Great info. I love lore stuff like this. I just wish the vid wasn't as angry/ranting. Personal opinion and, comparing lore to gameplay is awesome. But being angry/ aggressive about it makes me not like it.
i didn’t even know these raids existed until i was in shadowbringers. it should be mandatory like the crystal tower raids. great work on explaining this! i enjoy how you explain the lore in this game :)
Great video as usual. I ended up story skipping ARR when I first started because the tedious fetch quests were getting stale but it does mean I had to pick up the lore bits I missed through cutscenes and youtube. Keep up the good work, going to brag I was here early before you got big.
I'm getting an under-separation of gameplay from game-world here; our Jobs and their limits in gameplay are like templates, while a real >insert job< could do much more, or also do a thing other spell-schools can as well, but doesn't specialize in that field or action... For example a Dark Knight's weaponized "Cope Seeth Mald" probably shouldn't be getting mixed into healing magicks of any kind, unless corruption is the intent...
Oof, I learned the elemental wheel from FFXI… basically Fire > Ice > Wind > Earth > Lightning > Water > Fire. I thought they knocked it out of the park because fire wind lightning are the “light” elements because they are more etherial. You can’t “hold” fire, wind or lightning easily. Water ice and earth are the “dark” elements and you can “hold” those easily. The two tros made it easier for a BLM to put the right dots on there as any elemental wheel conflict results in overwrite of no effect. In FFXI some Job Abilities had aspects, though it’s unclear how much this affected things (if at all). Steal has a green icon, so it’s wind, does that mean it’s more successful on Windsday (yes there were days of the week for elements)? How about while wielding a Wind Staff? Stealing from earth-aligned mobs? Then you have JAs like berserk that are easy to verify. Red icon so it’s fire which is aligned with STR and attack so that makes sense. Does Firesday, fire weather or a fire staff help it increase your attack or lower defense? No, so why? I don’t know, just feels like SE designs intricate systems, then they collide with reality and player demands (fun first, making sense second is not a bad game design philosophy if moderated…) so they change them after of drop them altogether.
@lysandre1861 I did mean the total number of individual gods you murk. But if eulogia is all the others, and an individual, the score should reflect that.
FFXI's system had so much more depth. The elemental system permeated everything, for example Silence = Wind = boost your wind resist to indirectly raise your chances of resisting Silence. It's a shame the XIV team decided to just go with the "team jump rope" combat mechanics since 2.0. The current elemental system we have is as shallow as, in the words of AVGN, a puppy dog's piss puddle.
Just because I'll never stop being salty about it, would be cool to hear about a lot of the cool flashy aoes we don't have anymore or how Astrologian used to actually be able to fill in for both sides. Used to be a compliment to white mage with its strong shields in Nocturnal Sect, or a compliment to scholars with strong heals and regens in Diurnal Sect. Also can't forgot how the arcanist tree used to have Shadow Flair which was a unique looking aoe and was very cool to look at. I could go on about what I miss. Dragoons used to have a spammable aoe jump that also looked unique, and didn't lock you into place for a second like their main jumps. Bards used to have what was possibly the most satisfying spammable aoe in the game with Wide Volley, and even had an aoe fire arrow they could place on the ground that stuck around for awhile. There's so much that's changed or has been removed. Some of it is good, but there's a lot 2.0 players like myself REALLY miss...
