|
Ibblebibble posted:He said "the gods" in general, not Ultima in specific. Yeah the Gods are a known thing, Ultima isn't
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 04:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:35 |
|
|
Aah, guess I imagined the proper noun then. I’m a little unclear on who the fallen were. I’m pretty sure they were a past human civilization that ran afoul of Ultima, but I’m not certain that they weren’t just Ultima’s people’s civilization. Is that totally clarified at any point? Bugblatter fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jul 3, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 04:32
|
|
|
After you beat the game there are a bunch of extra lore entries and a few of them talk about the fallen. They're just a past human civilization that got bopped at dzemekys and honestly have very little relevance to much of anything besides leaving useful some gizmos
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 04:39
|
|
|
Ah, I should check those I guess. I’m a little unsure how to max my lore level too. In NG+ it’s still just a few pixels shy of the final level. I did all the side quests and hunts, so I guess there’s just some random flavor text I didn’t click on somewhere in the world?
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 04:46
|
|
|
Bugblatter posted:Ah, I should check those I guess. Might be some of the random mobs out in the world? There's an entry for antelopes and bighorns and stuff. You definitely don't need NG+ to get all the lore entries and max out your level considering that I did it first playthrough.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 04:48
|
|
|
Ah, yeah I started just Chocoboing past open world mobs when I realized they were boring to fight and gave no real reward. Also might be an area I didn’t visit, since the trophy for visiting every area is at 98% completion. I stared so long at the maps trying to figure out what corner I hadn’t walked in before giving up.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 05:06
|
|
|
Did anyone else take note of the Greek titan names associated with each chronolith? The "Hand of X" stuff. I remember Shiva = Rhea, Odin = Enceladus and Ramuh = Iapetus, and I also remember seeing Hyperion, Dikon(?) and Mimas(?), anyone remember the last one?
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 13:25
|
|
|
Ibblebibble posted:Did anyone else take note of the Greek titan names associated with each chronolith? The "Hand of X" stuff. I remember Shiva = Rhea, Odin = Enceladus and Ramuh = Iapetus, and I also remember seeing Hyperion, Dikon(?) and Mimas(?), anyone remember the last one? Phoenix is Hyperion. I know this because it's the only one I've done so far.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 14:04
|
|
|
Finished the game last week, enjoyed it but I think the ending was slightly weak. Sidequests really pumped it up though. (In my view, Clive lives, Josh dies, I totally didn't interpret that as Joshua being resurrected, just Clive neatening up the corpse.) I do have some points I don't understand: namely, why does Ultima take the form of "hooded Joshua" during the Phoenix Gate Incident/in the Eye of the Storm? What is his actual game there? Also, is there literally no point to Ultima being sealed inside Joshua (because it's just one of many anyway)? It feels like ultimately that plot point went nowhere. The idea that there are sixteen Ultimas (eight for the Crystals and eight for the Eikons, I guess?) is kinda interesting to me. But I still don't think I understand why the fire Eikon was in two parts, or indeed why there was a special association of Ultima with Ifrit, and if any of that is related to Leviathan being Lost (Water being somewhat "opposite" to Fire). There's just a bunch of stuff I was still quite ??? about I guess - interested in what people think.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 14:28
|
|
|
Not just why does he appear as Joshua, but why does he appear as Joshua from the future when he first shows up at Phoenix Gate? Can he see the future to know what Joshua would look like and be wearing? If he can see that why doesn’t he seem to predict much else? And if he can see that… still what purpose does it serve?
