Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[Cleretic]

The Machi aspect was more so due to them having a more organic, biological look that had a lot of black n purple. Where most Garlean stuff has none of those hallmarks. Garlean has mostly well the Ivory Standard as it's building colors that have a huge nod of brutalist architecture style with small hints of a very sentimental Amaurotine's touches.

While I admit this is largley helped out by hindsight--we now know exactly what the towers are, rather than just seeing them--I think their design makes sense as sort of a nightmarish parody of Garlean technology and buildings. There's the shared bio-organic nature, but especially from the outside, you can see them as sort of a twisted mockery of a Garlean alarm tower, built out of flesh and bone instead of metal and mortar. At the time that angle wasn't completely clear, but I do remember specifically running the Weeping City to get some comparative looks at their building style, and seeing that they had fundamentally different construction even if they shared some traits. Again, hindsight gives me the perspective to say that it feels like Mhach was built like that while the towers look like they grew like that.

[Vallavia]

I hate to burst this bubble, but Y'shtola directly said the House of the Crooked Coin was an Allagan thing used as part of the mechanism to launch Azys Lla. I think the only thing we're distracted by is the fact that it's purple, and Allagan stuff isn't normally purple--although I'd argue that Allag's general blue crystals and red tech aesthetics make the purple contraption in the Crooked Coin a decent midpoint. I actually don't think Solution Nine has any resemblance to the Crooked Coin at all outside of color scheme; the big difference to me is that the ornamentation is totally different.

I don't agree that Y'shtola's opinion alone and its use by the Allagans rules out the connection entirely, as predictable as it would be it's entirely possible that there's some overlap between the Allagans and the mystery Solution Nine people. Agree to disagree on the resemblance, I don't even detect anything remotely Allagan or Solutionny about it solely via design (having just looked at it again more closely five minutes ago), which to me suggests that it's something that predates both the Allagans and the current civilization in Solution Nine in the present day.

This just seems like another instance of drawing architectural connections that aren't actually real, despite counter-evidence. Like when people thought the towers in the end of Shadowbringers where a Mhachi thing, despite people in-game saying they were Imperial and them not actually resembling Mhach's stuff all that much. Or also in the Endwalker leadup, when people were convinced Sharlayan was deeply connected to Amaurot, mainly because they couldn't tell the difference between Greco-Roman and Art Deco as styles. (That somehow came back when we saw the Aetherfont for the first time, which genuinely surprised me.)

To be fair, Sharlayan does have a pretty significant connection to the Ancients, namely Hydaelyn herself, and like Sanna said the Greek influences are overflowing in Elpis and Pandaemonium. The facade of the Baldesion Arsenal does bear a certain resemblance to some Amaurotine buildings, namely in the isolated decorative spiral on the top (you can see it most clearly if you compare to the Watcher's Palace on the moon), and I don't think fixating on the finer details of Deco design diminishes that. I still maintain that Sharlayan's connection to the Ancients goes even deeper, with the very conspicuous group shots of the Forum all clad in matching robes and veils mirroring scenes of gathered Ancients in flashbacks, but that's another thread.

[MikkoAkure]

This has actually been addressed in this thread, which explains essentially that the Cathedral was dedicated to Sephirot and that Eorzeans later appropriated the sun symbol the Meracydians used for him to represent Azeyma.

That’s not what that says.

That thing you linked says that the sun/Azeyma symbol the Allagans and the Meracydians used has the same origin that spread the symbol across the globe. The Allagans didn’t take that symbol from them.

In 1.0 there were Allagan runestones that would drop from leves or something that had the symbols of the Twelve on them and they could be traded in for special gear that gave an achievement when you equipped them all (I think the gear and achievements still exist). Considering that the Allagans eventually forsook religion and Meracydia wasn’t conquered until near the very end of the era, these runestones probably date to before Allag even knew Meracydia existed. So like that link says, the symbol for Azeyma has been around in both cultures before both cultures met.

The thing the Allagans did appropriate were the squiggly line runic patterns on some of the stonework around the temple.

The sun symbol has a shared origin for both civilizations, but it’s the other random runes that the Belah’dians mistakenly associated with Azeyma that are solely Meracydian yet show up in Qarn due to being copied from Allagan ruins which were copied from Meracydia. But all the symbols for the Twelve have been unchanged since the early Allag empire at the very least, if not well before that.

[Fenral]

I thought that might be the case before they announced the CE/preorder and started playing FF9 on a work trip a few weeks ago, maybe I'll make an effort to finish before June 28 to see if it reveals any epiphanies to me about Dawntrail... I'm trying not to let my speculation go any wilder because it'll be here so soon anyway, we'll all know what's up with this weird cyberpunk city and their silly soul supply in a few months. But it couldn't hurt.

FF9 is kind of an acid trip, and if they take the cues they could from it then the back half of Dawntrail will be a catastrophic cosmological shakeup with far-reaching consequences. Or it will have almost nothing to do with it aside from a few locales and musical cues until we get some kind of big unrelated thing in the post-game story. (Here's a casual reminder that G'raha started out using Zidane's hair model.) There's always some missing piece we won't get until the patch actually drops (like Amon in Endwalker).

[Cleretic]

There's always some missing piece we won't get until the patch actually drops (like Amon in Endwalker).

Still kicking myself for not saying more often that the pre-Endwalker theory of 'Amon is Emet-Selch' doesn't make sense because the personalities and M.O.s don't line up at all, and a far closer match would be Fandaniel.

I didn't say it much because it felt absurd that an alliance raid midboss based on a forgettable FFIII character could possibly be relevant.

[Fenral]

I didn't say it much because it felt absurd that an alliance raid midboss based on a forgettable FFIII character could possibly be relevant.

Not sure if you were around for it, but you'd be amazed at how far people went to debunk "The Crystal Exarch is G'raha Tia" back in the day, so it's probably for the best.

[Cleretic]

Not sure if you were around for it, but you'd be amazed at how far people went to debunk "The Crystal Exarch is G'raha Tia" back in the day, so it's probably for the best.

I was around but not active in the way I am now. Up-to-date and semi-regularly roleplaying, but so distant from the game's community that I had to learn second-hand that we were getting Nier raids. I don't think I had any feelings or theories whatsoever about the Exarch at the time.

I remember that I also heard about the 'Zodiark and Hydaelyn are primals' trailer-reveal second-hand, and my response was essentially 'why am I supposed to care'. Which I just think is funny, because I've kind of wrapped all the way around to hitting that same response from the other direction now; my response to a big reveal isn't 'why should I care' because I don't, my response is 'why should I care' because I want to and think that starting with the intended emotional response, even if I don't have it, is helpful.

[Iscah]

The world map is always rather vague about marked location placements. From memory Ul'dah is further south than it should be and it generally seems a bit artistic over informational.