Since Tactics take place in the same timeline as XII....

[Hollycat]

refrences:
cloud: ff9, ff10
joseph: ff9, ff10-2
shinryu: 1, 5, 6, 8, 12, dissidia
lunarians (also cid is one in ff1, but you never see him cause he dead): 1, 4, 5[yes in a town in the 2nd world] in 7 they are the ancients. you could force 9, but I wouldnt.
dwarves live underground in a place filled with lava in(except in ff1 and 9): ff1, ff4, ff5, ff9

[Wolf Kanno]

Vagrant Story also connects both cause Vagrant Story takes place in the Valendian area of Ivalice which is also where Archades is said to be located in XII. Vagrant Story also has a reference to Agrias Oaks as well as a mention of Delita as well in the descriptions of accessories.

I never finished Vagrant Story, unfortunately. You never leave Leá Monde, correct? You never get to actually explore or see the region that Vagrant Story takes place in.

You never leave Lea Monde in the gameplay part but you actually get to see other locations in the prologue and ending. Not to mention the prologue is written by Durai, the same guy who narrates Tactics.

I also forgot about Kiltia which is the ancient religion of Mullenkamp that is trying to be wiped out in VS. In XII, its the religious order that Lady Ashe seeks in Bur-Omisace. Tactics fans speculate that the Church of VS is a future version of the Glabados Church.

refrences:
lunarians (also cid is one in ff1, but you never see him cause he dead): 1, 4, 5[yes in a town in the 2nd world] in 7 they are the ancients. you could force 9, but I wouldn't.

First, Cid isn't a Lunarian, he's a Lufenian, which is equally absurd and I seriously don't feel like anything in Dissidia should ever be taken as canon. Second, I would need a name for that town cause I've played V quite a bit and don't recall any such reference. Third, the Cetra are not Lunarians, they are an entirely different race. IX does make a parallel to them with the people of Terra but IX is all about referencing the rest of the series.

[Hollycat]

ok, and ill go see if I can find which town, I'll have to start a new game.

[erikramza]

Timeline. ff 12. Ff7. Fft. Vagrant story.
The advance games are either precursors, or some time after 7 but before tactics.
refrences? Lol. Nope.

[Bolivar]

There's a full map out there somewhere but basically FFT Ivalice is to the West of FFXII Ivalice. In XII Archadia in the East is fighting Rozarria in the West and in FFT Ivalice just got over a war with Rozarria to the East. I'm guessing Ivalice is more like a prestigious title for a region, like how the Byzantines carried on the mantle of "Rome" after Rome itself fell.

I also believe that Valeria and Zenobia from the Ogre Battle series are somewhere to the North of western Ivalice and migrated there or vice versa, as the name Denam, as in the protagonist of Tactics Ogre, seems related to Denamunda, the name of FFT's kings.

The zodiac stones must have shrank too.

I just assume the zodiac stones are the magicite and/or nethicite from XII. Like how Archades caused that accident in Nabudis with it, so did St. Ajora in Muronde.

[Greatermaximus]

This is part of fiction's upper limit. Something happening at a time not every real person can agree on. Otherwise it's almost topic worthy to point out that final fantasy is based around magic. It should be no surprise people appear and disappear from the most strangest places. That is one of the main invented purposes of this series/fiction.

[Skyblade]

Actually, according to the Ultimania's all of the Ivalice titles are connected somehow, though they fail to explain exactly how. Even Vagrant Story and the TA series. How TA1 can possibly be connected to the rest is up to debate and most of the team won't comment on it but TA2 certainly made a clustersmurf for the whole series by connecting TA1 to XII and FFT.

Yeah, the main problem is how to connect TA1 to everything. The others all fit in relatively nicely, but TA1 is not nice at all. I've been playing through and trying to work out how the connection really works for quite some time now (believe it or not, I am still working on my sequel/story idea), and I just cannot do it.

And the problem is, it really isn't compatable. Ivalice in FFTA is a single country, rather than the entire world. The Salikawood appears in both FFXII and FFTA, despite the two being supposedly completely different geographical locations. Similarly, Aisenfield appears in both FFTA and FFTA2, which, again, take place in differing locales.

Yet they do tie them directly together. Ezel Berbier is in both games, indicating that they take place within a fairly short timeframe. Montblanc shows up in both FFTA and FFTA2, and is, canonically, the same Montblanc from FFXII. Vaan, Penelo, and Al-Cid show up as well. All this pretty much forces the conclusion that FFTA, FFTA2, and FFXII all take place within a single lifetime of each other.

