What lore do you ignore?

[Cleretic]

The entirety of the Yorha raids.

EDIT: Hit post too soon.

The primary issue I have with the Yorha raids is they make themselves ignorable. They link to almost nothing in the greater FFXIV setting, they refer to almost nothing in the greater FFXIV setting, and the greater FFXIV setting refers to nothing in them. The only link is "they take place in a location in the setting, involving some characters who live in that setting".

If I ignore the Yorha raids, I cannot think of any difference that would make to the lore of FFXIV. So there's really no point in my trying to make sense of them in the context of FFXIV, especially since the last few times I asked I was told "it's just Yoko Taro". Which itself is not a useful answer, because that doesn't actually tell me anything.

I always saw this as an intentional design facet of it, because it's just not that kind of crossover. These days stuff like the MCU have trained us to consider a crossover as a big landmark not just in spectacle, but also in story: that Captain America Civil War must by nature be a big tentpole story moment for every hero that turns up because it's the one that all the big bucks went into to get all this big names together.

The Nier raids are absolutely crossovers, but they're a much more old-fashioned kind of crossover, where the fact it's a crossover is basically the only noteworthy thing about it; every character there is just doing their normal everyday thing, they just happen to be doing it together this time. It's like when sitcoms have crossovers. So to a degree, yeah, it's absolutely intentional that it's not super groundbreaking or exceptional as far as the story goes: to 2B and 9S this was just another day of fighting the machines, and to the Warrior of Light this was just another day of helping some rando and then weird monsters turned up. It's all in a day's work, and then they all move on.


...besides, people would be even madder if it did turn out to be important. Can you imagine if FFXIV's story suddenly said that now this far-future sci-fi action game is canon to this high fantasy MMO and they're just going to unavoidably force that into the world? Or worse, imagine Nier fans hearing 'this endgame raid in a different series' subscription-based MMO's third expansion is now canon and required reading'. There's a reason those sitcoms didn't cram big story beats into their crossover episodes: because while merging those audiences for one night might've been fun, making Mad About You a requirement for Friends' story to make sense is just a nightmare for long-term audiences.