Quote Originally Posted by RopeDrink View Post
Why not? That smacks of a personal preference more than anything. Next thing we may as well boycott the likes of Dissidia, or Super Smash Bros, or the current cross-over trend that has grown and infested the movie business since the likes of Freddy vs Jason, or Justice League, or all the superhero TV shows and movies that are cashing in on the concept lately.
I said it was personal preference. Not in those words, but I was talking about why I have an issue with it.

And those other crossovers are a different situation entirely. Dissidia and SSB are defined from the start as crossover between specific elements (and also, as far as I'm aware, are not intended to actually affect the canon of the games from which the characters are drawn). And to my understanding, the superhero crossover series has been crafted as such from the start.

My issue with this crossover (assuming it is an actual crossover of lores) has two main elements:

1. Scope creep. FFXIV is a world that draws from various FF titles to build its world lore (with the occasional non-impacting crossover with something else). Now it is FF + NieR that dictates the lore. Next expansion it might be FF + NieR + Other Game. It creeps away from its original intent of "FF crossover" and turns into "Final Fantasy and some other things XIV".

2. Introducing a separate established canon into this one, when it wasn't there from the beginning. If NieR is now canon to FFXIV, this isn't just using some characters for a novelty quest, it's taking an entire story and dropping it into the game. It affects the origins of things. It changes how people talk and theorise about the plot. It's a huge left turn adding an entire game that wasn't supposed to be there when the writers were originally conceiving the story.

If it was built as a crossover from the start, I would feel differently about it. It would be an integral part of the world from the beginning. Instead it's being grafted into an existing story, three expansions into a previously unrelated game.

The story of NieR has been told in the NieR games. The story of FFXIV has been told in FFXIV.

Now the story of NieR is being inserted into FFXIV instead of staying in its own series, and possibly rewriting parts of FFXIV as a consequence.

It just seems like it shouldn't be here.

On the other hand, if it is not impacting FFXIV outside of the immediate zone of the NieR raids and I can ignore it... fine. I am not interested in it being here, and they've done nothing so far to really sell the game to me as a non-NieR-playing FFXIV fan, but fine.

I don't want FFXIV plot theorising to turn into relying on NieR for a full understanding of what's going on in the wider game.