/r/ffxivdiscussion: Has FFXIV had any major retcons or plot holes in the story?

[Jeeqbit]

There was a retcon which was 1.0. They tried to salvage as much of it as they possibly could, but they didn't manage all of it. They didn't retcon the Circle of Knowing, but they virtually are all doing the same thing with no evolution 5 years later. They redid a lot of the 1.0 fights 5 years later in 2.0 by saying there were remains ie. of Bahamut or recreations or survivors that we didn't know about. They redid the dungeons by just saying they are overrun with creatures again since it's been years.

In most cases, instead of retconning, what they did was to evolve it in the lore. For example, they say that materia used to work differently, but advancements in society meant it was simpler now.

In the case of Lyse (and all the other scions for that matter), they didn't retcon them, but they did have a problem with them, which was that they were all the same. In order to solve this, they made them all disappear at the end of 2.5, to eventually return with unique disabilities or, arguably, super powers.

• Thancred returns with the inability to use magic, thus making him focus on his physical prowess.
• Y'shtola returns blind, thus causing her to use magic to see aether, which becomes something of a super power that helps us greatly in the story.
• Yda returns as Lyse, with a backstory relating the Ala Mhigo.
• Minfilia returns as part of Hydaelyn.
• Urianger was already unique. He was the book guy that knows everything, so required no changes other than maybe to fight.
• They killed off the ones they couldn't do anything else with or make different to Urianger: Papalymo and Moenbryda

All the characters since then are new, including Alphinaud and Alisaie.

"The biggest one is that in ARR there's this one scene with a bunch of ascians plotting or whatever, and I don't remember the details but that scene makes absolutely no sense considering what we know today of them. It's an issue of the devs having no plans for them at the time beyond "evil bad guys doing spooky stuff".

(I think the "retconned" part is that some of the ones present in that scene should be dead by all accounts, and have never appeared in the story beyond that one scene)"

Some of them appear in sidequests, including job quests (for example, you kill a load of Ascians in the Summoner quests, effectively explaining how many of the non-red mask Ascians die). There is also the one in the Eden quests.

As we know, only two red mask Ascians guinely survived the sundering with their full power intact and maybe Elidibus but of course he was a primal by then, so the other red-mask Ascians died like Ardbert did to become souls that inhabit flesh on a shard of their choice but weren't as powerful as the unsundered ones who never died (Lahabrea and Emet).

And the difference between the red-mask and non-red mask Ascians, of course, is purely that the ones with red masks were part of the Convocation. In terms of actual power, the one in the Eden quests wasn't necessarily anymore powerful than the throwaway Ascians we kill in the Summoner quests, aside from Arcane knowledge they would have remembered from being imbued with the memories from their Convocation crystal. Except, of course, they merge with Gaia and have the power of Eden at their disposal which is what makes them as strong as they are.

Let's not forget that even if there were red-masked Ascians that we didn't fight, there were other ways in which they could have died: Shadowhunter, Ardbert and other Warriors of Light on the various shards.

The echo/blessing of light has gone through like three or four significant retcons, from stepping into people's memories to change the past, to just seeing the past/xenoglossy + tempering immunity, to specifically having the power to weaken the servants of darkness.

The Echo allows you to see the past. It allows you to benefit from Hindsight without having any, by seeing their past.

However, what we know of The Echo now is it doesn't necessarily protect you from the aetherial corruption aspect of tempering. You're just less likely to get put into petrified state and walk towards the attack that will temper you because you can Remember who you are and come to.

What protects us from the aetherial corruption is The Blessing of Light, a complete collection of all the elements, something that is replicated by Nidhana to protect everyone, just like we get a specific element to allow Cid to break through Garuda's barrier.

Yet, we tell Arenvald he is safe because he has The Echo. So maybe Hydaelyn did give a lighter blessing still, or maybe primal tempering was never that much of a threat if you were simply a good fighter. The Company of Heroes seem to suggest that if you are just good at being a team, you can defeat a primal even without these gifts (it's not made clear if they have any gifts, I think).

I think the most legitimate retcon here is this. The difference between The Echo and The Blessing having been unclear throughout the game. Effects that are supposed to be granted by The Blessing are sometimes explained by The Echo both in the story and as status effects in battles.

[Sove92]

However, what we know of The Echo now is it doesn't necessarily protect you from the aetherial corruption aspect of tempering. You're just less likely to get put into petrified state and walk towards the attack that will temper you because you can Remember who you are and come to.

What protects us from the aetherial corruption is The Blessing of Light, a complete collection of all the elements, something that is replicated by Nidhana to protect everyone, just like we get a specific element to allow Cid to break through Garuda's barrier.

Yet, we tell Arenvald he is safe because he has The Echo. So maybe Hydaelyn did give a lighter blessing still, or maybe primal tempering was never that much of a threat if you were simply a good fighter. The Company of Heroes seem to suggest that if you are just good at being a team, you can defeat a primal even without these gifts (it's not made clear if they have any gifts, I think).

I think the most legitimate retcon here is this. The difference between The Echo and The Blessing having been unclear throughout the game. Effects that are supposed to be granted by The Blessing are sometimes explained by The Echo both in the story and as status effects in battles.

