Lore Book Revelations

[Grayve]

Timetravel, including Echo based time travel, confuses me. I need charts, so I am rather glad this isn't still in the game.

As an aside, If anyone has a chart or diagram explaining the Alexander time travel, please link it... I still don't understand what happened, to whom, and when.

[Cilia]

Timetravel, including Echo based time travel, confuses me. I need charts, so I am rather glad this isn't still in the game.

As an aside, If anyone has a chart or diagram explaining the Alexander time travel, please link it... I still don't understand what happened, to whom, and when.

This is kind of difficult to follow because, as Quickthinx says, time is a closed circle. You have to get used to fluidity in the flow of time instead of thinking of it as a one-way street. Anyone who has played BlazBlue can get it pretty easily, but it follows like this:

1. At an unknown point in the distant past, Alexander spits out Mide and Dayan. They return to Othard, found the Hotgo tribe, and live out their lives. The idea (legend) of Alexander is passed down in the tribe.

2. Inspired by their ancestors' tales, near past Mide, Dayan, and the others summon Alexander using Travanchet's horn as a catalyst. Things go awry: Dayan is absorbed by Alexander, the other Auri treasure hunters die, and Mide seals Alexander in the lake. (Truth: this wasn't Alexander's summoning, but Roundrox using Alexander's time warp function to return us to that fateful day. The Auri treasure hunters are killed by the on-board Illuminati, and Schrodinger knocks Backrix' journal chronicling A1-A10 from his hands, tumbling to the ground with it before we're warped back to the present. Past Quickthinx gets ahold of Schrodinger, whom he renames Shanoa, and the journal, which he uses as a guide to set up the events of A1-A10.)

3. A1-A10 play out, leading to 2.

4. Upon reaching the core of Alexander, Quickthinx traps us in a time bubble and forces Alexander to cast Judgment on us. We're saved at the last second and go on to face Alexander Prime.

5. After proving our worthiness by surviving Alexander Prime's Divine Judgment, he creates portals that send four party members back to 4 so we can save ourselves. (Alternate timeline: we die from a time paradox. We always survived Divine Judgment, because otherwise we wouldn't be there to have Divine Judgment passed on us. Time travel is funny that way.) Alexander Prime is successfully defeated.

6. Mide throws herself into Alexander's core to shut him down, allowing 1 to happen above. Alexander seals himself outside of spacetime.

It's all one big closed circle - there is no beginning or end. The events of Alexander play out in an infinitely recurring loop, constantly spiraling in on itself. It's a temporal singularity - everything within the loop has to happen, because it already has. We're just actors on a stage, unknowingly performing the same worthless comedy show over and over and over and over and over and over...

Put as simply as it can be, Alexander's Legend -> Alexander's Summoning -> Alexander (Raid) -> Alexander's Legend, ad infinitum.

(Yes, this means that Alexander essentially created himself and that Mide and Dayan are their own distant ancestors. The only other alternative is to believe that there is a "Time Zero" that Alexander originated from, but... it would have to be outside of observable time, and now we're getting really hypothetical in something that's already highly hypothetical to begin with.)

The Echo is something entirely different. With the Echo we can observe others' memories, but not interfere with them. The one exception seems to be Cid's goggles, but I have no idea how or why that single event is an exception. /shrug Even if you could interfere with the past, it would ultimately change nothing since doing so would create a temporal paradox a la not surviving Divine Judgment / failing to save your past self.

[Fenral]

Cilia broke this down pretty well in the patch thread, but I can flatten it into a line for you.

1) Some thousands of years ago, a clan of Au Ra is formed by a young male and female who emerge from a metal giant.

2) A few years earlier than the present, their descendants (including Mide and Dayan) attempt a summoning with assistance from Travanchet. It fails, Dayan is consumed, and the sole survivor is Mide.

3) Just before the present day, Mide contacts the Illuminati, who appear to be working based entirely on a prophecy that spells out exactly how events will play out. They succeed in summoning Alexander.

4 / 2) Many raid bosses later, the WoL, Mide, and co. travel back in time with Alexander to Point 2. The Alexander that appeared at that time was actually the one summoned in the present. The "prophecy" Quickthinx was following was actually a record of your raid progress so far.

5) Alexander Prime is defeated, and Mide is trapped along with Dayan in the core. Alexander declares the world doesn't need it to exist, and opts to erase itself from existence by freezing itself in a single moment in time. Why Mide and Dayan need to be sealed along with him is never really explained, but as it turns out...

6 / 1) Alexander does need them to exist after all. It sends them back into the past, to found the clan that would one day birth themselves, so that they may initiate the loop that ends with Alexander's summoning prevented.

(And that's without going into the other mini-loop that takes place during the Alexander Prime boss itself, where completing Alexander's trial during that boss fight is what allows you to break free of the trap that would have kept you from fighting it.)

Basically, it all happened already, with no definite beginning or end, in a complete f[kupo] you to laws of causality, and the ultimate goal of Alexander was to prevent its own existence.

[Khalithar]

Snip

Doesn't everyone love how time travel makes a story so simple and easy to comprehend? /sarcasm

[LineageRazor]

Doesn't everyone love how time travel makes a story so simple and easy to comprehend? /sarcasm

So who wants a simple and easy-to-comprehend story? Not me! I LOVE time travel!

