Quote Originally Posted by MikkoAkure View Post
A lot of it is definitely Roman inspired, titles, scattered terminology, history as a republic, conquering stuff. With a dash of Russian flavor. But the overarching inspiration is definitely the Gestahlian Empire. Gestahlian magitek weapons are ripped straight out of FFVI and pasted in 3D as Garlean magitek. Garlemald and Gestahl are heavily dependent on classic fantasy/sci-fi empire tropes that borrow from a lot of real-world historical empires including Britain and nazi Germany. You’re deluding yourself to say that it is completely free of any influence from that and that the writers built up a whole culture from scratch that has nothing to do with alluding to it at all.
It's surface level influence for aesthetics. There's as much influence from XII and VII in terms of what passes for 'magitek' in XIV. Personally I would have liked more influence from XII across the board - since the whole 'EMPIRE BAD' trope is dull, tiresome and rids a setting of a key fantasy cornerstone. I certainly wouldn't find the Elder Scrolls games interesting if they decided to randomly remove Imperials.

That aside, nobody has ever claimed that Garlemald is free of sin or perfect. They've simply pointed out that there's some good reasons why they did what they did - because they didn't the Warrior of Light to solve all their problems before they could fester and escalate.

Which is a key point, I've noticed. Whenever it is suggested that maybe the protagonists could actually endure some meaningful losses amongst the major characters such a suggestion is shot down - but it's considered acceptable for the game's antagonists, no matter how sympathetic, to lose absolutely everything they care about. I don't find that compelling - and if others do, fair enough. Though the real world doesn't subscribe to such black and white thinking and FFXIV certainly flirted with the idea of nuance during HW and ShB at the very least.

It just seems strange to me. Each of the major Scions died in Ultima Thule and then immediately got brought back to life less than ten minutes later. The player character is brought back to life when confronting Lahabrea at the end of ARR as well.

The antagonists have no such luxuries at their disposal. If they die, it's permanent. So I certainly don't blame them for getting their hands dirty out of necessity to protect their loved ones.

Furthermore, as I've said every other time this exact same discussion has occurred supporting the antagonists does not equal expecting the protagonists to just roll over and die. I liked ShB a lot for that reason. It didn't pretend that both sides lacked a point or that one side winning came at the cost of another. That's how...any conflict works.

EW took that and weirdly tried to justify genocide as an absolute necessity, though - which is rather strange to me! Still, if it's willing to do that then I don't see why we can't have darker narratives in general - but again, mysteriously, the expectation is for the major protagonists to be clad in ridiculous amounts of plot armour and somehow able to escape even 'unwinnable' situations with some contrived plot device.

I get it, though - for better or worse the development team are eager to appeal to the 'don't think, just feel' crowd first and foremost.