The protagonists' logic about light and dark is seems sooooooo bad

[Aye Harambe]

I rarely come across a story with such little thought seemingly behind its creation.

I'm just curious...am I missing something here? Was something lost in the translation to English? The dialogue was bad from the get-go, but I assumed that was just a byproduct of translation. Now that we're getting into the the conversation with Bahamut, I'm incapable of finding a way that "humans need the dark" is a sound assertion.

I get that the story led us to a problem where Chaos was needed, but the overarching theme of these conversations seem to go out of their way to reach beyond the situation at hand and attempt to justify the existence of darkness as some weird requirement in "balance."

[Katitoff]

Have you finished the story?
Have you found all the memos?

Hard to assmume what you know and don't understand from what you wrote.

Anyway

Lufenian kingdom/world/civilization has power to create worlds, it uses crystals and their light to balance the worlds and darkness to keep everything in check in case it spins out of control, strangers are send like kind of stewards to the world to keep its balance through their actions to prepare it for Lufenians

Not really sure what kind of overarching theme you have problems with as it all makes perfect sense once you beat main story and go a bit into Bahamut dlc.

First Final Fantasy games didn't really had all that complicated plot and this game expanded on and justified existence of crystals in the world of FF1 and I suppose FF2.

[CLG]

It's squenix writing so it being terrible is pretty standard. It doesn't help that this game originally wasn't supposed to be a final fantasy game to begin with.

[Broso]

What exactly is your problem here? Without darkness, you would not be able to even distinguish between light and darkness. There'd just be one thing and it would overwhelm everything, no matter how "good" you'd think it usually is. You can only think that because you are able to tell it from the other thing. You need the other thing to be able to do so though.

[Aye Harambe]

Originally posted by Katitoff:

Have you finished the story?
Have you found all the memos?

Hard to assmume what you know and don't understand from what you wrote.

Anyway

Lufenian kingdom/world/civilization has power to create worlds, it uses crystals and their light to balance the worlds and darkness to keep everything in check in case it spins out of control, strangers are send like kind of stewards to the world to keep its balance through their actions to prepare it for Lufenians

Not really sure what kind of overarching theme you have problems with as it all makes perfect sense once you beat main story and go a bit into Bahamut dlc.

First Final Fantasy games didn't really had all that complicated plot and this game expanded on and justified existence of crystals in the world of FF1 and I suppose FF2.

It's the concept that dark NEEDS to exist that makes no sense. Yes, in their situation they need it, but they're speaking as though it's a requirement by default--which is the part that's weird to me.

[Griever]

I get the story, I just hate this running theme in FF franchise that every FF is a dimension and lufenians meddled with all of them. I always felt this was an annoying concept that cheapened each world.

And now we even have villains from other games coming into other FF, like the ff2 villain coming into Ff1.

Fck that lol. I'm very disappointed in the storyline even though jack and friends are cool characters actually.

[Griever]

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

Originally posted by Katitoff:

Have you finished the story?
Have you found all the memos?

Hard to assmume what you know and don't understand from what you wrote.

Anyway

Lufenian kingdom/world/civilization has power to create worlds, it uses crystals and their light to balance the worlds and darkness to keep everything in check in case it spins out of control, strangers are send like kind of stewards to the world to keep its balance through their actions to prepare it for Lufenians

Not really sure what kind of overarching theme you have problems with as it all makes perfect sense once you beat main story and go a bit into Bahamut dlc.

First Final Fantasy games didn't really had all that complicated plot and this game expanded on and justified existence of crystals in the world of FF1 and I suppose FF2.

It's the concept that dark NEEDS to exist that makes no sense. Yes, in their situation they need it, but they're speaking as though it's a requirement by default--which is the part that's weird to me.

Balance is needed, not just light.

[Aye Harambe]

Originally posted by Griever:

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

It's the concept that dark NEEDS to exist that makes no sense. Yes, in their situation they need it, but they're speaking as though it's a requirement by default--which is the part that's weird to me.

Balance is needed, not just light.

But balance is only needed by the Lunefarians to maintain the status quo, which only the Lunefarians want to keep. Outside of that, there's no reason to keep darkness, so the protagonists constantly talking about how the world NEEDS darkness "for balance" goes directly against their plans.

[Broso]

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

Originally posted by Griever:

Balance is needed, not just light.

But balance is only needed by the Lunefarians to maintain the status quo, which only the Lunefarians want to keep. Outside of that, there's no reason to keep darkness, so the protagonists constantly talking about how the world NEEDS darkness "for balance" goes directly against their plans.