Hydaelyn grants her blessing to anyone who listens to her call, which led to peope believing the echo is what does it. This does leave us with the matter of defeating two primals (Ravana, Bismarck) without the blessing tho. Tho if I remember correctly, the block was aready being broken at the time of Ravana. Or the block was for something else entirely.

[Jeeqbit]

Hydaelyn grants her blessing to anyone who listens to her call, which led to peope believing the echo is what does it.

Yes, but the blessing is built up over time as we gather those crystals. So all the other people with The Echo might not necessarily have built up the blessing. There isn't necessarily a confirmation that they did.

Remember when Y'shtola using her aethervision was killing her?

Like in real life, we can say things are bad for our health, but usually the consequences won't be felt until we're much older. Unless we travel into the future, we probably won't meet old Y'shtola.

It was not always clear what was going on, if you were just seeing that past or actually going to it. Like that time we gave Cid his goggles.

I saw that as just his imagination/memory. We enter Cid's memories later on in the Bozja story and there are things that happen there where at first it's wrong and then has to be corrected, to demonstrate how memories get mixed up.

I saw handing the goggles back as a symbolic thing of "here's your memories back" and that this fact was making its way into his memories when he probably got them some other way.

Still, it's not impossible time travel was involved. We don't necessarily know a lot about it. We just know that Alexander can do it and therefore primals can do it but maybe we will learn the inner workings of it in future expansions.

Everything related to Ascians, Zodiark, Hydaelyn and general backstory of the world only started gain remotest sense of concrete shape as they were writing Shadowbringers. Until then, they had no idea where they'll be going with that plot arc. So you can safely assume most things that 'dont line up' between what we see from Ascians' meetings and actions prior to 4.x are safely retconned, rather than some dangling plot threads.

Not true. They had a pretty rough idea of what they were doing the whole time. The entire plot through Heavensward into Endwalker is foreshadowed in a Heavensward cutscene https://youtu.be/hJZ94R0TEzE?t=147

The cutscene says that Zodiark coveted power, so Hydaelyn bound him to the Moon. She admits she sundered the star into 13 reflections, each possessed of a shard, which I assume means the elemental shards we see her use so often. She tells us that the Ascians' goal is to restore Zodiark and make him whole (which is true) and that they are His servants (also true because Emet admits there was no fighting the tempering of such a powerful primal). She tells us they mean to tear down the barriers which surround the Source by creating calamities that result in a Rejoining that will help rejoin, among other things, Zodiark's fragments. She tells us they succeeded 7 times (also true).

If you go back to ARR you can even see that a lot of what Lahabrea says at the Praetorium is true, vague as it is. They obviously didn't know what they were doing then entirely, but they had a vague idea that their goal was to restore their god, Zodiark, by way of calamities. Which remained true to the end.

They also forgot that Black Mask Ascians exist after HW, not quite a retcon but generally a plot point that youd think would get more attention in light of revelations from ShB, but nope.

I think it can be argued that we defeated them in the Summoner quests, taken care of by Shadow Hunter or while chasing Elidibus.

Gaius surviving was definitely a retcon and not something planned though.

Yes, that was clearly a retcon because the fire was obviously meant to kill him. In fact, if you run the video of his final moments in slow motion, the flame intensity increases significantly making it impossible to leave the flame circle and then there are unavoidable explosions everywhere with him still there. The only way to argue he lived would be to say that what the cutscene showed us wasn't accurate and that he in fact ran out of the flame area right before the intensity increased.

Arguments have been made that him not being in POTD showed they were not sure about saying he's dead even as early as Heavensward. I'm glad that they didn't kill him because I found myself mostly agreeing with what he was saying and wondering why we were even enemies, when he was mostly being manipulated by Ascians and misguided by having grown up in the Garlean Empire.

They had a weird made up gibberish language that never came back.

It sorta comes back at The Tempest. The gibberish language still rings clear in our minds like it does with the dragons. When we go through Endwalker, they just use English, probably so that it doesn't annoy us, but it's the same everywhere, you know? We're going to Tural and they probably wouldn't speak our language. In fact they admitted they don't in the latest patch. Yet, we're going to go there and we'll all speak English, because the story wouldn't be fun if we needed a translator.

During the first cast, Lahabrea claims that "this is but a test of my god's power"

I never took that to mean it was actually Zodiark's power. I took it to mean it was an example of what his god would be able to do when it was restored, but wasn't actually being cast by his god. It's like if I open MS paint and draw a picture of Zodiark destroying everything. It's not actually Zodiark's power, it is just a picture; a demonstration of what Zodiark's power level will be when he is restored.

[DiaDeem]

I never took that to mean it was actually Zodiark's power. I took it to mean it was an example of what his god would be able to do when it was restored, but wasn't actually being cast by his god. It's like if I open MS paint and draw a picture of Zodiark destroying everything. It's not actually Zodiark's power, it is just a picture; a demonstration of what Zodiark's power level will be when he is restored.

I mean, yeah. As I said I'm purposedly overthinking it, but Lahee (that was his high school nickname) seemed rather direct about "A spell without parallel" and it being linked to "his god", so I know the Athena theory thing is not very likely... but not entirely implausible!

[Fawkes]

The Echo allows you to see the past. It allows you to benefit from Hindsight without having any, by seeing their past.

It was not always clear what was going on, if you were just seeing that past or actually going to it. Like that time we gave Cid his goggles.