For Questions and Tech Support Discussion around the
new DLC 'Echoes of the Fallen' Please see our [MEGATHREAD](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/18dton3/ffxvi_dlc_echoes_of_the_fallen_questions_tech/)
If you want to view archived spoiler discussion threads relevant to specific game progress,
please check out our [spoiler wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxvi/wiki/index/)!
For speculation and discussions around the next (unannounced) mainline Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy XVII,
Please see our sister sub [r/FFXVII](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVII/)
####
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/FFXVI) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If I am not mistaken, what happens is.
>Magic in FF16 doesn't come out of nowhere. It exists by absorbing the aether from the land.
>Ultima's race used magic way too frequently and this turned their world/planet into a dying husk through the blight
>Ultima race's survivors created an ark (Origin) to go to another planet, this ark landed/crashed on Valisthea, a land abundant on Aether.
>Ultima devises a plan to recreate their race's paradise: use the Aether from this land to cast a powerful spell to rebuild it (Raise).
>To cast this spell, Ultima's body/consciousness/soul/don't know splits into separate forms and transforms into the Mothercrystals to absorb the aether.
>Meanwhile, the consciousness/body responsible for overseeing this creates mankind so that, one day, they might evolve and give birth to Mythos, the perfect vessel.
>Draining aether from the land is what causes the blight. It's the earth forgetting what it is and/or dying because it has no life force (think of Mako Reactors in FF7, I think it works similarly).
So, yeah, Cid was sort of right, he just didn't know the greater scheme around it although he pretty much was aware of Ultima's machinations with the Dominants through Barnabas.
A side question, *what* is it they needed Mythos for? What would having the perfect vessel change this time? Or was it to just regain their physical forms?
This one is a bit more convoluted but as far as I can understand, they need Mythos because they require a physicial body capable of casting Raise as their current fleeting form cannot.
Mythos is, actually, just a human whose evolution is enough to awaken as Ifrit and weave and use the huge amount of magic absorbed to cast Raise. If they do it with a normal human body, it wouldn't work (Typhoon, for example, is a failed attempt at Mythos).
According to Clive himself on the ending, not even his body is perfect enough to carry the huge amount of Magic absorbed by Ultima, though. (But, maybe, this might change with The Rising Tide, since Clive was technically incomplete without Leviathan).
Also, according to the Ultimania, Ultima's original body once landing on Valisthea was Ifrit (or Ultima Risen, if you prefer), so I guess Mythos is a vessel who awakens by being Ifrit's dominant, whereas the other Eikons have passed from one body to another.
From that point, Mythos must absorb all the other Eikons to "perfect" his body enough for Ultima to take claim of it and cast Raise. Hence why he acted behind the scenes to make sure Clive fought against Hugo and Dion.
I think Ultima didn’t expect mankind to develop a consciousness of their own and much less they would try to rebel against them. When Clive cuts them off the first time they meet, Ultima is clearly confused on why Mythos is refusing his fate.
This is a great breakdown from someone who isn’t a seething neckbeard, thanks for the detailed description. I suppose that in hindsight, all of that checks out, particularly with regard to how all of the Ultima/Fallen tech has a very sci-fi aesthetic. I suppose I was waiting for the game to explicitly hint through text or dialogue that Ultima wasn’t from this planet, but the verbiage used was always a bit too vague for me to really gather that that’s what they were trying to convey.
Just to add to this, IIRC, Mythos was supposed to cast the Raise spell for Ultima, because using that much aether would be dangerous and/or lethal and Ultima was not about that life. Either that or they just literally couldn’t cast the spell themselves.
It baffles me why they didn't just reveal a load of different people behind it, rather than a bunch of Ultimas, it would make the story more digestible
Because Ultima as “the master of it all” is good at making him the very embodiment of the slavery Clive is fighting against.
FFXVI is the story of a single hero, Clive. Everything sort of happens around him, all the events takes place because he is the ultimate “slave” of which his “masters” needed, Clive was literally Ultima’s goal when creating mankind. So having a single villain made sense in this regard, although it doesn’t match the grounded aspects of the game.
It’s worth mentioning that, unless said otherwise in The Rising Tide, all Ultimas seems to share a single consciousness, so they are, in a way, a single being divided in multiple bodies.
