Quote Originally Posted by crowwww View Post
I'll invoke Cool Train here, it's huge, it's menacing, it's clearly fantastical yet the sound and the experience is so much more engaging than what we get with the Dawnblazer. It's an unfair comparison really. There's probably someone much more familiar with FFVI that could talk to that, but I like it. Fun encounter, fun design, probably fun nostalgia, full marks.

And it has a set of pilot wheels.
As someone who is quite familiar with FFVI (but again, not with trains), I think the two things I'd add that aren't necessarily clear in FFXIV are these:

1. The Phantom Train is explicitly depicted as a luxury passenger train; big Orient Express vibes, you go through dining cars, find individual passenger cabins, all that, even if it is weirdly haunted and wrong. That's not not present in the XIV fight, the interlude inside the cabin at least looks fairly nice, but the fight itself doesn't really focus on the cabin cars outside of the intro showing that there's clearly a lot of them. My gut says that the front engine car doesn't really read as 'luxury train', but that's without much knowledge of the subject.

2. The Phantom Train is essentially Charon's boat across the River Styx, scaled up; it turns up to ferry the souls of the entire kingdom of Doma after Kefka kills them all. That is to say, even in FFVI it doesn't have a manufacturer, a designated route, or specific energy requirements; it simply exists, running a route that mostly exists on a different level of existence than the world we know.

I was just curious what sort of similar logic could be applied to it, that's all!