(08-02-2015, 02:34 PM)Flickering Ember Wrote: 3. "Eorzea is a terrible place to live." There are implications in this thread that Eorzea is dangerous and harsh. I don't see how FFXIV is even the tiniest bit of a gritty fantasy though. (See: Berserk and Attack on Titan for comparisons) City states, and the world as a whole for that matter, are clean and pretty. We see mixed races regularly not only getting along, but befriending each other, in the majority of quests available to us in FFXIV. Suffering is implied, rather than shown. (If Eorzea is so dangerous, why don't we see more people dying during quests?)
The whole game is "clean and pretty", but I think that's more of a visual aesthetic than any kind of sign that Eorzea is light and fluffy. All it takes is reading quest text, listening to NPC dialogue, and reading the other bits and pieces of lore to figure out that there's a lot of very not "clean and pretty" all over the world. Refugees starving outside Ul'dah's walls, vagrants in the streets, dangerous, often carnivorous beasts around every corner, a pretty well-entrenched slave trade (that likely involves both slave labor and sex-trafficking), constant upheaval on many more rural towns by beast tribes, pirates that think nothing of slitting your throat and that the local government can't seem to keep in line, pretty sharp class divides in society, a forest where if you take a wrong step you risk death...
It's definitely not a nice place.
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