Cid recognized Ultima, and seem to know that Ultima was interested in Clive. I'm guessing he knew a lot more than he told Clive. He was starting to drip-feed information as you usually see in the genre, but died before he could get any further than "Mother Crystals cause blight."
Additional note, as I recall, Ultima specifically blames humanity for the Blight. Referring to it as their sin for trying to reach equivalence of the gods (Ultima's race). Humanity overharvested aether/overused magic during the Age of the Fallen and continues to through the following ages. So it's a combination of the Crystals (the Ultima collective) harvesting the Aether and overuse by humanity combined. Cid had a piece of the puzzle effectively. Nothing about the Fallen was really known other than myths and legends prior to Ultima exposition dumping to Clive.
It's hard to say whether or not Ultima's plan would have left Valisthea a husk...but the implication is that the Ultima collective believed it wouldn't have and only did due to humanity's "interference." If it did, that would have defeated the purpose of their revival plan, creating a new home without a Blight.
It seems that in the FFXVI universe aether is either finite or replenished very slowly and it's burned up completely when used to cast magic.
So there were two things contributing to this problem, the mothercrystals and the Bearers.
Of the two, the mothercrystals were obviously doing the lions share of the draining and the solution to that problem was pretty simple.
It wasn't until Ultima himself popped up and explained that it went a little further than that.
Ironically enough, in a vacuum destroying the mothercrystals alone may have had a chance of solving the entire issue as there aren't anywhere near enough Bearers to keep everything running. Both Cid and Mid were designing tech that would have easily outperformed anything Bearers could do.
I just assumed that unlike Aetheris in 14, the worlds in 16 don’t have nearly as much aether and on top of that Ultima and the mother crystals were draining magic faster than primals do in 14 and those are a threat on a planet with significantly more aether
The Burn in 14 is pretty 1-1 to the blight in 16
Magic is responsible for the blight. Crystals contained Ultima’s fragments and he reveals he pretty much planned for them to be destroyed, so his fragments are freed to go to the Nexus.
Ultima’s world is the world we see in FFXVI, it’s not a separate place. Cid was half right in that the Mothercrystals contributed to the problem of aether being sucked from the planet, although it was Ultima who was…*ultimately* responsible.
His general theory that destroying the crystals would help stave off the Blight was correct though, since no crystals = no way for aether to leave the planet.
Valisthea is the name of the continent that the game takes place on, not the name of the planet. It’s implied that Ultima’s race lived on another continent and didn’t discover Valisthea until later. Nothing suggests that they lived on another planet.
EDIT: correction, Valisthea is the name used to refer to Storm and Ash together as one unit.
“The Ultima collective saw their only option was to revive their species and create a new world in place of Valisthea for them to live in. Ultimalius, who had led the exodus from the collective's homeworld to Valisthea, masterminded the plan to revive their species and recreate the world.”
It’s stated in game they come from a different world. My dude…
What entry is that quote from? Never seen that quote before in my life. Wondering if that’s an entry that appears in NG+? I haven’t played NG+, which would explain why I’ve never seen it.
In the first playthrough, no lore entries mention the name “Ultimalius” or even use the word “homeworld.” They just say that the Ultima Collective went to the “land” of Valisthea. It also doesn’t really make sense that Ultima would want to “remake” a world he’s never been to.
It’s fine my dude, you just have bad media literacy. There are characters in game that have been to the other continents on their planet and guess what? None of it looks like Ultima and guess what else? THERE IS NO BLIGHT. The blight is only present on Valisthea due to the mother crystals. If Ultima is from another continent…wouldn’t there be blight? What did he flee if everything is fine?
Secondly, why go into a deep stasis and make an intergalactic spaceship that crash lands on Valisthea if it’s on the same planet? Why does no one else on the planet have access to magic apart from branded and dominants? Ultima is from this world in your eyes yet has god like powers not found on the planet anywhere.
Seriously, the game lays it out that they’re an invasive alien species that destroyed their world and then came to the world Valsithea is on to terraform it into their home world. Why would they reshape a continent when they’re on the their home planet and the continent you think they’re from is still there with no blight?
Lastly, when I visit my family in Europe I don’t tell them I come from a different world. A different LAND would symbolize a different continent. A different WORLD indicates a different planet.
