Ultima the High Seraph.

[Cleretic]

The struggle with Ultima as the Big Bad Villain is that... well, we kinda already beat her. Quite a while ago, in fact!

That's not an insurmountable obstacle to overcome in writing, but it is one: to do Ultima as a new, big villain that would feel fresh and interesting, you need to package it in a way that makes it more than just 'the boss we beat in Orbonne 30+ levels ago' (chances are good it'll be 40+ by the time they get to do anything), and importantly, feels like it. You need to frame and build up to this theoretical Ultima reprise in a way that doesn't feel like a rerun, or it'll just feel like a waste of time to a lot of people. The last thing we want to feel from a story is like we're watching a rerun.

As a bonus, if you do this right it also solves the 'make Ivalice mandatory' problem. If Theoretical MSQ Villain Ultima has an appreciable level of difference from Ivalice Raids Villain Ultima, then rather than requiring a previous reading we can be in the realm of 'healthy amount of optional dialogue but you still mostly get the idea if you haven't'. Something on a similar scale to, say, Omega's presence in Endwalker.


...All that said, there's also a new problem to this one that wasn't there most of the other times this idea's come up: that now, there's another villain named Ultima who's from space and had a storyline of appearing on the planet long ago and whose influence has caused some serious problems ever since both directly and indirectly. ...In a game that happens to share an awful lot of names in its credits with FFXIV. So now Theoretical MSQ Villain Ultima not only has to be appreciably different from Ivalice Raids Villain Ultima, it also needs to be different from FFXVI Villain Ultima, which is probably gonna be a harder job since most of the points of differentiation between XIV Ultima and Final Fantasy Tactics Ultima are actually exactly the things she shares with XVI Ultima!