6 Things from Final Fantasy that are Real

Hey Guys, sorry for the lack of posting this week but I have been bogged down by work and Resident Evil 5 and this post has took me a while to put together. I think it’s a pretty cool one though,  we have below six different locations and creatures from the Final Fantasy series that have real life counterparts. The good news (or bad depending on what you wanted from this post) is that none of them are cos-players so read on and discover how spectacular the real world we live in can be.

I will always include three or four photos of the real thing followed by some reference photos from the relevant Final Fantasy game, if you have your own suggestions feel free to let me know!

I had loads of fun finding them and now I really wanna put together a “Final Fantasy Holiday Tour”, I’m pretty sure it would make a mint.

6. Ifrit’s Caldera (FFVIII)

Ifrit has been in a shit load of Final Fantasy games and in the few that you have to go find him in he lives in a place that looks suspiciously like this.

This is Hells Gate and it is located in the Kara-Kum Desert in Turkmenistan (Yes, that’s a real country). It’s actually a massive crater of natural gasses that geologists decided to set alight to prevent them doing significant damage to other people.  That was 38 years ago and it’s still on fire. I’m pretty sure if Ifrit was going to live anywhere on our Earth it would be in an ever burning pit of fire in the middle of a very desolate desert.

Here’s a few images of what “Hell’s Gate” looks like.

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5. The Northern Crater (FFVII)

Historically Earth has been owned by meteors, while I doubt that any brought Jenova with them they did leave some pretty big craters, one of them in particular is very Final Fantasy.

In FFVII the Northern Crater is a pretty important location, for a start it’s FVII’s final dungeon and also sets the scene for further events at the start of FFVII:AC. According to FFVII backstory the crater was created by Jenevoa’s original arrival and acts like a gigantic wound on the planet. The crater itself is the reason eveything around it is barren as the planet draws lifestream energy to heal itself from the surrounding ecosystem. FFVII’s weapons also live in here although once Sephiroth summons meteor they fly out to go on Godzilla style rampages.

Our Northern Crater is located in Devon (no that one UK readers) Island in far north Canada. It is officially known as the Haughton Impact Crater and is approximately 23km in diameter and was formed nearaly 40 million years ago.  The impacting object is estimated at 2km wide and managed to strip the Earth back to the base rock with geologists finding material from 1700 meters down. Just like the FFVII crater it is very low temperature, spares in vegetation and high in altitude and the center is coated with a layer of permafrost.

It is infact so desolate and un-earlthly that NASA test Mars equipment here and the location has even been referred to as Mars on Earth.

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4. Antlions (FFII-Current)

Ant-lions are a staple desert area bad guy from the Final Fantasy series, they first appeared in FF II and have been back for many of the games in between as standard enemies or bosses all the way up to the recent FFXII and Reverent Wings titles. They are usually a bitch to kill as bosses as they will have one of those “you’re on one HP” attacks.

In real life Ant-lions are gross but kinda cool insects that have cocoon, larvae and adult forms (it’s not just game bosses!). They really do make those sand-trap funnels and it’s actually amazing that they can successfully burrow the pit with a special crazy angle that is the maximum possible steepness sand supports. They even throw debris (just like in the game) and corpses of their victims back out of their little death pits.

Eventually they turn into flies but clearly the larva form is the most awesome for making video game baddies.

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3. The Crystal Cave (Most FF)

Let’s face it, Square (or Square-Enix as it is now) fucking love crystals. Most FF game plots in some way revolve around crystals or at least feature them, a whole bunch of them have crystal as a character. For this particular example I am picking the Crystal Cave of FFVII because it’s specifically a cave but it could easily be FFIX’s crystal walkways etc.

The real life crystal caves are in Mexico  a place called Chihuahua and it’s name translates to the very original “Cave of Crystal”. They contain a lot of selenite crystal and are pretty epic. Wiki states the caves biggest crystal is 11 meters long with a 4 meter diameter weighing approximately 55 tons. Unfortunately I don’t think it holds the power of any one element nor is it sentient.

The crystal are however half a million years old and are formed as a unique combination between magma from the caves below and the extremely mineral rich water and soil.

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2. The Tree of Life (Iifa Tree, FFIX)

Another thing Squenix love to do is plunder religion’s rich tapestry of cool ideas for inspiration. This is no exception, the theological concept of the tree of life spans across many, if not all religions in some way and pretty much everyone knows some variation on the story. In my opinion the main interpretation in video games is that of the Norse Yggdrasil but believe it or not the real world has a couple of trees of life.

The first is in Mexico (apparent capital of real life Final Fantasy!) and is one big tree in Oaxaca. The wiki stats that the tree is 11.62 meters in diameter and DNA test have proven it to be one tree not a combination of many. The tree has lots of local Zapotec legends linked with it and estimates claim it to be between 1200 and 6000 years old, nice margin of error there guys. Apparently it was planted by a high priest back in the day but since then the church has stolen the ground off the locals and probably make money from people looking at it.

The second tree of life is in Bahrain which is not actually in Mexico! It’s over in the Persian Gulf and is quite desert based. What it does have is a 100+ year old (some people claim 600) mesquite tree that is seemingly growing without water.

It’s actually quite impressive but not as big as the other tree, it’s definitely a hard-core tree but it doesn’t spew mist out ot anything cool like that.

Another interesting link, the Kabbalah concept of Sephirot is often illustrated as a Tree of Life, or a weird coloured flow diagram.

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1. The Thunder (Gandof) Plains (FFX & X-2)

Yeah this gets number one on my list because it is the least likely to be real, a place on Earth where it thunders almost all the time actually exists. It’s more likely to be a case of the winds from the nearby Andes and gasses from the marshland than Dark Ixion but we live in hope.

The Thunder Plains in the FFX series were big barren space which was constantly bombarded with thunder and lightening. The Al Behd had constructed special lightening rods to draw the Lightening but by the time Tidus and crew arrive they are in disrepair and you have to play that [quote] fun [/unquote] minigame bashing X to dodge bolts. I also remember Rikku having a spaz attack at some point when crossing them which gravely concerned me when playing as she was my gil farmer.

The real Thunder Plains are located in Venezuela on the Catatumbo River, most specifically the Maracaibo Lake. The thunder there strikes up to 280 times per hour for 140-160 days a year.  The lighting generated forms in 2-10km electrician arcs  but does not generate any thunder, weird.

Interestingly they are Earth’s largest generator of ozone, seems like one of those “too convenient” things to me, if I was a religious nut I would probably use this as proof someone “designed” Earth.

Here’s some pretty epic pictures from the Thunder Plains.

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I hope you enjoyed the article, send it on to more Final Fantasy fans if you did and maybe we can find more real life Final Fantasy stuff, if we get enough I’ll do another collection post or extend this one.