What is going on with Square Enix and the 14 team?

[TaleraRistain]

It just wasn't like this back in the Stormblood and Heavensward days. It wasn't.

Stormblood was one giant seinen anime. The anime trappings have always been there. People derisively call this a weeb game but they're not far off the mark.

[AziraSyuren]

Stormblood was one giant seinen anime. The anime trappings have always been there. People derisively call this a weeb game but they're not far off the mark.

The funny thing is that a lot of these tropes were featured in FF before (or around the same time as) anime became infamous for them.

FFXIV's story had all the trappings of a standard Final Fantasy game for as long as I've been playing. The closest thing to an exception we've ever gotten was Shadowbringers and that's mostly because FF stories generally aren't written with that level of nuance to their characters. FFIX had transformation sequences as limit breaks and the series as a whole has had ridiculous summoning animations that wouldn't be out of place in a late 1990's to early 2010's Super Robot anime ever since VII. The Power of Friendship (and Love) has been a major theme to the series ever since IV.

HW in particular was pretty much the platonic ideal of FF stories until EW came along. Gods bad, religion bad, dragons cool but also sometimes bad, Moogles, you name it.

It's just really jarring because ShB was meaningfully different in a lot of ways. Even the fights lacked much of the dramatic flair (to their detriment imo) until the patches came along.

[TaleraRistain]

The funny thing is that a lot of these tropes were featured in FF before (or around the same time as) anime became infamous for them.

They predate FF. Manga existed before the 50s but started reaching its heyday in Japanese culture then and anime starting taking off in the 60s. So it's no surprise to see the ideals reflected in the FF series since they were known in Japanese society.