We’re approaching the end of the year, and that means once again looking at my prediction history for the year, which remains at around 60%. I am happy with that, as I have been in prior year, because realistically 60% is good. It means that I’m right more often than just flipping a coin, but I clearly do not have precognitive abilities. Which is what made it surprising to look back at my columns for this year and see that I figured out Final Fantasy XIV’s big plot twist from Dawntrail before the expansion actually launched.
To be clear, this was in no small part because I was synthesizing further information and using that as an obvious roadmap, and I don’t mean to imply that I got the whole thing right because I just spent the prior paragraph explaining that I am not a soothsayer. It’s more because I found it personally interesting to look back at my predictions, note what I got right or at least mostly right, and then be equally transparent about where I was wrong.
As I already started by noting one part I got right, it’s only fair to start by picking that prediction apart in more detail. When we saw how many Final Fantasy IX details were being shared, I proposed that what we had seen of the Golden City meant that we were dealing with reality colonists, people who came over from another reflection and wanted to make the Source their own. This was, obviously, also the main thrust of the Endwalker post-MSQ quests, but it also lined up nicely with FFIX‘s plot and the mystery of what Solution Nine even was.
The big part where I was wrong is my assumption that this was an existing group rather than one that was only arriving on the Source over the course of the MSQ. But in every other respect it’s pretty much the case. Alexandria wanted to take over and take souls to keep its cycle going for longer. It was never really going to work in the long term, but that didn’t matter.
Other big hits I had were in predicting that our new caster was Pictomancer, that our new melee job was a scouting DPS wielding a one-handed sword, and that the Final Fantasy XI crossover would be more about integrating the concepts of Vana’diel into the world of FFXIV than a straight crossover. That one is, admittedly, still something of a question mark, but it seems very clear at least to me that the intent is unambiguous in stressing that this may not be our Vana’diel, but it is a Vana’diel. A reflection close enough that we could understand it, in other words.
I also predicted that any Ascian influence would be external, not internal, and while we don’t know what’s going on at the end of 7.1 just yet, I feel pretty confident about that one still. If this is the Ascians getting involved (and I don’t think that’s exactly out of the question), it’s one that is clearly doing a specific thing for reasons we can’t yet ascertain, and not one that caused the main conflict that’s already over now.
What about big misses? Well, I had originally figured the expansion would send us to Meracydia, but I’ve also been guessing that for a while, and it wasn’t based on anything because at that point we had nothing that it could be based upon. Besides, there are enough things that I was wrong about otherwise to fill out the column without that!
For example, I definitely guessed Corsair with a gun offhand rather than a dual-sword Viper. I don’t mark myself as wrong for guessing the name (just as I don’t mark myself as right for guessing the name of Reaper), but the nature of the job itself I didn’t quite guess. I’m happy with it, but I didn’t guess it. I also guessed that Pictomancer would be more support-based (if anything, it’s just behind Black Mage in selfishness) and that the Golden City would have something to do with the Allagans.
I still think the obvious design elements we have do look very Allagan despite assertions from the in-universe characters that this stuff doesn’t look Allagan, but there’s also only so much you can do to make weird semi-future semi-magical technology look different in the game. Accommodations must be made for reality.
Now, if you want a narrative to wrap around all of this, it remains pretty much the same as the narrative has always been. FFXIV is very good at keeping its precise details under wraps, but it does have a tendency to show its hand in terms of what it chooses to emphasize and why. It did not carry over much from FFIX beyond a vague sense of plot ideas, and it’s easy to not see the Alexandrian plot as being similar to that game’s primary story, but the broad strokes are there. The import of Alexandria as a concept bears almost no resemblance beyond aesthetics to the original game, which is absolutely by design.
If you want guidance beyond that, however, I would note that a lot of people were absolutely rock-solid believing in Green Mage based on basically nothing beyond “well, turtles are green, right?” which should hopefully give people a little bit of pause moving forward. Yoshida’s shirts are more often than not about wordplay rather than just visual elements, and you should give priority to older games when trying to guess about where the series references are going to.
But what about further predictions? I… don’t have any right now. I’m not making any predictions about where this MSQ is going for two reasons. The first is that it is entirely possible that this arc will run until 7.5 part 1, and the fact that the team has been playing that possibility is no doubt intentional. I have a feeling it’s going to wrap up in 7.3 and then we’ll get two patches of prelude as is more common, but the possibility is still there.
As for the second reason? It’s just too early to make predictions, and that is also by design. Patch 7.1 deliberately concerned itself with filling out backstory and around the edges rather than moving a Big Plot forward, and that was specifically to put the whole “wait, what’s going on” at the very end to leave us all questioning until 7.2. Those questions do not yet have hints of answers, and trying to guess at them is ultimately just looking for patterns in tea leaves. We’ll have more to go on in a couple months. Until then? We need to wait and see what happens next, and if a few hints might be creeping in around the corner with the next patch preview.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, we’ll be a day ahead of the next major chunk of this patch containing the next custom delivery client, and somehow I’ve never really talked about custom deliveries despite how long that content has been regularly added. So let’s talk about it next week.
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.
