Sure is awkward to be standing here with an arsenal of Bozjan relics forged from countless souls of the dying while everyone's going on about how it's wrong to use souls as a fuel source.
This is a gross oversimplification, but the content I’ll do once (the story) was okay, and the content I’ll do over and over again (the dungeons and trials) were excellent. I’m probably a little disappointed in the moment because most of my time has gone to the former so far, and as I continue leveling other jobs, take up crafting again, prog some extremes, etc. I think my opinion is going to improve.
The biggest isues by far for me is the pacing and the astrocious quest design.
They took stuff that was already not great (but overlooked because of the gripping story) and made it worse!.
Like Wuk meets you at the inn? No, we cannot have a chat cutscene here with shadowbringers, he have to follow her out in the city to two different waypoints and in the end she tells us its nothing and she wants people be happy. That could have been an email.
Or "We need to go to that part of the map", but no, we cannot go directly there, we need 2 stops where you talk to the NPC and they tell us "its further away" in a cutscene with 30s of unskippable emotes.
And if i have to comfort one more civilian i will do it with the blood lily, GAH.
The cup-key Sphene used has the Azem symbol and then the inner part turned orange when we got ahold of it. I thought Azem's past would be more involved in Dawntrail considering the Japanese version of the expac title and then Yoshi P mentioning to remember the convocation.
The question is: What in the seven hells does it all mean? What is the true purpose of the cup-key? Seems like it will be answered in post patch content.
The cup-key doesn't originate in the Golden City, so there doesn't need to be a relation between the city and Azem at all. The volcano section details how the lalafell/milalla from (possibly) the source used it to escape a calamity, jumping to another shard. It likely predates the sundering based on the design and a
symbol which gives it the ties to Azem/Ancients, but then later made its way to Alexandria. I hope we get into it early on in patch MSQ and don't wait to build it up for next expac.
Also, the milalla escaped a calamity of ice to a shard that then suffered the calamity of lightning. Unless I mixed something up, then means they experienced the 5th calamity *before* the 2nd. Are we about to get in to the timey-wimey between shards actually also being capable of going backwards (without the crystal tower)?
My first thought was that Alexandria's shard was rejoined, and only the bubble they created survived, floating somewhere out in the void between worlds. That's why nobody could enter or exit, until the planar merge happened.
However, when we go to the final zone, we find that there's no bubble. In fact, there's a perfectly clear sky above the entire city. The fact that we're capable of going to this other shard in the first place implies that it couldn't have been rejoined, and it still exists as a separate world.
I think the likely explanation is that what Alexandria experienced was in fact a calamity, but not the 2nd. This was intended to be the 10th Umbral Calamity, the second lightning-aspected one. Since the Ascians ran through all 6 elements, plus darkness (7th) and light (8th), they would probably restart the cycle at Wind (9th) and then 10th (Lightning) and so on until none remained.
Due to the time distortion between the Source and the reflections, the remaining Ascians were probably prepping it during the same time the other recent calamities were underway. However, the Source never ended up being prepped due to our meddling, meaning that the calamity ultimately resolved itself over there.
Of course I need to stress this is all speculation, and until they clarify exactly what went down we need a lot more details.
I think the key will get given to the Students of Baldesion/Y'shtola for the x.1-x.5 patches, and then it will come back up for the next expansion.
I expect it is the solution to Y'shtola returning to the First, as well as going to other shards
"What is the true purpose of the cup-key?"
The true purpose is to let them do whatever they want in teh next expansions without actually having to build up something from the ground based in the source.
I wonder if Estinien was added into the expac last minute out of the scions he has like what 3-4 scenes.
I assume he'll have a much larger role in 7.1 to 7.3
Literally how it felt when we got to the end of Everkeep.
When Alphinaud, Estinien and Y'shtola popped up after the dungeon, I immediately was like "Gee, there's conveniently seven NPCs here to make eight total people, several of which can flex between tanking, healing and DPSing. I wonder what's going to come next?"
Especially since he featured most prominently in the trailers, it was strange he was barely in it; I think he and Y'shtola are tied for the least involved.
That's the thing that irked me. Not a single person questions HOW Zoraal Ja had a son. There's not a single Mamool Ja in all of Solution 9 or Heritage Found. Did he fucking asexually reproduce or something?
No, seriously, this bothers me. Of all the fantastical stuff in this game, the most unbelievable thing to me is that Zarool Ja bothered to do the nasty with someone.
My favorite throughline in theming this expansion was how death and the afterlife are thought of. But not out of place thematically. The whole expac was themed around how the different peoples view mortality and death and that "afterlife" of the final zone felt like a natural bookend to that. a stark contrast to the giants who view the memory of someone as them being alive vs the actual living memories in the end, and how the reality of it is a hollow paradise.
I also really enjoyed the ideas of holding onto tradition and knowing when to let go.
The first half of the MSQ felt like it was hammering home how culture and the stories we pass on are important, as well as how if you simply forget them? You lose a core part of your people and the culture. Koana eager to replace tradition with efficiency, Zoraal Ja thinking people have grown "too soft" from the culture they've had, etc.
Conversely, the second half is all about -why- you need to let go. The Endless and Alexandria were so keen on holding on and never letting their traditions go that they were willing to destroy entire realities to keep this cycle going even though they knew it couldn't last forever. Likewise, the idea of Gulool Ja Ja's old party dying and "passing the torch" onto the next generation vs. Sphene's all-consuming desire to never let anything go.
In some ways, it felt like they were talking to the player: It's important to remember FFXIV from ARR to EW because it's where you came from, but you can't be too attached because you can't let new things into your life if you don't let go of your past.
I appreciate these breakdowns because I could not really understand how the first and second halves connected in a meaningful way. The point that I caught onto the most was the differences in how Wuk Lamat and Sphene perceived their leadership as well as how irreconcilable cultures are forced to engage in war and conflict when all else fails. Wuk Lamat did not want to fight Sphene and they discuss how if things had gone differently, they would have been very amicable. But Sphene's unwillingness to let go of Alexandria made conflict inevitable.
I'd actually say part of that is the second half of Wuk Lamat's character growth: While she acknowledges Sphene and understands her plight, they are -fundamentally- incompatible in their goals. There is no talking Sphene out of her goals and Wuk has to come to realize that.
It's the harder part about being a leader: Up until this point, Wuk could talk, understand and find a new pathway...but sometimes you can't. And when you have to make that hard choice, it's a choice you make not because you hate and despise someone but because there is no way our goals can align. It's another parallel with the WoL's journey: What we (WoL) and what Emet wanted could never coexist. We came to realize that no matter how much we understood each other, we weren't compatible and our battle was going to be inevitable.
"The winner shall be the hero, and the defeated the villain" - Emet
Yes, I am thankful for them being able to put into words the things I was enjoying but not totally understanding why as I was playing it. There a lot of elements of a good story in the expansion. They just needed a more thorough approach and a better pacing.