The only way I've been able to actually make it fit is by blaming everything on the Gran Grimoire. It is also still in canon, and, according to both FFTA and FFTA2, is pretty much all powerful. So what must have happened is that the Gran Grimoire transported Mewt and company to Ivalice, much as the Grimoire of the Rift transported Luso there, and then the Grimoire changed Ivalice to match Mewt's mind and desires. So Ivalice was a stand-alone world that Mewt changed, rather than created, and it most likely changed back with his departure, including reshaping the memories of those who live there to completely forget about the events and the fact that the world reshaped itself twice within a span of a few years. Not the most fun explanation, but the only one that comes close to working.

[Roogle]

I wonder about the timeline because it seems like it was all forced together to sound cohesive for the concept of the Ivalice Alliance. I doubt that this was all planned out properly like how a timeline should be. For example, in the Suikoden series, there are numerous disconnects between Suikoden II and Suikoden V. Suikoden V takes place a number of years before Suikoden and Suikoden II, but was developed only a few years ago. It becomes difficult to connect ideas like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance to the other games because it was such a different take on things, likely made without continuity for the Ivalice Alliance in mind.

[Skyblade]

I wonder about the timeline because it seems like it was all forced together to sound cohesive for the concept of the Ivalice Alliance. I doubt that this was all planned out properly like how a timeline should be. For example, in the Suikoden series, there are numerous disconnects between Suikoden II and Suikoden V. Suikoden V takes place a number of years before Suikoden and Suikoden II, but was developed only a few years ago. It becomes difficult to connect ideas like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance to the other games because it was such a different take on things, likely made without continuity for the Ivalice Alliance in mind.

You can remove the "seems like" bit from that sentence. It was retconned to fit in. Technically, the only games that are a part of the Ivalice Alliance are FFTA2, FFT: War of the Lions, FFXII International Zodiac Job System, and Revenant Wings. They weren't all linked, especially not that closely, before that. FFTA was loosely based off of FFXII, as the games were in development at the same time. It even figured as a plot point that Mewt imagined the world based of a Final Fantasy game (kind of hilarious, since FFXII and the Bangaa which were mentioned as being a part of it, had not seen release yet). So it wasn't really planned as an active part of the lore. Nor, for that matter, was XII originally.

The Ivalice Alliance came out after the success of both those games meant that Square could try to milk more money out of the IP, and they did a very poor job of cramming together vastly differing projects. Fortunately, the Ivalice games have mostly been of such high quality that we just don't care, and it does give me (as the resident Ivalice historian) some fun work to do trying to sort out how everything works and what relations the various stories and myths have to each other.

[Bolivar]

That's the problem, though, that the Ivalice universe/timeline does make a lot of sense up until the Ivalice Alliance. We know how and where FFT, Vagrant Story, and FFXII fit in with eachother, and it could be reasonably agreed that Mewt used the Grimomire to build a world off of a video game he had played, and that game was Final Fantasy XII. Yeah, it wasn't out yet, but iirc they were in development at the same time and if the Matsuno mess hadn't happened at Square, I think XII would have actually been released before Tactics Advanced.

As far as I remember none of the original team had much to do with the Alliance. Hell, I like Motomu Toriyama and I liked Revenant Wings a lot, but ideally, he should not have been allowed anywhere near that series, especially when he was working on a number of projects already, all of which were also titles he should *not* have been working on, because he was supposed to be envisioning the Direction for the next numbered Final Fantasy title, instead of wasting precious time, ultimately sabotaging the game and arguably the credibility of the franchise, in order to make spinoffs (seriously, wtf).

Up until Square decided it needed three spin-off franchises (FFVII, FNC, Ivalice Alliance) inside of a franchise which already had spin-off franchises (Crystal Chronicles, Kingdom Hearts, now Dissidia and 4 Warriors), Ivalice was a closed universe, developed by a closed team. It's obviously a continuation of the Ogre Battle franchise, in which every game takes the form of a different RPG sub-genre. At this point, it's highly likely that XII, Tactics, and Vagrant Story are actually each one of the games in the original scenario for Ogre Battle Episodes I-IV.

So FFTA2, Revenant Wings, and War of the Lions may alter products produced by Square, but they have no bearing on what the actual concept for Ivalice is in Matsuno/Minagawa's heads.

[Skyblade]

I never finished Revenant Wings (actually, I couldn't figure out how to finish Revenant Wings. As far as I can tell, the game is basically unplayable after a certain point), so I can't really comment, but what I saw of that game also fit in reasonably well with the whole canon of Ivalice. It occured between XII and Tactics, and doesn't exactly ruin any of what we had before.

