Despite the numerous trailers spoiling much of Final Fantasy 16’s story, the world of Valisthea is still a mysterious place with deep history requiring an actual historian to keep track of. And now, thanks to the help of a Redditor, we’ve got even more lore for that historian to jot down.
Thanks to Reddit user Corsicasse, we now have a translation of the Valisthean map. This map has been available for a while, but the text was very small and stylized to make it really hard to read. Through arcane magic known only to Corsicasse, we now have that text in plain English and French, and it reveals a lot about Valisthea.
“The people of Valsithea are quick to insist that theirs is a realm blessed in the light of the crystals, and that this blessing is everlasting, their claim upon it righteous,” the text in the upper right corner of the map reads. “Yet in truth they cling like whelps to their Mother’s ankles, sucking greedily at the withered teats of these crones. E’er running from the black of the land, but ne’er from the black that consumes their hearts, the men of the great nations embrace envy as the one true virtue. And thus they are slaves to strife, offering up their backs to the scourge of war for only does its sting bring them joy.”
That “black of the land” refers to the Blight, a so-far unknown scourge that both kills and corrupts. We still don’t know exactly what the Blight is or where it comes from, but we do know that Clive will spend much of the game trying to stop it. It’s presumed that it might be due to a corruption of the Valisthea’s MotherCrystals, but the source of this corruption remains unknown.
What we do know is that vast swathes of Valisthea are uninhabitable because of the Blight, and the translated map discusses this in great detail. The “nor’eastern shores” of the “emerald coast” are said to be avoided by sea captains as the “rivers have soured–waters once clear as dew, now foul with death.” Then on the opposite side of Valisthea, both the Kingdom of Waloed and the Crystalline Dominion have been rent by Blight that “extends beyond the sands and into the very sea itself. Beneath these waves trawlers will find no fish nor whale, only twisted aberrations with flesh as foul as a bloated corpse.”
And as you can see, the map makes it clear that Rosaria hasn’t really been touched by the Blight, which explains why the Dhalmekian Republic is so interested in Rosaria.
Final Fantasy arrives June 22 everywhere except Saudi Arabia where Square Enix’s “unwillingness to make the necessary modifications” have resulted in the game’s ban. Nobody’s quite sure why, but Middle Eastern countries have a habit of banning games that depict same-sex relationships.
