What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Striker44]

Thinking on it, it seems a lot of people really like Amaurot, despite the story boiling down to an us vs them scenario. I haven't seen anywhere near as much enthusiasm for any of the city states in FFXIV. Even Garlemald seems to have more fans. It seems that there has been a critical failure on part of FFXIV's narrative to get the audience to care about the survival of the protagonist's civilizations of Ul'dah/Gridania/Limsa over the antagonists' civilizations. Even more puzzling given that Amaurot is introduced in the last hour of ShB, whereas the player has been running around inside and fighting for Ul'dah, Gridania, Limsa, etc for hundreds of hours before. I wonder what makes the city states less sympathetic or endearing despite having orders of magnitude more screentime? Is it that Amaurot and Garlemald get cool cutscenes in the MSQ while the city states don't? Or perhaps those hundreds of hours spent in the city states creates a familiarity that makes those factions seem mundane?

I wouldn't call it a "critical failure" of any sort whatsoever. Rather, I see it as a huge success in writing that saw the playerbase come to sympathize with groups that we had originally been "led" to despise. The writers also did a great job in helping players distinguish between the leaders of those civilizations - the Ascians, the Garlean Emperor, etc. - and the common people within them (it also helps when some of those leaders end up supporting us a la Gaius).

There's also the really important point that we didn't come to sympathize with those groups until they faced actual destruction. We shed tears for the Amaurotines because they had this near-utopian society that was suddenly facing destruction from a source they couldn't fathom and which they didn't cause (to our knowledge). We grew a soft spot for the Garleans when their capital was razed to the ground and all of our experiences with them were helping the commoners who suffered as a result. It's natural to sympathize with people in those situations. By contrast, there's never been any real threat to Ul'dah/Gridania/Limsa. There are "threats" such as the sahagin, ixal, etc., but there's never really any fear that they would succeed in destroying any of the major city-states.

I usually refrain from WoW comparisons, but I think there's an apt one here. The general WoW playerbase over the years didn't really have much "enthusiasm" for Teldrassil (Night Elf home). Even players who created Night Elves frequently got out of Teldrassil as quickly as possible and leveled elsewhere. But when the WoW writers had the Horde actively burn Teldrassil to the ground? Suddenly there was outrage. The point - it's simple human nature to have stronger feelings of sympathy for groups that are actually destroyed than for groups that are never really "threatened", and doubly so when you spend your time seeing how the common people in those groups suffer.