So you're saying they made the right call to ignore the usual nonsensical powercreep of every gacha ever under the east sun ?
It's not just powercreep, but the narrative importance they once held. For example, there was Port Breeze, an island that worshipped and sacrificed to the wind primal Tiamat for her blessings as she gave rains that brought bountiful harvests and good trade winds for airships, making the island prosperous. There is Albion, an island that was historically protected from foreign invasions by the primal Luminiera, to whom a human must be sacrificed in a bonding ritual that eventually lead to the candidate's life force being sucked away over the years in exchange for being bestowed the sheer power of the primal. Etc.
The player character, Gran, was unique in that that his lifeforce became mixed with Lyria (
a girl who originates from neither the Sky realm or the Astral realm), and Vyrn (the baby reincarnation of the god-dragon Bahamut, who destroyed the previous universe and created the new Sky and Astral realms). Since Gran is tied to beings that come from outside the created universe, he too becomes removed from fate and becomes able to alter it while almost everyone else is subject to it. That is why a teenager is able to go around subduing one Primal after after another when it is normally a herculean effort for the inhabitants of the GBF universe. During the early game, the only other example we had of people defeating Primals was a Luminary Knight - one of the seven most powerful mortal warriors in the setting - wielding rare magical artifacts and utilizing the Erste Empire's cutting edge technology. The climax of the Phantagarde storyline revolved around a Primal that could rewrite reality, which could only be stopped by Gran/Lyria/Vyrn while everyone else got deleted from reality.
Then Primals were downgraded into just being nothing special, being taken out on a regular basis by your average joes. In the
Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies storyline, we get a flashback arc to 2,000 years ago during the time of the Astral War, when the people of the Sky realm fought a revolution to overthrow the Astral's occupation and drive them back to their home dimension. In that war, we see the Astrals
mass producing primals in vats and sending them out to the frontlines to be used as fodders. We see severals Primals being very nearly killed by regular volunteer rebels. Not even powerful warriors like the Seven Luminary Knights; just average townsfolk who had never wielded sword or a bow prior to the revolution. It also does not help that almost every primal beast we see in the flashback war arc isn't a huge monster like the primals we saw in the early GBF storyline, but instead just look like regular sized humans. Granted, we see rebel officers admit
that they couldn't have won the war without Primal defectors, and we do get one example of
a terrifying Primal that was unstoppable like in the old lore, but it overall made them look weak compared to the old incarnation of them.
And then in arc that takes place in the present, we see hundreds of primals being enslaved by humans, betrayed by the people who worshipped them, hunted down and killed by adventurers for crafting materials, etc. The raison d'etre of the event villains, Geo and Freyr, is that they are tired of seeing their kin being abused and slain by the Skydwellers. They've been collecting hundreds of cores of their fallen kin. If the Primals are this easily killed, then the Black Knight and the Erste Empire look stupid for trying to gather all of these magical artifacts, inventing new technologies, and coming up with elaborate plans to defeat primals, when they could have just sent in a couple squads of footmen through the front door and got the job done. Gran loses his claim to fame too. You also have to wonder why every island you visited was worshipping Primals if it turns out that they are very mortal and being killed off on a regular basis. They would be unworthy of all of this praise and sacrificing.
Basically the Primals went from being powerful gods to just being people, but with crystal cores in their chests instead of fleshy hearts. The later introduction of the Six Dragons helped bring back that original GBF feel of there being
fearsome beings out there, but then they too wound up getting
anthropomorphized human forms and treated as people too. So the setting doesn't feel as wide open and full of possibility, awe, wonder, and danger like it used to.
