FFXIV story/lore thread

[Kaixin]

RE: 3 coils. Before entering Coil 2, Urianger says something like

Upon the evidence of thy previous foray, we determined that the elder primal is sustained by three such binding coils. Thus did we commence to scour the realm, and found in the Twelveswood an as-yet-unexplored fragment of the lesser moon bearing a most familiar aetheric signature...

I had thought this meant 3 coils total, counting Coil 1 (T1-5). I guess he meant 3 coils left (out of 5), after deactivating Coil 1 (T1-5).

[Rocl]

I made a map showing known dalamud debris impact but got too hyped by the A Realm in Peril trailer showing modern day adventurers in Carteneau.



rough approximations

orange x = neurolink (coil entrance)

red x = ground zero

purple x = other debris: salt strand & boulder downs, "key fragments" observed in T9's carteneau (and confirmed in the A Realm in Peril trailer)

[Edelweiss]

Grandia.

[Nama]

Off topic but damn that map just made me realize how huge of a walk the zone transition between east thanalan and south shroud is to completely skip over Paglthan.

[Rocl]

Off topic but damn that map just made me realize how huge of a walk the zone transition between east thanalan and south shroud is to completely skip over Paglthan.

Not really, Eastern Thanalan is further north than you think it is: it contains the Yugr'am River.

[Nama]

Seems all of Thanalan is more north then I thought. My confusion over East Thanalan comes from this map ingame which doesnt even show said river anywhere close to being where Eastern Thanalan is. Even though this map and all the other "region" maps are post 2.0 they don't seem to be very accurate in where areas really lay relative to each other.

[Edelweiss]

You know, there's something bothering me about how the Harriers in Rathefrost, Mor Dhona don't look like the other undead (specifically zombies), if they in fact even are undead (people insist they are). Their skin tones and eyes are entirely normal. Their gear is all rusted and worn shit. It's an oversight if they are undead, right? I don't really recall anything in the lore about them so far. They kind of seem, IMO, to be just another group of hostile bandits or something (though they lack any kind of shelter).

Regardless it always struck me as rather peculiar to just have them hoboing it up out in the middle of nowhere. All of the other bandit/outsiders have some lore, be it quest/FATE given.

[Raldo]

Harrier - A person who engages in persistent attacks on others or incursions into their land.

I just assumed they were a bunch of bandits/trappers/whatever. The term Harrier certainly doesn't evoke the idea of them being undead. I suspect they're outcast adventurers from Mor Dhona.

[Niiro]

I was never given the impression they were undead either.

[Qeomash]

I assumed they were simply because the other mobs that wear that gear are the zombies in Southern Thanalan.

[Rocl]

I always assumed the Harriers by Rathefrost were Ishgardian Heretics since they were Elezen and wore gear reminiscent of the ones you encounter in Coerthas.

[Lokus]

Since we were talking about how off the maps represent the ingame world, I decided to just superimpose the Region maps onto the world map. Amazingly they fit nicely, like a glove for some, however certain things still don't make sense when you see what's ingame like with Eastern Thanalan. If only I had photoshop or something besides paint so I could somehow make the regions transparent.

[Cutriss]

If only I had photoshop or something besides paint so I could somehow make the regions transparent.

http://getpaint.net

Anyway, the Battle of Carteneau always bothered me because I was an idiot and had always assumed that it took place in southern Mor Dhona (IE - where we were during the apocalypse event in 1.0). The fact that Carteneau is now a peninsula off to the west of Bluefog means that either we weren't actually at the site of the battle itself, or that whole thing has been pseudo-retconned. From what I remember of the final day, the fighting basically started near Brittlebark and moved westward around Silvertear Lake. Now that whole area has shifted west and then south and I'm puzzled by it (unless Carteneau *includes* that peninsula as well as Brittlebark).

[solracht]

Carteneau is south west of Mor Dhona, south west of Brittlebark, and it's always been there since the first Eorzean map surfaced. No, we weren't there during the apocalypse event. The main host of the Eorzean alliance is sent there to battle the already gathered troops of the VIIth Legion, while the adventurers (players) stay behind to stop the rest of the VIIth legion from joining the battle.

[Qeomash]

The Sad Tale of Phlegethon and Acheron

Greetings all!

Fernehalwes here. Many of you may know me as a dropper of lore bombs, others as an English voice for Yoshi-p during interviews and Producer Letter Lives. However, when I’m not trotting the globe, eating aged prime rib in swanky steakhouses (which is never), I’m back at the Square Enix headquarters in Japan localizing the bejeebers out of FINAL FANTASY XIV with my all-star team of translation/localization/culturalization specialists. But what, you ask, does a translation/localization/culturalization specialist do (other than create and fix bugs, as is documented in this here dank, cobwebby corner of the forums)?

Oooh! Oooh! That’s easy! You translate the game from Japanese to English!

Well...if it were only that easy.

Japanese and English are such different languages that a great deal of rearranging and decoding has to be done before a translation turns into something coherent (I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with the stinky-poo nuggets that Google Translate excretes).

On top of that, there are cultural differences that have to be taken into account, as well. Some turns of phrase, characterizations, jokes, etc. were created by the Japanese writers with the Japanese audience in mind. If FINAL FANTASY XIV was a game that took place in modern-day Tokyo and all the NPCs were named Hiroshi and Akane and Hatsune, then we’d try to preserve as much of the culture as possible, as it directly pertains to the setting. Eorzea, however, is an original fantasy world, and we wanted to make it feel like one. That meant drawing on our knowledge of fantasy and incorporating it into the dialogue, etc. so as to be something more accessible to fans of the genre as a whole.

