The feeling of beeing Home ...

[aveyond-dreams]

That doesn't change the fact that people who are fans of the empire regardless of their reasons should be treated with a bit more respect than they currently are.

[Theodric]

Garlemald is quite clearly inspired by a combination of the Romans and the Russians, just with a technological twist thrown in for good measure. The attempts to try and tie them to a certain era in Germany's history are misguided and deceptive - usually based around taking one or two specific elements, greatly exaggerating them and presenting them as something completely different to what is actually being portrayed.

(To say nothing of the constant issue of the English localisation using some strange phrasing choices that are not present in the other languages!)

Though as I have said before in the past, a common trend for certain posters from the lore forum is to insinuate awful things about people who like the antagonists in the game over a lengthy period of time. They push and push until, finally, someone will crack a joke at their expense and then they'll point to that as the worst thing ever and make it seem like it's 'both sides' to blame.

That isn't the case at all - and Endwalker revealed that such concerns are disingenuous in the first place given that certain posters went from 'genocide is never okay' to 'genocide is perfectly acceptable when mommy hydaelyn partakes of it'.

I don't particularly care if some of you dislike the Garleans or the Ancients. I've frequently stated a desire to agree to disagree where differences of opinion are to be found.

[Kazemon15]

G'raha Tia in my opinion remains one of the best characters in FFXIV that was repeatedly cheapened by the mishandling of his character in the story to the point where he is likely one of the most important problems in the current writing. Stories shouldn't be turning previous fans of him like me into people who cannot stand to see him on screen, or more recently in 6.1 when he started talking my number 1 thought was, "This is kind of embarrassing, maybe I should just go ahead and uninstall this."

Characters like him don't move copies of the game or make for decent posterboys, that's what characters that look and behave like Aymeric, Estinien, Ardbert, or Hien do. G'raha Tia is not a man that fulfils any common fantasy archetype and it makes him all the more difficult to get invested in at a glance. While his Shadowbringers writing can indeed hook a player once they get to know him long enough, starting in 5.4 that begins to be eroded away until he's reduced to his state in 6.1. This shouldn't have played out like this.

That's your opinion. Most of the playerbase loves G'raha and his goofy nature, myself included. He is a much needed breath of fresh air to the serious tone most of the scions tend to be. Don't we have enough stoic emo good looking characters as a poster boy?

Also G'raha's personality type hasn't even been in media until recent years, so people who don't understand it think he's "badly written" when he isn't.

[MikkoAkure]

That doesn't change the fact that people who are fans of the empire regardless of their reasons should be treated with a bit more respect than they currently are.

You can be a fan, but it’s a bit extreme to say they never did anything wrong and act like they were maligned by the director and the writers. I’m not going to pretend the “good guys” are shining beacons of light either since they’re not. But this is still a video game, which tend to necessitate enemies, and in this case they leaned into the classic “evil empire” trope rule book harder than they did for the Archadian Empire.

It feels like people are saying that the people who made the story don’t understand it as well as they themselves do and the Garleans are some poor puppy that everyone is kicking around for no reason. Even a faction among the Garleans themselves asked “are we the baddies?” and thought that expanding past Ilsabard was a bit extreme.

The “good guys” didn’t get out of the story unscathed either. Lest anyone forget, 1.0 ended with Garlemald “winning” and meteor successfully being summoned down to Eorzea, causing widespread death and destruction across the whole continent + Vylbrand. Though the major cities weren’t destroyed (because again, video game and they needed to be reused), it took 5 years for a sense of normalcy to start coming back and the realm still hasn’t fully recovered, with Coerthas still covered in ice and a good portion of the Shroud was flattened.

Garlemald is quite clearly inspired by a combination of the Romans and the Russians, just with a technological twist thrown in for good measure. The attempts to try and tie them to a certain era in Germany's history are misguided and deceptive - usually based around taking one or two specific elements, greatly exaggerating them and presenting them as something completely different to what is actually being portrayed.