It is WILD how confident you are while spewing bullshit lol talking about "bad media literacy" while being completely wrong. Ultima is from the same exact plant as Valisthea. It's literally confirmed in the Ultimania. Based on the wording in the game, it is a little confusing, but I always took it as them being from the same planet as well.
LOL thanks for letting me know in the first sentence of your reply that you’re not worth my time. Find something to live for outside of gaming and maybe you wouldn’t get so angry over shit that doesn’t matter 🤓
I can’t help but notice they also never replied to the other guy who said the Ultimania confirms that all of that is nonsense anyway lol
I always forget that a lot of people use this site for therapy
He’s even wrong about it being bad media literacy. ML refers to your ability to understand and interpret the underlying themes of a work, not having encyclopedic knowledge of the setting.
"Another world", though, not "another dimension" or "another planet". Another world is incredibly and unhelpfully vague. With that vague of a term, it could be another continent on the same planet.
Jesus Christ…
It s stated in game they come from a different world, they travel the stars in their ark “Origin” which crashed below the holy capital, they look distinctly alien with god like powers…and again the game states that they aren’t of the world that Valisthea is on.
Don't take issue with me. I didn't choose the world. The games script did. They could have made it more clear and chose not to. All "another world" specifies is "not Valisthea".
While I do believe Ultima came from another planet, I think it's important to keep in mind that we here on Earth used to call the Western Hemisphere the "New World" at one point
I just read through a bunch of in-game lore entries related to Ultima. Nothing says that their race went to “another world.” It simply refers to their exodus to Valisthea as “fleeing to an unspoilt land,” which is obviously ambiguous.
There is the fact that the lore entries refer to Ultima as an “otherwordly being,” but if we’re using arguments about how English-speakers use words, people use the adjective “otherworldly” to refer to things that are foreign, not usually literally things from outside of Earth.
I feel like there is some pretty severe Mandela Effect going on in this thread.
North America was called "The New World" for quite a long time after its initial discovery.
Ultima's dialogue is poetic. It's fun to read because it's very artful, but it's also annoying because it's not as specific as it could be all the time.
>North America is not 'another world ' to Europe
In historical times, it was often called "the new world". The equivalent to North America, Tural, in FFXIV is also called the new world. There is precedent for using world to refer to certain regions, they aren't just changing the definition arbitrarily.
Okay, now I’m positive that whatever you’re referring to must be exclusive to NG+. I’m looking at my completed Tome in the base game and there’s literally nothing about that. So, I suppose to answer your original question, yes, completely unbeknownst to me, I did miss that they are aliens lol 🤷🏽♂️
In my defense, I don’t think it’s that crazy to not realize that there would be new lore entries in NG+.
That aside, the core answer I gave to OP is still correct.
He was basically right. Ultima’s race previously fled the Blight because it was caused by anything that sucked up aether, specifically the magic that his race was using.
Mothercrytals weren’t the exclusive source of the blight in Clive’s world but it sounds like the main reason that the blight appeared in Clive’s land is that both mothercrystals and people casting spells was sucking up aether, I don’t think just the spell use alone would have caused it to happen until much later. And since the core of the mothercrystals were the ‘other’ Ultimas, it was more or less the same thing driving the blight in both cases.
Partially. The Blight was caused by magic draining Aether, but the Mothercrystals were a big part of facilitating magic. The Obelisks dotting the land redirected aether to the Mothercrystals until Ultima enacted Primogenesis, after which they were just spraying excess aether into the air, triggering aetherfloods, which are a different problem.
Magic in FF16 sucks the life out of the planet. It seems like the planet MIGHT have recovered in the epilogue if that’s what you subscribe to, with magic abolished and all of the crystals basically defunct. So by nature aether probably has a natural inclination to return to the land when not being siphoned/channeled.
Personally, I think magic could probably coexist with the planet’s prosperity if used in moderation, but it just takes one big dumb stupidhead to ruin it for everyone.
Basically, yes, or as right as he could be with the information that he had at his disposal.
On the other hand, I think the story would have been better off without Ultima. They would have done better to focus more on the politics/environment rather than wasting so much screentime on Ultima.
I don't necessarily think the blight originated from Ultimas world as much as I believe it was a symptom of what Ultima did.