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 14:45
|
|
|
I think Joshua trapping Ultima within him was just something he thought he had to do, he didn't really because Ultima wasn't going to do anything at that moment anyway. Clive had to have all the Eikons attuned, Ultima was just being menacing and Joshua reacted to the only information he could have at the time.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 15:15
|
|
|
agreeing that the ending was too abrupt and couldn't seem to decide which direction it wanted to take. it's repeatedly stressed right up until the final brawl that clive's mission is meaningless if he dies for it and yet the framing overwhelmingly tilts toward "oh he dead." you could argue that the ambiguity of that scene is meant to mirror the ambiguity of humanity's own survival (and is thus resolved by the epilogue) but still, it's awfully brief considering how lavish the rest of the cutscenes were they really should have emphasized outside of the codices that it was ultima's own world that they trashed with excess magic use and their stopover in valisthea was a glorified terraforming project. the way he frames it in his expodump makes it sound like he bestowed magic on an unrelated world as an initial attempt to play god, and in light of the codices it's clearly a self-serving revision of events, but the game never touches on it and the whole plot suffers as a result. FF16 from the go places a lot of emphasis on the material conditions of its world - like 80% of the NPC chatter concerns crop failures, labor routes, and economic turmoil that gets worse as you keep cracking the crystals, with cid making it clear that the slavery and cruelty that undergirds their society keeps going because people don't want to give up their comforts. then you get barnabas and ultima, who toss all of that aside to drone about will and consciousness for hours on end. they float high above everyone else's circumstances, reducing the conflict to abstracts when up to that point it had been far more concrete and immediate i do think it's neat that you can draw a straight line from annabella's worldview to ultima's - the people aren't relevant, the sovereign/godhead is all that matters - but he and barnabas as presented in the actual plot run exclusively on vibes and this is not a vibes-based story like FF8. the old platitudes about how resilient and cooperative and wunnerful humanity is fall flat when your premise hinges on the fact that we are doing this to ourselves, to say nothing of the relevance to our own terminally hosed planet. they could have at least somewhat squared the circle if ultima's far more personal stakes in this project were brought front and center, instead we get the perennial "so god is evil and you kill him, yeah" barnabas suffered the most from that shift. by the time you make it to waloed (loving gorgeous environments at least, best in the game) it's basically become a solipsistic kingdom - its only sapient resident is barnabas, everything in there is a reflection of him, and yet there's just nothing there to his character. you get a few glimpses at stuff that could have been built on, the fact that he originated from outside the twins, that he's one of the last followers of ultima's old religion, never ages and is the only dominant for odin in recorded history, but all of it's tamped down so that he can just be "ultima, part one" and ultima is not deep enough to require an introductory course decent overall and it's nice to experience a mainline FF that had a coherent vision in mind for once, but i'm probably going to remember it as a story that wrote checks it couldn't cash Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Jul 3, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 16:16
|
|
|
Azubah posted:I was in awe of Clive's VA during his sobbing over Joshua's body though, that felt like real grief. I think, but am not 100% sure, that clive's VA lost their dad shortly before recording and said he channeled that grief into the role, so, yeah
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 17:03
|
|
|
https://old.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/14pu3uj/where_in_the_world_is_clive_rosfield_theory/ fans be crazy but that's some good triangulating
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 02:18
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:agreeing that the ending was too abrupt and couldn't seem to decide which direction it wanted to take. it's repeatedly stressed right up until the final brawl that clive's mission is meaningless if he dies for it and yet the framing overwhelmingly tilts toward "oh he dead." you could argue that the ambiguity of that scene is meant to mirror the ambiguity of humanity's own survival (and is thus resolved by the epilogue) but still, it's awfully brief considering how lavish the rest of the cutscenes were I think you must not have been paying attention to the final scenes with Ultima because most of what you claim was missing was pretty explicitly spelled out, and Clive's reaction to him is just "you're not a god, you're just too arrogant to admit you made a mistake so you're making the exact same mistake again here." So, like, exactly what you wanted the plot to be. Ultima is ultimately just Anabella on a larger scale, except you somehow seem to have bought into his "I am a god!" rhetoric when the story is specifically about challenging that.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 02:39
|
|
|
Ibblebibble posted:https://old.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/14pu3uj/where_in_the_world_is_clive_rosfield_theory/ Hahahaha this loving rocks
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 02:43
|
|
|
Was Ultima even an alien? I thought they were from another continent, though I might have been conflating Valisthea and the Twins when Ultima might have been referring to Valisthea as the whole planet, I dunno. Maybe I misread a lore entry.