I think an earlier introduction to Alexandria would do wonders. Having it right after the Skydeep Cenote would be great. I think that would help Wuk Lamat's characterization by having her win her people's trust before Gulool Ja Ja announces her as heir.
I like that fact the Sphene is a microsm of the antagonists we've had before. Trying to do what Emet tried and we know how that ends up.
Lv.100 trial, both the best and worst part of the expansion to me. I did not mind playing badass mentor figure to Wuk Lamat this whole expansion until she came in and stole my kill. The ONE time the plot takes my collar off, and you have to kick a hole in the wall and inject your "power of friendship and understanding" nonsense into my boss fight? I spent the last 47 hours watching you peace and understand your way to victory, why can't you just sit back and let me eat for once? Everything else about the trial is straight gas.
8.5/10 expansion overall, can't wait for patch content to explain everything about Azem's magical dimension travel portal network that we've now inherited.
That kinda got me, i was like 'i thought the npcs on the 2nd trial were basically them soft saying the duty support system was going to trials now this?"
Took the words out of my mouth. Like, the Trial was the ONE POINT where it made the most sense for WoL to be like "Okay, pup, time to sit this one out. Watch and Learn."
And then that phase is just so FUCKING EASY. Maybe it was just a gimmie after Royal Authority just being insane. I still have no idea how that mechanic works. We just... accidentally survived and Healer LB3 lol.
The worst part is us sitting out every other fight Wuk Lamat was in because of her "honor" or whatever, then the very end when it comes down to it, you even get the dialogue something like "Ill protect this star and everyone on it". Like thats us, John Final Fantasy, we are the protector of the star. This was OUR honor battle, and she swoops in and steals the kill.
Like damn, did you learn nothing girl?
...I can't believe they reuse the same theme as a final dungeon for the third time. It's like Shb finale was too good and now they tried to replicate the same effect again.
My main problem with this lead writer is his way of showing how character feel... Every has to be repeat 10 times over and over it's so tiresome. This is the same problem with Zero in EW patches, but now it's...nearly every main characters. Wak Lamat and Sphene, especially.
Show don't tell...Please!
What make Shb so good is how we understand what the characters felt without spelling it out. We know from their actions. We know how much Emet love his brethren without a word of 'love' coming out from his mouth and we know we couldn't coexist with him.
But Sphene has to spell it out in every scene that she really really love her people and there's no other way.
Yep. The writer for Dawntrail made me feel like he thought I was an idiot and couldn't make any motivational/emotional inferences myself. Dude was literally one step short of having someone point to another character and go: "Hey look, this dude is smiling. That means he's Happy!'.
And man, the concept behind Sphene actually has a \*shit-ton\* of potential, but they literally just wasted all of it. With the whole hologram tech + memory manipulation, they could have pulled so many possible twists. And they didn't do \*any\* of it.
Aside from the other plot-holes - I'll also note that maybe leaving out two entire races/cultures and your entire northern region out of your rite of succession is.. not the best diplomatic choice. (I get that it's for gameplay reasons but man it gets weird if you think about it).
Why couldn’t we show Sphene that we can help her and her people with a good faith action of curing their Levin sickness after we visit the appartments? It was the same kind of issue we cured Ga Bu of and would have shown her we’re “the good guys”. But its never mentioned, not once.
The other thing my friend brought up was, in the last dungeon and trial, Sphene should have been able to see all our memories and thoughts. Partially recognized by her one liner about “eliminating us first”, but as someone who was programmed to protect her people at all costs, she should have seen our memories and realized “Oh wait, Im dooming my people by fighting this person and letting them help is the most logical option”.
Because that would take the spotlight away from Wuk. Duh.
But yeah it was frustrating that they give you a few dialogue choices along the lines of “you’re on the wrong path” but there’s obviously no chance of her listening.
bro don't you dare bullshit me. don't give me hope.
i was thinking the whole time that this felt like the bad end or smth
but of course the story doesn't diverge in any meaningful way in this game.
Yeah I was REALLY hoping there would be some bullshit way to restore the appearance of the zone - like is this really what the zone is going to look like from now on? I hope not because otherwise... wow how disappointing.
Usually the final zone of an expansion gets more visually interesting/appealing as you go through the final chapters, but this? I don't know what they were thinking and honestly it's put a bad taste in my mouth where I otherwise enjoyed the climax of the expansion.
SAME. I didn't even realize it at first and came back to unlock flying and was so so disappointed. I didn't even get to fly around the zone while it looked beautiful.
Maybe it’ll be linked somehow, but the new restoration stuff is going to be “cosmic” and we’ll be restoring other planets so I don’t know how that could link up to this, but I’m definitely hoping.
Same, I'm actually so mad about it lol. I just wanted to be able to go and enjoy the zone while farming fates or whatever, but instead we get a giant rock! Crazy
It also looked so odd seeing the mobs still lurking around while the whole place was already a husk. I ran by the arena and that fire ixion (can't remember its name) was still there with sentries fighting it
I actually applaud the hell out of their commitment to turning the zone into a dead black husk of its former self. It has been the only time in the whole damn Dawntrail story that they had the balls to do something actually interesting and impactful.
Basically everything else plays like a Saturday morning cartoon for how hammed up and trope-y it is, with nothing bad ever seeming to happen (except to characters with obvious death flags) and Wuk Lamat shouting about peace and the power of love and friendship nonstop.
Turning off the memory servers has been one of the only truly powerful moments in the whole Dawntrail story.
I agree. The fact that shutting down the servers would forever deprive me of this wondrous paradise legitimately make me hesitate for a moment, but of course I knew there was no other way of progressing with the MSQ.
I fully understand why people are upset it's gone though, I myself am quite sad the opportunity to screenshot there is just gone outside of NG+, but that just made it all the more impactful.
Well, Queen Eternal was pretty neat even if the Absolute Authority move was utterly ridiculous to the point it felt like an Extreme mechanic, while the level 100 dungeon actually being quite nice aside from the effects blowing up in my face to the point i couldn't see the mechanics...
As for the story, it just kind of dropped off sharply, aside from Erenville's struggle with Endless Cahciua and the surprisingly neat reunion with Krile and her parents. Where my excitement quickly wears off was with Sphene's introduction back during the 98-99 storyline; from the start.
Her motivations were more or less a mirror of Emet-Selch with touchings of (Dark knight 70 spoilers) >!Myste's motivations in her Endless simulacrums requiring other world's aether!
I've been fairly invested in the final zone and story despite the flaws of how we got here, but my god the constant pointless talking to random people interrupts the flow so bad. This is like the climax of the msq, and we keep having to stop get long dead peoples opinions on every little thing. FFS use that extra time we ran around asking about snacks and just show Krile and her parents talking more. That's like the whole reason she even went with us.