Your point about why BLM's Umbral Ice restores MP threw me down a rabbit hole around the question, why _does_ Umbral magic have a healing effect? I came up with an entire theory which I think actually explains it really well. So here's my crackpot theory if you want it (WALL OF TEXT WARNING): In short, injuries and fatigue in FF14 work very differently than in real life. In FF14 your physical body is one solid mass of aether, and your body is just an expression of the current state of your aether. For example, the "color of your soul" (the color of your aether) usually changes very slowly over time and is what determines your personality, while the shape of it can change quickly and determines what your physical body looks like. The other core factors are the quantity and density of your aether, which determines how much energy or force it takes to change you (both harming and healing). So with that in mind we can say that ALL forms of injury, healing, fatigue, and recovery are about how stable your aether is. You are healthy when your aether is in a resting state, where it is free to move but not fluctuating too much. And when you get hurt, it's because your aether is struggling to maintain balance and is at risk of collapsing (leading to death) or permanently changing shape/color (leading to physical or mental disfigurement). Healing magic works by stabilizing the shape of your aether, and the very act of stabilizing returns your body to neutral. Compare this to real life, where injuries first require stabilizing and then require growth to actually repair the damage. This explains how in Eorzea the simple act of resting after battle cures all wounds, and why permanent injuries are still possible. Bringing it back to the Black Mage question...what is happening when mages expend and recover MP? The truth is that spellcasting (spending MP) is essentially flexing your aether like a muscle, and doing so makes your aether gradually more unstable as you get more tired. Our bodies naturally keep us from overexerting ourselves, but it is possible to surpass this. Louisoix and Papalymo know this all too well... So anyway, what Black Mages figured out is how to "heal" this aetheric fatigue by quickly restabilizing your own aether, allowing you to flex it again to keep casting. And since stability is Umbral, they use Umbral Ice to cure fatigue, which we see as "recovering mana". TADA, MYSTERY SOLVED! --- Fun fact, we actually see how this goes wrong in the BLM job quests, where the baddies use black magic incorrectly and throw their own aether out of balance, leading to death. Also, if the theory is correct, this means that Black Magic could theoretically be used to restore _other people's_ mana. Which would be super cool! Final Bonus Fact: Why did White Mages never figure out this technique if it's technically a form of healing? Because Black Mages figured it out first and they're racist against BLMs. Case closed.
Because Umbral symbolizes movement and flow, so it makes sense for it to allow your mana to flow back into you. Astral symbolizes stasis, which is why you don't get mana back.
I like this idea!. Also, once upon a time, channeling Mana to others was a role ability, and Black Mages were basically mana battery for drained healers!
@@AzureRoxe Close but not quite. _Darkness_ symbolizes movement, and Darkness is equivalent to Astral (meanwhile Light is equivalent to Umbral, AKA stasis). Urianger explains this during the events of Shadowbringers.
SE: Nice lore theory you got there. Would be a shame if… someone were to update the game. But yeah, even without ice = more mp, 90% of what you said still fits.
I enjoyed the video because it was supposed to be a humorous take and doesn't pretend to be exhaustive in the least. People in the comments need to chillax and enjoy a short-form video while we're all stuck waiting for the game to come back. Sincerely, Another Um-Actually FFXIV Player
It should be noted, that the black and white triagles in the chart are not indicators of whether the elements are astrally or umbrally aligned. Those are purely there to show the rock-paper-scissors relationship the elements have with defeating one another. If you do Eureka, you'll get familiar with it quickly. Rather, the elements at the top of the chart are Astral(darkness\active) elements, the elements at the bottom are umbral(light\passive) elements. Foul and Polyglot are unaspected but Astrally aligned. Unaspected just means that its neutral aether that isn't aligned with the six elements, but it still likely has a polarity towards darkness. This already has precedent. Bahamut was an unaspected but astrally-aligned(darkness) calamity, as stated by the encyclopedia eorzia. Black Mages and White mages not having Voidsent/Golems likely has everything to do with job design and nothing to do with the actual capabilities of the two jobs in lore. Also, Square Enix hates pet jobs, because they're janky as hell in the current engine, and they've been slowly removing and minimizing pet functionality in the current pet jobs each expansion. Summoning Bahamut