Ability to see the future: Loose plot thread?

[Iscah]

I absolutely hated how they handled that plot point in Bozja and I hope it never comes back..

The drama over Mikoto's vision was silly. That's exactly where you should be looking at what you did see and asking what you can do around the edges of that event to make sure that when she does inevitably fall, somebody is there to catch her.

[Cleretic]

The drama over Mikoto's vision was silly. That's exactly where you should be looking at what you did see and asking what you can do around the edges of that event to make sure that when she does inevitably fall, somebody is there to catch her.

And yet that's kind of all you can do with future sight as it was used in that story. Either what we see is true but not the whole story, or what we see can be changed so that it doesn't happen as we saw it at all. And either way, you just end up questioning what the vision added, because... well, if you saw someone falling off a cliff and that's the thing to avert, surely you would've had much the same crisis from seeing them in danger while perilously close to a cliff, right?

That doesn't make it unworkable, but it's something you need an interesting answer for, and Mikoto's visions just didn't. Again, I'd point to Xenoblade Chronicles as an example of that approach done well, but that's also a story where that concept is its Main Thing, even down to being a central gameplay mechanic (and if I'm honest, not an especially interesting one). But Xenoblade also does the latter approach, where it's possible to entirely avert the vision. That actually has some advantages storytelling-wise, because it can actually pull the trigger and show people outright dying in the visions rather than cutting away at a conspicuous point.

but even Xenoblade's approach I wouldn't be interested in seeing FFXIV do, because there's not actually that much interesting about it; Xenoblade kinda did it all. But even if they did just do all that, it still took a direction I know a lot of people who play this game would hate: that sometimes they can't change what they see not because it's some arbitrary fixed point, but because they're only human and there's only so much they can do. There's no supernatural element meaning it was impossible to save that person; they just couldn't do it even with the advance warning.