Logo Stances and Battle System

You'll notice a few things if you look at the image, first of all I don't really notice any "evil" look, unless you consider a color as having an ethical/metaphysical alignment. Colors are however, commonly associated with emotion and have been proven to have an effect on us, so I'll start with that position.

Red is commonly associated with anger and fierce nature, and if you look at the image as the red is coming at you, as denoted by the sword basically thrust at the viewer, they're on the forefront. So my theory stems from the belief that the red (those in front) are in a stance, or some sort of adaptation where they are considered offensive, or aggressors, those in back are defending their backs, and as such have adopted a calmer more stalwart color (blue). This would make sense since they have stated they would like more diversity in parties and for people to fulfill their role and not have everybody spam WS like in later levels with FFXI. This would be a key departure from FFXI's combat and if different abilities are opened as per stances like they began to do with FFXI, if you could alternate between the basic defensive or offensive, plus whatever specialized stances your job had that would open up a wide array of possibilities based upon what you were fighting and who was in what stance.

With that, one could imagine that each stance would have specific abilities associated with it per job/weapon, and additional stances per basic stance. Say for example PLD, a job known exclusively for its tanking prowess. If it were to be put into a defender stance, it could lose attack, and various other abilities or bonuses for damage, (similar to Defender ability in FFXI but to a much greater degree, and far more customizable) while gaining bonuses to say shield block rate, or straight defense, etc, the possibilities are endless. Now imagine the inverse, a PLD who doesn't need to soak damage, but needs more damage power, they could switch to offense, perhaps wield a great sword and go to town. This would make all jobs much more flexible and provide a myriad of strategic opportunities the likes of which we have never seen in a game to date (and this is something SE is basically known to do, inventing new and better ways to play).