(6.55) Urianger's Mysterious Letter

[jadeharley]

At the end of 6.55, cutscene #4 of "The Coming Dawn", we see Urianger and Thancred, acting mysteriously with their own letter, presumably from a competing candidate for the throne. This letter actually seems to be written in Eorzean lettering, though it is very small.





What could this mysterious letter say?

Some existing speculation:
Paragraph 3, line 1 seems to start with "We're pleased to announce that"
Paragraph 4, line 4 starts with some capitalized text that looks like "Wings of the Goddess"

[jadeharley]

It's really hard to read this stuff, even zoomed in, but with a good grasp of both Latin and Eorzean lettering, you can sort of pick out patterns in the text.

Before anyone says "Lorem Ipsum", it's clearly not that. The writing also has a lot of phrases that vibe similarly to official writing and announcements from the English localization team.

Searching for snippets of some of the phrases, an old announcement for FFXI in 2008 has a surprising number of matches, but this is very wild speculation on my part

[Cleretic]

Searching for snippets of some of the phrases, an old announcement for FFXI in 2008 has a surprising number of matches, but this is very wild speculation on my part

This would actually not be surprising to me. It's effectively lorem ipsum, but not literally. They need this to look at a glance like it's actually got a meaningful structure, but also know that it's not going to be in any way legible, so they copy and paste an existing block of text that would have the right 'shape'.

There's a lot of instances of 'we need text but don't expect the text to be readable or important, so we'll just slap in whatever we've got lying around'. I think HD transfers caught a couple; I remember that there's a Gundam Wing scene where a computer's medical readout was actually the installation instructions for a Photoshop plugin, because there was no way they were gonna be readable at standard definition.

[jadeharley]

Someone on reddit found this old image from Idyllshire, indicating this is probably a reused texture.



No Dawntrail secrets this time (or crazy time travel expansion hints), but I'm thinking the FFXI patch notes theory is probably correct.

[jadeharley]

...a computer's medical readout was actually the installation instructions for a Photoshop plugin, because there was no way they were gonna be readable at standard definition.

Heh, I remember Evangelion had a scene where it dumped scrolling html from some random website (maybe the GAINAX homepage?)

[vexis58]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ost_from_2008/

It's a news post from FFXI originally from 2008.

https://imgur.com/a/gvGkHlA

[jadeharley]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ost_from_2008/

It's a news post from FFXI originally from 2008.

https://imgur.com/a/gvGkHlA

Yep, that was my theory, and it looks like people have settled on it!

[Cilia]

It's pretty common to reuse textures like this, especially for little details most players won't notice.

I remember freaking out, thinking all the text in the library books on Borderlands 3's Lovecraft-inspired DLC planet having the opening narration to the first game in the displayed text of books, thinking it was on-brand for the location... come to find out it's in all the books in the game, even the base. SAD!

[BokoToloko]

I'm guessing Urianger and Thancred are following the request from the catboy prince/competitor, given they could've had a chance to meet each other and be friends in Sharlayan.