To many, myself included, there also isn't any real tension in the first place since it's pretty easy to work out which characters are never going to be in harm's way. The humour, then, comes off as poorly timed because there's nothing to get over in the first place.

There's a lot of melodrama about how the player character and his allies have been through 'so much' and yet they've never had to deal with even a fraction of the loss that most of the antagonists have endured. Which, in turn, just makes most of the protagonists come across as complete narcissists to me.

I also don't think it's unreasonable to expect bolder storytelling with higher stakes than what we have at the moment when previous Final Fantasy games had just that in spades.

I particularly enjoyed the intrigue and consequences in Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII. I also liked the boldness of some of the plot twists in Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy VII.

Most recently, I played through the Final Fantasy VIIR expansion and that gave a nice sense of danger and consequence without relying on having the antagonists act like fools and then die without ever scoring even a single victory.

It's very unfortunate that FFXIV is trying to just shuffle all of the consequences onto the antagonists and the occasional secondary character. Such a sense of lack of loss/stakes does not personally endear me to the likes of G'raha.