Our passive characters and why the 2.55 story fails (BIG SPOILERS) (rant warning)

[Arkenne]

Well... about our character's personalities... its like with military rations...
Since they can't make a food that will appeal to the taste of everyone, they had to go for a ration that no one would like.

[Exodus-E]

Our killing primals isn't unique and only something we can do. The primals have been defeated before without us and our blessing. What makes us unique is that we are immune to being tempered, not that we can kill primals. The company of heroes who we had to do all those quests for back when we were still an unknown had put Titan down. It's even stated in the Ifrit cutscenes that the Flames and Blades could put down Ifrit, just that more lives would be lost as they have to kill anyone that gets tempered.

To add to that, Tristan from the Summoner quests is heavily implied to have beaten Ifrit before (because in order to tame and summon an Egi, one must defeat its Primal beforehand); it's just that he lost his brother to tempering in the process...

[Hyrist]

I really would like to hear from the devs in the nature of the player's relationship with their own character(as in, are they an extension of our responses, or a stand-in for Derplander, predetermined and set). the reason for this is that multiple quests and cutscene give mixed signals on this. From Gaius's elevator conversation, the carriage guys in the intro, to various conversations in sidequests, my initial reaction was "Which response best suits Kallera's, what would she say?" The story required involvement, and kept interest and investment in the characters that we log in with everyday. The voices within that we have for our characters, our emotions, that aren't all uniform. I do not believe we all view ourselves as Derplander.

2.55's final scenes, they way they were handled, ended up taking many players out of the story, this is generally a mistake in storytelling. By including agency with the arrest and involvement with the escape, I think the cutscenes would've been taken a lot better.

Examples: Not everyone understands being suddenly whisked from the Sultana's meeting room to the banquet bound, but a lot more would understand getting an option of going quietly, or getting in a quick scuffle where you are overcome by the guards, then taken to the banquet bound. Whose to say going quietly wouldn't result in a punch to the face anyway?

The decisions of the Scions buying the rest time, Minfillia certainly, could've warranted multiple choice reactions ("You ARE the Scions!" "...Don't you die on me!" "Why are you doing this?") To give a sense of it being the last time you might be able to say something to them.

I'm all for more dialogue choices for flavor effects, and we have had them occasionally in the beginning parts of our game, so there's precedent to occurring.

But asking for a Dev response on the relationship between your character and the plot-line is not required. You need only look at the history of Final Fantasy to understand it. Before the moniker of "It's an MMO, not an RPG!" is stated in protest, I will remind the forum base that this is not Final Fantasy's first foray into MMOs. FFXI handles the players part in the story near identically.

Again, I'm neutral as to the way it's done, mainly because to me, it's the way it's always been done. I have other games that give me personal agency and full control over my characters. Final Fantasy has always been less of a chose your own adventure style RPG, and more of a novel story built into a game format. So much so that these days I take it for granted. It's rather odd to me that this garners such a reaction from players, but I have to remind myself that many players here have never played other FF games before, or simply were pushed away from FFXI.

[AdamFyi]

Uh, no. He wasn't. You mean Raubahn, the leader of the Immortal Flames.

In reply again because I looked up the cutscene. Yes, Alphinaud was captured and gaoled. Pipin implies as such during the escape from Ul'dah while on the carriage when he stated, "Needless to say, I did not think his imprisonment justified."

[Mugiawara]

If she were a real person, I would feel bad.

But she's not. She's a video game character. I'm allowed to laugh because I can make the distinction between Reality and Fiction. Can you? Perhaps you need some help if you're starting to mix your Fiction in so much that you can't tell the different. Y'might give some good cannon fodder to those that say GTA make people violent.

you must not like reading some books, while I think this games general story sucks, this was one big huge wow factor for me. if the author really hits people in their feels and gets people like me all into the story, they're doing a good job lol! I'm excited to see what's next! (on.mobile typos inc)

[Riepah]

In reply again because I looked up the cutscene. Yes, Alphinaud was captured and gaoled. Pipin implies as such during the escape from Ul'dah while on the carriage when he stated, "Needless to say, I did not think his imprisonment justified."

And what is your point? Just because he was gaoled and broken out immediately doesn't mean he isn't still the official leader of the Crystal Braves and perfectly capable of confirming that THEY are the traitors, and not the WoL if they had cut some of them down.

[Natsuno]

you must not like reading some books, while I think this games general story sucks, this was one big huge wow factor for me. if the author really hits people in their feels and gets people like me all into the story, they're doing a good job lol! I'm excited to see what's next! (on.mobile typos inc)

Certain points of the story got me in the feels, and then right at the end... He made Tataru cry! :'(

[Eidolon]

you must not like reading some books, while I think this games general story sucks, this was one big huge wow factor for me.

To be fair; I do like books. I just wasn't invested in this. And even when I read books, I still don't mind laughing when a character I like dies. XD It's why I can watch things like Tali'zora's death from Mass Effect 3 and not be affected by it - she was my favorite character adn only romance option, but I still didn't mind watching the "Bad" ending of the Quarians with her death at all.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to be able to emotionally invest into a character. But the moment you start thinking that laughing at a death in a video game is a sign of some sort of mental deficit, I'll in turn call another person out on much the same for being TOO emotionally attatched. It easily goes both ways in that regards. :P

[FrejyaAthenes]

Defeating him does show that the WoL is still pretty strong without the power of light, I'll give you that. However, that was it. We defeated the Ascian. That is all. We did not kill him. We tried to using Moenbryda's plan, but there was not enough Aether to kill the Ascian. Moenbryda sacrificed herself to boost the power of that 'Sword of Light' and in the process, we were able to kill the Ascian. Without Moenbryda's research, we wouldn't have been able to kill that Ascian.

Thus, we can conclude that the WoL can be compared to Minfilia in terms of powers, but in terms of strength - we're probably just stronger than a lot of people.

Pretty sure that Ascians being hard to kill is more based on their biology than our power. Remember that Ascians are basically ghosts that possess humans and cannot be killed be conventional means. Just because we couldn't kill him normally doesn't make us weak.

Think of it this way: if Superman or Goku fought against the Norse god Balder their attacks wouldn't do anything to him because Balder can only be harmed by Mistletoe. Does that make them weak?

[Krr]

Pretty sure that Ascians being hard to kill is more based on their biology than our power. Remember that Ascians are basically ghosts that possess humans and cannot be killed be conventional means.

That's correct. The main reason Ascians are so 'dangerous' in the MS is because they're dark spirits possessing host bodies; killing their host just causes the host to die while the Ascian's spirit disperses for a while, regenerates, and then possesses a new body. They're pseudo-Primals (or based on what we've seen with recent Primals, possibly even just plain Primals) in that sense. The point of the light-laser was simply to kill Nariables rather than only temporarily banish him.