Okay hear me out, this all started with a discussion I had with a friend about FFIV, he disliked the game whereas I adore it, so I asked him what it was he didn't like about it and after some various complaints we came upon the topic of how Cecil and his party are largely incompetent about stopping the badguys, basically Golbez outmaneuvers the group from the very beginning up until Golbez stopped being the antagonist. Now I ended up shooting back because his favorite FF is IX and frankly, Zidane's group utterly fails to stop Brahne, Garland or even most of Kuja's plan until the bitter end. Switch to FFVII, Cloud and AVANLANCHE never have a real success against Sephiroth until the very end, hell Cloud and his group are largely better at being terrorist by blowing up the reactors or sabotaging the Giant Materia mission but they never really succeed to do anything truly world saving until the bitter end. Both casts for FFV and FFVI largely fall for everyone of the villains traps, Yuna's group plunges into an ancient conspiracy and just make everything worse until they finally beat Sin, and Ashe and her group are playing to Vayne's fiddle for most of the plot. There is not really one set of heroes who ever accomplish anything truly good before the end except the NES entries and possibly the MMO entries.
So what are your thoughts on this ploy that is used often in the games?