Quote Originally Posted by Lambdafish View Post
Kuwagami has it right by condensing it down as much as he can, but even then a few VERY IMPORTANT plot points are missed out, such as the ascians plans, as well as explanation of the echo (which you might not find important, but it is key to future storytelling, see below as to why this is important).
Actually, I just tried to condense the storyline leading you to Ishgard, as that is really the point bothering OP (can't access Ishgard, aka extension, without this part). There are quite a few other things going on at the same time about the true essence of primals, what the echo is and what it means to be a warrior of light, but none of these are deemed interesting by OP so I skipped them.

Quote Originally Posted by zbtiqua View Post
I'm going to pretend I am a writer for this game and create a different scenario to show you why this makes no sense.

1. Ishgard has refused strangers in its walls for many centuries before the events take place.

2. One day, the king of Ishgard decided to venture outside of his city walls. He was suddenly attacked by a dragon. You saved him. He came to trust you greatly.

3. You can now enter Ishgard.
I understand what you're saying, but really, that wouldn't work. Firstly, because you can't really shorten all the stuff that takes place so easily. You could get rid of a few FedEx quests maybe, and some "let's become buddies" quests, putting them as optional for rushers, but that's all.

Not to mention that your scenario bears no sense for various reasons :

=> there is no king in Ishgard

=> except for a few warriors and outcasts, noone from Ishgard ever leaves Ishgard. The heretics fled in central Coerthas because they could avoid Ishgard's eyes there. Haurchefant is an outcast, he decided to leave Ishgard on his own and would most likely not return if not our situation at the end of 2.55. As for Aymeric, he came only because we were famous primals slayer, and he needed to deal with Shiva (then Vishap)

=> even IF you were to save the pope or whatever in a 3 steps quests, the only reason why they granted you a pass is because your situation was a life-or-death matter, and they were left with "let us come or Ishgard's saviors are dead with your honor shamed eternally". This kind of scenario takes time to develop, you can't just put it as simply as you did.



Quote Originally Posted by zbtiqua View Post
There is no lore argument because the "lore" exists within a system created by the people making decisions. It is like trying to prove to someone that "god" exists because he is written about in the bible. It is a logical fallicy. There is no way around this... sorry.
I wanted to discuss about it but I can't find words to express all I want to say about the subject.

I'll just say that games, and J-RPGs in particular, tell you a story. If you don't like the story, that's fine, but you aren't entitled to the end of the game if you didn't beat the scenario first. FFxiv may be a MMO, but it's also a J-RPG and a FF game. It is focused a lot on storytelling. And I don't think that's a bad thing considering the amount of crap in many other MMOs when it comes to scenario. Despite the fact that it bother people like you who just care of the top end game raids.

Just remember that your category of players represent less than 5% of the players in FFxiv.