Ran'jit's strength makes no sense

[CaesarCV]

Hm....power levels have always been a bit of a mess, and always rather irrelevant. They're pretty pointless too, when we we're dealing with all manner of gods, time or dimension traveling robots, demons, and more. They even had a literal storyline about a character (Omega) being really confused about how things don't conform to his power level expectations. Sometimes our characters can fight gods, otherwise we're forced to flee by random soldiers. It's best not to worry too much about it.

If we do want to discuss the point more though, our characters do have 'power on' mode and 'power off mode'. In 'power on mode' we have something else backing us like Hydelyn's Blessing, Hraesvelgr's Eye, a boatload of corrupted light, etc. When in those circumstances we can basically 'exceed the limits' and fight stronger opponents. When we're not in that mode, we can be defeated by tough opponents like Ran'jit or Zenos.

[Lord_Umbra]

Ran'jit doesn't really beat us though.. his strength is laughable. Recall our encounter with Zenos we barely grazed his health bar & he's just walking slowly towards us & then he beats us leaves we're actually downed on our backs not to a knee. Encounter two & 3 Ran'jit flees after not even battling us unlike Zenos who leaves cause he has no interest in fighting our friends & leaves 3rd "dungeon" cause he wants to fuse with Shinryu for Ultimate fight against us it all accumulates to an epic Trial whilst Ran'jit is nothing more that a solo TWO solo instances for the WoL which second we fairly easily defeat him.

Ran'jit issue is he isn't OUR antagonist he is Thancreds & he should've been ONLY Thancreds & should've been killed in the Thancred solo RP instance, never did I feel him a threat he was going all out in first encounter & we destroyed him down to like what 60% or so of his life remaining he wasn't a being I felt was a threat for my character at any point.

[VeolE]

I swear I thought Ran'jit look like Mercenary Tao Pai Pai from Dragon ball.... I hope I wasn't the only one...

[Rakshazi]

Character limit

As much as I love the MSQ, the one thing that irritates me is Ran'jit's ability to for some reason beat us. I can kind of accept that Zenos can considering he has his own version of the echo and is known to be overwhelmingly powerful, but I can't really accept Ran'jit being even more powerful than the guy who singlehandedly(?) defeated Thordan and Shinryu possessed by Zenos, especially being backed by the scions. Heck you even fought Omega, you know, the guy who fought a calamity level Shinryu

He may be the general of the largest army in the world (A laughable statement since when we storm Eulmore we fight mostly civilians and maybe half a dozen or a dozen soldiers), but that's like saying you're the biggest goldfish in the bowl, it's a small world and even though it has its hardships I highly doubt such a guy would be able to defeat the WOL backed by the scions, disregarding how he one shots everyone by some bs. I like the story but I really wish they would leave out the forced defeats, he shouldn't even hold a candle to the WOL and if they wanted to create a believable antagonist they could have done something involving the light wardens

His strength more than make sense if you were playing with attention to the story. He was not only the man who fought for YEARS against sin eaters, he also raised the generations of Minfilias (Dying words: "There you are, my precious girls..."). More than that, if you will be kind enough to remember (and assume game level mechanic as an actual measure of power "IRL") how actualy our fights vs Zenos were you will realise, that he was 10 levels ahead of us. Than we gained few levels and were able to chip his helm, then we were 70 vs 70 and beat him. Same with Ran'jit. He's just more EXPIRIENCED fighter.

[Valenth]

I swear I thought Ran'jit look like Mercenary Tao Pai Pai from Dragon ball.... I hope I wasn't the only one...

Definitely drew the comparison as well, though Tao Pai himself is also pretty much an often used archetype of villain, even down to the clothes and (facial) hair used.

[VeolE]

Definitely drew the comparison as well, though Tao Pai himself is also pretty much an often used archetype of villain, even down to the clothes and (facial) hair used.

Haha, well that explains everything

[RopeDrink]

Ran'jit doesn't really beat us though.. his strength is laughable. Recall our encounter with Zenos we barely grazed his health bar & he's just walking slowly towards us & then he beats us leaves we're actually downed on our backs not to a knee. Encounter two & 3 Ran'jit flees after not even battling us unlike Zenos who leaves cause he has no interest in fighting our friends & leaves 3rd "dungeon" cause he wants to fuse with Shinryu for Ultimate fight against us it all accumulates to an epic Trial whilst Ran'jit is nothing more that a solo TWO solo instances for the WoL which second we fairly easily defeat him.

