Quote Originally Posted by Cilia View Post
While walking a middle road is a nice idea, eventually you reach one end or the other. In Kingdom Hearts' case of Riku, he reaches Light before the end of II, and only in CoM and II is Darkness presented as anything more than evil. The "road to dawn" is, in other words, the path of redemption.

The Warrior of Light has no such need to walk that path. Everything they've done has been selfless sacrifice; barring presently-unforeseen consequences of whatever goes down in 4.5, the need to walk the path of atonement or redemption is... not there at the moment. Without that the term "balance" remains nebulous as ever.
That's true, but the "middle path" doesn't need to be a road to redemption - rather in FFXIV's case it could be the path that we need to walk so redemption isn't necessary. Or this is the downfall and the middle path to redemption comes later.

(And it also seems appropriate, given the apparent association of story colour-schemes and times of day - we are now at nightfall, and we do need to walk the road to dawn. Possibly as in the "eighth dawn" after the coming eighth Calamity...)

I guess it comes back to that problem of "what does taking the side of darkness actually look like?" - without compromising our morals or actions as a character.

It's going to be a long and agonising wait to see what this actually means.