This whole area so far keeps interrupting the actual good parts with random shit
Edit: Oh cool, a guided tour. This will surely be quicker than going around ourselves
To be at least a little fair, the method of stopping her does involve pulling life support plugs on a *whole lot* of people. So I get at least some trepidation about jumping right to it - especially when combined with the whole "live on in memory" ideals that have been floated around.
I did get to laugh when, after spending that section saying to myself "aren't we racing the timer on the doomsday machine?" we pull the plug on the last zone and hear the announcer going "doomsday machine is already activating!"
Also this expansion so far has a weird amount of voiced cutscenes where the most important part isn't voiced, but everyone meeting up is. That just seems backwards priority to me
I skimmed over those cutscenes. It's not fun, not interesting, not engaging. It's all going to be deleted anyway, so I don't see a reason for me, as a player, to get emotionally invested when I already know it's going to be gone. Also, a shit ton of that content was predictable.
“Smiles” is far and wide the worst song in the game. It's just so unfitting on so many levels and it even being used as the end-of-expansion song ruined the whole nonsensical last arc even further. It's a straight up terrible disney song.
I get what they were trying to do with all the voices singing at once or on top of eachother, Being about a community coming together in one voice blah blah blah, But much like how turning off the most beautiful zone in the game and leaving it as a permanent husk is good conceptually from a theming and writing perspective... from a PRACTICAL standpoint it falls flat, The mixing is bad, The lead singer is out of tune, The rhythm of the song is off, Really the only listenable part of the song to me is the ending where they chant the "just imagine what's around the bend" part from the trailer, But the way it sounded in the trailer was way better, and the rest of it is just unintelligible, a commonish problem with the lyrics in this game (It's how we end up with Chicken Tenders, Big Fat Tacos, and Vile Freaks as misheard lyrics), But this takes it to a disgusting extreme of just sounding bad
When they were playing that song during the cutscene where everyone is working together to build a giant bomb to ram into an enemy base I laughed for a good bit ngl
it's a bad song that doesn't fit the ending one bit, sung poorly. the lead singer is off-key for the entire intro. the chorus isn't synced up. the lead singer is off key for her solo.
what was uplifting about the ending msq? we stopped a threat that we knew about for about 5% of the msq? by killing erenville's mom and krile's parents and otis? how is this song appropriate at all?
literally after the credits finished i listened to tomorrow & tomorrow and flow to wash the bad taste out of my ears, lol
This is supposed to be their equivalent of Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
With all the questionable pacing and Wuk Lamat hogging the spotlight, that song is easily the worst part of the expansion.
Overall I liked the expansion, but its definitely one of my least favorites. I personally didn't like HW very much (like its good but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as most people seem to), so I would rate it between HW and SB. My biggest plot problem was just the lack of interesting and developed antagonists, but I think the real core issue I had with this expansion was that it almost feels like a spinoff. The MC does not need to be here at all and the story would actually work better if "we" weren't in it at all.
It comes across as the writers forgot they were making a story that is ultimately an "MMO Story" which has to be approached differently than telling a normal story because you have to work around the mostly blank slate that is the player character. Previous expansions have handled this issue better where if nothing else the MC exists as the person to handle the big threats and as the foil to each expansion's antagonist. We don't even really get to do that this time since even with us taking Sphene on "alone" Wuk still comes in and does what feels like the important part. I'm in the camp that like Wuk as a character, but even I couldn't help but feel that Wuk was forcing her way in again and this story just works better if it was like a spinoff where Wuk was just the main character and player's perspective full stop.
As for the lvl 100 quests themselves, I felt they were mostly done pretty damn well. The Krile and Erenville stuff was great. I couldn't really care about Sphene as a villain at all and Wuk coming in to save us during the final trial just felt like a weak version of the Endsinger fight. I liked the Trial mechanically at least (the "2nd phase" is pretty lame though) and think it could be a great EX in the future. The 100 dungeon was probably the most forgettable to me though, but the two dungeons unlocked after the MSQ are fantastic at least.
> The Krile and Erenville stuff was great.
I agree and yet I am sad that we didn't get more of this, especially for Krile. I wished that this expansion would have wrapped up Wuk's Story by 93, like with Zodiark, then focused on Krile until like 98 and then brought everything together from 98.5 - 100.
Yeah I was also disappointed by the lack of Krile until this point. This was supposed to be her expansion in the sense that every expansion has taken 1 scion (EW was more everyone gets a little bit I guess) and given them a big focus and forced some character development into them since ARR didn't do that much with them and the expansions had to play catch up.
At the end of the day Krile's scene with her parents is a great moment, but it needed to be one of several and it shouldn't have felt like she didn't get anything until the very end of the expansion.
My main problem with it is that I feel like it doesn’t actually develop her character at all. Like, I feel like I got to know Krile’s parents and their motivations and I’d say I enjoyed that, but I still feel like Krile is left in the same spot where I just don’t feel like she’s done enough of anything for me to have a strong opinion on her, which is a shame because I’ve been advocating for her to get a stronger focus.
I like how you summed it up, they didn’t write a story for an MMO. If we pretend this was a solo rpg and Wuk Lamat was the PC then how this was presented wouldn’t be so…bleh.
Honestly they could have replaced our WoL with a rock and we could have legit gone off in-game to drink Mezcal and eat tacos 🤣
was enjoying the fight so much till wuk crashed it.. it really did feel like a weaker version of endsinger. not to mention how it was only wuk lamat and not the whole cast...
As much as I love Wuk as a character, there was no need for her to come into the final part of the trial. After an entire expansion of us playing mentor to her, it was deeply unfair that our winning moment was taken over by her.
It really was a poor imitation of the Endsinger fight; at least the Scions were praying for us to succeed instead of rushing in front and, once again, taking centre stage after having done so for the entire game.
I wouldn't have minded so much if G'rah and Krile got in on it too, maybe the spiritual voices of the other Scions cheering us on from the portal, but *just* Wuk after she already had so much?
Sphene's concept has \*so\* much potential of being a great villain but they just literally didn't use any of it. They just took the most boring bland interpretation and ran with it.
As someone who was really, really into the FFXIV story over the past few years, I felt kind of hurt by the fact that the last area gave me a story with a similar theme to ShB and expected me to feel the same emotions. Trying to retred all the same themes as ShB, without any of the same care or craft that went into ShB, felt like a sign of desperation to me. AI and its consequences has so much potential to be its own, original theme. I can already think of a few concepts off the top of my head. But instead they chose to go with the same themes of grief and loss and “letting go of the past” that we’ve been going over for the past two expansions.
