The Eikon battles are FFXVI's most operatic choice, and this session introduces them properly. Titan and Phoenix and Garuda in collision are not just spectacle. They are the political order expressing itself as catastrophe, great powers whose conflict is felt entirely by the people beneath them. The Dominants who carry Eikons did not choose to become weapons. They were assigned the role.

Clive watches these clashes from the outside for most of the game, carrying Ifrit's power without understanding it. What the early Eikon sequences establish is scale — not just visual scale, but the scale of what has gone wrong with this world and what it would take to make it right.