Originally posted by Broso:

What exactly is your problem here? Without darkness, you would not be able to even distinguish between light and darkness. There'd just be one thing and it would overwhelm everything, no matter how "good" you'd think it usually is. You can only think that because you are able to tell it from the other thing. You need the other thing to be able to do so though.

[THE FUN ENDS HERE]

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

But balance is only needed by the Lunefarians to maintain the status quo, which only the Lunefarians want to keep.

In the game it says if the world becomes greatly imbalanced in favor of either light or darkness it is destroyed. The lufenians were pumping in darkness from other dimensions to destroy it in the end, but they could just have easily use light (before deciding to get rid of cornelia they had strangers to make sure it didn't get annihilated forever due to imbalance). Their usage of cornelia for their experiments didn't involve 'maintaining the status quo', but intentionally mutating the populations, bringing the world to the brink of destruction, abductions, etc. and resetting it for further use.

[Katitoff]

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

Originally posted by Katitoff:

Have you finished the story?
Have you found all the memos?

Hard to assmume what you know and don't understand from what you wrote.

Anyway

Lufenian kingdom/world/civilization has power to create worlds, it uses crystals and their light to balance the worlds and darkness to keep everything in check in case it spins out of control, strangers are send like kind of stewards to the world to keep its balance through their actions to prepare it for Lufenians

Not really sure what kind of overarching theme you have problems with as it all makes perfect sense once you beat main story and go a bit into Bahamut dlc.

First Final Fantasy games didn't really had all that complicated plot and this game expanded on and justified existence of crystals in the world of FF1 and I suppose FF2.

It's the concept that dark NEEDS to exist that makes no sense. Yes, in their situation they need it, but they're speaking as though it's a requirement by default--which is the part that's weird to me.

Well, yes, it does need to exist.

Did you missed the part, where purified crystals went ballistic and started creating calamities in the world due to lack of darkness balancing their influence out?

Its a magic world created by magic crystals used by dimensional-jumping/creating civilization that uses Darkness and Light like we use water and electricity.

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

Originally posted by Griever:

Balance is needed, not just light.

But balance is only needed by the Lunefarians to maintain the status quo, which only the Lunefarians want to keep. Outside of that, there's no reason to keep darkness, so the protagonists constantly talking about how the world NEEDS darkness "for balance" goes directly against their plans.

You didn't paid good attention, Jack says the world needs darkness to be able to invoke its own light, not artificial one Lufenians provided and takes on a role leading to that path.

[Sixtyfivekills]

If all you need is light, stare at the sun. I'll go and hide in shadows.

[FreshMint]

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

I'm incapable of finding a way that "humans need the dark" is a sound assertion.

I get that the story led us to a problem where Chaos was needed, but the overarching theme of these conversations seem to go out of their way to reach beyond the situation at hand and attempt to justify the existence of darkness as some weird requirement in "balance."

Let's see if I got this right;
First of all, balance of light and darkness has been a reoccurring concept in Final Fantasy- FF3 tells of a case where a world was flooded by light as opposed to darkness, and 14 even has an entire arc focused on that.
The entire philosophy revolves around that bad has to exist to balance out the good and/or that one cannot/shouldn't exist without the other (is a civilization without sadness truly alive etc).

In the case of this game specifically:
With help from a mysterious collaborator, the Lufenians have found out that the balance of light and dark in Cornelia has been disrupted, and that this will lead to total annihilation.
This leads to the creation of the Stranger project, which spirals out of control when Jack- having regained his memories and overwhelmed by the death of Princess Sarah- absorbs a lot of darkness and ends up taking the mantle of Chaos and wrestling Cornelia free from Lufenia's experiments (as he wanted from the start, disgusted as he was with how they treated Cornelia).
This doesn't resolve the issue of Cornelia's imminent annihilation though, but leads to a new idea of Jack where, in order to bring back balance, they needed light strong enough to balance out the darkness- which brings us to the start of the first DLC in which they want to 'train' Warriors of Light to be strong enough to defeat them, and thus end the cycle.

Going back to the question of why people 'need darkness'; With threats of 'darkness ruling the lands', the people of Cornelia will start clinging to hope instead- which I suppose leads to the classic cliche of 'the heroes that will save the world draw power of the hope of the people'.

[Griever]

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

But balance is only needed by the Lunefarians to maintain the status quo, which only the Lunefarians want to keep. Outside of that, there's no reason to keep darkness, so the protagonists constantly talking about how the world NEEDS darkness "for balance" goes directly against their plans.

No balance is always needed, a world with only light will have problems.
I believe there is even a final fantasy which explores this by having "Warriors of Darkness" (holding dark crystals) appear for exactly this reason. And they aren't "bad", they are just the counterparts to the WoL.

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Warriors_of_Darkness