10 Games You Didn’t Know Were Secret Sequels
Vagrant Story & Final Fantasy XII Is A Secret Sequel To Final Fantasy Tactics
The main numbered entries of Final Fantasy games tend to have nothing to do with each other — aside from reoccurring references, item names, and general plot elements. Like a lot of JRPG series, each game is its own separate entity. The items and magic names might be the same, but the world and the story are not a continuation.
Apparently, that isn’t so when it comes to these three games — Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy XII, and Final Fantasy Tactics all take place in the same world, on the same timeline. The world of Ivalice was created by Yasumi Matsuno, and it’s a much darker, more political world than most in Final Fantasy.
When it comes to direct connections, we have a few — including a returning (and easy to miss) character. At the start of Vagrant Story, a short quote is shared by in-game writer A.J. Durai. The narrator of Final Fantasy Tactics, and the man that goes on to write the secret history of events that transpired during that game, was an ‘Arazlam Durai’ — the same character.
There’s more! The Gran Grimoire is an important McGuffin in Vagrant Story and in the Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance series. The continent of Valendia is shared in all the game maps / histories, and Final Fantasy XII is a prequel to the world of Final Fantasy Tactics, where the advanced civilization of airships has fallen, and the god-like beings that once controlled mankind’s fate have been defeated. There’s so much more, too!
Dark Souls Is A Secret Sequel To King’s Field
The Dark Folk want to return the world to a state of True Darkness, a darkness that is warm and peaceful. Beings of light oppose it, although humanity is described as being born of the dark, of beings that come from the dark — there is a strange force causing a once-great kingdom to crumble from within, and vast cities are left to rot and decay. No, I’m not talking about Dark Souls; that’s the plot of King’s Field 4.
King’s Field is the spiritual predecessor of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, but they share more than just hardcore dungeon-crawling. Most of the connections are directly tied into King’s Field 4 — Seath The Scaleless, the Moonlight Greatsword, Sen’s Fortress, New Londo, and even Nashandra the Abyss Queen are all directly plucked out of King’s Field and placed verbatim in Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 2.
The stories are so similar, and the worldbuilding is so vague in the Dark Souls series, you could easily say the games are a direct continuation. As we learn in Dark Souls 3, everything is connected — it’ll just end up in a massive heap at the end of the world anyway.
What are some more secret sequels we missed? There are plenty of spiritual successors and hidden links in gaming, and we’re always looking for more!