Rasen Kaikyo

[Anonymoose]

Some friends and I have been trying to figure out the world map for a while now; a lot of it is ... strange.

How can Rasen Kaikyo be east of Kugane but also part of the Ruby Tide Sea, which itself is west of Kugane? We haven't figured it out, yet. My first guess was that SE was originally taking us to Rasen but then changed it to the Ruby and it just wasn't a perfectly clean transition. Then I thought maybe the labels were merely positioned awkwardly; that the Ruby Tide Sea was only the strait between Hingashi and Othard while the Rasen Kaikyo was the sea between the Ruby Tide and the Glass Ocean. Except Kaikyo itself means strait. Maybe the Ruby Tide and Rasen Kaikyo are two straits and the Ruby Sea doesn't have a proper map label...? I have no idea.

And that's just the beginning of the weirdness, though I theorize that most of it is simply caused by SE not having to split the regions into multiple zones in 4.0 yet utilizing the same map mechanics as 2.0, so the entire map structure got shifted a tier. Now "Othard" is on the region level, and "Yanxia" is on the zone level despite Yanxia being a region of the continent of Othard.

Then Hingashi is the on the same level as Othard, which I would understand (because Aldenard and Vylbrand are on the same map tier) if it weren't for the fact that Koshu is the same font/size as Othard, on the "great landmass" tier (which are using the region map pins now) and if you open the Hingashi map it's labeled Koshu but contains the map of Shishu, Kugane, and Shirogane. But you can't lower Koshu a tier and put Hingashi there because Shishu's map label is on the same tier as just Daitenzan, a region of Koshu.

Even if you concede that the map has been shifted a tier, that regions are acting as continents, areas as regions, and that zones and regions are now equivalent, it's still hard to pin down the hierarchy as if it were an atlas (land mass, region, area, contrived cultural realms).

I'm having a lot of trouble with it, lol.