Quote Originally Posted by Reokudo View Post
Technicalities. Your character is a soulless puppet because giving your character a personality would remove the feeling that its you. Imagine they made your character an overly aggressive moron who gets blown up all the time. You'd sit there like "That's not what I'd do!" SE can only do so much.
Though in all the FF games save for FF1, all the characters have a personality. In FFXIV (and I assume FFXI) because it's a MMORPG, you aren't playing a single character, nor everyone in the party (as in all single player FF games.) If FFXIV were a single player game, your companions are all the Scions.

Thancred, Yda, Papalymo, Y'shtola and Urianger would be your "party" , but they are only really used in cutscenes. 90% of your interactions in the game that move the story along involve Minfilia (Up to level 50), or Alphinaud (All post level 50 content save for the Raid's.) I'm not sure if this is because Yoshi-P wants to "kill off" the V1.0 cast or just take them out of the storyline long enough to setup V3.0, and they all eventually show back up.

If Nanamo is permanently gone, then I expect the same of Kan-E-Senna and Merlwyb at some point as well. It would likely mess up the game balance for new players if they pick a Grand Company/Starting City based on spoilers about who is alive at the end. It's far more likely that Nanamo comes back otherwise completing the remaining crafting jobs (of which Culinarian and Goldsmith both involve making something for "the Sultana") might result in some broken storyline plot points.

If FFXIV were a Single Player game, then having the companions and the leaders of the cities "supposedly die", would be pulling the Louisoix V1.0 deus-ex-machina again, and they would just appear later (Both FF4 and FF6 pulled this before.) So you'd effectively start "Chapter 3" with nobody again, like at the beginning of the game, and have to (optionally) find everyone again.