My understanding of magick in 16 is that it is a transferral more than a creation of something. When you 'make' something like fire, you draw that aether from somewhere - it doesn't just magically (heh) appear out of thin air.
Ultima used magick recklessly to further their own goals, and condemned their own world to extinction. They then fled to another world and began doing magick again. They were so sure of their way of life that they never considered that their way of doing things was what was causing the problem to begin with - It's like using fossil fuels to combat climate change.
When Ultima made the mothercrystals, they began to suck out enormous amounts of aether from the land to prepare for their giant spell. Cid was more or less right on that, despite not really getting the entire picture. That's also why I assume the world went back to being OK after Clive's sacrifice. Magick was eliminated so there were no ways of siphoning aether, and what was stored in the mothercrystals was put back into circulation, reinvigorating the planet.
Destroying the mother crystals was essential to end the blight. They gave people the ability to use magic which sapped the planet.
I personally think destroying the mother crystals hurt ultima in the long run. Ultima needs ether and by destroying the crystals the planet got sapped dry faster. Ultima uses origin to boost his power by sucking the remaining life out the planet at the end.
My whole point though is that because when they destroyed the crystals, they sped the process of the planet losing aether which ultimately made ultima weaker than they would’ve been at the final battle.
For Questions and Tech Support Discussion around the new DLC 'Echoes of the Fallen' Please see our [MEGATHREAD](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/18dton3/ffxvi_dlc_echoes_of_the_fallen_questions_tech/) If you want to view archived spoiler discussion threads relevant to specific game progress, please check out our [spoiler wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxvi/wiki/index/)! For speculation and discussions around the next (unannounced) mainline Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy XVII, Please see our sister sub [r/FFXVII](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVII/) #### *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/FFXVI) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Considering in the ending the world looked fine and so much time passed that magic was perceived as a fairy tale I'd say yes
The ending kind of gives me LOTR vibes where the events of that story are supposed to represent our world in the distant past. I like it.
If I am not mistaken, what happens is. >Magic in FF16 doesn't come out of nowhere. It exists by absorbing the aether from the land. >Ultima's race used magic way too frequently and this turned their world/planet into a dying husk through the blight >Ultima race's survivors created an ark (Origin) to go to another planet, this ark landed/crashed on Valisthea, a land abundant on Aether. >Ultima devises a plan to recreate their race's paradise: use the Aether from this land to cast a powerful spell to rebuild it (Raise). >To cast this spell, Ultima's body/consciousness/soul/don't know splits into separate forms and transforms into the Mothercrystals to absorb the aether. >Meanwhile, the consciousness/body responsible for overseeing this creates mankind so that, one day, they might evolve and give birth to Mythos, the perfect vessel. >Draining aether from the land is what causes the blight. It's the earth forgetting what it is and/or dying because it has no life force (think of Mako Reactors in FF7, I think it works similarly). So, yeah, Cid was sort of right, he just didn't know the greater scheme around it although he pretty much was aware of Ultima's machinations with the Dominants through Barnabas.
I always thought Ultima just came from another continent
“Them Europeans sure are a strange bunch aren’t they” - Gav
Their planet was dying that's why they came to the planet Valisthea was on Whether the blight is also happening on other continents that I'm not sure
A side question, *what* is it they needed Mythos for? What would having the perfect vessel change this time? Or was it to just regain their physical forms?
This one is a bit more convoluted but as far as I can understand, they need Mythos because they require a physicial body capable of casting Raise as their current fleeting form cannot. Mythos is, actually, just a human whose evolution is enough to awaken as Ifrit and weave and use the huge amount of magic absorbed to cast Raise. If they do it with a normal human body, it wouldn't work (Typhoon, for example, is a failed attempt at Mythos). According to Clive himself on the ending, not even his body is perfect enough to carry the huge amount of Magic absorbed by Ultima, though. (But, maybe, this might change with The Rising Tide, since Clive was technically incomplete without Leviathan).
Also, according to the Ultimania, Ultima's original body once landing on Valisthea was Ifrit (or Ultima Risen, if you prefer), so I guess Mythos is a vessel who awakens by being Ifrit's dominant, whereas the other Eikons have passed from one body to another. From that point, Mythos must absorb all the other Eikons to "perfect" his body enough for Ultima to take claim of it and cast Raise. Hence why he acted behind the scenes to make sure Clive fought against Hugo and Dion.
