Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180114010136/@comment-31763506-20180115015344

In answer to the second question, it's a matter of rational consistency, because the whole timeline is a suppositious enterprise built up from subtle hints in the game text.

One of these was that the if the HoP guy was soliciting donations for a Midsummer ball and then a Midautumn ball, that'd indicate a timespan of 2 to 4 months between the frist event and the second, during which Mid-summer occurred. So if we can't inder from the request for a Midwinter ball in Chapter 1 that there is a sixish month time gap between the end of Ch 1 and the beginning of Ch 2, implicitly including midwinter and midspring, we also have to discard the previous deduction, and with it the only fixed anchorpoint for the chronology of Ch 2 other than that Simon was in the Orgasmic Empire a bit less than 4 months and that the Ardford Summit has to have taken place towards harvest time in the year it occurred. And that last one is even more shaky given that we've established that we can't infer seasonal info from the graphical resources.

There are other points though. Robin's exact words in Devil's Pass were that Simon "turned 55 earlier this year", while he tells the archivist in the Orgasmic Empire that he is 56. So that means that he has had a birthday between chapter 1 and chapter 2, and that a new year has occurred as well. That's completely incompatible with the timeline as written, which has both statements occurring within the same calendar year. A game start in autumn with a six month time gap between chapter 1 and chapter 2 reconciles all the above points very cleanly.

It helps now that I have RPG Maker so that we aren't relying on my memory for exact details.

(If you really want to split hairs, I'm speculating as to what calendar year Chapter 4 starts in.)