The Warrior of Light and tournaments...

I won't refer to anything specific to avoid spoilers but on numerous occasions the Warrior of Light takes part in a tournament of some description. Sometimes it is done for the sake of sport whilst at other points it is done with lofty stakes in mind.

Still, there's one thing I've not seen addressed as of yet. The Warrior of Light is literally blessed by Hydaelyn. Empowered, even. Therefore nobody really stands a fair chance against a competitor such as this and yet the Warrior of Light is allowed to compete anyway.

Am I the only one who finds this to be troubling? In a setting where so many people are just trying to get by and the Warrior of Light isn't exactly starved for glory it feels rather dubious for the WoL to participate in such things for sport and absolutely thrash the competition again and again.

How many of those defeated will be humiliated and ridiculed? Or just give up what may be a life's dream? In some cases, those supporting or running the tournaments are well aware of the WoL's divine blessings and feats of strength, so that adds an element of moral greyness to the equation; especially if it's a fight that permits death and/or injury. Anyway, just some idle musings that I figured I'd bring up here to start a debate...

I haven't played Stormblood yet, but in my experience they are either in the class quests, where you are still considered just a normal if talented person, or the MSQ where the tournament in question is between the various heroes of the realm in which case they are similarly strong.

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Originally Posted by Shadotterdan

I haven't played Stormblood yet, but in my experience they are either in the class quests, where you are still considered just a normal if talented person, or the MSQ where the tournament in question is between the various heroes of the realm in which case they are similarly strong.

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^ This, from what I can remember. I don't really remember any specific "tournament-style" fight where you're obviously just going in to obliterate the little man; well, aside from the fact that you are the player character, have all the plot armor in the world, and are obviously going to fare better against the NPC. Usually. ._. In any sense, most of these "tournament-style" fights are also a bigger picture sort of thing. You may defeat the little man, but you're ultimately doing him and everyone else a service in doing so by using your victory to accomplish something bigger.

Since you mentioned spoilers, I'm going to guess the latest example of one such "tournament" you may be referring to is:

The Naadam. In which case you are a) a foreigner and no one has any idea who you are or what you have accomplished, and b) going up against multiple tribes of bloodthirsty/power-hungry Xaela and their quite powerful/scary leaders. Difficult and frightening for anyone, even the WoL. :P It was also with the purpose of winning the respect of said tribes (sort of) and (definitely) forcing them to fight with you in the liberation of Doma, so there's your "bigger picture/purpose" right there.

I was under the impression the Blessing of Light only gave the WoL an advantage against primals, Ascians, and other entities Hydaelyn deems a grave threat to her well-being (Not that lacking it stopped us from defeating Ravana and Nabriales regardless).

At the core, they're still an exceptionally talented individual overall.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

Therefore nobody really stands a fair chance against a competitor such as this and yet the Warrior of Light is allowed to compete anyway.
...
How many of those defeated will be humiliated and ridiculed? Or just give up what may be a life's dream?

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Truly serious competitors would want to compete against such an opponent because s/he is so powerful; how much more glorious would be the victory hard won against such a legend? And those who fight to fulfill a life's dream are not typically so self-deprecating as to think losing to an absurdly strong opponent is a sign of total weakness.

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Originally Posted by Miyha

SPOILER ALERT UNTIL I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET THE DAMN SPOILER BBCODE TO WORK

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The spoiler tag is HB. It prolly stands for "hide box" or something similar.

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Originally Posted by Shadotterdan

I haven't played Stormblood yet, but in my experience they are either in the class quests, where you are still considered just a normal if talented person, or the MSQ where the tournament in question is between the various heroes of the realm in which case they are similarly strong.

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Also Ultros.

If the opponent is the bad guy in the fight then they deserve the smack down.
If the opponent is a good guy then one of two things happens:
1. the opponent defeats the WoL and earns infinite glory.
2. the opponent loses the fight that they were never expected to win and they still get glory from actually challenging the WoL and lasting more than .5 seconds. Also, those that are capable fighters in such an uneven fight will learn what they can from the fight and use it to become better.

Either way the good guy opponent wins. The WoL isn't in the tournaments to be defeated or to defeat others, they're in there as a status symbol to the others. "I was in the tournament with the WoL! OMG SQUEEE!" Its the story they tell their grandkids 50 years from now.

As mentioned before, our Blessing of Light helps a lot against the Ascian and Primal threat, but we're not all-powerful (we defeated Nidhogg with Hraesvelgr's eye, for example, which we them gave back); we're extraordinarily powerful adventurers, but there's also other very powerful individuals.

In the Nadaam, while we ARE more powerful than most people in there, we're getting a lot of help from the Mohl, Hien, Yda and Gosetsu, who are also very powerful people in their own right. It also helps that many of those tribes were also fighting each other; if they figured we were the biggest threat and focused us down, probably only Gosetsu's insane strenght and stamina would have prevented us dying on the spot.

As for the other one I think you may be talking about

While we are strong and gameplay =/= story, it's implied we didn't wipe the floor with Raubahn and it was a pretty even fight, especially considering he's handicapped; at this point, most of the "strongest men" in the alliance WANT to test themselves out against us, which is pretty much the point of Hullbreaker HM, as well

And we can't forget that

Zenos did wipe the floor against us TWICE, even if we ultimately defeated him at Ala Mhigo and as Shinryu,

it does serve to remember that, game mechanics aside, we're not invincible or immortal, we're just much stronger than the average but almost every group has someone close to our strenght.

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Originally Posted by WhiteArchmage

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I remember that fight with big R. He mentioned something about wishing he could have faced us at his full strength, in his youth. That would have been a sight to see.

This post is gonna echo most of the sentiment of earlier ones, I think, but three things:

(1) As has been mentioned, we're powerful, but not THAT much more powerful than those around us. Solo instances and same-level mobs can typically overwhelm us quite quickly; our gifts mostly just allow us to take on supernatural threats that similarly-skilled warriors wouldn't be able to and provide us with a variety of passive abilities that let the game exposition at us, neither of which can be easily exploited in organized contests of combat prowess. But that's sort of a moot point anyways, because...


(2) ...we don't really participate in that many tournaments in the first place. I can think of...two, maybe three? It's not really a thing that happens that much in narrative, certainly not enough to say that it happens "again and again."

(3) The ones we do participate in aren't the sort that involve your hypotheticals - nobody's honour or glory is ever on the line. Our presence is basically a novelty, meant as a main attraction of the event in question (Grand Melee); or, just one of many exceptionally skilled warriors in a regular event that often sees wanton slaughter above and beyond what we contribute to (the Stormblood one). I can think of one where your point holds some water, and ironically it's the one in the 2.x Hildy quests; even that, though, never has us stealing the much-needed winnings of the person involved through duplicitous use of our gifts, instead taking her out of the competition through investigation before she has the chance to fight us.

So yeah. I can tell that a certain event in the current MSQ isn't sitting well with you (possibly because it edges too closely to "Warrior of Light takes advantage of an established culture in order to overcome narrative hurdles and nobody sees that as a bad thing" for your tastes?), but I don't think this is a reasonable moral charge to place on our heads.