A lot of it is definitely Roman inspired: titles, scattered terminology, history as a republic, conquering stuff. With a dash of Russian flavor. But the overarching inspiration is definitely the Gestahlian Empire. Gestahlian magitek weapons are ripped straight out of FFVI and pasted in 3D as Garlean magitek. Garlemald and Gestahl are heavily dependent on classic fantasy/sci-fi empire tropes that borrow from a lot of real-world historical empires including Britain and nazi Germany. You’re deluding yourself to say that it is completely free of any influence from that and that the writers built up a whole culture from scratch that has nothing to do with alluding to it at all.

That all said, they’re still not 1-to-1 for Germany and you can’t call everyone who likes the Garleans a nazi, but it’s not some pure being that has nothing at all to do with public ideas of “evil empires” that media use as a crutch to help tell stories.

[Cach]

the twitter/reddit/"influencers" so any suggestion would fall on deaf ears unless said people are on board on it as well

Maybe the japanese ones, I don't think western sentiments are THAT important, or at least is the impression I got.

being a naysayer that thinks the game does nothing right.

I will endeavor to upload a pdf with all the points of the game I still enjoy every time I step into a criticism thread. By the same token, I expect a 2500 word essay on the pointed criticism all the game defenders have before taking them seriously. (I'm obviously joking, but you get my point)

but it’s not some pure being that has nothing at all to do with public ideas of “evil empires” that media use as a crutch to help tell stories.

IMO, people wanted an interesting and nuanced story, that sadly got gutted before its time. I doubt any Garlean fan wanted a redemption arc.

[Theodric]

A lot of it is definitely Roman inspired, titles, scattered terminology, history as a republic, conquering stuff. With a dash of Russian flavor. But the overarching inspiration is definitely the Gestahlian Empire. Gestahlian magitek weapons are ripped straight out of FFVI and pasted in 3D as Garlean magitek. Garlemald and Gestahl are heavily dependent on classic fantasy/sci-fi empire tropes that borrow from a lot of real-world historical empires including Britain and nazi Germany. You’re deluding yourself to say that it is completely free of any influence from that and that the writers built up a whole culture from scratch that has nothing to do with alluding to it at all.

It's surface level influence for aesthetics. There's as much influence from XII and VII in terms of what passes for 'magitek' in XIV. Personally I would have liked more influence from XII across the board - since the whole 'EMPIRE BAD' trope is dull, tiresome and rids a setting of a key fantasy cornerstone. I certainly wouldn't find the Elder Scrolls games interesting if they decided to randomly remove Imperials.

That aside, nobody has ever claimed that Garlemald is free of sin or perfect. They've simply pointed out that there's some good reasons why they did what they did - because they didn't the Warrior of Light to solve all their problems before they could fester and escalate.

Which is a key point, I've noticed. Whenever it is suggested that maybe the protagonists could actually endure some meaningful losses amongst the major characters such a suggestion is shot down - but it's considered acceptable for the game's antagonists, no matter how sympathetic, to lose absolutely everything they care about. I don't find that compelling - and if others do, fair enough. Though the real world doesn't subscribe to such black and white thinking and FFXIV certainly flirted with the idea of nuance during HW and ShB at the very least.

It just seems strange to me. Each of the major Scions died in Ultima Thule and then immediately got brought back to life less than ten minutes later. The player character is brought back to life when confronting Lahabrea at the end of ARR as well.

The antagonists have no such luxuries at their disposal. If they die, it's permanent. So I certainly don't blame them for getting their hands dirty out of necessity to protect their loved ones.

Furthermore, as I've said every other time this exact same discussion has occurred supporting the antagonists does not equal expecting the protagonists to just roll over and die. I liked ShB a lot for that reason. It didn't pretend that both sides lacked a point or that one side winning came at the cost of another. That's how...any conflict works.

EW took that and weirdly tried to justify genocide as an absolute necessity, though - which is rather strange to me! Still, if it's willing to do that then I don't see why we can't have darker narratives in general - but again, mysteriously, the expectation is for the major protagonists to be clad in ridiculous amounts of plot armour and somehow able to escape even 'unwinnable' situations with some contrived plot device.

I get it, though - for better or worse the development team are eager to appeal to the 'don't think, just feel' crowd first and foremost.

