Saying that Astral was "the name chosen" absolutely
does not mean that there was never any other term considered or used prior to it. And it's
patently absurd to suggest that the fact that the localization started in 2014 implies that all of the terms used in the final game were implemented in their final form at that point.
Anyway, if you want evidence that the summons were, at least at one point, called Eidolons, consider this:
Final Fantasy XV began as a Fabula Nova Crystallis game (FF Versus XIII) and
was still a FNC game as of February 2014.
All FNC games called summons "Eidolons."
Over the course of 2014 and 2015, Final Fantasy XV underwent significant changes that transformed it from a game that was considered to be part of Fabula Nova Crystallis to a game that was
no longer considered to be a part of Fabula Nova Crystallis as of its PAX 2015 showing.
That the term "Eidolon" doesn't appear in datamined content is not particularly suggestive, given that using Japanese terminology would have been far safer for a term with an inconsistent localization history. And, given that some of the datamined content includes Versus XIII material (where summons
would have been called Eidolons), it seems like the term Eidolon might have been intentionally removed.
As such, while my only real
evidence that the term Eidolon was still used in 2015 is the Gamespot article, that's considerably
more than the evidence that you have provided, which consists of nothing more than free-standing assumptions and the fallacious insistence that the absence of evidence is the same as evidence of absence. If you're going to claim that the localization starting in 2014 means that all of the major terms were determined at that point and the concepts to which said terms refer have not changed since, you're gonna need some real good evidence, especially since
FFXV was still FNC in early 2014.
You appear to have completely missed my point.
If the localization team was 100% certain that they were going to use Astral in the final game and they were willing to use the term without explaining what it was for in Episode Duscae,
they would have explained that the Astrals were Astrals as soon as the confusion arose.... and they
certainly wouldn't have
failed to tell the live translator that summons were called Astrals during a post-Episode Duscae panel! There is literally zero reason for the localization team not to have made the choice clear if the localization wasn't in flux.
This contradicts your assumption that the term was in place since the localization started,
but that is all the worse for your assumption, because it's far more reasonable to drop the assumption than to hold instead that the localization team was apparently too incompetent to say, "Hey, the summons are actually called Astrals" instead of simply saying that the summons
weren't called Archaeans (and allowing a live translator to call them "Eidolons").
That the kennings were already in use doesn't prove that
every important localization choice regarding proper nouns had been made. There's good reason to think that they weren't!
I think you misunderstand the provenance of Gamespot's information. Their article states that "director Hajime Tabata shared more details on the game's story and major features with GameSpot,
including a deeper dive into footage shown during a panel at PAX Prime today."
In other words, they didn't report the information from the PAX Prime panel -- they asked Tabata exclusive questions
after the panel, which is why they're the only source for a number of the things in the article.
This is important, of course, because that means that they were dealing with a
different translation than the translation at the panel. Even if the same translator was used, it's possible that interpretative differences like city-vs.-town or boat-vs.-boats could have slipped in... which means that trivial details of the sort can't be used to undercut Gamespot's reliability.
As for the last bit,
you're making unsubstantiated assumptions again. Given how many alterations FFXV's story went through, you literally have no evidence that the context of the painting was the same in 2014 as it was revealed to be in 2016. Some of the connections obviously remained the same -- most notably the four heroes and the knights -- but that doesn't mean that
all of them are identical. To put it more pointedly,
the reapers that exist in the painting no longer have any role in the game, so there were obviously at least some changes made.
I'm not being willfully ignorant. You have proven literally nothing, given that your entire argument is based on assumptions, fallacies, and irrelevant details.
The very fact that the use of "Eidolon" was considered by Gamespot to be a confirmation of the proper name for the summons is proof that the term
isn't synonymous. Not to mention, if Eidolon was truly synonymous with summon, Gamespot wouldn't have felt it necessary to explain that Eidolon is "the term for creatures you can summon in Final Fantasy XV."
In other words, Gamespot
didn't consider "Eidolon" synonymous with summon, therefore they
did consider the live translator's use of that term sufficient to suggest to them that Eidolon was the correct term. And Gamespot is a professional outlet that knows how the Final Fantasy series works. They're not incompetent.
No matter how many times you accuse me of "basing this on nothing," it won't stop being true that practically no one who discusses FF uses the term "Eidolon" in any instance where the original game didn't choose to use it as a proper noun. Dissidia 012 is the only counter-example, and even that can be explained as Dissidia -- an official FF game in its own right -- choosing
its own proper noun to use for games that didn't use a proper noun for summons.
Show me five unique instances of people who use the term "Eidolon" as a generic for FF summons in games that don't use Eidolon as a proper noun, at least two of which are professional gaming news outlets, and I'll reconsider. If you can't do that, then admit that Eidolon is
always a proper noun in the context of FF as opposed to a viable generic term for summon.
Explain the reapers, then. We know they were in the game and that they were removed. They're in the painting, but we don't even know what they were intended to be.
In other words, it's easy enough to justify the angelic figure being the Oracle in the context of the final game. But there's no way to know whether the angelic figure's role in 2014 or even 2015 was the same as the role that was in 2016 because we
know for a fact that the game's lore has changed since then.
And I think it's worth considering this: literally no one in 2015 questioned that the angelic figure was a goddess, and no one
could have guessed anything about the Oracle's role based on the painting. From the visual symbolism perspective, the angelic figure was clearly positioned as something more than what the Oracle ended up being.
Actually, I'd argue that the Astrals' role in the lore leaves an obvious open space for some power that exists above them. The Astrals were explained to have the power of the stars (hence the name "Astral"), and yet the soul of the planet Eos (
the Star) is contained within a questionably-sentient Crystal. It is very, very easy to imagine a prior draft in which the Star was sentient and produced the Astrals before falling asleep within the Crystal... and how such a role could have been determined to be unnecessary when the team sought to streamline the game's lore.
In other words, the lore might be complete without a supreme goddess now, but there's no reason to assume that such a goddess never had a role to play in the game, especially since we know that one of the roles portrayed in the painting -- that of the reapers -- was depreciated. (Based on the Gamespot article, it also seems like the game originally planned to portray the creation of its world, which would have provided a reason why such a role would have been more necessary in earlier revisions. Furthermore, the article suggested that the primary influences in FFXV's mythos were Eastern, which does not hold in the final game, so the goddess's removal might have gone hand in hand with the game's apparent decision to focus on Judeo-Christian paralles.)
As such, trivial mistranslations alone are nowhere near enough to claim that the Gamespot article reported their exclusive interview so inaccurately that the exclusive information they included should be ignored.
