(07-24-2014, 05:03 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: There's a third option. Maybe Papashan's just developed enough technique to overcompensate for his size? Relying on agility and being entire magnitudes smaller than your foe is a valid tactic, as is letting them think you're going to go down easily. If it was so simple to just be aetherially reinforced, there'd never be any reason for people to have sculpted bodies or actually try; Magic is just making us better. Having everyone on the planet be functionally equal because reasons feels like a cop-out to me. Having those who are able to hang with the bigger/smaller/faster/stronger/magical folk through experience and effort is what makes them heroes (or villains!) in the first place. Handwaving it away with magic makes for poor storytelling.
"I overcame Ultima weapon thanks to crystal-steroids! Thanks, Mothercrystal!"
This is a fallacious rationalization and proves you know nothing about actual combat. There's an old axiom in boxing, it goes a little like this: "A good big guy will always beat a good small guy."
Reach matters. I don't care how good you are, if the other guy's got longer arms and a longer weapon he's going to have all kinds of advantages over you. "Waif-Fu" is a TV Trope, ya'll. It's not real life. In real close-quarters combat, size does not directly correlate to speed or dodging ability. There are tons of really huge fighters who can move like lightning--the US military has quite a few of them, for example.
The only possible way Papashan could be "heroic," then, is if he only fought people who were less skilled at fighting than him. Which doesn't make him very heroic since he would thus only fight battles he knows he can win. Look at it this way--a nine-year-old female martial arts student might be able to beat up an untrained, but otherwise average adult male. Maybe. If he was taken by surprise, perhaps. However, if the adult was trained, she would have no chance whatsoever. It would simply be no contest.
So, viewing this in the light of reality of combat, the use of magic to "amp up" a martial fighter makes all kinds of sense in the universe FFXIV is set in. Pretty much every physical weaponskill has flashy animations with colored lights and explosions--that would suggest that our attacks are "charged up" with aether. Because magic is magic, that would mean that actual physical qualities would fall to the wayside and the story goes out of its way to suggest that most Eorzeans have a similar capacity for aether (with the exception of some folks, such as Cid, who is Garlean, and that one THM questline lala).
Let's not even get into the fact that you've got a tiny little lalafell, the size of a very young human child (perhaps a bit pudgier) who can block castle-crushing attacks from a ten-meter-tall giant. Or a huge magitek mecha. Or a full-size dragon. Or any other number of equally monstrous and huge enemies that would, if combat was handled realistically, require full armies to actually take down, meanwhile it's shredding big male roe after big male roe with single snaps of its jaws.
Neither of the handwaves are especially "believable," but I consider the "magically amped up warriors" to be much easier to swallow than completely disregarding the basics of melee combat. In fantasy stories like these, which are fairly high-magic, not very dark thematically and have a strong action element, I always assume that magic is being used for far more than simply casting spells, but also to reinforce the strikes of melee fighters and help everyone take way more damage than a humanoid body should ever be capable of absorbing. I consider FFXIV to fall in the same category as RWBY, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and possibly even the Fate/Nasuverse, where all player characters are essentially on par with Servants in terms of how much ridiculous punishment they can take and just laugh it off.
attractive enmity device
