Lore, FFXI or FFXIV

[Zohar_Lahar]

My biggest problem with XI was the apparent disconnect between Celestial Avatars and the whole Altana/Promathia story, and the way everything was dragged out with WotG. Odin was a particularly vexing case; CoP seemed to imply the Shadow Lord had him awoken from his protocrystal in the Northlands with that girl's song, and the beastmen mistakenly thought he was Promathia for some reason. Then in ToAU, Odin is wandering around like a hobo god ion another continent until he can do battle with the Iron Colossus Alexander....which they had previously done 1000 years ago. So did he get stuffed into the protocrystal that recently, and where was Alexander's protocrystal? And in WotG, the Dark Divinity apparently was the one behind the Shadow Lord's power, who somehow caused the Zilart to awaken from stasis when did something to the Crystal Line. (I never understood what Eald'narche meant by "noise" in that network)

The story seemed so confusing and incoherent at that point, and given how much of an ordeal it usually was to do get people to help with anything in that game, I couldn't justify keep playing. I remember trying it again with Abyssea, but that just exposed how terrible the core design of the game was, and Abyssea's story didn't make much sense either. Apparently in an alternate timeline, Promathia was not stopped and absorbed the Phoenix/Selh'teus....which turned him into Shinryu who was on the moon for some reason.

All in all, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has shown itself to be an order of magnitude better than XI in terms of world-building and playability. The only significant flaw I see in XIV right now is that the histories of the beast-tribes and their primals are not as fleshed out as well as they could be.