A game for 4 year olds

[Cleretic]

Funny because from my pov you’re the one who’s doing this shallow point-scoring by creating strawman out of my discussion with Mikko. And please tell me where I said I want something “worse”? Because I clearly said that the provinces are free to join the Empire or not.

Literally in the post Mikko was quoting above the one you quoted, where you crack out entirely non-sequitir attacks against Gridania for no purpose other than to go 'see they're bad too, this is why we should get my extremely specific ideal imperialism'.

And speaking personally? I actually liked that we only turned up to Garlemald after it got wrecked. There's nothing that visiting a still-strong Garlemald would've brought to the table that the game is especially well-equipped to handle; going to the enemy city would open up great angles for subterfuge and stealth, but we actually know the game's not good at that because of Garlemald itself; the Thancred quest, In from the Cold, and the tailing quests were probably the worst-received parts of Endwalker as a whole (although personally, I thought In from the Cold was quite good). And the nature of zones means that there can't be a drastic change across a whole zone, so if we did get that hypothetical Stealth Mission Garlemald then either it'd remain a stealth zone in the entire game, or that the intact streets of Garlemald would need evergreen enemy spawns. And if you don't lean in that direction and just stuck to what the game's already known to be good at? Well, then a focus on a still-standing Garlemald is just Cold Stormblood. And we've already got both Stormblood and winter zones, combining them isn't new or interesting, I would just be bored; even Bozja was already repeating a lot of the notes of Stormblood, and even if I think Bozja did it better that 'I've heard this song before' factor was a negative.

But blowing the capital to smithereens before we get there, filling the streets not just with rubble, but with rogue magitek and tempered soldiers? Not only does that fix the zone continuity issue, it provides new and interesting areas we'd never seen before (I remember damn near the first thing about Endwalker I saw and actually liked was noticing that Garlemald seemed to be based on pictures of the Battle of Stalingrad). And that newness also spread to the Garleans themselves, because for once, we see them on the back foot. This provides a vulnerability we'd never seen, how they handle when they're not the ones with the gun to someone's head. And just as interesting as what changes in that scenario--them genuinely fearing the retribution they assume we're bringing--is what doesn't change, but comes in a whole new angle--their strong sense of national identity has gone from fueling a racially-supremacist imperialism to instead a death-grip on their independence far beyond what's reasonable or helpful.

I was in no way interested in going to Garlemald until I learned that Garlemald got blasted.

Garlemald's broader issue, like many empires introduced in the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole, was that it merely ended up being a front for something bigger. The instant that the latter part of Stormblood revealed that Varis was no more than a puppet dictator under Emet's thumb with no meaningful power of his own, Garlemald itself was devitalized of its story potential. What's the significance of going head to head against the Emperor in a climactic battle when we've already crushed the Ascians? He couldn't even be considered as a Mid-boss. Where is the mystique in exploring the modern city of Garlemald when Amaurot is even more modern in appearance?

There was no opportunity to make Garlemald more interesting without wrapping up the Amaurotines' involvement in the story, preferably for good.

And yeah, this is also genuinely a thing. Emet-Selch robbed the Garlean Empire of any agency, human depth or even stake in their own story, so any interest I may have once had in marching on their capital was completely sucked dry by that revelation in Stormblood's patches.