And FFTA2, again, fits in with what we had previously. Sure, several main characters take a vacation to Jylland, but that is not exactly lore-breaking. The only real problem (aside from the butchery of the main story, and, seriously, why did they do that when the rest of the game is as awesome as it is?) is that it attempts to directly tie FFTA to the rest of Ivalice, which can't be done.

I mean, maybe I'm missing something, but how did Revenant Wings or FFTA2, on their own, fail to fit into the Ivalice lore?

[Bolivar]

I don't know if they failed to fit in on their own or created any direct contradictions. Actually, I thought you were implying they were rushed to fit in with the lore and ended up ruining it, but it seems what you said was that the games were never intended to be a part of the same lore until the Alliance. My bad!

My whole thing is that Ivalice is the creation of the mind of Matsuno and envisioned by Akihido Yoshida, Hitoshi Sakimoto, and Hiroshi Minagawa (and sometimes Hiroyuki Ito and Hideo Minaba). As much as I liked Revenant Wings, I'm not sure if Square really should have touched the series without them. We don't know if the story with the winged people and their relation to the Occuria really happened, or whatever went down in TA2. For as obsessed as Square is with exploiting its IP, it really doesn't understand how it is you build its strength.

I mean, I'm also of the mind that Tactics, Vagrant Story, and XII were created as separate entries of the same saga all along, and were probably originally Ogre Battle episodes.

[Wolf Kanno]

Well technically Revenant Wings was a last minute addition. The game was originally mean to be an original IP but SE execs decided to go with the momentum of XII's release and turn it into a quick sequel. That's why it doesn't actually have many members of the Tactics team involved.

I can agree with Bolivar that FFTactics was most likely a Tactics Ogre entry re-written as an FF title but I don't think VS or XII are. While VS definitely has a few mentions from Tactics world (and technically XII but we'll ignore that) I wouldn't be surprised if they were simply meant to be shout outs to Tactics and not some tie-in. I think the whole "Its Tactics world at a later date" ended up being something where the developers simply said "sure, why the hell not?" after they heard fans speculating.

XII in my mind was always suppose to be Matsuno's revision of what Ivalice was meant to be. I felt the inclusion of the different races, was basically him taking the concept of Ivalice from FFTactics and going back to square one . I mean even the moogles in Tactics when referenced, made it sound like they had more in common with the moogles of FFV and VI than they did with the Moogles we've seen in the Ivalice Alliance so far. So I kind of feel that if Matsuno was still running the show, he would probably suggest that Tactics, Vagrant Story, and TA1 are connected to Ivalice but they are not connected historically. They simply share the theme of Ivalice and XII was meant to be a new starting point. Now, I feel the remaining team is connecting them together, but with the exception of TA series, I feel the rest have no issues being connected to each other as long as they are split by hundreds sometimes a thousand years apart. TA1 is just the loose cannon cause no one knows if its the origin story of Ivalice, or if its a weird side story where our world mixed with Ivalice.

Personally, I'm still hoping for a new entry in the Ivalice Alliance, its mostly been Crystal Defenders game lately, and now that Matsuno helped work with the remake of Tactics Ogre, I'm hoping he can be contracted into a new Ivalice game.

[Bolivar]

^ Me, too, I actually asked Alexander O. Smith and his partner what the likelihood of this happening was at PAX East last year(Inside Game Localization FF12, Tactics Ogre, and Beyond! Part III - YouTube -> starts off just shortly after I started talking!). He didn't shoot me down! But he also said he can't comment, which leads me to believe he's already signed the Non-Disclosure Agreement. It's happening, baby!!!

I think your thoughts are interesting, Wolf. I haven't played Vagrant Story (I'm scared to, is it on US PS Store?) but from what I've heard it does sound like it was an original game with nods to Tactics as a kind of easter egg for fans of the director.

I still kind of feel like XII was intended to be a MGS3-type precursor, where the implications of how the world turned out the way it did in the later games isn't immediately apparent. But I think with the location of Rozarria and the explanation of the creation of nethicite/magicite, and the little Glabados nod at the end, it was intended to be the "Episode I" kind of entry in the series. But I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up uncovering some dev docs confirming what you say.

Man, I really love these games, I hope they come back together, too!

[Wolf Kanno]

Vagrant Story is on PSN, you should give it a try, its like what would happen if Matsuno was in charge of a MGS game if you ask me. VS seriously defies being pigeonholed into a genre, but that's a good thing.

As for him working on more projects, I'm hopeful but now that he's joined Level-5 to pursue working on smaller titles, it may be awhile unless he finished up another project with SE that no knew about before joining them. Of course SE has a pretty good working relationship with Level-5 so its not exactly unlikely he can't be roped into another remake, I know the Tactics team really wanted to do a remake of Vagrant Story after they finished XII, so maybe he can be roped into that.