The FFTA/FFTA2 connection is a really odd one. There are a lot of definite and obvious connections, but there are tons of contradictions as well.

Mewt comes back at the end of FFTA2, and gives a fairly solid clencher that the games are directly connected, but he is the only recurring character to give that impression.

But there are issues with that. The entire Judge/law system is overhauled, and has very different roots and implementation in the lore of the two games. Ezel makes a reappearance as an alchemist who fiddles with the law (he makes a card for your clan that protects your Judge from being barred from combat), yet no mention is made of his previous attempts to break down the law (or any of the other events of FFTA), nor does it mention the differences in the law system.

Montblanc reappears as a travelling Black Mage (and even though my clan's average level was 12 when I finally got to him on Hard Mode, the little twerp joined me at level 45. Do you know how many resets it takes to get a Black Mage to have decent speed when they join at that level?!), but, though he mentions Clan Centurio and the adventures from FFXII, again, there is no mention of FFTA's events.

Nono is also mentioned after you recruit Vaan and Penelo, as the chief machinist of the Strahl who was left on Lemures (indicating that this is after FFXII: Revenant Wings, and by about 2 years, from the feel I got), and recently finished construction of his own airship. Again, no mention of his previous airship adventures in FFTA, where he had his own merchant ship that got wrecked twice.

Al-Cid also shows up, and when he joins your clan, he mentions that he was laying low because of some trouble in Rozzaria to the east (Jylland is definitely to the west of Rozzaria and the rest of the FFXII Ivalice, this is mentioned several times). What that trouble is, we never get to know, unfortunately.

Jylland is shown as a continent or country in Ivalice, while in FFTA, Ivalice was an individual country, not a world. The laws apparently only exist in Jylland, and were made by Lezaford, a mage in that realm. When you talk to him about the judges on some of the side quests, he says they are more magical golems than individuals. Tied to the Judge Pact, but with no personality or will. There is a small mention that when the laws were first made, they affected everyone until complaints about it being too restrictive caused them to be restructured so only those who swore the Judge Oath would receive their benefits, which could indicate that the law system (and thus, perhaps the Judges) were different, but even that does not match up with the system we saw in FFTA, where the laws seemed to have been in play for a long time already, and were arbitrarily messed with at the whim of the royal family.

Seams are either absent from FFTA2, or have been restructured into the Rifts, but we don't get enough info to tell for sure.


So how do we reconcile the two worlds? They have a lot in common, and Mewt's cameo at the endgame says that the worlds are the same, yet there are some glaring inconsistencies. My only guess is that the Gran Grimoire is responsible. When Mewt first read it, I think it must have reshaped Ivalice from the FFXII world we know to the world we saw in FFTA. When Mewt left the world reverted back to it's natural state, leaving the events of FFTA as a sort of parallel existence or alternate history.

What happened to the Gran Grimoire is a bit of a mystery as well. While Lezaford mentions it in a quest, other than that, it is not seen. There is some speculation that the book Luso writes in at the start of FFTA2 may be the Gran Grimoire, but I'm not a huge fan of that theory. For one thing, the Gran Grimoire's pages were not blank, nor were they understandable in our language. Also, assuming that Luso did write in the Gran Grimoire, it would raise the quesiton of why didn't the world shift to mold itself around his dreams, the way it had Mewt? If Luso did cause the world to shift, even if not around his dreams, then does the fact that the world settled into the canon Ivalice mean that no one is going to visit there from Luso and Mewt's world again (since if they did, and the world changed again, it wouldn't be the canon Ivalice anymore)? So, no, I don't think that the book Luso wrote in was the Gran Grimoire.

Although I can't help but notice that it was mysteriously absent from the library when Luso returned to his world. Also, why would Mewt have another magic book? Did he collect them at some point, hoping to find a way back to Ivalice? Or did the book move on its own, gravitating to a place where it could take Luso (who was chosen by the Grimoire of the Rift), to Ivalice, and then, once its purpose was fulfilled, it left?

For that matter, what connection did the book have to the Grimoire of the Rift? It was unlikely to be the same book, as Luso did not act as though it was the same book when Cid pointed out the Grimoire to him during the first mission. He treated it like a basic journal he was carrying around (unknowingly), and didn't comment on any similarities between the Grimoire and the magic book in the library.


Um, yeah, I guess I'm writing text walls again. Sorry. I just seem to get a bit carried away with these games. I have no idea why.