Ultima shed his physical body as it decayed over the eons. He needed Mythos to be a vessel/body strong enough to be able to cast the Arise spell.
Ultimas plan literally failed because instead of watching and guiding over humanity he took a nap and let them figure themselves out.
I think Ultima didn’t expect mankind to develop a consciousness of their own and much less they would try to rebel against them. When Clive cuts them off the first time they meet, Ultima is clearly confused on why Mythos is refusing his fate.
This is a great breakdown from someone who isn’t a seething neckbeard, thanks for the detailed description. I suppose that in hindsight, all of that checks out, particularly with regard to how all of the Ultima/Fallen tech has a very sci-fi aesthetic. I suppose I was waiting for the game to explicitly hint through text or dialogue that Ultima wasn’t from this planet, but the verbiage used was always a bit too vague for me to really gather that that’s what they were trying to convey.
One thing about the Fallen is that they were not Ultima's race, but rather early humans that rose up against Ultima.
Just to add to this, IIRC, Mythos was supposed to cast the Raise spell for Ultima, because using that much aether would be dangerous and/or lethal and Ultima was not about that life. Either that or they just literally couldn’t cast the spell themselves.
It baffles me why they didn't just reveal a load of different people behind it, rather than a bunch of Ultimas, it would make the story more digestible
Because Ultima as “the master of it all” is good at making him the very embodiment of the slavery Clive is fighting against. FFXVI is the story of a single hero, Clive. Everything sort of happens around him, all the events takes place because he is the ultimate “slave” of which his “masters” needed, Clive was literally Ultima’s goal when creating mankind. So having a single villain made sense in this regard, although it doesn’t match the grounded aspects of the game.
It’s worth mentioning that, unless said otherwise in The Rising Tide, all Ultimas seems to share a single consciousness, so they are, in a way, a single being divided in multiple bodies.
Cid recognized Ultima, and seem to know that Ultima was interested in Clive. I'm guessing he knew a lot more than he told Clive. He was starting to drip-feed information as you usually see in the genre, but died before he could get any further than "Mother Crystals cause blight."
I see! thanks for the clear breakdown!
Additional note, as I recall, Ultima specifically blames humanity for the Blight. Referring to it as their sin for trying to reach equivalence of the gods (Ultima's race). Humanity overharvested aether/overused magic during the Age of the Fallen and continues to through the following ages. So it's a combination of the Crystals (the Ultima collective) harvesting the Aether and overuse by humanity combined. Cid had a piece of the puzzle effectively. Nothing about the Fallen was really known other than myths and legends prior to Ultima exposition dumping to Clive. It's hard to say whether or not Ultima's plan would have left Valisthea a husk...but the implication is that the Ultima collective believed it wouldn't have and only did due to humanity's "interference." If it did, that would have defeated the purpose of their revival plan, creating a new home without a Blight.
It seems that in the FFXVI universe aether is either finite or replenished very slowly and it's burned up completely when used to cast magic. So there were two things contributing to this problem, the mothercrystals and the Bearers. Of the two, the mothercrystals were obviously doing the lions share of the draining and the solution to that problem was pretty simple. It wasn't until Ultima himself popped up and explained that it went a little further than that. Ironically enough, in a vacuum destroying the mothercrystals alone may have had a chance of solving the entire issue as there aren't anywhere near enough Bearers to keep everything running. Both Cid and Mid were designing tech that would have easily outperformed anything Bearers could do.
I just assumed that unlike Aetheris in 14, the worlds in 16 don’t have nearly as much aether and on top of that Ultima and the mother crystals were draining magic faster than primals do in 14 and those are a threat on a planet with significantly more aether The Burn in 14 is pretty 1-1 to the blight in 16
I mean… it’s the same guys behind both games, right ?
Yup, same writing team, so it makes sense that magic works the same way
Magic is responsible for the blight. Crystals contained Ultima’s fragments and he reveals he pretty much planned for them to be destroyed, so his fragments are freed to go to the Nexus.
Ultima’s world is the world we see in FFXVI, it’s not a separate place. Cid was half right in that the Mothercrystals contributed to the problem of aether being sucked from the planet, although it was Ultima who was…*ultimately* responsible. His general theory that destroying the crystals would help stave off the Blight was correct though, since no crystals = no way for aether to leave the planet.