[Cilia]

See? That's the stuff I mean. The confusion is real. How did we save ourselves? How was he summoned if the summoning we saw was only Alex transporting to the past? Who was the original summoners/creators of Primal Alexander? It makes no sense, because he had to already exist in the future to become a legend in the past...

EDIT: Not expecting an answer, as I understand ( I think) that its a temporal paradox, but it explains my point of why I don't like time travel in echos. Only rarely does time travel make logical sense, and the Alex story really destroys the suspension of my belief.

It's a causal paradox, specifically a bootstrap paradox.

As I explained earlier, the only way to make heads or tails of it is to assume there is a "Zeroth Loop" that we cannot observe where, say, the Auri treasure hunters really did summon Alexander, and the Illuminati later independently "refurbished" him, leading to the events of the raid. The Illuminati shoot the Auri treasure hunters in their confusion, and Backrix loses his footing, his journal tumbling to the ground without Schrodinger's influence. Past Quickthinx gets ahold of it. We genuinely proved ourselves worthy to Alexander, and after her sacrifice he takes pity on Mide and Dayan, releasing them in the distant past. With the knowledge of Alexander, his tale is passed down in the Hotgo tribe as legend until near-past Mide and Dayan try to summon him - however the time loop is now in effect, meaning Alexander now has to exist as a fixed entity in time. To this end he creates Schrodinger / Shanoa, an automaton cat he acts through that will nudge events to keep the loop perpetual.

In other words, the "Zeroth Loop" is a genuinely alternate timeline that may no longer exist because Alexander is self-observing. Since it exists outside of our ability to observe, such as it is, it's anyone's guess what the "Zeroth Loop" really was like and by extension how and when Alexander first came into existence. (This is all highly hypothetical, mind.)

Except for the "Zeroth Loop," we're all just actors on the stage, unwittingly performing the same worthless comedy show for eternity. And even if we did know, we still couldn't perform anything but that same worthless comedy show. Exactly when or how Alexander was first summoned nobody knows for sure since the "Zeroth Loop" cannot be observed by us, but the events surrounding Alexander are the way it had - well, has, I guess - to be... Can't turn out any other way.

I'm probably getting way more involved than you asked for, and for that, I apologize.

Side note: the Echo is not time travel, it's just the ability to dive into others' souls and view their memories.

So who wants a simple and easy-to-comprehend story? Not me! I LOVE time travel!

I'm not a fan of it in particular, but I do enjoy how it makes me think. Usually it's just "bad guys are doing bad things, go stop them!" Here I'm having to actually think... if only a little. The first BlazBlue game ran heavily on a similar setup, and Sonic 06 had a big one as a part of the story, so it's not really anything new to me.

[Grayve]

*snip*

While fascinating, that only raises more questions. Specifically, if there is at least one 'alternate timeline', does that not mean there are more? And how does an 'alternate timeline' differ from an 'alternate dimension'? While I don't mind time travel stories, they need to establish the rules they work under, and stick to those rules. The Alex tale does not do the former, as far as I can tell. Did Alex kill (or let die) millions of alternate lives and worlds to calculate his results via alternate timelines? Did the WoL die over and over before the true ending happened? (if there are answers, please tell me... its questions like these that make me shove Alex into 'fun fights, but ignore the story' in my brain, unlike the rest of the games story.

And, yes, I know the Echo isn't time travel. Viewing the past is fine, but doing so and not being aware what you are viewing is the past is not. It only confuses the narrative, at least to me. Maybe playing through the events (of 1.0) made sense, but reading about them only makes me confused. Also, Echo with in an Echo just... makes even more confusion.

[Belhi]

The final truth of Alexander is pretty full on. He is probably the first primal we have faced which we genuinely couldn't have beaten if it had seriously wanted us to dead. It is extremely fortunate that the purpose for existence essentially decreed that it must remove itself from the timestream. Its also the first primal I think we have fought that help us beat it.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Well, to be sure, Alexander's "Gordian knot" — his time paradox which, in this case, allows him to remove himself from the timeline — is possible if one accepts there's only a single timeline. From there comes the assumption that everything in the future must have been caused by something in the past.

If this were a reality that allows multiple, tangential timelines to exist, who knows how many alternative realities are possible?

After all, we now know there used to have been as many 13 Shards of the Source. Technically speaking, we do have a multiverse within the reality that is FFXIV. And, technically, that would also mean that as many as 13 different space-time realities are possible.

Thankfully, we don't have to deal with that mind-exploding possibility, because it seems time flows in a single direction and at the same pace for all 13 shards and the source.

[LineageRazor]

Thankfully, we don't have to deal with that mind-exploding possibility, because it seems time flows in a single direction and at the same pace for all 13 shards and the source.

Well, I'm not so certain that this is true. Dialog from the closing cutscenes from Alexander indicate that he examined many different timelines before deciding that the best one was one in which he sealed himself away. The implication is that he had the ability to NOT choose the timeline we know, if he had deemed another one superior - that he had the means to set us upon whatever track he deemed best, and could, essentially, decide which future is going to be the "real" future.

Of course, Alexander DID make a decision, and the timeline we witnessed reflected that decision, so it's impossible to know whether Alexander ACTUALLY changed anything in the past, or instead simply fulfilled his predetermined role in it. It's seriously implied, however, that Alexander had a choice in the matter. Things turned out the way they did because he willed them to, and that he COULD have willed otherwise.

From a logical standpoint, it doesn't make much sense, to be sure. But, hey, this is Final Fantasy - logic doesn't have to play a role!