Where is [Spoiler]?

[Anonymoose]

What are your thoughts on Gaius whereabouts?

I haven't been thinking too hard about it because the stingers throughout Stormblood all seem to have a very delayed payoff. They seem to be following the Griffin formula; rather than hyping us for what's coming soon(ish), they've been giving us brief snippets of context from "the other side" as we went about our year-and-a-half march towards where it all comes together.

Elidibus is on his way to us, Solus is on his way to the First, Varis is trying to pull a Thordan, Zenos is coming at Ghimlyt sideways, and I just tell myself "Gaius is exactly where he thinks he needs to be."

I guess it depends a lot on your take about the location of the next expansion.

And what a ride trying to figure that out has been. "It's time to take down the Garlean Empire!" ... but there have been zero hints pointing towards Ilsabard ... but they won't tell us where any of the areas are ... but Solus is clearly going to the First ... and then there's the Voice. So I go into the Keynote thinking, "Okay, I hope this helps us narrow it down. Is Ilsabard just getting Light-scourged into the 'messed up world'? Or are we going to the First? Or is Dalmasca involved? Is it a Before/After time travel thing?" and what do I get? What looks to be Mesoamerican and Old West architecture supplemented by an armadillo. So add the New World to the possibility mix.

I feel like somewhere around 3.5 we went from being spoon-fed foreshadowing you couldn't miss to being hit with foreshadow buckshot and addition retcons new revelations. "Who is going to accidentally guess correctly?"

I really would like to see the next xpac cover the other shards, because it really does make more of an impact imo.

I waffle on this one a lot.

Final Fantasy is a franchise about saving the world you know and love against all odds and challengers. I think that's why it tends to feel cheap when they bring in alternate dimensions and timelines that make your world smaller and less significant with (cosmologically speaking) less at stake.

FFXIV seems to have tried to mitigate this a bit. They admitted up front that "the (one) universe" was broken and now there are (fourteen) dimensional planes. Alexander seemed to show us that time long before us and time long after us was set in stone unless manipulated from the outside, changing the past, present, and future all at once depending on your individual chronological locale.

Changing or adding to these already-extant things rather than making use of them in a novel way risks cheapening the world or further convoluting the setting - something every Final Fantasy game is wont to do (to its own detriment at times), especially in the final few chapters, lol.

"Killing" Gaius twice seems cheap imo.

I could live with it, if he died in consistency with his own character in a way that completed his story. As organic as the world is, the story and its people definitely follow traditional dramatic arcs. Gaius's first "death" didn't jibe very well with the big picture. You could make it fit with 1.0, or 1.23, or 2.0 alone. But all three together felt weird, and unbecoming of what he was supposed to represent. With those affairs in order, I wouldn't be totally against a good death.

Ironically, SE could have - without bringing him back - used addition-retcons to retroactively explain his behavior in context of the more recently written lore about the Populares / Optimates polarization, looming death of the Emperor, and larger Ascian machination. (No matter who won, Gaius as we knew him was going to lose.)

But this is more fun.