Does Yoshi P Hate FF9?

[Cilia]

A couple I forgot to mention:

The first boss of the Underkeep is a Gargant, a species of giant insect used as transport at various points in IX. This one specifically looks like the "wild" type found in Fossil Roo as opposed to the more tame specimen encountered earlier in Gargan Roo.

While the Bloodstones that power up the Valia Pira in IX aren't here for understandable reasons, they're still referenced in how the spheres that launch its cross attacks are blood red. (There is one small design change to the Valia Pira itself - it's missing the Terran crest.)

While out spending time with Sphene, she buys and indulges in a Dali coffee. Dali is the first village you visit after the opening events in Alexandria during IX, and is linked to the (infamous) coffee sidequest in that game. (The old man Morrid who wants three kinds of coffee mans the nearby Observatory Mountain, and one of the coffees - Burman - is found in Dali itself, though you have to take an unintuitive detour before Kuja's attack on Alexandria early in Disc 3, while you're supposed to be winning the Tetra Master tournament, to get it.)

[Cleretic]

(There is one small design change to the Valia Pira itself - it's missing the Terran crest.)

I'm not sure I'd call that a 'small' change since the crest is kinda the whole design for Valia Pira. But that's also itself kinda the sign of how they worked in the FFIX references: if it were a shallow 'look, it's a thing you know' reference they probably would've kept the Terran emblem, especially because out of context it just looks like a cool abstract design with some wings; you could've thrown it into Heavensward as a Church thing or Shadowbringers as something related to the Sin Eaters and it would've scanned fine without needing any extra thought to comprehend it.

But instead, because Dawntrail deploys it as a tool of Alexandria, it's got the FFXIV Alexandria emblem. Which is itself a IX reference, that emblem is sort of a redraw of IX Alexandria's to be a bit more in-keeping with the world Dawntrail puts it in. But it's all made more narratively complicated, and in turn more narratively in-place, by giving Alexandria the boss that's just a weaponized emblem. It's maybe one of the most shallow IX references in all of Dawntrail, because you can quite easily just read it as 'look it's Valia Pira', but even just redrawing the emblem of Valia Pira gives it a lot more weight and meaning than reusing it as-is.