Ran'jit issue is he isn't OUR antagonist he is Thancreds & he should've been ONLY Thancreds & should've been killed in the Thancred solo RP instance, never did I feel him a threat he was going all out in first encounter & we destroyed him down to like what 60% or so of his life remaining he wasn't a being I felt was a threat for my character at any point.

This is allowing health bars tell too much of the story for you, rather than letting the story do that itself. You also have to account for the fact that Zenos' version was the first of its kind (from a purely MSQ perspective), thus future versions of similar Duty/Story-telling would be done differently (re. better) by default. Yes, the fact we could barely shave HP off X target tells its own tale from a mechanical perspective, but that isn't solid 'comparison material' when determining character strengths from the MSQ itself. It'd be like claiming the two sisters in GDark dungeon are the most resilient because, mechanically, they won't transition until you've reduced them to 0 HP (where they remain unkillable). The pre-and-post scenes are the concrete. The playable portions are exactly that, the playable portion which, at best, is but a hint/indication (but not an MSQ in itself).

The fact you didn't feel Ran'Jit was a threat says enough, especially considering we were fed just enough backstory and scenes to show that he very much was. The difference here is that for every scene displaying his power, another was used to counter it - which would be expected of a sub-villain rather than the main antagonist. It's not much different to Grynwaht > for all intents and purposes, he was the boss of X and Y duty, as well as Z dungeon, but he was also comic relief and not meant to be taken as seriously, compared to Zenos, who was the main antagonist and absolutely was handled seriously. Ran'Jit is similar. We know he's a general working with the main antagonist (or at least, the one we believed to be the main antagonist until later), ie. he's a big threat, but he's not "THE" threat.

Square has a habit of creating villains to act as doorways to the main bosses. Ran'jit is one of them - and if I'm honest, one of the better-handled ones. We didn't need an autobiography to figure out what he was about and what he was capable of, and considering his run-time, it was a near-perfect blend. There is more than enough for Square to use as a spring-board to flesh him out further (if for some crazy reason they decided to do so), but also not enough for you to get bogged down by dialogue or reading to figure him out. His strengths and purpose were clean, crisp and concise. No farting about. Perfect for a sub-boss.

[vegasssparkyrich]

Two words:

Plot
Armor

The writers love thumbing their noses at players, obviously. "Hah, let's see them make sense of this!" while half agree that it's lame and the other half justify the writing.

[Liam_Harper]

What bothers me more is how we can beat Ran'jit and Zenos, yet in cutscenes we're very rarely impressive at all, we're shocked or startled by danger, have to be saved or retreat many times, have been pushed back or forced to one knee and almost any trick works on us. While Ran'jit goes around kicking giant moving mine carts filled with people, can fall down a pit and shrug it off, is immune to Fae tricks and Zenos takes on whole armies and blocks assassinations unfazed.

We're on par with them, slayers of gods, veterans of countless battles. It'd be nice to see us display that occasionally. Give the occasional confident smirk or appear unfazed while our allies panic, take a blast and shrug it off, deflect a laser with one hand, break free from restraints effortlessly, things like that. Something that actually portrays us as being strong as we are. Doesn't mean we have to be immortal, just stronger than we currently look.

One of rare example is Susano's sword, where the tank single-handedly blocks something the size of a skyscraper and deflects it. Things like that.

[Ilenya]

What bothers me more is how we can beat Ran'jit and Zenos, yet in cutscenes we're very rarely impressive at all, we're shocked or startled by danger, have to be saved or retreat many times, have been pushed back or forced to one knee and almost any trick works on us. While Ran'jit goes around kicking giant moving mine carts filled with people, can fall down a pit and shrug it off, is immune to Fae tricks and Zenos takes on whole armies and blocks assassinations unfazed.

We're on par with them, slayers of gods, veterans of countless battles. It'd be nice to see us display that occasionally. Give the occasional confident smirk or appear unfazed while our allies panic, take a blast and shrug it off, deflect a laser with one hand, break free from restraints effortlessly, things like that. Something that actually portrays us as being strong as we are. Doesn't mean we have to be immortal, just stronger than we currently look.

One of rare example is Susano's sword, where the tank single-handedly blocks something the size of a skyscraper and deflects it. Things like that.

Part of the issue is, and I recall this specifically coming up in the aftermath of 2.55, they can't really spend time accounting for every single job in the game for their cutscenes, at least in regards to having an animation for you actually doing things. I don't think Scholars/Summoners would be blocking many swords with their books, for instance, ability to do it in Susano'o ignored.