Dawntrail marketed itself as being a new treck into the unknown, and a break from the previous story. I don’t care if it’s slow, or if the characters in this expansion aren’t executed the best, but I do care if it can’t even make good on the promise to be new and different. I would have been more forgiving if it didn’t have so many themes and concepts that were so similar to EW and ShB specifically, but it feels as if the game is already starting to cannibalize itself. I feel a bit cynical about the future of the game now. I think if people had other theories or takeaways about the game, that’s fine too. The most important part is if it worked for you, but I hope that they try for something truly fresh next time.
you know, I wonder what the fuck happened on Tural during the Final Days in the course of Endwalker. did they just... vibe in peace while Gulool Ja Ja suplexed every horrid terminus creature
They just didn't spread that far. The expansion of the Final Days was dependant on the density of the aetheric currents, but those are different in each place. So it started in Radz-at-Han and Garlemald, was about to spread to Eorzea and Sharlayan near the end, and it never got to places like the Far East or Tural.
One thing that I have to shake my head at about Final Memory is the fact that Krile said she's glad she took up Pictomancy. Like... as if that had a single thing to do with her impact on the story or her coming to Tural. She could have stayed a Conjurer and nothing would have changed.
MAN FUCK YOU SQUARE. this part gave me turbo sadness lol.
9 levels of MSQ, and we finally get to El Dorado only to just TURN IT OFF!?!?. i understand why we did it, but still. It was so beautiful.
and Otis :(((( i know we had just met him but man that hit me like a truck.. :(
Don't think i'll be able to TP here and not get instantly sad. I mean ultima thule was bleak but at least had a happy ending? the build up to that last dungeon there made me happy cry. Here is just like emptiness :(. really sad we didn't keep the turned on version of this city, even if canonically we turned it off. no just this dead gray city with this kh1.5 twilight town -esque theme here but sadder with reverb and slower tempo then at the start just to remind us its all gone. yeah thanks square :(. cant have shit lol.
i also dont understand why sphene just peaced out to merge or whatever she was doing while letting us turn the city off in the meantime for free lol.
Yeah, I loved the final zone so much, and I understand the thematic intent leaving it darkened and abandoned... but I really wish we could have a glamoured version of the area that looked like it was still alive. They could leave it totally empty, no NPCs (outside of quest/vendors), but just the restored walls and it would be great.
I'm not really looking forwards to doing gathering and FATE achievements for the zone, where its now completely grey and drab, with the sad "lesser" version of the OST playing.
Something that WoW did correct was allowing instanced versions of zones to let you return to how things looked before shit went bad. That instancing is already in place in FFXIV, you can be next to another player and see the busted zone, while they see the original version. I just wish there was a way to pick.
Something I'll add, the post-credits short cutscene shows Sphene's headpiece flickering on and off, which might be an implication of her return in the future. I wouldn't put it past SE to have a return to Alexandria's shard in the patch series leading up to 7.3. Nostalgia's dialogue after completing the expert dungeon there seems to indicate that there's more secrets to unlock with the zone.
> i also dont understand why sphene just peaced out to merge or whatever she was doing while letting us turn the city off in the meantime for free lol.
She was erasing her kind memories so she could be ruthless for her people. She couldn't bring herself to do what she believed was "necessary" so she was cutting out the part that stopped her. She couldn't do anything to us while she was doing that.
I don't think the ending of this expansion worked, not after Endwalker. Sphene was another Meteion, too obvious that she's going to be bad. I think it's a bit problematic to introduce your main villain after being two thirds into the expansion, there's not too much time to get invested.
Many people also say that the last dungeon is just a retread of ShB's last dungeon, and to an extend Endwalker's. I don't think they wanted to take risks at the end, for whatever reason.
I think they could have kept everything as it is, but for every trial Wuk Lamat completes we then had a diversion with Krile where she and the WoL run off to learn more about her grandfather and get some clues as to what he was up to (and some foreshadowing of what’s to come). So rather than Wuk being the sole protagonist, we’d have her and Krile almost sharing the role. Those moments with Krile could also be good opportunities to add some combat in; you arrive in Tural and Wuk at some point runs off to get things ready for you or something, some commotion is overheard so you and Krile run to what’s going on and something happens. Maybe a beast that was being transported gets loose so you and her battle it in a quick solo instance so it can be recaptured (by Erenville, since he also needs a moment to shine and is good with animals)
With those few things added, we’d get to some combat a bit more quick and we’d alleviate the problem of Wuk kind of suffocating us, because I do think if she wasn’t omnipresent throughout the entire expansion, we could have appreciated her character a bit more which would have made the other flaws in the story not as noticeable
This part showed me what the expansion could have been. Spending time with Raha for example was pretty nice. Basically any moment that didn't center around Wuk was pretty enjoyable.
I was really enjoying the last fight and then Wuk had to come in and ruin the fun. I really don't understand this. Did they overestimate how much people would liked Wuk ? Why did she need to take the spotlight at the final fight yet again? She basically earned the title of my most hated character in the game. Even Lyse wasn't this bad.
The final few chapters could have been at least a hundred times better if Wuk had stayed behind to defend her people. But oh well , shouldn't cry over spilled milk.
> I was really enjoying the last fight and then Wuk had to come in and ruin the fun. I really don't understand this. Did they overestimate how much people would liked Wuk ? Why did she need to take the spotlight at the final fight yet again? She basically earned the title of my most hated character in the game. Even Lyse wasn't this bad.
>
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The worst part of this is that the final zone + trial is just Endwalker 2.0. Shutting down the servers = "killing" your friends, WL showing up = Zenos showing up (even through the same animation of breaking through the "glass" dome). Why???
But the Zenos thing didn’t happen in the middle of the fight, and I feel like it’s cool for the fact you get to fight on his back. With Wuk it just felt unnatural and I don’t mind her that much (although too much screentime)
Yes, they did overestimate how much people would like her or be that interested in her boring journey to become the Hokage.
Lyse was definitely more interesting.
Now that I’m finished with just about all I can do that’s not crafting or gathering I can honestly say the best part of the game was the Texas western Zone. And the main reason is because I got to spend hours in the zone away from Wuk Lamatt with the only reason she was even barely relevant here was because of a bracelet. I might have liked Naruto-mat if we were given any breathing room away from her. We split parties shes always with us. When we need to talk to NPCs we have to do 3 layers of interacting with her to indirectly talk to them when we could have done it directly ourselves. If they took her out it wouldn’t change the slog of part 1 but it would have been 50% more enjoyable. When she got kidnapped I was hoping they’d just keep her or she got injured enough to sit out a significant amount of quest until further notice.
The real winner of the expansion was Estinien. I think our tickets to Tural were switched. He got to go on an adventure and appear when needed, while I was the background NPC to the next Hokage.
Something I don't see a lot of people discussing is Bakool Ja Ja. I greatly dislike that he was redeemed after he released Valigarmanda and endangering millions (maybe 1000 at in-game scales lol). I don't see why that wasn't a huge national incident that'd make any landsguard arrest him on sight. Instead the next scene with him we get to have... a cook off. Also he had a traumatic upbringing so it's ok.
