money's still on FFIX reference and maybe a good old fashioned high tech baddies vs. low tech good guys save the rain forest kind of plot.

[Enkidoh]

Thinking about it more, I'm now considering it far more likely that Solution 9 is simply yet another Allagan facility, as we already know Allag was very much cyberpunk in feel anyway (especially in it's late era), and.. looking at the artwork, some of the decorations used in the holographic displays/banners... have an identical geometric pattern to the pattern on another Allagan facility we know of - the crystalline 'aetheric valve' structure in the House of the Crooked Coin in the Azim Steppe! (And remember, that structure 'didn't look Allagan' from what we knew of Allag at the time either, and yet SB's later storyline confirmed it was indeed Allagan).

Working on that, I wouldn't be surprised if Solution 9 was a last resort concept in the dying days of the Empire (hence the name, it was the 'ninth' attempt to ensure the Empire's civillian society lives on), and was set up by more cooler heads to ensure some of the Empire citizenry lived on past the collapse with the Calamity and resulting Umbral Era, whose decesendants still remain there to this day. Of course that's just my headcanon so it's almost definetley wrong!

[Iscah]

The R tribe siblings from the Moonfire Faire quests mention living with their mom and dad when their dad was alive, Ranaa Mhigo moved to Radz-at-Han with her family and her dad changed professions from hunter to merchant, Zhloe had to take care of her sister after both their parents died together, T'kebbe arrived in Idyllshire with both her parents before they died, and R'ashaht (Storm Commander) lived with both her parents. There are several other Miqo profiles that mention a "family" but I don't count because "parents" plural are not mentioned.

Half of those examples are Keepers so there's nothing to be read on the state of Seeker culture there (besides a running tendency for the writers to neglect their own lore when it comes to unusual family structures and a suggestion that nobody on the lore team is checking), and T'kebbe's parents could be taken as potential reinforcement of the culture if anything – a pair of young lovers forced to run from their tribe and settle in the farthest frontier regions because under traditional law they can't be together if he's not the nunh.

R'ashaht's lorebook entry could be sloppy writing or translating on a minor entry, but if not then it's only an indication on the state of the Limsa-based R tribe again, same as the Moonfire siblings.

Bonus headcanon: what if the more urban Seeker cultures haven't abandoned tribe structure but adapted it? Families are just micro-tribes claiming a single house as their territory, and getting married just means declaring independence from their parents' tribe and forming a new one together?

[Iscah]

Ehh... My money's still on FFIX reference and maybe a good old fashioned high tech baddies vs. low tech good guys save the rain forest kind of plot.

I really hope it's not going to be "the baddies" because we already had a glorious high-class city with slums below that was our antagonist for 90% of the plot before getting redeemed just in time to be the tomestone hub.

Thinking about it more, I'm now considering it far more likely that Solution 9 is simply yet another Allagan facility

It can't be Allagan; the colours don't clash horribly.

But yeah, good point on it being in line with the House of the Crooked Coin.

[Cleretic]

Bonus headcanon: what if the more urban Seeker cultures haven't abandoned tribe structure but adapted it? Families are just micro-tribes claiming a single house as their territory, and getting married just means declaring independence from their parents' tribe and forming a new one together?

Yeah, that's kind of how I read it. The M tribe out in Ala Mhigo are traditionalists, but that doesn't mean that, say, the Y tribe aren't using some derivation of it.

I generally picture a more 'modern' suncat family structure still having both a lot of kids and a deference to grandpa at family gatherings, even if they're living out of different homes now.

EDIT: ...actually, the Y tribe still being really focused on 'get married and have lots of babies' would explain some things about Y'shtola. Especially that one Stormblood short story with Y'mhitra.

[Vyrerus]

I really hope it's not going to be "the baddies" because we already had a glorious high-class city with slums below that was our antagonist for 90% of the plot before getting redeemed just in time to be the tomestone hub.




It can't be Allagan; the colours don't clash horribly.

But yeah, good point on it being in line with the House of the Crooked Coin.

Well, there's a dungeon related to/within the city, so there's some sort of antagonistic force there, at a minimum.

Given that its color scheme and architecture (mainly for the interior segments though some of the building geometry too) is heavily referential of the serpentine labyrinth of Outer Ra'Kaznar from FFXI I'll be surprised if it's a no baggage, no baddies type of place.

I mean, I don't expect the trapped souls of adventurers and Adoulin knights and extraplanar butterflies to be stalking its halls, but it gives me bad guy's place vibes.