Originally Posted by
Rez09
Honestly, I have more attachment to individual stories told within Ivalice than to Ivalice itself and don't see it as an especially realized world. I've never noticed narrative threads tying together the various games in the world I've played (so, FFT, TA, and 12), and even if they do exist they do not do so at a strong enough level to have ever truly begun developing the world itself. This is in contrast to, for instance, Front Mission, Star Ocean, and Suikoden, all of which did excellent jobs defining and engaging the player in their shared worlds within the first three titles, and each game managed to tell its own independent story while still drawing on and contributing to the fiction of the universe overall, sometimes with fairly substantial chronological disparity, which is something I never felt Ivalice achieved. The story and events in FF12 should have had worldwide implications, but there is no sign of anything other than Balthier from it impacting FFT, and nothing related to the Lucavi or Occuria touch anything outside of their respective titles. This lack of a building fiction between the titles always left Ivalice feeling rather flat to me, and I don't especially care if more entries appear there or not, and I especially don't want them if SE decides to make entries to tie the world together, as I have no faith in their ability to properly do that at this point.
That said, while I may feel Ivalice fails as a shared world, it definitely succeeds as a setting, with a great collection of races, level of technological progress, and mystery surrounding magic and crystals. It feels fantastic in a way most other titles in the FF series don't especially manage, if they do it at all. The games themselves also succeed on the narrative side completely, and I always find the behind the scenes powerplays and 'schemes within schemes' engaging, and even in the case of FFTA, where I don't enjoy the story at all, I can still appreciate the effort the writers put into the ideas they were trying to address without necessarily sacrificing their characters and replacing them with the railroad spikes needed to tie the vision of the greater plot together.
So, in short, the games are great, the setting is great, the world itself is unactualized.
EDIT: Wait, I just remembered something, I think the Lucavi might appear as the summons in FF12, but even if they do I don't think they do so with the weight they should have, considering their role in FFT.