The wound the world carries is not recent. The Blight has been spreading for generations, the Mothercrystals extracting more than they can return, the land dying beneath a civilization that called its own hunger progress. Clive awakening to this is not an epiphany. It is the slow accumulation of everything the game has shown him finally cohering into a direction.

Hero is a complicated word here. FFXVI is careful about it. Clive is not heroic in the sense of being chosen or blessed or narratively protected. He is heroic in the older sense — someone who accepts the cost of the necessary thing and pays it anyway, knowing that what he is paying may be everything.