is explained in the job quests for summoner. You don't have to defeat the primal, you simply have to be exposed to their residual aether. In the case of Bahamut, we went to a location heavily influenced by Bahamut in the Mor Dhona region. If you've played the Binding Coils of Bahamut raid, you'll also realize that the same area was heavily suffused with Phoenix's aether as well. I heavily recommend playing through it, it gives Alisae a character arc in ARR and has one of the most badass cutscenes in the game. As for why we don't have Leviathan, Shiva, and Ramuh? Current SMN players want to know that too. : \ Red Magic is different from White and Black magic fundamentally. Red Magic uses the reservoir of aether within the caster to cast spells. Black and White mages suck in ambient aether from the world and fire it out as spells. Almost like how primals work. Remember your point about white mages never using water? Well, the War of the Magi, a war between Black and White mages, was the cause of the Sixth Umbral Calamity. Basically nobody was hurling water spells around, which tilted the balance of the world towards water, setting it up for the water calamity, which is why black and white mages became hated and why the Red Mage, a mage that did not screw up the balance of the world's aether, was created. Conjurers and Thaumaturges notably pull only from their own aetherial reservoirs, which is why they're weaker but safer. Astrologian pulls power from the stars, which are gates? I forget half the lore for them. Sage is actually closer to ritual magic than science. In the earliest forms of sage magic, nouliths were stationary stones positioned around the target of the magic. They created a boundary around the target area and provided succor for those within. This evolved into the nouliths that sages use today. You'll notice that the nouliths often surround and spin around their targets as a holdover from the older form of magic.
You completely ignored the fact that Umbral is not the stilling, but the constant motion of magic... Play Shadowbringers again. Urianger flat out tells you the magic chart from the source is wrong.
He specifically says that they have astral and umbral backwards, that the First calls Umbral Light and it is the stilling of ether that will cause Black Rose to kill everyone
I thought the same, but Johra is right. I had to rewatch the cutscene to be sure. What Urianger says is that they had the concepts of _Light_ and _Darkness_ backwards. In other words, they thought that Light was an Astral phenomenon when it's actually an Umbral one. Their original definitions of Astral and Umbral are still correct, so the chart is accurate.
As someone who is a notorious story skiper that plans to actually pay attention to the story this expansion this couldn't come at a better time. So these 10 minutes are all I know of the story going into Dawntrail, thank you.
Slight correction: pretty sure that the grand companies want to recruit you BECAUSE you killed ifrit, not send you to do it. They pretty much kiss your boots to try and get you to join theirs BECAUSE you’re a badass.
i have a critique to make! if you count Zenos as a half-god, you should yotsuyu also count as such. i mean... with her happens nearly the same stuff as with zenos. and yes, i only write this comment, cuz the "1/2"-sting burning in my monk-perfection eyes! leave me be! XD
I had the luxury of playing ARR-Shadowbringers in a few months, so I remembered G’raha, but I wonder how many people who have been playing since the beginning actually knew who he was when they saw him. He seemed like a nobody when I did the Crystal Tower questline lol.
You'd be surprised. The story means a lot to a good majority of the player base. I remember the discourse before the launch of the expansion was speculation on whether Graha was the Exarch.
Bozja has been a slow grind I haven't really prioritized yet, sorry. And I'd probably only count Elidibus as half because the Ascian's are all kinda god-like already, but I wasn't going to add each of them in as well
Were Ratatoskr and Niddhogg mates? I don't recall that bit of lore. Lyse is not a princess. Her father was a guard for the Mad King before fleeing to join the Resistance. Lyse is only the leader of the resistance, at the dying request of Conrad Kemp.
Good video! As far as I can tell, Krile didn't create pictomancy, one of the original Archons from the fifth astral era, Relm, created the school of magic! I'm really looking forward to getting more lore from the 5th astral era. The War of the Magi is a super interesting part of XIV's lore.
Very good summary! I still recommend people playing the story and learning all about the characters but this is a good reminder and refresher before the new expansion, thanks!
I love this. while a bit sad that all the... raid series weren't covered. but that would add on like another 10 minutes? (I really like the lore/story that comes from them. Including, but not limited to: Coils, Alexander, Omega, Eden, and Pandaemonium. ....Wait, that's all of them) Great recap though! Will share!!
