What's your opinion about the game's story?

[Shurrikhan]

And, uhm... I feel like my post has gone on long enough so I'll stop there. To be honest, there are a lot of other plot points I could bring up, but I think I've hit the main points. xD

I really can't help but wonder what the minor points were, too. In complete agreement with everything you've listed here.

[Naunet]

I really can't help but wonder what the minor points were, too. In complete agreement with everything you've listed here.

Haha okay. I'll elaborate on the Garleans first, and that will probably lead into my "inconsistency" point with regards to how characters state a problem is vs how it ends up being presented in the action.

The Garlean Empire is, on paper, terrifying. Their military technology and clout, from the way everyone talks about it, would have the capability of wiping Eorzea clean. The foot soldiers alone are supposedly possessing of extremely deadly weapons. Basically, the outline of the story (and all of the character dialogue) sets the Garleans up as this nigh-unstoppable force that we really only have a chance of defeating if we can trick them into making mistakes. Which we do. Over and over and over again. SE wrote themselves into a corner. While attempting to make an intimidating Big Bad, they created an empire fool of bumbling buffoons. There was only a single time they "won" to a degree where they felt like a threat - after the Waking Sands were invaded and the majority of the Scions were killed. That was a powerful moment, but although characters continue to bring up the spectre of that day, it's not a threat that's ever really followed up on. Thus the Garleans end up looking like incompetent would-be-conquerors who got lucky a time or two but are otherwise easily outsmarted and outfought by the Good Guys.

Basically to fix this, they needed to win more.

The beast tribes and their primals also never feel like a credible threat, because as soon as they are summoned (and our "efforts" to prevent them from being summoned invariably fail) we deal with them handily. Ifrit, Garuda, Titan - they all just feel like minor distractions that have no real impact on the story and no opportunity to demonstrate the supposed existential danger they present to Eorzea. I'll admit I haven't done any of the HW primals yet, but I somehow doubt they're any different. Ramuh has been the sole exception thus far, and I actually really enjoyed the story introducing him. Getting to interact directly with Ramuh and hear his perspective on the world - as well as present our own treaty - was really interesting. It suggests that the primals are a lot more complicated than they're usually made out to be, and this is actually a side point in the Ascian plot (Y'shtola makes some throw-away comments every so often about how we don't yet understand how primals work). The unfortunate part is that I have not yet seen that fully explored. But anyway, the main point is that the primals are in practice push-overs and this is emphasized by the repeated quests of, "Oh look, they've been summoned again. I guess we better go kill them."

That's all for now! It's dinner time. I could go on forever on this. My husband is an author and we often have lengthy conversations about what was or wasn't well-written in the MMOs we play, so this is a topic I've put a lot of thought into!