Ibblebibble fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Jul 4, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 02:48
|
|
|
Ibblebibble posted:Was Ultima even an alien? I thought they were from another continent, thought I might have been conflating Valisthea and the Twins when Ultima might have been referring to Valisthea as the whole planet, I dunno. Maybe I misread a lore entry. "discarding their physical bodies to make the journey to Valisthea" says they are not from around here to me
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 02:50
|
|
|
Blockhouse posted:"discarding their physical bodies to make the journey to Valisthea" says they are not from around here to me look maybe they didn't have boat tech, idiot mages can't figure out how to sail but can figure out astral forms
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 02:53
|
|
|
If Square actually did put that much thought into the depiction of the night sky, I wonder if there’s more thought into Metia than I’d assumed. It doesn’t make sense for it to be a star or a planet since its proximity to the moon seems set. Seems like it’d have to be another satellite of Valisthea. As for Ultima, I’d initially thought we was an alien, but something in the lore later made me think otherwise and he’d just come from elsewhere on Valisthea. I can’t recall what it was that made me change my mind though.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 03:00
|
|
|
I assumed Ultima was an alien, much of the ancient ruins were the hulls of crashed spacecrafts and satellites, all the 'meteorite' upgrade materials were bits of high-tech debris from the lost space age, and that Metia was some kind of satellite or space station or something. But that's also largely bc I was reading into the influences that Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind had on the setting.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 03:05
|
|
|
Cephas posted:I assumed Ultima was an alien, much of the ancient ruins were the hulls of crashed spacecrafts and satellites, all the 'meteorite' upgrade materials were bits of high-tech debris from the lost space age, and that Metia was some kind of satellite or space station or something. But that's also largely bc I was reading into the influences that Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind had on the setting. all of the ancient ships and stuff are from the Fallen, who were the humans before the current society. the "menne of magitek", as they are called in the codex. though the codex does describe them as essentially copying ultima's homework when it came to designing their stuff, so
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 03:07
|
|
|
Origin is explicitly the ship they came on
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 03:41
|
|
|
Yeah, I can’t recall what made me rule out aliens because everything seems to support it. It’s funny that they intentionally took inspiration from GRRM’s GoT story, but coincidentally wound up just as close to his Elden Ring story, what with ancient aliens planting giant structures that humans revere but are actually parasitic. Cephas posted:I assumed Ultima was an alien, much of the ancient ruins were the hulls of crashed spacecrafts and satellites, all the 'meteorite' upgrade materials were bits of high-tech debris from the lost space age, and that Metia was some kind of satellite or space station or something. But that's also largely bc I was reading into the influences that Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind had on the setting. I’ve read the Nausicaa manga many times. Since when did it have aliens?
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 03:51
|
|
|
Nausicaa doesn't have aliens, but it does have the whole deal with nations conquering each other to gain territory as a spreading climate-change blight renders the land unusable. And also there being towns built into the ruins of ancient indestructible space crafts and chocobos
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:05
|
|
|
Clarste posted:I think you must not have been paying attention to the final scenes with Ultima because most of what you claim was missing was pretty explicitly spelled out, and Clive's reaction to him is just "you're not a god, you're just too arrogant to admit you made a mistake so you're making the exact same mistake again here." So, like, exactly what you wanted the plot to be. i have no idea how you could have gotten this read unless you skipped every other sentence of my post
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:08
|
|
|
Clarste posted:I think you must not have been paying attention to the final scenes with Ultima because most of what you claim was missing was pretty explicitly spelled out, and Clive's reaction to him is just "you're not a god, you're just too arrogant to admit you made a mistake so you're making the exact same mistake again here." So, like, exactly what you wanted the plot to be. Please read the posts you quote.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:10
|
|
|
Cephas posted:Nausicaa doesn't have aliens, but it does have the whole deal with nations conquering each other to gain territory as a spreading climate-change blight renders the land unusable. And also there being towns built into the ruins of ancient indestructible space crafts And the current inhabitants of the planet being an expendable means to an end for the original humans who are preserved in a high-tech facility waiting for their terraforming operation to be complete. And a blight that they caused. Yeah, lots of parallels for sure.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:39
