First things first: This article is not about your favorite ability that has been removed from Final Fantasy XIV over the years. No, even if it’s the option of pole-dancing on your Dragoon. Instead, it’s about the fact that we’ve just sort of let certain kind of powerful things get… lost. Like, there are a surprising number of things in the world of Etheirys that someone probably should have been keeping an eye on but we don’t know anything about.
Keep in mind that by “lost,” I don’t mean to imply that the writers have lost track or forgotten about these things or that these elements have been intentionally ignored. My point here is that these things are out there, bouncing around the fringes, and they haven’t been brought up in a really long time. So it’s worth considering their absence and what that might mean for the future of the game’s storytelling, isn’t it?
Tiamat
The end of Shadowbringers finally gave us forward motion on Tiamat’s story after she’d been sitting in Azys Lla for ages since Heavensward. She was freed, helped us fight against Lunar Bahamut and the Telophoroi in the early stages of that conflict, and then… well, then she went off to do whatever she felt like, apparently? That part remains vague.
Now, keep in mind, we know that at least as of the end of Endwalker she’s all right because she responded when Vrtra called his siblings. But we didn’t actually see her at all. We also haven’t seen her since, despite the importance of Vrtra and Azdaja in the story to this point. You’d think he might give a call or see if she’s up for some adventure.
Sure, to a lesser extent Hraesvelgr counts here, but it’s not hard to imagine what Hraesvelgr’s life looks like outside of helping with major things. He’s re-establishing lines of communication with his brood and with Ishgard, slowly seeing guests again, and learning to move on after literal centuries of stewing in his grief. Not that he doesn’t probably have lots of grief considering how things ended with Nidhogg. We can probably guess what he’s doing.
Tiamat, though? She’s been chilling in Azys Lla for a much longer period of time, she has no one to contact, and the place that she once called home was Meracydia, which seems like the sort of thing that might be worth considering when you take into account how impenetrable that area has been up until now. There appear to be no reports of her just chilling out somewhere else, either. I admit to not teleporting back to Kugane all that often, but she’s just kind of… out there doing her own thing.
Considering that there are currently three members of the First Brood on the planet and in control of their own fates, I think that might be important? Someone should maybe have a contact number for Tiamat? That seems like an oversight.
Ultima
The Heart of Sabik is given a much less poetic name in Japanese, and even if it weren’t, we know where that is, or at least the general area where pieces of it are now. We didn’t lose that, exactly, but we’re not getting it back now. But you’ll note I’m talking about the spell itself here because as much as Lahabrea said that ancient Allag failed to figure out the Heart of Sabik, we’ve had a lot of things casting some variant on Ultima for a while now.
None of them, of course, had the sheer destructive power that Ultima itself unleashed in the Praetorium. That was a big boom, it would have killed the Warrior of Light if not for direct divine intervention, and it’s clear that the spell’s destructive power is appreciable. And yet we have never seen any of the Ascians attempt to cast it again or even contrive to bring it back, even as lesser copies have popped up here and there.
It is possible, of course, that this spell simply cannot be cast by living beings. Maybe it’s something about the reserves of aether required, maybe it’s just a particular technique, maybe a lot of things. We can make guesses about why Demi-Ultima and Proto-Ultima and other variants are all we’ve seen since then. But it seems worth considering that this spell was known, and honestly that rings just a little hollow to me, that Lahabrea would be able to force the Ultima Weapon to cast a spell that its designers didn’t know was possible.
And we still do have some Ascians unaccounted for – and I mean actual Ascians, not whatever Gaia counts as at this point. Sure, they might all be dead and/or not worth keeping track of. But we’ve never really examined this spell, what it draws from, or even if it can be cast or controlled… and that seems worth considering, especially with our next Deep Dungeon heading into more Allagan territory.
The Tycoon
All right, is everyone ready to do the Twinning dance while we talk about this? Super. Go.
This is, in some way, a minor one. The Tycoon is on the First, so it’s a little difficult to just have the Ironworks walk over and pick up the pieces. And it is in pieces now because it got broken pretty good because it attacked us because… uh… well, because there needed to be a last fight for this dungeon and it looked cool, all right? Stop asking weird questions. Plus, you know, it was a component of a specific device that requires the Crystal Tower.
But therein lies the issue, yes? The Crystal Tower no longer has a certain cat sleeping in there. And the WoL can still cross back and forth freely between the First and the Source; that’s kind of something several elements of questing and the like rely upon. And that means it is, at least, theoretically possible for having all of the parts necessary to create a vessel that travels through space and time across the rift and winding up in other worlds.
It does require a bit of extrapolation to assume that this is still lying around ready to be used, but we do still have all of the components. The Crystal Tower is on the Source; Cid has the same notes about Omega and Alexander as well as access to whatever Omega qualifies as now. Heck, if anything he could have more access to information by buzzing by and talking with the Omicrons. You could argue – convincingly – that the main reason no one is trying to recreate the Tycoon is that the whole reason for trying it once was for the survival of the world, and that’s not a pressing concern any longer.
Yet at the same time, G’raha Tia knows about it. And he knows it works this time. And it seems as if everyone has kind of just voluntarily forgotten about that, especially when it seems like it might be kind of useful information here and there.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, let’s talk about something that’s still rather lore-focused by taking a look at the outstanding potential series references that could support a raid series.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
