Quote Originally Posted by Diavolo View Post
Well, the devs are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they had full blown primals, people would bitch that they weren't sticking to lore and that they are totally messing up the whole notion that a tonne of crystals and lives are needed to summon them. And since they decided to go the lore-friendly route, now people bitch that they aren't impressive enough (despite the fact that you're only summoning the ESSENCE of the primal, not the primal itself). There really is no way for them to win.
Actually it has zero basis in lore whatsoever.

The premise of primals isn't that you need a ton of crystals and/or lives to summon them, it's that they're stronger the more of those things they have. We know this because in the main story quest both Ifrit and Titan are summoned by the cries of only 3 of their respective beast tribe members, none of which had any crystals in their possession that we know of. The only lore that exists to justify the egis is the lore they added specifically for summoner quests, in other words AFTER they decided to go the egi route.