[MikkoAkure]

IMO, people wanted an interesting and nuanced story, that sadly got gutted before its time. I doubt any Garlean fan wanted a redemption arc.

Ultimately Garlemald was a victim of being from 1.0 and like the Ascians, there were no plans for them except to be there being evil and doing evil things. They relied on a lot of tropes to carry the weight of their story early on and throughout ARR so when it came time to say “hey, let’s actually spend time on the story this time”, they still had the baggage of years of being faceless bad guys doing war crimes and even then, that didn’t stop them telling Garlean war crime stories in ShB.

They were whatever the story needed them to be, and in the beginning, we needed an irredeemable, unstoppable force we don’t feel bad about killing a bunch of. The public has a shared consciousness molded by history and other media that borrows elements from that history and writers end up borrowing from that pool of ideas, subconsciously or not. Obviously the 1.0 writers didn’t open up a WW2 history book to Germany and said “this”.

George Lucas has openly said that his Empire from Star Wars is based on nazi Germany, and with how crazily popular that was and how much of an impact it had on the public consciousness, a lot of subsequent media has borrowed from it to help tell their own story. FFXIV is no different and Garlemald comes from a lineage of ideas that started there.

Calling someone a nazi for liking the Garleans is stupid since again, they’re not 1-for-1. But fanatically supporting them without acknowledging the bad they did and saying the writers are bad for what they did to them is its own separate level of yikes.

It's surface level influence for aesthetics. There's as much influence from XII and VII in terms of what passes for 'magitek' in XIV.

I still think there’s much more from FFVI, which had heavier German historical influence than the other two. At least 2 magitek designs came straight from that game and Solus is pretty dang close to Gestahl with the whole “old long haired man at the head of a magitek empire” schtick. Ceruleum was similar to mako to a degree and they introduced FFXII judge armor, the Ifrit, and FF7’s weapons. But besides Ceruleum, the rest felt like the standard Final Fantasy theme park ideas being ripped from other games and stapled into sidequests specifically designed to evoke those 2 games.

The influence is still surface-level, but it’s still there and it’s meant to be the first impression you get from them. But again, being surface-level is why I wouldn’t call a Garlean super fan a nazi.

Personally I I would have liked more influence from XII across the board - since the whole 'EMPIRE BAD' trope is dull, tiresome and rids a setting of a key fantasy cornerstone.

This I agree with, but they took the route they took, for better or worse (mostly for worse).

[Adamantini]

I agree with everything, especially this one.

The Fake Dead Queen Catgirl and SE's Postergirl Y'shtola Rhul

Seriously, this character is a joke. It "dies" every expansion. She dies in the base game too. It's like those children's comedy movies, where the same joke is repeated several times, but here it's just drama.

So what can I do?

What I'm going to say is hard and cold. It will look like I'm trolling here. Prepared?

Stop playing.

Companies only listen when massive numbers of players turn their backs. Don't like the game anymore? Stop playing, stop giving money, stop talking about it.

Now what you will do with your free time, only you can say.

[AwesomeJr44]

I get it, though - for better or worse the development team are eager to appeal to the 'don't think, just feel' crowd first and foremost.

The braindead consoomer market is sadly one of the biggest audiences out there and creative media like movies and games have taken a big hit in the past few years because of it.

I mean, look what happened to Marvel and Star Wars. They started putting all their budget into the fancy CGI flashing lights on the screen and ignored good story writing, mainly because they know that legions of braindead consoomers will still buy tickets for latest product. Why bother putting effort into a good story when you can make something mediocre and still have the consoomer market love it as if its a masterpiece?

[Novae]

I think something is missing since EW, but for me, it starts even before, with 5.4 and Graha/Alisaie simping. EW was still enjoyable for the most parts, especially when the Scions weren't all nodding together behind their indestructible plot armor ( first part of the Moon, Elpis, Zenos duel). But the fake deaths ruined the end for me. 6.1 was boring, the newfound adventure was just another Yshtola escort. I -now, don't give a damn about the story and I only play for the battle content. If they bring back the twins in 6.2, I'll just skip the whole thing. I'm so tired of these characters.