FFXVI and XIV connection theory

[Cleretic]

For what it's worth, XIV Ivalice was staked from the outset as not being the Ivalice, and had immediate evidence for that... that people mostly didn't notice because it required you to be enough of a nerd to recognize a timeline discrepancy. The timeline of the Ivalice games is basically XII->Tactics->Vagrant Story (with the other Tactics games being a little harder to place, but also not referenced in XIV so whatever); meanwhile in XIV, clearly enormously different versions of XII's events are taking place in the present, while Tactics' was in the past, and Vagrant Story is faintly implied to be going on somewhere off-screen.

'XIV Ivalice' is 'Tactics Ivalice' in the same way as, like, XIV's Golbez is IV's Golbez: it's not, and they try to make it as clear as they can while still retaining the reference. Granted they weren't very loud about that with Ivalice, but I'm not sure how they could've stated it clearer (or at least earlier, I feel like it's pretty clear by the time Fran turns up) without distracting from the story.