Shadowbringers and Ivalice

[silentwindfr]

exept northern from there we have the map and no forest there...
like said the fact that they have hint that rak tika is the home of a viera race while they are from golmore jungle is from the get go is strange, is true that they haven't said is not time travel, but they haven't talk of time travel too, but my point is the whole idea of time travel come from one line, when every hint, point to the first shard.... the sole presence of minfilia as envoy of hyadelin (her eyes hint to it) and the fact to say that we need to be a warrior of darkness.... is hint big enough.... if we had the capacity to time travel....
why only go back to stop the 8th calamity?
why not go stop dalmud and the release of bahamut?
why not go back in time for stop every calamity? why not go and stop even the creation of the empire!

time travel is a mess.... without a very solide story you will be filled with paradox.... alexander is a perfect example of this.... the whole story of alexander is a time paradox.... since the two that did go back in time, are born from the clan they have themself create!
any author or scenarist will say you.... that time travel is the most dangerous and complicate setup to use without breaking everything! the theory about time travel.... is bogus....

[Bright-Flower]

My thought is that the expansion will be half southern Othard, half...something else. Whether it's another shard or time travel or on the empire's continent IDK, but that's my thought.

With the dangling plot threads of Fran's resistance group and Dalmasca still needing liberation, and the Viera likely living in the Greatwood, that's my guess. It felt like they intentionally left some open plot threads in Return to Ivalice with Dalmasca.

They also teased the second job was related to the expansion's main city. And with Dancer likely being it, I'm going to say Radz-at-han is the main city. It's geographically close enough to southern Othard to serve the same purpose Kugane did to east Othard. Dancer lore seems like it could easily tie into it.

[Iscah]

exept northern from there we have the map and no forest there...
like said the fact that they have hint that rak tika is the home of a viera race while they are from golmore jungle is from the get go is strange

No, it's not strange that Viera can be found somewhere other than the Golmore Jungle because it has been said in the game that they can be found in another location as well.

I went and checked the quote.

WANDERING DRAMATURGE
The word "Viera" itself means "people of the wood," and true to that name, both the Rava and the Veena make their homes exclusively in the Golmore Jungle, or the primeval forests which line the southwestern foothills of the Skatay Range, respectively.

The punctuation can be misleading at a glance, and it might be misread as saying that the Golmore Jungle is the primeval forest, but the "respectively" makes the intended meaning clear: the Rava clan live in the Golmore Jungle, and the Veena clan in the forests around the Skatay Range to the north (for which he conveniently failed to mention the name of that forest!).

if we had the capacity to time travel....
why only go back to stop the 8th calamity?
why not go stop dalmud and the release of bahamut?
why not go back in time for stop every calamity? why not go and stop even the creation of the empire!

Because that would break the entire timeline by affecting the events that utimately led to us going back in time in the first place.

I happen to still be unconvinced that we're going to be undoing anything, particularly given our main example of how time logic works in this story, but that doesn't rule out any form of time travel plot.

The Alexander plotline, convoluted as it is, is an example of time travel not breaking the timeline.

time travel is a mess.... without a very solide story you will be filled with paradox.... alexander is a perfect example of this.... the whole story of alexander is a time paradox.... since the two that did go back in time, are born from the clan they have themself create!

any author or scenarist will say you.... that time travel is the most dangerous and complicate setup to use without breaking everything! the theory about time travel.... is bogus....

There are paradoxes in the Alexander story, certainly - but there's actually a critical difference between kinds of paradox.

Paradoxes are a problem if they alter the timeline in ways that would affect your ability to alter things in the first place.

If you accidentally kill your past self or an ancestor, you should no longer exist, therefore you couldn't be there to cause that death in the first place.

If you successfully prevent a past disaster from happening, it never happened, therefore you don't know about it and won't try to prevent it.


The Alexander storyline is a stable time loop - it runs on a different kind of time logic that avoids these "timeline-breaking" paradoxes altogether. Instead there are oddities that make you ask "how did this ever happen in the first place?" but the fact is that it did happen, and always will have happened, and there is no alternate version of the timeline where it didn't happen.

There is only one timeline that runs from past to future, but at some points people (or things) will relocate to a different position on that timeline. They may experience a certain period of time twice or multiple times by travelling back and going though that period of time again, though as a separate entity from their past self. And it always happened that way.

There are things that probably shouldn't have happened, but they did, and in the end nothing happens that prevents past events from taking place.

If, say, Mide had died partway through the story - let's say Quickthinx shot her at some point after losing his "book of predictions" - that would create a paradox because she needs to survive so she can go back in time and become her own ancestor.

But from another perspective - she will not die partway through, because a past event (returning to found the Hotgo tribe in her future, our past) has happened, therefore she cannot have died before reaching that point.

Therefore, Quickthinx still might shoot her with the intent to kill her, but it will not, cannot, already did not happen. He'll miss, or the gun will jam, or someone will stop him before he pulls the trigger. There is no possibility that he will succeed, because it is provable that he did not.



It's certainly a tricky kind of story to write, and to get your head around how all the parts of it play together.

By the nature of it, there will be "paradoxes". Things will happen that could never have happened if there wasn't time travel occurring.

But if it's mapped out well, the final result balances out.

Maybe Event A couldn't happen without strange time-travel events causing Event B, and Event B couldn't happen without something triggered by Event A.... but what matters in the end is that both of those events did happen, and can support each other's existence because it never played out any other way.



Also, if you can grasp how it works, there are all sorts of clever things that can be done in a "no paradoxes" timeline. You can mess around with "what actually happened" versus "what is thought to have happened".

You can accidentally, or deliberately, cause a past event to happen.

You can attempt to stop a past event from occurring, only to create the circumstances that make it happen in the first place.

You can take your knowledge of what happened in a past event and use it to your advantage. Say you can freely travel in time, and need a magical artifact that was stolen three years ago by a thief who vanished without a trace? Time to start planning a heist, because you know it's going to work. If you're lucky, there might even be notes about how the thief carried out their plan.
(And then it all goes wrong anyway because your rival had the same idea, came to the same place at the same time, and beat you to being the thief.)

Usually it comes with all sorts of "don't let your past self see you" warnings, but I'd love to see a plot (not necessarily in this game) that actually works with this. A regular time traveller might be able to plan to be in two places at once, and "help themself out".