Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Gunning for the most anticlimactic reason for Solution Nine at the moment. Just what a civilization designs when the aether is overwhelmingly electric. That there’s no Shards involved and it’s a lot younger than anyone, including my previous guess, has suggested. Not even an earlier Astral Era. Everything text or quasi glyph-based is red herrings. Going to set low - and thus reasonable- expectations. Because at this point a nonAscian/Ancient/Shard/Alien connection would be subverted expectations.

I think the most anticlimactic explanation is they are an isolationist society that's been there the whole time. Like they found a way to survive the second umbral calamity and they've just been in hiding. "Yeah, we've just been down in this cave the past 7000 years perfecting our cyberpunk aesthetic. A meteor? Hurled right at your continent? Ya don't say."

[Denishia]

I think the most anticlimactic explanation is they are an isolationist society that's been there the whole time. Like they found a way to survive the second umbral calamity and they've just been in hiding. "Yeah, we've just been down in this cave the past 7000 years perfecting our cyberpunk aesthetic. A meteor? Hurled right at your continent? Ya don't say."

Oh, see even that is way too spectacular for how low I'm resetting my speculations. Solution Nine is, at most, a thousand years old. And probably less two hundred. But younger than Mhach. It's actually not an older civilization at all but a contemporary of all the other Turali nations that came together to form Tuliyollal and the seeming tech difference on the practical international stage didn't translate to imperialistic power over their neighbors. The Cyberpunk is all aesthetic. This sounds ridiculous but it will be justified in the plot. The big level 98/99 twist are something altogether different.

[kaynide]

Oh, see even that is way too spectacular for how low I'm resetting my speculations. Solution Nine is, at most, a thousand years old. And probably less two hundred. But younger than Mhach. It's actually not an older civilization at all but a contemporary of all the other Turali nations that came together to form Tuliyollal and the seeming tech difference on the practical international stage didn't translate to imperialistic power over their neighbors. The Cyberpunk is all aesthetic. This sounds ridiculous but it will be justified in the plot. The big level 98/99 twist are something altogether different.

Ehh, I mean considering real world Earth went from horses drawn wagons to Drone-based Amazon deliveries in less than 200 years, it's not THAT unrealistic to speculate a rapid rise of tech prowess. And since we already had a high-tech society in the Allagans however many years ago, any exposure S9 had to it would only accelerate their progress.

I'm more curious if it's connected to anything else in old lore (like the Green "Ark" near Rhalgar's Reach is connected to Sharlayan). Like, I wonder if S9 is the survivors of Mhachi. And the streets are crawling with undead (but very polite) citizens!?

[Denishia]

See, if Solution Nine is tied to the civilization of Urqopacha, being a heavily and aggressively expansionist empire originating in a Peruvian-looking region, then a lot of undead would be highly appropriate. What with not just the mummies but that dead rulers were still afforded political power and given taxes, so a fantasy version could very well have actual zombies.

I want whatever is going on in Solution Nine to not be connected to anything else - especially not Allagans (or Ascians). But I will grumble a tiny bit less if it's Mhach just because of the post-patch Void Quests teasing but not doing anything substantial with the Void Ark raid. Just enough to remind players of its existence.

If forced, I would rather have rogue Meracydians if there's an outside group (Allagans, Shards, older non-Turali civilization, etc...) involved to lay the natural foundation for going to Meracydia in a later Expac beyond an Estinien-level excuse of checking off the bucket list.

[kaynide]

I mean, if we want to go deep rabbit hole delving… S9 could be in the inter dimensional cleft.

Hear me out, as a grab my red string and tinfoil hat.

So, the expansions very loosely get inspiration from older FF games; FF3 and the Crystal tower/warriors of darkness for SB, A lot of FF4 obviously being in EW.

Assuming the trend continues, FF5 is the next reasonable source of inspiration. Major plot points include the inter dimensional rift between worlds.

In addition, FF5 had the Warriors of Dawn (whose trail we may or may not be following in 7.0), which included Galuf…(Krile’s father in both FF5 and 14). FF5 also involved the reunion of 2 worlds.

If I had to go even more deep, I’d say the game necessitates planar travel for future expacs as an alternative “solution” to merging worlds. Because we know at some point we are going to reunite Thancred and Y’shtola with their loved ones on the First.

[MikkoAkure]

I'm more curious if it's connected to anything else in old lore (like the Green "Ark" near Rhalgar's Reach is connected to Sharlayan). Like, I wonder if S9 is the survivors of Mhachi. And the streets are crawling with undead (but very polite) citizens!?

Mhach’s version of that Sharlayan ark in the mountains was the Void Ark that was supposed to take them to Dun Scaith and we all know how that turned out. Ul’dah, Sil’dih, and Ala Mhigo were populated by Mhachi survivors so I think they’re accounted for anyway.

Does anyone know if Allag used the modern alphabet? I know all our maps for Allagan areas do. If Solution Nine is still using an older script, they’d have to be older than even Allag, from another Shard, or picked it up from somewhere and adopted it as their own for some reason. I think that script being there pokes holes in a lot of theories and limits the scope of our speculation.