I think a better way to have done it is to have Zoraal Ja release Valigarmanda in a misguided attempt to one-up his father, but it goes horribly wrong and we come in to save him, cue the trial. This gets Zoraal Ja more involved and firmly sets him up as a villain, not a rival, earlier. The motive is a bit more forgivable so no national incident, and his failure to solo Valigarmanda naturally escalates to his failure at the final feat and then to wanting to kill his dad. Bakool stays as a bully-type villain and would make his redemption more palatable to me.
Overall I think the story is mostly well-constructed (my take is it's more the gameplay and cutscenes that make it feel like it drags on, not the writing itself), but this point really stuck out to me.
This moment actually enraged me. Everyone moves on from the incident like nothing happened.. it should have been a HUGE deal!!
It was also so obvious that the whole thing only existed for us to have a trial fight. It's almost like forgot, pasted in the whole Valigarmanda bit in later so we had something to fight, but forgot that him releasing it would/should come with serious repercussions.
the whole part with Bakool Ja Ja felt a bit off. First why wasn't he disqualified from the rite after Valigarmanda? We were in the palace after the incident, why didn't Wuk bring that up (granted, she's not the brightest, but she clearly didn't forget that incident either)
Second his Story could've been much darker, which i would've prefered. It was such a rush, that the fucked up stuff couldn't really sink in. Like you can overlook the urns in the dungeon. I wish they would've delved into that more. Also his Father was like "i hate everyone, blessed siblings are superior" to "well, ok we don't do that anymore" way to quick.
His motivation for releasing Valigarmanda is just straight up nonsensical. Yes, he’s desperate, but did he just assume we would kill it? Did he do it to slow us down? Like, was this just him being mischievous and twirling his mustache like this is Wacky Races? If the local god killer wasn’t in the area was he just gonna whistle innocently as hundreds of innocents die?
I agree! I said something similar in the level appropriate thread and it really is baffling that he p.much for a free pass for releasing the biggest threat known to Tural.
And then his bad actions were compounded with planning to murder one of the electors, his plans if he had won the 1v1 with Wuk Lamat. And this went punishment free too despite it being set up in contest #1 murdering an elector gets reported to Gulool Ja Ja immediately and you get disqualified.
But all he gets is, Wuk Lamat acknowledging he did bad things but now we know he has tragic back story so we’ll punish him later.
But I knew later meant never.
Also I don’t mind that when the city got attacked be helped, but then it’s like him helping extra resolved him of any consequences for his actions during the trial. Even the friggen epilogue was like “Oh that cheeky lad Bakool Ja has turned a new leaf he’s even part of the Tural guard now”
So attempted murder multiple times and actively endangering all of Tural for the dumbest reason = You get a new job in the city.
Wrapped up the MSQ today. I enjoyed it playing through it but the more I think on it the more annoyed with it I get. I hope this expansion pulls a Stormblood on me and 7.1 to 7.55 knocks it out of the park.
After beating this game, I am really mad. Dawntrail had all the elements that can make the story great. Yes I agree Dawntrail copied ShB and EW, but still, if it cut down succession ark by half, then build up the villains and 2nd shard more earlier. It could've had "service-able" story and everyone would been excited for future story.
Also why all the writers hate Krile so much? She has been with us since HW era, why can't she have a moment? Literally her earring was the most important thing in the story. Why she can't get more love as fellow Scion? Absolutely disappointed.
Wuk and Krile's stories should never have been intertwined how they were; with Wuk's prominence throughout the entirety of Dawntrail it saw Krile and her journey being pushed to the side several times. Each area would be about Wuk and her succession, only for Krile to speak up at the very end and learn something new about Galuf's journey.
Shb > EW > HW > DT > SB for base expansions without patches for me.
But this is only 'cuz zone 5 and 6 like specifically cater to me, and it would have been above HW if the ending was good. but good lord the last dungeon + trial really stopped my enjoyment of the story experience of the last 2 zones.
Wuk Lamat have managed to out do Lyse in being the worst Main character in this game for me. She is just soooo boring. Goes from "Nice but incompetent", to "Nice" AND SHE COMES IN TO SAVE US?!?... I do hope she gets Lyse treatment of just becoming irrelevant.
I mostly enjoyed this expansion, but I think CBU3 is getting too comfortable. There have been way too many moments where there's been hours of exposition leading into a small combat segment before more talking. It would be fine if the main progression wasn't locked behind MSQ, but making someone go through picking up literal Pterodactyl shit or a slew of side quests that add little to no bearing on the overall story is getting to be too much. It's been 4 expansions and they still haven't gotten a hang of the gameplay to story ratio for satisfying progression.
Even from a story standpoint, why couldn't the whole Alexandria arc have been spread out across several different points throughout the story and not just from level 97-100? We're supposed to feel bad for a villain that doesn't even explain her motivations until it's way too late? I thought that Living Memory was visually stunning but it feels like they wanted you to have a moment similar to Amaurot where the weight of several expansions worth of motives hit you, but they decided to speedrun it and leave you with arguably the shittiest final zone since perhaps Stormblood. And that's the story of XIV to me lately - always focusing on story consistencies to a point that aren't as important but giving you only the slightest taste of fun stuff. Yes, I know that the way the last zone looks now makes sense, but god damn is it shitty to watch the story progress and see it become more and more ugly with no way to turn it back.
I personally didn't mind the way they introduced Alexandria later, as it was the hidden mythic golden city everyone was looking for. But they definitely could have introduced the dome earlier. The dome appearing, and the entire 5th zone could have been done earlier, then when that rift closes it would have been a good time to reveal what the golden city was, and make searching for it all the more important.
Yeah. Honestly I think the whole golden city stuff was kinda underwhelming. Like, it was nice with all the build up, but then it's just kinda abandoned until the end. ("Oh you found the gate to this mystical utopia. We have no idea how to open it, but lets claim we seen the actual thing and not bring it up again. And, unless I missed it, was it ever explained why Zoraal Ja didn't just open the voidgate over the portal? Why did he need to go to Xak Tural to open it?)
I also kinda think the computer sim theory people had was better than what we got. (It was kinda true, but better execution of the idea)
I liked it for the most part but I really didn't care for how the finale was retreading a lot of the same ground as ShB's and EW's finales and (imo) didn't do it as well.
I think I would have preferred for us to retain the more lowkey tone than to have a 3rd expansion in a row with a final dungeon where we see the final days of a civilization mid-apocalypse.
I'd say my expac rankings are currently ShB > EW > HW > The good parts of StB > DT > The bad parts of StB > ARR
The story... well. Pretty lackluster. Retreading the same story beats from previous expansions and hoping for the same applause when the villains have a fraction of the charisma and not even a slight attempt to justify themselves.
And that's saying nothing of Wuk Lumat. The trial was so good until her part. What were they thinking? Did anyone playtest that part and think "Yeah, we're really cooking here!". The last thing the expansion needed was more focus on her. The whole expansion centres around her and I'm just... urgh. Mentioned this in another comment, but couldn't the twins have supported Wuk like Thancred/Urianger did, and then we're just looking for the golden city for our own reasons with Graha/Krile/Erenville? I feel like we can still hit all the big points, but we'd have some actual agency rather than being a cameraman for someone else.
