Summary??

After the events of Return to Ivalice and in the wake of the new civil war with Varis dead, the Empire's IVth Legion breaks off from centralized Imperial control and tries to tighten its hold on Bozja and Dalmasca. Their leader, Legatus Noah Gabranth, attempts to create a new egilitarian nation for his legion, comprised of mostly non Garleans drawn to him for various reasons and prove willing to even summon Primals to claim the land. He doesn't even try opening dialogue with the Bozjans though so fuck'im.

The Bozjan Resistance recruits you to help, as the liberator of Ala Mhigo and Doma. First things first, they're of a mind to reforge the legendary weapons of the Blades of Gunnhildr for patriotism and morale or something, but the weapons were lost when the Garlean facility they were behind held in exploded from the Meteor project's early stages. Mikoto, the echo-blessed scholar from Return to Ivalice, comes back andends up demonstrating her involuntary Echo ability - the ability to see a short, pre-destined clip of the future, which the WoL also experiences due to the Echo latching on. Somehow. They see themselves treating Cid, who is thrashing about while seemingly having some sort of nightmare. They put this together with the need to perfectly replicate the weapons for some reason to go get Cid, whose father worked at the facility that blew up.

It turns out that yes, Cid had visited that facility but his memories of the event were muddled. Mikoto proposes using an ancient technique (used by Allagans? Some other 3rd era civilization? I need to go back and review that lore myself) that involves utilizing the Echo with a special sort of crystal to enter Cid's memories more directly. This gets into things like subjective memory vs objective memory and that what one person remembers might be vastly different from what actually happened, and that your job will be to try and sort things out. You end up going inside Cid's memories of the day he visited the facility, and his mind tries suppressing the entire event, causing you to fight Garleans, weird nightmares, and even Bahamut inside a twisted version of Bozja called Memoria Miseria. It all caps off when Cid struggles to remember a moment where someone shot him as he objected to the Meteor Project continuing and you end up fighting a past version of Varis zos Galvus as a solo trial (which makes way for an extreme after). Cid's memory eventually corrects itself into showing him his *father* shot him, having been tempered by Bahamut during the project, which he didn't realize. Cid's not having a great day.

Still you manage to extract and get an accurate account of Cid's memories involving the Blades of Gunnhildr, and begin to recreate them into Resistance Weapons. After this, you're given leave to head to the frontlines in Bozja Southern Front, where you're introduced to various hard to pronounce Hrothgars and also a Roegadyn soldier named Misija. Over the course of advancing the story here, you learn Misija had a terrible life growing up in Bozja and that she was poor and led a life on the streets while the nobility of Bozja looked down on her kind. Notably, nobility who were still in the Resistance and bullying her, and possibly planning their own coup. She ended up studying under Garlean schools during the occupation and gaining a number of skills. No surprise then when she turns out to have preferred Garlemald's hellhole system to Bozja's hellhole system and ends up being a spy. They go so far as to kidnap Mikoto and imbue Misija with her Echo, and they reclaim Save the Queen, the blade of Gunnhildr herself, which was kept in a different place than the other weapons of Gunnhildr's blades. Also stealing Mikoto's crystal focus, Misija reveals herself as a descendant of a handmaiden of Queen Gunnhildr, who was herself anointed Queen Gunnhildr and made into a primal for reasons? There's a lot of jumping through hoops to avoid showing female hrothgar. Anyway, the Queen of the past was Misija's ancestor and subsequently betrayed by the Blades of Gunnhildr when she took on the power of a primal to defend Bozja but turned out too powerful.

What's all this lead up to? Misija alters the memories of the queen stored in the aether of Save the Queen to incense the former queen's spirit and then summons her as a primal to temper the modern day Blades of Gunnhildr, various soldiers who've been helping you in fates throughout, and completely spoils your conquest of Castrum Lacus Latore. Also you fight a not-Ranjit named Lyon who seems to be some sort of beastmaster dude. We do rescue Mikoto though.

So shit's fucked up, but it turns out Misija needs to keep feeding the blade with aether or something to keep the primal train going so she sets out to find the queen's old stronghold, Delubrum Reginae. We claw through waves of amalgammed tempered soldiers and ancient guardians, then beat up Misija herself fused with Gunnhildr, and capture her, separating her from the blade. At this point the Queen herself seems to admonish Misija for becoming destructive enough to want to destroy Bozja if she couldn't have it.

Their biggest ace in the hole gone, the IVth Legion calls in a warship as a last ditch effort and the fight moves to a new field called Zadnor. Not a lot happening here except Mikoto keeps having a vision where she's thrown out of an airship and seemingly dies, but she keeps pressing on trying to help the Bozjans get inside the warship. As a matter of fact, the time does come that she's riding that airship with Cid for reasons, while you run ground interference, but when she's thrown out of the airship, Fran saves her, which doesn't contradict the vision or anything. Sadly we never see her future vision averted. They manage to clear a way into the warship Delriada, where the IVth Legion pull out all the stops, summoning Ivalice primals, bringing out their strongest beasts and mechs, and eventually even unleashing the thing they found at the end of Return to Ivalice - an Allagan weapon made of fused machinery and voidsent bits as a body for Diabolos. The Diabolos Armament. Most of the IVth Legion dies, and Misija ends up deus ex machinaing the sword into her hands and teleporting out of jail to sacrifice herself to stop it in copycat Ysayle fashion, and then your Resistance leader mercy kills her at the end when her strength is spent.

The singular survivor of the entire affair, the not-Ranjit, returns to Gabranth to report, who seems very unbothered by the loss of his subordinates. Lyon seems more than a little mad at this, but notes Gabranth has some sort of condition that's finally 'catching up with him'. Gabranth then has Lyon imprisoned as punishment for losing Bozja. Then in the field notes for Gabranth they reveal Lyon breaks out, kills Gabranth, who goes on to be some sort of haunting ghost figure while Lyon's fate remains unknown.

The Bozjans then draft a new constitution, with the leader notably borrowing some Garlean principles because he feels like throwing out everything about the empire out of spite wouldn't help Bozja progress. This turns out to be a contraversial decision but it's eventually accepted. Then the Warrior of Light goes off to farm their resistance weapon and is never heard from again as their subscription lapses.