Occult Crescent speculation

[Cleretic]

The Forked Tower was cleared like, a week ago. It took longer than several Ultimates largely for organizational reasons; with Savage raids or Ultimates you can just keep trying, wipe after wipe, but with the Forked Tower you have to organize re-entry every single time, which is especially difficult with instances being busy right now.

That said, there's interesting stuff in the notes from the bosses, which you can find online.

Two of the bosses--the Demon Tablet and Marble Dragon--are Amdapori constructs. There's note that the Marble Dragon is too accurate to have been done without reference, suggesting that the creator must have been to Dravania to study them first-hand.

The 'Dead Stars'--Nereid Triton and Phobos--are tasked with managing the weather of the Crescent. Unclear what happens now that they're dead.

And the Magitaur is a voidsent, showing that this isn't entirely the Amdapor Show. Most interesting to me is that it mentions him wielding four weapons from the War of the Magi: the rune axe, sage's staff, assassin's dagger, and holy lance. Now, this is interesting because they're four of the twelve Sealed Weapons from FFV.

Finally, the 'treasure' at the top of the Forked Tower is an archive of texts in a language nobody can understand. Naturally, we don't have any idea what that entails, save that it's probably about the Fifth Astral Era.

I think most interesting of all, though, is the absence: this is only one half of FFV's Forked Tower dungeon, this is the physical tower. The other half is the magic tower that we're getting later, whose final boss is Omniscient. If you've played FFV you should already see where this is going, but if not:



That's what Archive's robe is based on.

A rather loaded question

Was the Exdeath character that Omega made us fight inspired by a person from the 5AA? (making a distinction between FFV's Exdeath, and the Exdeath simulation from the Omega raid series)

I'm not gonna answer this in spoiler tags, because while the answer is long, in this context it's mostly just a very long 'no'.

Basically, there's two trains of logic you have to consider with Omega's bosses. The first is what the Ironworks go off on initially, that it's lifting these figures from literature and is very bad at reading: in this case, the in-universe version of FFXIV is from an epic poem that's not only fictional, but Omega also interpreted literally when it probably wasn't intended that way. So basically, Exdeath is like the FFXIV world's version of Beowulf (or probably more likely Grendel; we don't get much insight on the poem).

But then there's the notion that FFXIV Omega is the actual Final Fantasy crossover figure Omega, and that these aren't inaccurate interpretations of historic or fictional figures, but are Omega recreating figures it actually encountered through the rift, which it plausibly could've fallen into in pursuit of Midgardsormr. Sure enough, Omega debuted in V and made appearances in versions of I and VI, so that completely tracks, and explains why Omega's recreations are inaccurate to FFXIV's record, but are accurate to those games. It also explains Kefka, who outright doesn't appear in any in-FFXIV text, historical or fictional.

In short: neither take really syncs up to the Fifth Astral.