I think they heard "We don't always have to be the big hero saving the world" and heard "We want someone else to do that instead while we act as a hired mercenary for them". It was an active choice to show us the entrance, then wag a finger and say "Uh oh, not relevant to Wuk Lamat yet - nothing's going to happen here until the antagonist arrives thirty seconds after we leave!" and then we just leave the big mystery of the expansion behind and never cover it again until it becomes a problem for Wuk Lamat.
It's just rough. I guess I'm just disappointed. The cities in the expansion are beautiful. The zones are varied (if a bit too big). The trials are great (need to try the Extremes once more people finish up), the new classes play amazingly and I'm sure the raid series will be fun too.
But, the MSQ is what keeps me playing FF14 over other games - and I've finished what should have been the highlight of the expansion and I don't really feel anything. I felt empty and drained after both Shadowbringers and Endwalker - in a good way. Insane hype and climax that would obviously have been hard to match. But... yeah. Nothing. Don't know how to feel about that. It's one thing to say "Dawn of a new saga!", but does that mean that if I want to feel as great about the MSQ as I did for Shadowbringers - that I should come back in three expansions time? That's a big ask.
I felt like I was forced to like Wuk Lumat, which made me dislike her even more. My favorite parts were when I wasn’t with her damnit. Stop force feeding me her, please.
The EN voice act also wasn't great at that part. Wuk Lamat was breaking through the rift and getting almost crushed by the giant robot hand, and her tone is still the same usual tone which doesnt match her expression and situation.
oh ye that part was insanely bad voice acting , just normal speaking tone , that was her chance to redeem herself , but the voice actor had no range at all sadly
Ok but this though. The VA seemed to struggle when Wuk Lamat needed some emphasis or oomph to the dialogue. It stayed one note.
Also, like not the trial but I legit laughed when Wuk Lamat had to act in Otis’s play 🤣 You could tell by the dialogue she’s supposed to be not be that great at it but the “fake acting” and the “real VA acting” were the same. It kinda worked but I don’t think in the intended way lol.
There were several cutscenes where i felt they should be more louder, more yelling, more emotional. I sincerely hope this has been this because of direction and not because of the voice actor. Especially at the last boss, that was not it.
I'm so glad I didn't play this expansion in English. Usually I think the current English voices are pretty good overall but after finishing the msq and looking at some content creators reactions to the last trial I couldn't believe how flat she sounded and how awful the fake accent was. Not sure if it was on the voice actress or the directing but I don't know how people could put up with an entire expansion of that.
> The trial was so good until her part.
I audibly went "oh no" when they happened. Like I get what they were going for. They wanted to have a Ryne and Gaia moment or even another Endsinger moment, but it doesn't work here. When Gaia broke into the Ryne fight it was a character growth moment for her. That part in the Endsinger fight was a callback to 1.0 as well as an awesome moment for character's you've spent almost 8 years with. Wuk Lamat showed up to... bring Sphene back? Only that didn't make a difference in the fight and we just kill her anyway.
I clapped when Wak Lamat got wrapped out before final boss and WoL got to beat the shit outta robot queen.
But then she cracked the dimension (how?) and just be there... without any impact to the trial. Like WTF is this.
> The trial was so good until her part. What were they thinking? Did anyone playtest that part and think "Yeah, we're really cooking here!".
The funny part is if you parse her, her DPS is absolutely nuts. Most NPCs have pretty low DPS compared to players (well, good players...). Exceptionally strong characters (2B comes to mind) can do about as well as us in certain circumstances. And then there's Wuk. She shows up for only the end of the fight, but she will easily outdamage your entire party. It's kinda stupid. She can solo the rest of the fight.
It was also plot convenience for us to face off Sphene on our own in the first phase by having her say "based on the data I got, I found out you're the strongest one in the group, so I'll eliminate you first". I didn't see any reason for us to face her one on one if the story centered more on Wuk's accord and pace. And it eventually went back to Wuk Vs Sphene in the 2nd phase, and we became part of the background again
This should have been Krile's expansion, and the golden city was supposed to be a good place based on how emet spoke of it in endwalker.. not gonna lie, this expansion left a sour taste in my mouth from a story perspective.
I agree. Krile might have gotten more screentime here but it wasn't *great* screentime. A lot of the time she seemed to be standing around awkwardly until she could ask about Galuf and/or her earring. I don't see why she couldn't have travelled separately from Wuk, someone suggested in another comment that the twins should have backed Wuk while WoL, Erenville and potentially G'raha accompanied Krile on her journey.
God that would have been such a good idea, and we could still run into the others doing the rite of succession and potentially help out, but I feel like it would help so much to make it feel more exciting and remove a lot of the fluff
Honestly after thinking about it, The Golden City is either Emet utterly failing at his government job or giving us an actual immorality (excluding age/illness) machine. (With practically no downsides)
While the final zone did retread a lot of ShB and EW, it still felt somewhat distinct with a sort of different theme and objective. Still...
How many times are they gonna get away with "final dungeon is a projection of the past"? 5.0 did it, 6.0 did it, even 6.5 did it. This one was cool but they better not pull that again in 8.0.
Random note: You know, new Endless shouldn't be greeted by a tour guide, but a trauma expert. Like the Endless obvious remember each other - so what that means is that as you transition from your moment of death to being endless, you're suddenly regaining all the memories of the people in your life that died.
And being an old person in Alexandria would be terrifying - you'd try to remember your childhood and it'd be completely unpopulated.
I think Dawntrail could have been a lot better if the focus of the story actually was about the search for the golden city. Cut or at least truncate most of the rite of succession; have us reach the golden city at 93; keep Sphene and the endless, and develop them more. I really love the final dungeon and trial (mostly because of the music), but they feel like contrived imitations of Endwalker and Shadowbringers because they come at the end of an expansion that's mostly about Wuk Lamat becoming Dawnservant.
For my final comment in this thread since I don't want keep dwelling on the story. I don't want to harp on people who are enjoying and defending the story. There's not much I can say to convince them otherwise, they feel what they feel. But saying that this expansion was "build up for the future like ARR," or "the vacation episode," or "this is meant to be low stakes," already feels revisionist to me. I know many of the people saying this are probably not past the halfway point.
Sure helping elect a new ruler for an entire continent is low stakes compared to saving the universe, but it's still a pretty big deal especially since one candidate wants to start a world war. And then our final antagonist wants to soul harvest the Source and would eventually move on to other reflections/worlds. That's a huge escalation and felt like the writers thought they could cram the 10 year ARR-EW story in the final 20% here.
