Quote Originally Posted by MikkoAkure View Post
If that were the case, why does the official promotional material for the game say things like "rise up with the people of Eorzea and the Far East, and cast down the curs of Garlemald!", "Using the calamitous arrival of the Seventh Umbral Era to sinister advantage", "He regards friend and foe alike with contempt, and tales of his brutality against both have spread far and wide."?
That's just typical marketing talk at work and it's speaking from the perspective of the player characters who do not necessarily have the full picture for any given situation and have been specifically gifted with various perks to conveniently deny them the necessity to go down a similar path themselves when it comes to protecting their loved ones.

Yoshi-P has also specifically commented on how Garlemald is viewed by some players and the protagonists alike:

“They may be commanders or generals or they might be fighting against soldiers from the Empire, in those cases, the player would be facing those people as the enemy and those people would have masks on, so we wouldn’t really see them as a person but we just perceive them as the enemy.

“So that is one thing in the background that we’ve had in the background up until now and that is just a given of how their position was in the story. These people are from a completely different country, as a player and them, we have no relationship between us, no linking with blood or anything like that. So we might have seen them in the same way as we see a monster, so they were just an enemy.”

“As you’re walking through Garlemald, you might see there is a highway that’s been destroyed or there might be a park and the ground which is starting to collapse, so there are these signs of huge destruction there, but we wanted to show those people who live there had a very similar life to how we grew up,” Yoshida continued.

“So maybe the kids in Garlemald, they went to the park and they had a slide and they used to play with the slide just as we did when we were growing up as kids. It was very important for us to show, to express, how those people had their daily lives and we placed a lot of importance on actually thinking about how we would express that when the player finds themselves visiting this city and going there to see what happens there.”

Source: https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-...oshida-3068707

It's pretty common for many stories to introduce antagonists who the protagonists oppose only to reveal that in many ways, they're not too different and they have their own ideals/dreams/complexities at play.