That road, unfortunately, is not one without its share of potholes, pitfalls, and landmines. To make sure everything stays on track, we are inclined to take certain liberties─to make certain decisions that may appear absolutely batty to most. Those decisions, when left unexplained, have been known (on occasion) to be the spark that starts a flame war. Nobody likes a flame war (least of all me), so that’s why I decided to start this little corner explaining the proverbial methods behind our madness.

And so, without further ado, here’s our first installment, and it’s quite a doozy. I like to call it...

COOL STORY, BRO ～The Sad Tale of Phlegethon and Acheron～

Back before patch 2.1, the LOC team was given a list of enemies that would be appearing in the soon-to-be-released Crystal Tower. For the most part, the list contained names that were taken directly from FINAL FANTASY III, making our job pretty easy. We merely had to go and get the FFIII glossary from our in-house database and work a little Ctrl+C Ctrl+V magic. That is, until we came across ティターン and its FFIII translation of...wait for it...Titan.

Wait, what? Titan is already a primal. How can you have a completely different enemy with the same name?

Well, it turns out that the Japanese katakana rendering of the primal/summon Titan and the FFIII mini-boss Titan are different. So, while both are supposedly based off of the exact same Greek myth, because one developer decided to use one spelling of the name (closer to the Greek pronunciation), and one developer another (closer to the English pronunciation), FFXIV was in the clear to use both as completely different entities (well, the Japanese version, at least).

FFXIV (and all other FFs where a summon)
...Japanese: タイタン (EN pronun: Tie-tun)
...English: Titan
FFIII
...Japanese: ティターン (Greek pronun: Tea-tahn)
...English: Titan

After asking the development team if it was possible to choose a different enemy from FFIII to replace Titan (it wasn’t), we had a localization pow-wow and considered our options. Using the spelling Titan was never an option (too much confusion, as well as system-related wackiness). Using a made-up alternate spelling (like Tytan) seemed a bit cheesy, and using a spelling (Ttan) based off of an undeciphered Cretean writing system (Linear A) seemed a bit far-fetched. However, after a bit of research, we discovered that the FFIII Titan shared the same design (but different color palette) as a few other enemies, one of those being Acheron. We approached the monster team and asked if it would be alright to use Acheron in place of Titan as the translation of the FFIII Titan. They understood our predicament, and said that they did not mind. The French and German (who also had the same problem) decided they would follow suit, and all was solved...OR SO WE THOUGHT.

Fast-forward to a month before patch 2.3. We get a list of the enemies slated to appear in the second leg of the Crystal Tower...and what do we see? アケローン. For those of you who don’t read katakana, let me give you a hint: it’s Acheron.

So yeah, you can bet the first thing we did was go to the monster team to help refresh their memories about what happened around 2.1. Needless to say, it seemed to have slipped ALL their memories, and they weren’t keen on making any changes, as enemy design was pretty much complete and Acheron played a big part in this next leg of the tower.

Well, the localization team gathered again to decide what we were to do this time. There was always the option of going back to FFIII and choosing another enemy that used the same design (but different color palette), but I wasn’t going to get caught in the same trap again. It was time to simply choose a new name. As Acheron was a river of Hades, it seemed appropriate to choose another river. Styx and Lethe were a bit too major and had appeared in other Final Fantasy games (making them fair game for future fodder), and Cocytus was ripe for the invocation of a thousand thousand sneers. So Phlegethon it was.

The only problem now was having Acheron in both the JP and EN versions, but as completely different monsters. As a lover of lore, I hate retconning more than I hate corned beef in my yogurt, but this seemed to be an instance where a grievous wrong needed to be righted, and so here we are.

Titan was Acheron, and is now Phlegethon. Acheron is now back as Acheron (also known as Acheron).

And now you know...the rest of the story.

[Evane]

The Sad Tale of Phlegethon and Acheron

tl;dr version

Spoiler: show

CT1's Acheron is named Titan in the JP version so the loc team named him Acheron. In CT2 there is a boss named Acheron so the loc team had to change CT1's Acheron's name to Phlegethon.

Does this mean what we fought wasn't the fabled hero that we thought he was...

Spoiler: show

idk.

Edit: beaten.

[Rocl]

No, it's a retcon. Ferne pretty much admitted it in the post. The great hero of the Allag enslaved by the Empire in the Labyrinth of the Ancients is Phlegethon and it always was him.

[Niiro]

Just noticed that Nero walks/stands like an Elvaan but is a hume.

Did we ever get any kind of confirmation on Nael being Elvaan? I remember a discussion about it a while back and everyone assumed he was because of his stance/animations.

But considering Garleans are practically a sub-race of their own (with the stupid 3rd eye thing) it would make more sense if they were all of the same basic race (hume).

(Livia and gunshield guy were from conquered lands iirc, not native Garleans)

[Raldo]

The character creator allows several (all?) races to add a 3rd eye, so I don't think it's restricted to Hyur. I'm not 100% familiar with the lore, but since we never saw Nael's face, there's no guarantee he had a 3rd eye and/or was a native Garlean anyway.

but yeah, I don't recall any confirmation what his race was exactly.

[Lokus]

Nael's family were Garlean Nobles iirc so I take that as them being native.