Quote Originally Posted by melflomil View Post
I don't dig deep into the lore but I like the story so far in FF14

Since we beat that guy without the blessing we passed the first test. Also aren't the hard mode primals mandatory for story completion? We beat all primals without the the blessings of light. Well not without but i don't think Hydelen intervene against them. I believe the echo gives us the power of a god
They are, but for over a year they were only there if you wanted to go for a relic weapon and hard primals basically have zero impact on the story. The only reason people need to beat the hard mode primals to access a story quest now is Square's way of shoving people into content that either new players are stuck on or had been ignored by other players.