The Epidemic of Amnesia.

[Arohk]

Don't you think there are way too many Characters that lost their memories?
It is an overused story telling device and especially in FFXIV.

"I woke up in Eorzea, but i can't remember where i came from or how i got here, Adventurer can you herp me?"

This is also an overused trope at this point in many many games.

wink wink
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Xa0ACKaNo

[LilimoLimomo]

Part of playing any Final Fantasy game is accepting that there's probably going to be a healthy dose of amnesia.

[Cleretic]

Actually, trying to gut-feel how many people we've met with amnesia. Not including us, or the whole Warrior of Light memory-cloaking whatsit...

• Cid (got better)
• Yotsuyu (got better, then died)
• Gaia
• Arya in the Red Mage questline
• Clive (but weirdly not Lightning or Noctis)
• Zero (seems less amnesia and more just 'after ten thousand years you forget some stuff')
• Elidibus if you want to count him
• Technically the Kairos memory-wipe
• Lahabrea, temporarily and voluntarily

This is a generous definition, personally I'd cut about half of these. And it pprobably feels like it's only that big when you actually count them out, it's not like 'the Scions have a lot of people with white hair' where they're all in the same room and you can physically see it.

[SannaR]

I would probably take out from that list Clive, Zero and Elidibus. Clive if we're just counting XIV cast as cross over stuff doesn't seem and isn't meant to have any mentions or long lasting effects of them. Zero and Elidibus because is it really amnesia if the passage of time is mostly the culprit? Especially if you never thought that the one day you met two strangers offering to team up with you would have been a very important day in your life thousands of years later. With Elidibus even if he chose to look at the memories tied to his convocation stone we know that they 100% wouldn't have been his own. But mostly memories Lahabreha and Emet-Selch had of him. Probably why Emet-Selch basically left himself symbolic and sometimes more literal sticky notes about things he didn't want to forget.

[Zero-ELEC]

Gods, if I never have see another Dunkey video it'll be too soon.

Anyways, no, there's no epidemic of amnesia, and the situation you postulate is not common at all. There's two situations where that sorta happens, only in event quests, with Iroha in The Maiden's Rhapsody and Clive in The Path Infernal and.... that's it.

[Ancalagon_Blacktalon]

yeah crossover characters don't really count because having these events be remembered in their respective games would break the plots of said games.

I'd argue that the same is true for Time Abysses like Zero and Elidibus. hell, with how forgetful I am in real life (I can't tell you what I ate two days ago), this logic would make me an amnesiac! lol

[Cleretic]

Zero and Elidibus because is it really amnesia if the passage of time is mostly the culprit? Especially if you never thought that the one day you met two strangers offering to team up with you would have been a very important day in your life thousands of years later. With Elidibus even if he chose to look at the memories tied to his convocation stone we know that they 100% wouldn't have been his own.

I feel like the differences in how Zero and Elidibus' 'memory loss' are written and depicted is interesting, but I don't think either are amnesia. Zero's is just 'you don't remember that much of your childhood' writ large, and honestly isn't depicted as in any way negative or tragic; it's used as a source of dramatic irony, that we know more than she does, but that's about it.

With Elidibus it's more depicted as something akin to Alzheimer's. We're seeing someone after a serious decay of their memories, where they're clearly a shell of their former self, and it's very much depicted as tragic even if the guy's a terrible person; in fact, there's an air that some of that terribleness might be because of those memory issues, as he's forgotten the root reasoning behind his stances that might've led him to be more sympathetic if he remembered it.

[Iscah]

With Elidibus even if he chose to look at the memories tied to his convocation stone we know that they 100% wouldn't have been his own. But mostly memories Lahabreha and Emet-Selch had of him.

For the sundered-and-reinstated Ascians this is generally the case, but Elidibus is more complicated.

On the one side, he's one of the people who created the memory stones in the first place, so he had the opportunity to insert his first-hand memories rather than just what others thought of him.

On the other, he was by that point not actually himself but a primal who may or may not have had Themis's soul within it, so there may have been some benefit in the other two adding their memories of the original person. But even without that, the memory stone should have helped "reset" primal-Elidibus's memory to everything he had of himself at the time of creating the stones and which has since been lost.

[Darkstride]

I don't actually feel like there are a lot of scenarios in XIV that involve amnesia. Care to cite what situations you are referring to, if you're claiming it's overused in the game?

[Rudje]

For the sundered-and-reinstated Ascians this is generally the case, but Elidibus is more complicated.

On the one side, he's one of the people who created the memory stones in the first place, so he had the opportunity to insert his first-hand memories rather than just what others thought of him.

On the other, he was by that point not actually himself but a primal who may or may not have had Themis's soul within it, so there may have been some benefit in the other two adding their memories of the original person. But even without that, the memory stone should have helped "reset" primal-Elidibus's memory to everything he had of himself at the time of creating the stones and which has since been lost.

Elidibus is (once he's allowed to do more than [vague handwaves about balance] anyway) very consistently written as someone with early-to-middle stage dementia, which is why he hit particularly hard for me since those problems run in my family. In those cases, reminding someone of a painful memory is like they're learning it for the first time all over again, which depending on the memory can mean a drastic decrease in quality of life as they're getting fresh blasts of stress hormones extremely frequently. Even for a human-shaped primal it may have been too much to bear.