Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
FFXIV wouldn't exist in its current form without the Ivalice games. They've long since been a huge source of inspiration for the style of world building, story telling and art style - to say nothing of the fact that a decent chunk of developers worked on those games.

So I think it does a major disservice to claim that the Ivalice content was 'forced'. It was dialogue heavy, yeah, though I don't think anything about its story was particularly difficult to understand...nor did it feel out of place. Furthermore, reading between the lines it's pretty clear that a lot of the plot threads weaved into the Ivalice story are, in fact, likely to be picked up again and made relevant in the MSQ's.

I enjoyed it thoroughly, especially compared to the Nier raid which has absolutely nothing of interest to me whatsoever...beyond the music.
No one was dissing the Ivalice games... It's one thing for XIV to be inspired by and be worked on by the same crew from those games. But that means nothing to crossover content implementation... which was objectively poorly done. When you have multiple reddit threads all along the same lines of "someone please explain the Ivalice story to me" and many comments on said threads saying "yeah I have no idea either, here's my stab at it," I have to disagree that the story wasn't difficult to understand. It should feel self-contained within 14 for those without any prior knowledge of the other games to understand while having the references to cater to those who do have that knowledge, and it just doesn't. It's absolutely fine if you enjoyed it, and I'm happy that OP did, too. Just don't discount the multiple people who found the story hard to follow just because you personally liked it.