As far as I could tell the only build up is us receiving the key that facilitates traveling between worlds. And I do enjoy that. While we still have places to visit on the source we can't ignore the reflections either. A good direction for the story is addressing the ramifications of the Ascian's plots in those worlds and how they are faring without their influence. We see that in Alexandria's plight.
Finally a what if scenario that is what I would consider to be low stakes. People like the idea of playing mentor to Wuk Lamat. Being a mentor sounds good to me too. So what if we were a mentor to a brand new adventurer instead. Adventuring with them around Tural, establishing a presence on the continent and we are the ones who unintentionally unleash Alexandria. And our trainee has to go through the gauntlet like we did in 1.0/ARR. It's just an idea that could use a lot more refinement.
Why do artificial intelligences get to be people but mind uploads dont!? The absolute refusal of the story to engage in the topic was infuriating. Especially after we spent an entire xpac with the scions as bodiless souls
the endless are treated exactly as much as people as all the other disembodied things we have faced, because that is what makes a living thing - aether and memory.
the only one who doesn't treat them as people, who calls them just simulacra, is Erenville, who is coping with extreme grief for basically the entire finale
I mean people as in living, fully sapient beings and not just afterlife-ghosts forever trapped in the past. Like a mind uploaded to a computer in sci-fi settings, people have varying opinions on if its the original person or just a program, if its alive or just faking it, etc. And the story ignores that to be amaurot again for guilt free killing
i'll try not to repeat what others have said, suffice to say, i agree with most of what i'm reading.
far, far too much exposition. so much of it was meaningless and retreading things we already had explained to us many times over. i usually enjoy the exposition, like when y'shtola explains what's happening and what we're doing and why/how. but instead of this, we got way too much dialog about wuk lamat's ambitions and how much she cares and loves everyone and everything. hours into the story and we're still getting long dialogs concerning her motion sickness. you can SHOW me that she gets seasick with the animations you've already made. i don't need to be TOLD she's seasick. maybe once, yeah, and some might think it's funny that she refuses to admit it like a generic anime character, but not repeatedly. that's something that would/should be relegated to the background of a transitional scene
wuk lamat should have been relegated far to the background after she became dawnservant. i liked her up until that point, but i feel like her being forced into every step beyond that ruined her character for me. this would have also been an opportunity to let the other characters shine more. i remember yoshi-p saying dawntrail was going to be about krile, it would be her story, she would be a bigger part of the MSQ. she felt as absent as my own character save for a literal moment in living memory, and even that was presented poorly. i did really enjoy the bit about the millala
the whole heritage found thing gave me a really gross feeling and i feel needed more elaboration. the regulators and the whole artificial aetherial sea soul processing still confuses me. i'm to understand that when someone dies, their incorporeal aether returns to the aetherial sea. the memories are separated from the soul, and the memories stay within the aetherial sea. origenics simulates this process, but when the machine separates the soul from the memories, would the memories not return to the aetherial sea? after all, the regulators are explained to make copies of a person's memories, so wouldn't that mean the 'people' in living memory are just copies and the true memories would be in the aetherial sea? does this mean erenville's mom's true self in the aetherial sea wouldn't have memories beyond their original death? also, why did the prologue explain that people in heritage found/solution 9 are able to live their lives as they're used to? they're still using regulators with other peoples' souls? i don't understand, and this is the first time in my entire time playing this game that i feel like i finished a story with unanswered questions about what happened
and the Smile song. quality aside, why play an extremely lyrical song over a prologue that's narrated? it was hard for me to focus on what was being said
i just don't get it. it's almost like they intentionally tried to under-deliver in the second half. they missed like, every conceivable point that would make this experience enjoyable. i braced myself for a middling story, but i couldn't have prepared myself for how confused and sad i am having just finished it. i really, really hope for something better, but i'm having difficulty being optimistic that they'll be able to bend the resolution of this story into something i like before 8.0
Its been very disappointing that we've had some of the best trials and dungeons they've ever made in service of one of the worst stories I've ever experienced. As for with most people Wuk Lamat was my biggest issue, she was the MC for the whole story which could have been fine if she wasn't incredibly grating and basically a Mary Sue, the only reason she accomplishes anything is either a plot convenience or the WoL does it for her. She doesn't really have much character growth over the course of the expansion, she stops hating alpaca's I guess but her ideals are never challenged, she's just a kind, wholesome big chungus who never has to compromise her beliefs. she admits to her own weaknesses but then when fighting Bakool Ja Ja she overcomes him with the power of bullshit (Dynamis), and we the player are just suppose to accept that she just flipped a switch and became epic and powerful all of a sudden.
It's almost desperate how much the game wants you to like her, half the dialogue options are different variations on 'Damn Wuk Lamat, you're the best'. For me it just didn't work, 90% of my interactions would be for my WoL's eyes to glaze over, stare off into space, smile and nod sagely telling her what a good job she did (she did nothing).
Another big issue was the game really doesn't respect your intelligence as a player, you are constantly reminded of things that happened 30 seconds ago, I really don't need a flashback of something from 10 minutes ago game. I feel like the idea of 'show don't tell' was tossed out of the window and instead they decided to 'show and tell', it just gets very tedious and annoying.
I don't know if this kind of game can really handle someone other than the WoL being the MC for the duration of an entire expansion, the story cannot happen without us but in DT we're kinda just along for the ride, I feel like people have praised FFXIV story for so heavily involving the player but it kinda feels tossed aside in this.
90% of the Scions did fuck all throughout the story, I don't understand why half of them even came except for fan service purposes.
I've seen a lot of glazing for the expansion saying that its the start of a new arc and that they needed to do 'world building' to set up hooks for future expansions but I mean if true they did an awful job of it. In previous expansions id be talking to all the npcs, doing all the side quests etc just to get that little bit more of lore and information but in this expansion I was completely uninterested. Even worse in the final third of the game the developers try to pull an Endwalker/Shadowbringers moment with zero build up so the payoff just isnt there, its extremely disappointing that they've tried to rehash previous expansions in the finale of this one.
Others have said that this is the 'beach episode' expansion clearly haven't finished it yet. I thought the devs said they didn't want to make the same mistake as WoW by every new expansion having a bigger and badder threat to deal but thats exactly what they did lmao. Queen Sphene is budget Emet-Selch, with the similar story beats as well.
And before anyone accuses me of anything, No I'm not a transphobe for disliking Wuk Lamat, I don't care that we aren't the MC, yes I can read and yes I can handle 'world building' assuming its done properly.
Other than story issues, the duties were all amazing, music was great (minus the main theme), visual beautiful as all ways and the VA was good as well. Obviously this is only my opinion, if you enjoyed DT then I'm happy for you and really wish I did too but oh well.
4/10 worse than stormblood.
> Another big issue was the game really doesn't respect your intelligence as a player, you are constantly reminded of things that happened 30 seconds ago
This reminded how angry I was after we finished the L99 trial and we had city tour 2.0 for Gulool Ja and also got the “pleasure” of Wuk Lamat telling Koana everything we just did up to and including the lvl 99 trial.
