Thread: YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse (Pre-5.1 Speculation)

While I do like Nier: Automata, when I heard the announcement I initially recoiled. I've since softened to the idea, but I still feel that it's quite a can of worms to open; it's been clear from the start that FFXIV is a Final Fantasy fanservice vehicle with a lot of nods to the other games in the series, but this seems to be taking the first steps into making it a Square-Enix fanservice vehicle. What's next? Xenogears? Chrono Trigger? Secret of Mana? Ehrgeiz??? No matter how carefully they tailor the crossovers, adding elements from such a variety of games as significant lore objects is likely to get messy after a while!

That's a concern for another day. Time to speculate on how androids and machine life-forms can fit into the lore as we know it! My initial thought would be that the android crew could come from the same "ascendant realm" as the entity the Kuribu automaton was designed after. As this realm seems to be relevant to the upcoming expansion, it seems like a pretty good hook to latch onto. I don't know whether they'll be literal androids, or just humanoids so alien in nature to what we know that they might as well be androids (much like Kuribu herself).

The Machine Lifeforms would be right at home in the Clockwork City of Goug, in my opinion. Perhaps, thousands of years ago, the denizens of Goug opened a gateway to the ascendant realm and launched an invasion. The gate was closed, but the Machine Lifeforms remained, proliferated, and have plagued the ascendant denizens ever since.

The Allagan angle is one I hope will be avoided, since Allagans have been so overdone in this game. That said, the bit about Allagans creating automatons so advanced that ethical concerns were raised (pfff! Allagans and ethics! Wattalaff!) was a good catch, and that would fit the YorHA angle to a tee. The question remains, then, just what have they been DOING all this time? "YorHA" would indicate there's a whole advanced organization of androids, presumably at war with Machine Lifeforms - so where are they, and how have they kept this conflict a secret?

It will be interesting to see what they come up with!