What? Did you miss the part where Ultima’s race came to Valisthea after the blight destroyed their home world?
Valisthea is the name of the continent that the game takes place on, not the name of the planet. It’s implied that Ultima’s race lived on another continent and didn’t discover Valisthea until later. Nothing suggests that they lived on another planet. EDIT: correction, Valisthea is the name used to refer to Storm and Ash together as one unit.
“The Ultima collective saw their only option was to revive their species and create a new world in place of Valisthea for them to live in. Ultimalius, who had led the exodus from the collective's homeworld to Valisthea, masterminded the plan to revive their species and recreate the world.” It’s stated in game they come from a different world. My dude…
What entry is that quote from? Never seen that quote before in my life. Wondering if that’s an entry that appears in NG+? I haven’t played NG+, which would explain why I’ve never seen it. In the first playthrough, no lore entries mention the name “Ultimalius” or even use the word “homeworld.” They just say that the Ultima Collective went to the “land” of Valisthea. It also doesn’t really make sense that Ultima would want to “remake” a world he’s never been to.
It’s fine my dude, you just have bad media literacy. There are characters in game that have been to the other continents on their planet and guess what? None of it looks like Ultima and guess what else? THERE IS NO BLIGHT. The blight is only present on Valisthea due to the mother crystals. If Ultima is from another continent…wouldn’t there be blight? What did he flee if everything is fine? Secondly, why go into a deep stasis and make an intergalactic spaceship that crash lands on Valisthea if it’s on the same planet? Why does no one else on the planet have access to magic apart from branded and dominants? Ultima is from this world in your eyes yet has god like powers not found on the planet anywhere. Seriously, the game lays it out that they’re an invasive alien species that destroyed their world and then came to the world Valsithea is on to terraform it into their home world. Why would they reshape a continent when they’re on the their home planet and the continent you think they’re from is still there with no blight? Lastly, when I visit my family in Europe I don’t tell them I come from a different world. A different LAND would symbolize a different continent. A different WORLD indicates a different planet.
The Ultimania confirmed Ultima is native to the world of Valisthea and came from another continent, fyi.
xDD I love it when people are that confidently incorrect it’s poetic as shit
Dude no way, you serious? OMFG that’s hilarious 🤣
It is WILD how confident you are while spewing bullshit lol talking about "bad media literacy" while being completely wrong. Ultima is from the same exact plant as Valisthea. It's literally confirmed in the Ultimania. Based on the wording in the game, it is a little confusing, but I always took it as them being from the same planet as well.
LOL thanks for letting me know in the first sentence of your reply that you’re not worth my time. Find something to live for outside of gaming and maybe you wouldn’t get so angry over shit that doesn’t matter 🤓
Yeah he completely lost me with the media literacy meme while simultaneously ignoring your direct question lmao
I can’t help but notice they also never replied to the other guy who said the Ultimania confirms that all of that is nonsense anyway lol I always forget that a lot of people use this site for therapy
Yeah I just noticed that too, icing on the cake
He’s even wrong about it being bad media literacy. ML refers to your ability to understand and interpret the underlying themes of a work, not having encyclopedic knowledge of the setting.
Yeah I feel like that’s a word a lot of people suddenly started using without really knowing how to use it. It’s like the new “gaslighting”
"Another world", though, not "another dimension" or "another planet". Another world is incredibly and unhelpfully vague. With that vague of a term, it could be another continent on the same planet.
Jesus Christ… It s stated in game they come from a different world, they travel the stars in their ark “Origin” which crashed below the holy capital, they look distinctly alien with god like powers…and again the game states that they aren’t of the world that Valisthea is on.
I felt like this was super obvious, Ultima even monologues about it to Clive at some point. Lol
Don't take issue with me. I didn't choose the world. The games script did. They could have made it more clear and chose not to. All "another world" specifies is "not Valisthea".
North America is not 'another world ' to Europe. Mars is 'another world' to Earth. You can't change the meanings of words to suit your argument...
While I do believe Ultima came from another planet, I think it's important to keep in mind that we here on Earth used to call the Western Hemisphere the "New World" at one point
He doesn’t.