|
|
|
pretty much everything around ultima from the heart of origin to the final punch is straight from gurren lagann, while the punch itself is asura's wrath CBU3 definitely went for the BIG AND LOUD classics
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:40
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:i have no idea how you could have gotten this read unless you skipped every other sentence of my post Admittedly I was responding mostly to the first sentence of the second paragraph, but the fact that you said the plot boiled down to "consciousness and will" or "killing god" also struck me as you kind of skimming over the main points of those scenes and accepting the framing of the villains at face value. Clive does not care about consciousness and will, he cares about material conditions which is why he spends the entire game trying to solve those (admittedly through a rather detached view that getting the aether back will ultimately fix every other specific problem and let people live freely). Accepting the framing of the villains and not the hero's reaction to that seems very silly to me.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:46
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:pretty much everything around ultima from the heart of origin to the final punch is straight from gurren lagann, while the punch itself is asura's wrath I feel like every clash waa a reference to something considering they do both a Jojo Ora Battle and a Kanehameha beam struggke
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:50
|
|
|
Clarste posted:Admittedly I was responding mostly to the first sentence of the second paragraph, but the fact that you said the plot boiled down to "consciousness and will" or "killing god" also struck me as you kind of skimming over the main points of those scenes and accepting the framing of the villains at face value. Clive does not care about consciousness and will, he cares about material conditions which is why he spends the entire game trying to solve those (admittedly through a rather detached view that getting the aether back will ultimately fix every other specific problem and let people live freely). Accepting the framing of the villains and not the hero's reaction to that seems very silly to me. it's the game that accepts the framing of the villains because it doesn't touch at all on any other aspect of ultima outside of the codices. clive accuses him of arrogance and hypocrisy strictly in the context of his own framing of events ("our gracious attempt at gifting a previous world with magic ended in failure") and not the one shown in the codex ("we pumped our planet dry after discovering magic and scrambled to find a new one, then botched it by taking a nap"). by only engaging with ultima's pretensions of godhood and the master-servant relationship he has with humanity, the main story ends up framing its final conflict in the context of freedom and willpower - abstract, easy - and not the earlier portrayal of desperation and cruelty in the face of mass inequality and dwindling resources - concrete, difficult
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:50
|
|
|
I've never read the codices and I still got all of that from the dialog, so I completely disagree. Edit: The point is that Clive sees Ultima as no different from any of the other human tyrants he's met along the way, taking their own mismanagement of resources and making it someone else's problem. Clarste fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Jul 4, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 04:52
|
|
|
I just did the quest where clive was dealing with the nobleman who was sicking hounds on branded. I was very satisfied when he and his small child were killed by a wolf. This final fantasy game rules.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 05:35
|
|
|
Shard posted:I just did the quest where clive was dealing with the nobleman who was sicking hounds on branded. I was very satisfied when he and his small child were killed by a wolf. This final fantasy game rules. too bad Clive didn't do it himself
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 06:53
|
|
|
theCalamity posted:too bad Clive didn't do it himself At least it was heavily implied that one of Cid's lads did it for him. Clive was just an intern at the time. Murdering nobles wasn't yet within his pay grade.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 07:16
|
|
|
The dog did it tbh
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 07:19
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:At least it was heavily implied that one of Cid's lads did it for him. Clive was just an intern at the time. Murdering nobles wasn't yet within his pay grade. It kind of never is? I don't think Clive ever attacks an unarmed person in the entire game. Not really his thing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 07:26
|
|
|
Blockhouse posted:It kind of never is? I don't think Clive ever attacks an unarmed person in the entire game. Not really his thing. Kupka was unarmed
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 07:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:35 |
|
|
Mechafunkzilla posted:Kupka was unarmed 
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2023 07:56
|
|