I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. The main site covers the missions, but what about the real meat of CoP – the story and the characters? So many people have expressed a desire to go back and see the cutscenes, but since they’re scattered through the world, often in dangerous territory, viewing them all in order would take days upon days of travel. So this is the next best thing – all the NPC text and as many screenshots as I felt were necessary.

For the love of everything holy, if you don't want the Chains of Promathia plot spoiled, leave this section now. This part of the site is mainly for people that HAVE seen the story and want a review, or are trying to remember some obscure fact but can't quite recall, or people long since quit the game that want to see what they missed. I can't exactly force you to leave, but if there is any possibility, even a slim hope, that you'll eventually do the CoP missions, I highly recomend not reading this section. And I know there are a fair number of spoilers going around on linkshells and stuff, but they usually only talk about the BCNM fight enemies. There's PLENTY of story going on in the background. Too much for even someone like me to remember, and that's saying something; I really got into all this.

So far, I’ve got Chapters 1 and 2 done. This is but a taste of things to come. This is going to take a long time to design, write, proofread, and compile, but I have hopes that it will be pretty awesome when it’s done. I plan on adding character descriptions and various CoP-related essayish things about some of the weirder plot points. Maybe a story FAQ for the major questions too.

This isn't supposed to replace the History of Vana'diel site, but rather agument it. The History is much larger in scope, but fails to go in depth. This part of the site was designed to be as complete as possible. Every line of script from every cutscene supplimented with expliations between the two and pictures of important events. Painful detail is what I do. I want to state that I have tremendous respect for the History site and have taken only inspiration from them, not any of their screenshots or descriptions.

All of the text is, to the best of my ability, word-for-word what appears on the screen during the cutscenes – with several exceptions you should be aware of. First, any time the NPCs say your character name, I have them say Player instead. You can just pretend they are saying your name there. Second, they always refer to the player as female. I thought about putting he/she him/her notes in there, but it was awkward and got in the way.

Anything in parentheses is also added by me. Sometimes it is necessary to indicate who a character is speaking to (by who they are facing – obvious in the CS, less so in the text version). Also, many names are left as ??? since we don’t know the name of that character yet. I gave a brief physical description in parentheses before each ???’d name.

Some dialog may very depending on your race, nationality, job, rank, quests completed, or other factors. I don’t know. It’s essentially impossible for me to track some of these. If it matters, I did almost all of the cutscenes as a 75 WHM mithra from Bastok, rank 10, with a lot of random CoP-ish quests completed.

The paragraph forms are added by me to fill the gaps between the dialog. Call it fanfiction if you want – it was necessary to make things make sense. They’re my accounts of either the action sequences that happen in between the dialog, or how the player likely feels during trips between the cutscenes. I left out most of the talk about the actual missions themselves – if you’re looking for mission details, the main site covers it far better. Hopefully it is suitable to the people that actually enjoy how I write - all three of you, maybe.

Much like the NPCs in the cutscenes, I make no indication to any members of your party you would have needed to beat the missions. Yeah, my descriptions have you soloing Promyvion and Ouryu and Omega Weapon without major issue. It’s just one of those things. If this bothers you, you can pretend Nag’molada and Prishe and Tenzen and the rest of the NPCs helped out. I was actually rather annoyed they never DID, though I was suitably vindicated in the final fight.

I also assume that you've done a few things in the game; killed the shadow lord, finished the Zilart missions, and generally a number of quests. I think that's what SE was thinking when they designed Chains of Promathia, as it makes heavy reference to mission cutscenes beforehand. Things just wouldn't make sense to someone who hasn't completed at least ZM4 and learned about the mothercrystals, crags, zilart, and kuluu.

I firmly believe that Chains of Promathia has one of the best Final Fantasy stories to date. Unlike the plot of Treasures of Aht Urhgan, which is more of an experience then a story, Chains of Promathia is suitably epic, covers vast tracks of the world, has a dozen interesting and well-developed characters, and spans a large amount of time. Perhaps it is too large for some people to remember the numerous sub-plots. So, to all you cutscene-mashers out there that are regretting missing the fun, this is for you. Though if you have time time, tracking them yourself is far better. The first cutscene at Monarch Linn during mission 2-5 is a personal favorite. Yeah, the one with Bahamut and the airship.

Oh, and FFXIpedia, I see you have a “script coming soon!” section on your Promathia mission pages. You ripped off my work on the missions a couple years ago. I was nice about then and didn’t want to start demanding entire articles get taken down and rewritten out of personal spite. But, if those script pages get mysterious filled in shortly after this goes public, I’ll be quite a bit more annoyed. I mean, seriously, I did this all by myself (with a few bewildered parties to open the way in the case of promyvion and riverne, heh) in a manner of days. You guys have thousands of contributors and a couple years to fill in the script on your site. How hard can it be for one of your people to visit some goblin footprints? Maybe I’ll intentionally change a few minor words in my script just to see if I can catch you.

In any event, thanks to all the people that supported me on this, and on previous projects. You guys make spending weeks on things like this totally worth it.


Doing my best to make FFXI successful, one insane project at a time,

- Erecia



(Shut up already! Let's see the first mission!)
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