How is Vagrant Story connected to Final Fantasy?

The connection begins as vocabulary. Final Fantasy XII, Matsuno’s next Ivalice game, is salted with Vagrant Story terms: Riskbreaker as an honoured title, and the names Leámonde and Kildea, spelled a little differently in each game’s localization. Matsuno told the French magazine Joypad in 2004 that Ivalice, the world he began building when he joined Square in 1995, is one complex place with a very long history, and that the stories of Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII unfold quite close together on its map.

Then he complicated it, honestly, in 2011: the original plan was not to set Vagrant Story in Ivalice at all, and the Tactics elements woven into it were meant as intertextual reference, a form of fan service. Both statements are on the record, and this page keeps both, because the tension between them is the true shape of the connection: a world retroactively unified by its author’s second thoughts.

The threads run forward as well as back. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance built its plot on a Gran Grimoire from the lost age of Kiltia, a book of which the game’s own manual says that whoever holds a copy holds the power to change the world; Vagrant Story’s Gran Grimoire is the same legend told from inside the older, darker country, where the book turns out to be a city. And in Final Fantasy XIV the connection became an event: the Return to Ivalice alliance raids of the Stormblood expansion, written by Matsuno as guest creator, followed by the Save the Queen storyline, which required the raids to unlock and drew on concepts from the unused Vagrant Story sequel.