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

[DiaDeem]

"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".

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

Also, if you overthink it enough, you can argue Athena casts the second Ultima during the second half of the Porta Decumana fight. Lahabrea makes no mention of re-casting Ultima before or after "leaving the rest" to Gaius, and doesn't even make mention of the potential second cast at all after the fact. Why would he call Gaius "Pathetic" right after failing himself to cast Ultima a second time? Well, because he didn't actually do it, and it certainly wasn't Gaius either. During the first cast, Lahabrea claims that "this is but a test of my god's power" but Zodiark never casts Ultima. The only two characters to ever cast the spell are Lahabrea and Athena. One could argue that "his god" in the context of the Ultima spell was retcon from Zodiark to Athena, as a god is what she wanted to become. Of course there's no way they were planning Athena back then, but it's fun to me to think he was talking about her back then, even if it seems silly at a glance. The whole Heart of Zabik storyline in Pandae has that weird retcon vibe.

I enjoyed it, lol