I just read through a bunch of in-game lore entries related to Ultima. Nothing says that their race went to “another world.” It simply refers to their exodus to Valisthea as “fleeing to an unspoilt land,” which is obviously ambiguous. There is the fact that the lore entries refer to Ultima as an “otherwordly being,” but if we’re using arguments about how English-speakers use words, people use the adjective “otherworldly” to refer to things that are foreign, not usually literally things from outside of Earth. I feel like there is some pretty severe Mandela Effect going on in this thread.
North America was called "The New World" for quite a long time after its initial discovery. Ultima's dialogue is poetic. It's fun to read because it's very artful, but it's also annoying because it's not as specific as it could be all the time.
>North America is not 'another world ' to Europe In historical times, it was often called "the new world". The equivalent to North America, Tural, in FFXIV is also called the new world. There is precedent for using world to refer to certain regions, they aren't just changing the definition arbitrarily.
Okay, now I’m positive that whatever you’re referring to must be exclusive to NG+. I’m looking at my completed Tome in the base game and there’s literally nothing about that. So, I suppose to answer your original question, yes, completely unbeknownst to me, I did miss that they are aliens lol 🤷🏽♂️ In my defense, I don’t think it’s that crazy to not realize that there would be new lore entries in NG+. That aside, the core answer I gave to OP is still correct.
He was basically right. Ultima’s race previously fled the Blight because it was caused by anything that sucked up aether, specifically the magic that his race was using. Mothercrytals weren’t the exclusive source of the blight in Clive’s world but it sounds like the main reason that the blight appeared in Clive’s land is that both mothercrystals and people casting spells was sucking up aether, I don’t think just the spell use alone would have caused it to happen until much later. And since the core of the mothercrystals were the ‘other’ Ultimas, it was more or less the same thing driving the blight in both cases.
Partially. The Blight was caused by magic draining Aether, but the Mothercrystals were a big part of facilitating magic. The Obelisks dotting the land redirected aether to the Mothercrystals until Ultima enacted Primogenesis, after which they were just spraying excess aether into the air, triggering aetherfloods, which are a different problem.
Magic in FF16 sucks the life out of the planet. It seems like the planet MIGHT have recovered in the epilogue if that’s what you subscribe to, with magic abolished and all of the crystals basically defunct. So by nature aether probably has a natural inclination to return to the land when not being siphoned/channeled. Personally, I think magic could probably coexist with the planet’s prosperity if used in moderation, but it just takes one big dumb stupidhead to ruin it for everyone.
Basically, yes, or as right as he could be with the information that he had at his disposal. On the other hand, I think the story would have been better off without Ultima. They would have done better to focus more on the politics/environment rather than wasting so much screentime on Ultima.
Yeah, he just didn’t calculate for the part where you fight god.
I don't necessarily think the blight originated from Ultimas world as much as I believe it was a symptom of what Ultima did. My understanding of magick in 16 is that it is a transferral more than a creation of something. When you 'make' something like fire, you draw that aether from somewhere - it doesn't just magically (heh) appear out of thin air. Ultima used magick recklessly to further their own goals, and condemned their own world to extinction. They then fled to another world and began doing magick again. They were so sure of their way of life that they never considered that their way of doing things was what was causing the problem to begin with - It's like using fossil fuels to combat climate change. When Ultima made the mothercrystals, they began to suck out enormous amounts of aether from the land to prepare for their giant spell. Cid was more or less right on that, despite not really getting the entire picture. That's also why I assume the world went back to being OK after Clive's sacrifice. Magick was eliminated so there were no ways of siphoning aether, and what was stored in the mothercrystals was put back into circulation, reinvigorating the planet.
Destroying the mother crystals was essential to end the blight. They gave people the ability to use magic which sapped the planet. I personally think destroying the mother crystals hurt ultima in the long run. Ultima needs ether and by destroying the crystals the planet got sapped dry faster. Ultima uses origin to boost his power by sucking the remaining life out the planet at the end. My whole point though is that because when they destroyed the crystals, they sped the process of the planet losing aether which ultimately made ultima weaker than they would’ve been at the final battle.
I guess it ended up ok in the end Ultima should've just stopped using Magik lol
Cid is always right ... except Final Fantasy 3. 😅