See, if Solution Nine is tied to the civilization of Urqopacha, being a heavily and aggressively expansionist empire originating in a Peruvian-looking region, then a lot of undead would be highly appropriate. What with not just the mummies but that dead rulers were still afforded political power and given taxes, so a fantasy version could very well have actual zombies.

The old civilization of Urqopacha were giants and their descendants still live in Urqopacha. I think they’re the trolls that are being copy-pasted from Treasures of Aht Urghan that were shown off in the last fan fest.


Another weird potential clue is the merry-go-round that Yoshi-P insisted is important. Horses aren't very widely known around this world, but Solution Nine's merry-go-round features them. If Tural is accurate to our world, horses would not be present there at all unless they were introduced but the people they've been in contact with as a potential Europe-analogue use chocobos instead.

[Denishia]

Another weird potential clue is the merry-go-round that Yoshi-P insisted is important. Horses aren't very widely known around this world, but Solution Nine's merry-go-round features them. If Tural is accurate to our world, horses would not be present there at all unless they were introduced but the people they've been in contact with as a potential Europe-analogue use chocobos instead.

Good point about the weird chocobo/horse division in Aldenard and Othard. And it has me thinking about the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI) that allowed South American mammals, esp. marsupials, and terror birds into North America and the more successful invasion of native North America genus. But instead of a Central American land bridge, Tural has a literal narrow bridge. So it'll be interesting if the zones keep to an extreme division of mob types. And I'll be laughing if only one of continental regions has chocobos and whichever option they pick.

Please please have a glyptodon mob and make a mount version. I don't care which one of the armadillo mobs is used as a base, but I love all of them in game and give me new variations.

[YianKutku]

Does anyone know if Allag used the modern alphabet? I know all our maps for Allagan areas do. If Solution Nine is still using an older script, they’d have to be older than even Allag, from another Shard, or picked it up from somewhere and adopted it as their own for some reason. I think that script being there pokes holes in a lot of theories and limits the scope of our speculation.

Working entirely off unreliable memory, Allag used the "modern alphabet". In fact, the "modern alphabet" is the Allagan one, or at least close to the Allagan one. (Source is EE2 p34-35.) This is a bit of a retcon, since EE1 p29 claimed the priests and scholars of the Fourth Umbral Era came up with an entirely new alphabet to hide their studies from the anti-intellectualism of that time, and that became the modern Eorzean alphabet. Now, EE2 says the Allagan alphabet is close enough to the modern Eorzean alphabet as to be mutually intelligible, except the pronunciations are different due to drift. How this affects historical research in-universe is not elaborated, other than mentioning how this language and alphabet was lost during the Fourth Eras and rediscovered later.

However, one handwave given by the lore writers (primarily Koji Fox) is that "early Allagan" and "late Allagan" are very different periods, since the empire spanned a few millennia. This is why the Labyrinth Of The Ancients looks nothing like Syrcus Tower, architecturally. This is also the explanation given for why there are many pieces of unfamiliar script scrawled on the various robots in Azys Lla: they're supposedly from a forgotten dialect of part of the Allagan Empire that is lost to history. From a Doylist perspective, the actual answer is this is what happens when the devs have to grab models and textures from FFXIII due to development crunch, and forgot to modify the Pulse writing.

So there's already a potential loophole for "this unfamiliar alphabet is Allagan, but not the only Allagan alphabet".

As for Solution Nine, the part which I'm expecting a lot of speculation from is how the alphabet used there is identical to the "proposed Ancient alphabet" combining Eorzean and Vrandtic alphabets to find a common ancestor. Putting aside the caveats about "this is what in-universe scholars think", the fact that it's used here gives a very high chance that this is the Ancient alphabet, with only a miniscule chance that it's all a coincidence.

So somehow, Solution Nine retains the Ancient alphabet, after the Sundering and twelve thousand years. This is remarkable, because even the First did not, despite the First having literal Ancient ruins that survived those twelve thousand years, as Anamnesis Anyder. So presumably there have been fewer world-shattering and culture-destroying events on the First, but Norvrandt still has a completely different alphabet. (I do not believe the alphabet will have changed in the hundred years since the Flood of Light; too little time.) So how did Solution Nine, on the Calamity-prone Source (including the "continent-breaking" Fourth Calamity) have writing in the Ancient alphabet?

[Iscah]

So somehow, Solution Nine retains the Ancient alphabet, after the Sundering and twelve thousand years.

We don't know that for certain – we just know that they are using it today.

As previously noted, it's possible that they have revived this script from ancient ruins rather than using it continuously.

[diamondedge83]

Something just came to me now as I was reading these responses; perhaps it's already been hypothesized, I don't recall, but solution 9 could come from the Eighth Umbral calamity timeline's future. Perhaps they created an entire city and had it travel back in time to long before the timeline split (or created the city after they arrived) in order to escape the Ninth Umbral Calamity. Chrono Cross event in our future? It's probably something way more mundane, but it's fun to think about.