Thread: 3.1 MSQ Reaction [SPOILERS]

Yep, basically. Probably the most depressing FFXI expansion, but everyone knew going into it that it would be at least partially morbid for reasons I'm not going to bother explaining to someone not interested in XI's lore because it would take a rather large post.

tl;dr version of Wings of the Goddess that Yoshi is referring to:

It starts off with Atomos appearing in your world and sucking you into the past to the Great War against the Shadowlord, which wasn't too far before the events of normal XI. A bit longer than the time skip from 1.0 to 2.0 in XIV, but it had a similar effect on the game's lore.

You meet another girl from the present there and work with her to discern why you're there. Eventually, she starts fading from existence and people stop remembering her entirely, as if she never existed.

More things happen. Odin is involved, like he is in almost everything in FFXI. He's a much more powerful figure in XI, ruling the underworld and everything in it. The introduction of Hades made his role slightly more unclear when it comes to what he controls, but I won't bother getting into it, since that's a different expansion. tl;dr of the Odin tl;dr: Void, void, void, void.

Eventually it's revealed that the FFXI world you've been playing in the entire time is a "fake" world, created by the Goddess Altana because she did not like how the Great War ended. But this fake world is encroaching on the true world, and that's messing everything up. So Atomos, the Devourer of Time, is trying to completely devour your world to fix the "error" of your emotional, rather short-sighted but well-intentioned Goddess, which is collapsing all of existence.

In the true FFXI world (not yours), the girl you're with has a pact with Odin and you're her favored servant as a Spitewarden. Which basically puts you at the very top of the food chain, too. The most relevant comparison in XIV would be an Ascian, since the Spitewardens have control over Demons, many of which are voidsent in XIV, such as Imps and Shadowdragons - the AK NM final boss or that dragon in the recent FFXI event FATE.

You don't fix things, not really.

You satisfy Atomos by sending one anomaly (the girl you're with who is a demoness in the true world) to the other world to replace the demoness. Everyone forgets about her and it's as if she never existed in everyone's memory but yours. Also, your world still is the fake one and Atomos is still there, a looming shadow but no longer a direct threat.

Originally Posted by CyrilLucifer

tl;dr version of Wings of the Goddess that Yoshi is referring to

This is interesting, because I've read on the headcanon thread (I think) a theory/headcanon that the version of Hydaelyn we're playing on was in fact a Primal world created by the Phoenix/Bahamut battle during the Calamity (and that no one actually time traveled to the future)

I think it's worth mentioning that once Exdeath made it known that his objective was restoring the world to its original form, Bartz's immediate knee-jerk assumption is that it is a world of evil.

(Classic Bartz: he's completely wrong. Sorta. The evil plan comes into effect after the worlds are merged.)

Which is, as always, not to say that this is what must happen here, just that there's an in-series precedent for this sort of misunderstanding.

Originally Posted by Rocl

There's about four alternate dimension storylines I can think of in XI and I believe the most recent one was the finale (which had direct ties to the Void I've heard). Wings of the Goddess is the first in that list, but there's still other "options."

Abyssea, WotG, Rhapsodies, and which? Dynamis? I'm not entirely sure I'd consider Dynamis something he's referring to there, it's not an alternate dimension in the same way. It would fit Morningstar's "Primal world" though.

I personally see Abyssea basically doing exactly the same thing to the story of XIV as WotG would, which is changing history at one point for the worse due to things that did or didn't happen. This one has equally interesting implications, because it deals with Promathia's change, not Altana's.

Rhapsodies is a change in the future, yes?

Actually, all of the alternate FFXI worlds are depressing, what the hell.

Originally Posted by CyrilLucifer

Abyssea, WotG, Rhapsodies, and which? Dynamis? I'm not entirely sure I'd consider Dynamis something he's referring to there, it's not an alternate dimension in the same way. It would fit Morningstar's "Primal world" though.

I personally see Abyssea basically doing exactly the same thing to the story of XIV as WotG would, which is changing history at one point for the worse due to things that did or didn't happen. This one has equally interesting implications, because it deals with Promathia's change, not Altana's.

Rhapsodies is a change in the future, yes?

Actually, all of the alternate FFXI worlds are depressing, what the hell.

Every timeline but "the main reality" is royally screwed. The fourth in question was the Voidwalker/Provenance storyline where we end up in a world where the Mothercrystal never shattered or something. (And I have a whole lot of reservations about a lot of the XI-Alternates with the way their pantheon is structured.)

Dynamis was a side-pocket of "the main reality" maybe? Again, the way their pantheon is set up in XI is needlessly confusing to me, lol.