Dev Tracker - Discussion

All I remember about TVR is someone going "Oh yeah, Galkas used to have a penis, then thing happened and now all Galkas are smooth like Ken dolls as punishment."

Oh, I completely agree with this. After CoD, the story for FFXI can never be as high stakes. I am more forgiving for them trying with Chaos, but that's a personal preference thing.

I think it's worth noting that Chaos hasn't been around for 5,000 years in the story. It wasn't ever really even a threat till one of the eggs was found during the crystal war and Delkfutt mishandled it's safekeeping. But also, this isn't too dissimilar from Atomos? Like, the Shadow Lord is defeated from Rank 6, the nations are saved. But bummer, there was an avatar there all along that will eat the world because of something some people are doing during the crystal war. Not defending or criticizing either, but Atomos was a much bigger insert than was Chaos.

Oh, I'm understanding a bit of our disagreement better with this elaboration. You and I have different definitions for the word "Retcon". I view a retcon to be a writer purposefully telling you that a previous portion of the story was told incorrectly. It sounds like you view a retcon to be a writer taking too many creative liberties with the blank space in a story's lore. The introduction of Chaos never invalidated any of the previous stories. It just elaborated on several blank spots in the lore (the silent period after the meltdown).

Edit: I'm clogging up the "Dev Tracker" thread again, my bad. It was a fun discussion!

Retcon is shorthand for Retroactive Continuity, and it was popularized by comic book writers (which led to many, many, many people misusing the term).

In order for something to be a retcon it has to violate a story's narrative or world building continuity in some way.

Examples of Retcon within FFXI:

Lady Lilith's Vana'diel was the true outcome of the Crystal War, and our Vana'diel is just Altana's desired outcome that she forces to happen. We were never just heroic adventurers, but Goddess Chosen with Divine Dispensation.

We didn't actually kill The Shadowlord. The Zilart Princes and Ark Angels did (in spite of our later revealed Divine Dispensation).


Examples of Not-Retcons, merely additions within FFXI:

Within the first 5000 years of The Meltdown, a draconic entity threatened the whole world. Odin and a Heroic Galka took him out behind the shed, and put him down. He entered stasis within an egg or sixteen, because he's a weird quasi-dimensional dragon that drinks tesseract Crystal juice(Creation energy).

The Olduum Civilization was all about lightning, and may have created Maroliths, and passed the caretaking of their special control staff into the hands of the Mamool Ja.

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Use of the word can get a bit murky, because a lot of things can affect continuity. Even things added that were intended to have no bearing on the story. XI has plenty of retcons within its own framework, some of them are pretty hard asks if you really care, but there really aren't a lot within TVR. They did good with what they had to work with, as always.

I like to use SCRIPT

Suspension of
Common
Reality
In
Present
Time

Whatever happened before doesn't matter, whatever happened after doesn't matter, only what is happening now matters.

TVR feels weird. Especially the Odin parts, although I can sorta justify it as Demons being extremely biased narrators. FFXI is chock full of each race’s culture being unreliable narrators that only remembered small parts of the overall story after all.

I don’t like the implication that demon infiltration is as common as TVR made it either. A demon or two is fine, but the numbers TVR presents is a real problem when you consider the ***they could have caused in the crystal war by NOT having the various kindred openly fight when they could have easily sabotaged from within like how Tonberries were used as assassins.

And SCRIPT is a different term. It’s more analogous to Marvel time. A retcon is when you change the previously established canon, not when you dump something into a lore gap even if the new information sounds dumb. For example, the first Zilart cutscene is a retcon because it changed what happened previously. The brothers being Zilart on the other hand isn’t a retcon. You just didn’t have all of the information.

She didn't exactly force it to happen.

1. The Lillith timeline was the true timeline.

2. Altana creates an alternate timeline, where the allies won.

3. Atomos destroys fake timelines, she knows this when she creates it.

4. Altana creates a wildcard in this new timeline, where the adventurers can enter her world (the players didn't exist in the past, nor in Lilliths timeline as far as we know).

5. The player travels back in time to the past.

6. The player changes the past and allows the allies to win decisive battles (for instance the player allows Windurst to hold out and win against the Shadow Lords first attack against them, by stopping the reinforcements), so that the timeline she created now is the real timeline due to having a proper past.

She gave the 5 races a second chance and created Cait Sith to help, but the player / allies still made the current timeline real by their actions.

it's really our fault, if we had delivered all those Beastmen's Seals earlier maybe Odin could have funded more infiltrators back then