Ivalice

[Wolf Kanno]

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.

To be fair to Ivalice, it was not originally meant to be an expanded world. Tactics is so tonally different from the rest of the franchise that it's better to say it's just Tactics Ogre with the names filed off and replaced with Final Fantasy references. Vagrant Story was initially claimed to not be connected to Ivalice despite a few fan service nods to Tactics and it was only later that it was welded in despite not really having anything to do with the franchise, and it sounded like that was more of the higher ups stepping in than the team's idea. Hell, it's canonization is still debatable.

It's obvious that the actual "Ivalice" that Matsuno wished to make didn't really start until FFTA and XII, which both feature interesting references to the two prior Ivalice games but whether it was meant for them to still be connected is unknown at this time. FFTA2 is the proper sequel to XII and probably does more to connect it to the other Ivalice games than others. The real issue is that two games really don't mesh well with the other entries, namely FFTA and Vagrant Story. I feel that had Matsuno stayed with Squenix, he could have made it into a more cohesive franchise, as it is, he basically built a popular world and later tried to expand on it with various results. In my own opinion, a new translation could easily reconcile the most glaring discrepancy VS has with the other ivalice titles. TA is the hard one, because TA2 pretty much confirmed it happened within the timeline despite the fact that I feel it was obvious that TA was meant to be a stand alone entry. Course stuff like that is bound to happen when the head guy is no longer in charge.

Despite that though, there are several connections between the games. XII gives us the origins of the Lucavi as well as the fridge horror realization that it's Ashe's fault that they will eventually terrorize the world. XII also gives us a glimpse of the Kiltas Religion which has been degraded into a cult by the time of Vagrant Story as well as showing that VS takes place in the same country as Archades since the region in both games are referred to as Valendia. In addition, the nature of Mist in XII is very similar to how the Dark work's in VS. TA2 shows us Goug Machine City in it's prime while also giving us a better idea of the world's geography.

Based on one line in FF12, it sort of seems like Ashe is supposed to be St Ajora, but I don't think anything matches up well enough for that to make sense, ao it's probably a throwaway homage more than an actual story tie.

I am struggling to remember any time Ashe is referred to as a saint within FFXII. Lot's of references to her lineage as the Dynast-King's descendant but never a saint.

I doubt it would have even been in there as just a nod, because all of the connections I mentioned above wouldn't cause a retcon to the overall scenario. Also FFTactics has received an updated translation in terms of the War of the Lions edition, and Ajora is still Ajora, and not Ashelia which even when going into the Japanese wouldn't be phonetically close enough to be a translation error. Not to mention, as you said yourself, the retcon it produced is too large to be reconciled within the games.