Bahamut arrives and the game escalates to a register it has been building toward since the prologue. Dion Lesage is not a villain. He is a Dominant who has been told his entire life that his purpose is to serve, to be the weapon his nation requires, and now the nation that required him has been corrupted from the inside. What he does with Bahamut is the action of someone who has run out of options that don't involve burning everything.

The kingdoms trembling beneath are not abstractions. They are the Bearers who survive in them, the ordinary people who had no vote in how the Dominants deployed their power. FFXVI keeps returning to that gap — between the people who wield mythic force and the people who live inside its consequences.