Various stuffs about FF

[A Black Falcon]

I don't know, I think that the "lack of experience with the source material" thing might be part of it. I mean, when Japanese games are set in Japanese or Chinese mythology aren't they much more consistent than they are in Western, overall? And the same goes for most Western RPGs, just the other way around... there are definite exceptions of course, when a dev team really knows what it's doing and does its homework, but overall?

You are right though, games always take liberties from their source material. I mean, in games you need to fight like 10 or 100 times more than you would in just about any reference you'd be getting a story from, and in a very different way most of the time (not whole armies, wargames excepted, etc)...