I feel a lot of the story elements are limited to the game mechanics themselves, often times you are asked to battle some threat and to go gather allies to do it. For us as the gamer, those allies are seven other people. But from the perspective of the npcs and our characters we probably gathered a whole army or so to fight this threat. In other words, because the game is often limited to solo, four man or 8 man, the power of our character might be exaggerated.

A example of this is after steps of faith, one of the npcs state that many people were lost during the battle. But from the perspective of the gamer, we only had 7 other people who helped defend. Another thing to consider is often time we view cutscenes and story elements outside of our character's perspective. Or in other words we get to view things happening when we aren't there. Which gives us information that technically our character really doesn't know.