Stormblood ending was thoroughly disappointing

[LineageRazor]

The other (yet another) thing that troubled me with Stormblood was how easy it was to basically walk in and liberate two countries that have suffered for years, and we didn't even do that much. It feels a bit cheap, really.

I thought this aspect was WAY more pronounced in Heavensward. You waltz in and, in a matter of weeks, bring peace between dragons and humans that have been at war for more than a thousand years, and have that war deeply entrenched in their culture. Liberating Doma and Abania, Garlean occupied for decades rather than millennia, seemed a LOT more reasonable compared to that.

Honestly SB was all over the place. When we first met Zenos we, somehow, lost to him hands down. Why exactly? Nothing changed from the time we met him in Reach to the time we faced off in the Lochs, we didn't go through any sort of rigorous training or power up.
The story just literally required us to lose simply to make him look like a threat.

I felt like Zenos was poorly handled, as well. They definitely needed to make the final encounter with him more challenging, to match up to the expectations the Main Scenario laid down in building him up as some kind of amazing badass. He should not have been a faceroll dungeon boss - or, at the very least, should have had an optional "EX" version to serve as the TRUE Zenos encounter. (The dungeon boss? Just propaganda we shared with the common folk to downplay the Garleans' reputation for being unstoppable. The true fight, we shared with only the Wandering Minstrel who, for once, had no need to embellish...)

I also felt like the first encounter with Xenos made no sense. We couldn't touch him at all - he had NO reason at that point to suspect that we were his destined foe, and he should have ended us right there. The outcome of the second encounter, where we chipped his mask? THAT should have been the first encounter. THAT should have been the seed that started his obsession with us, that began his irrational leadership decisions designed to pave us a path to him once we were ready. The second counter should have been closer still, convincing him that he made the right choice in sparing us the first time.

There seemed to be no good reason why he left us alive the first time, as we utterly failed to impress him.

[Makeda]

The other (yet another) thing that troubled me with Stormblood was how easy it was to basically walk in and liberate two countries that have suffered for years, and we didn't even do that much. It feels a bit cheap, really.

I thought this aspect was WAY more pronounced in Heavensward. You waltz in and, in a matter of weeks, bring peace between dragons and humans that have been at war for more than a thousand years, and have that war deeply entrenched in their culture. Liberating Doma and Abania, Garlean occupied for decades rather than millennia, seemed a LOT more reasonable compared to that.

There actually is some real world precedent for this sort of thing...

Not on a scale of weeks, but there are multi-generational wars that an outside group, in one case even a very small outside group, have waltzed in and ended.

Marshal Plan at the end of WWII has effectively brought peace between the Western European powers that had been in constant war since the fall of the Roman Empire... and before the Romans since the stone age (that set of facts implies that the day the EU breaks up, they'll be at war again).
The same conflict ended war between Japan and Korea that had been on/off for the last 1000 years.

Cortez ended a two-century long brutal occupation in Meseoamerica in the span of about a year when he helped the Toltecs overthrow the Aztecs. He was almost a literal 'Warrior of Light' style figure - a singular strange outsider from an unknown land showing up and rallying defeated locals who were abused on a scale that made the Garlean occupation of Doma look 'friendly'. Those who replaced Cortez after he was 'removed' by Spain turned this is a much less amiable situation... but Cortez himself sort of 'forms the mold' for this archetype of the outsider intervention.

France and England bringing their conflict to the region that is now Vermont / Quebec ended an 800 year long war between the Mohawk and Iroquois.

- Note how in the real world... the end of these conflicts at the hands of outsiders often leads to 'mixed results'. Not all of these were ideal resolutions. But... the idea of an outsider waltzing in and ending somebody else's war is not just 'made up fiction'.