Quote Originally Posted by Roogle View Post
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.