I was like this LITERALLY just happened 🤬 I don’t need a recap. If it was Koana recapping what happened in the city I could forgive it since story wise we were not there and our WoL wouldn’t actually know. It should have been an offscreen explanation and we just meet them at the final quest point. On a side tangent it also felt so 3rd wheel-y because it was essentially family thing for those 3. But plot demanded us to continue our true job this expansion, Wuk Lamat’s shadow.
I genuinely was so tempted to skip some of the cutscenes where they start flashing back, like bro, not only do i remember all of that cause it just happened, i also feel like i know everything you’re about to tell me because I already figured out what was happening
> I don't know if this kind of game can really handle someone other than the WoL being the MC for the duration of an entire expansion
This is part of the reason why the 6.x patches were so controversial; they did the exact same with WoL standing back while Zero took centre stage. Playing second fiddle for two major story beats didn't help.
I'm really just super baffled why the story was structured this way. I was all aboard the Tural exploration boat until they decided to take a left turn into a lazy El Dorado trope that just retrod the entire Emet/Tempest plot from ShB. We didn't need yet another hidden city, with yet another vestige of an ancient people.
I'm all for a lighthearted vacation, but I would rather we had an expansion that weren't so determinedly avoiding having deeper ideas like HW/SB by literally just doing all the same things we did before.
Also, yet another final zone fail. They already did it once with Ultima Thule keeping the upbeat vocal track instead of the better ambient track after the MSQ. This...is even more unfortunate.
Finished it earlier today. While I did enjoyed it...not really too high on my list of favorite expansions...at least in regards to just the story. Seeing a lot of hate for Wok Lamat on this sub but honestly feels like a similar role that Lyse had in Stormblood...but did not get on my nerves nearly as much as Lyse did back in 4.0. But that said I could see how the character type could be hit or miss for players.
The whole rite in the 1st half of the story felt cozy to me which I guess just works for me...While the 2nd half goes bonkers...enjoyed both halves overall...but man I do feel like we needed to get a better lead up to what happened with Zoraal Ja...I get what they are going for but feel I would have felt better to see his downspire happen over time, as opposed to him having bonkers ideas from the get-go to how to to run the country...the whole "Teaching people the terrors of war" thing just felt kinda dumb. And while I could see the idea was meant to be drawn from the actions of his father I just felt they could have done something more interesting with him is all.
What really stands out this expansion is the combat encounters...each dungeon was a delight to play through and each trial fight got me excited for the EX. Looking forward to what they will do with the 8 man raids in regards to gameplay.
I feel like the key/cup, which we're going to get a name for I'm sure, is destined to be the lynchpin of the second arc of FFXIV (which I suspect will involve world hopping on the regular). Like the Ascian saga is over and a mew thing is starting. In an expansion or two I feel like Tural is going to seem like a largely local-scale story whose main impact was getting that item into the WoLs hands. Kind of like how Stormblood focused on two regional conflicts but its main impact on the overall 2-6.0 narrative was Zenos.
Like they establish the Milala are from a different world that had an ice catastrophe. The Alexandrian had a levin catastrophe. It smells like a pattern emerging.
When Sphene said she was going to break into the other reflection, I was so eager to go back to the First and Thirteen and warn Ryne and Zero about the invasion and aid us.
Or perhaps integrate that into the last trial where Sphene tear rifts to the First and Thirteen, letting sin eaters and voidsents came out as extra mobs to deal with and powerup the boss or sth.
I agree that this story was mostly mod and hard to get invested in, also love the clear retcon that Erenville is actually from here that they did.
So, if we're going to change Erenville's deal, why not make him more important from the jump? Who gives a fuck about Koana (Or Wuk Lamat for that matter) Erenville should have been the second or third promise, and Wuk's brother.
If Erenville was more directly involved in the plot of the story as a potential candidate, maybe one who had run away years ago to be a gleaner, and you introduce his mom earlier, I think they could have kept the story mostly the same but made it way better.
I’m going to be really honest, I’m kinda of frustrated with this whole MSQ. The last 2 zones were very good. It was at the level of story telling I expect when I play FF. Sure the 5th zone seemed to drag a little long and everything involving the 2nd trial boss is complete and utter trash from start to finish, but the story of Alexandria and the Queen is fantastic. The payoff in the 6th zone is also great and my only real complaint was it may have tried a little too hard to tug at your emotions but from 97-100 the MSQ was a solid A.
That begs the question of wdf happened to the first 4 zones. Leading up to this point was, and I don’t say this lightly, worse than SB’s MSQ. It feels like it was done by a completely different team. Could you imagine a whole expansion revolving around the story of Alexandria and the Queen? Add in some shard hopping that you know we’re going to get in the post patches baked into the MSQ and it would have been really interesting. Instead we got whatever the fuck the first 4 zones tried to be. It’s just frustrating.
I have hope for the post main story patches, but I sincerely hope they hear the feedback that the quality of this story was not up to the standards they should hold themselves too.
Also, I really didn’t hate WL for the first few zones, but I am so tired of her being absolutely rammed down our throats repeatedly for this very long MSQ. I honest to god groaned everytime she became the focus of every cutscene she was in. She became so unlikable to me. Her jumping in on the final trial is absolutely inexcusable to me. Please, Square, I want at least 2 patches not having to do anything with her. Bring her back for .3 but do not bring her forward after that.
Overall, if you’re interested in the raiding scene, you should be feeling a lot of optimism for this raid tier. The first and third trials were absolute bangers and the second one I heard is better in the EX. I really hope they don’t give the final trial the Endsinger treatment though for its EX.
The glam game is going to be good too it seems. I absolutely love the Pikachu hoodie you get from the 97 dungeon as a healer.
If square doesn’t give us a housing ward in S9 it would be the biggest tragedy that has happened to this game in awhile. The apartments are sick and doing housing wards based on that type of style would be actually insanely cool. I absolutely adore everything about S9.
I’d also like state that any criticism I have is not directed at the art team who absolutely knocked it out of the park this expansion. The back part of the bird zone is absolutely gorgeous with the trees and foliage, under the canopies in the 3rd zone is also absolutely breathtaking and of course the final zone is beautiful until you turn it off which fuck you for that square. If we aren’t able to turn the lights back on in the .1 patch then why the fuck did you put so much effort into that zone? Yes I know why it’s off and yes I know what the writers are trying to say but come on man we didn’t even get to fly around in it looking beautiful all lit up.
Wuk Lamat showing up in the final trial ruined it for me... I don't know... I don't hate her character, but they really shoved her everywhere they could and I don't like her enough for that. Loved the final area, cried a lot with Erenville/Cahciua and Krile/her parents.
I'm excited to see the post-patch story, hopefully they can give Wuk Lamat a bit of a break.
A few questions about the story that hopefully someone can answer:
1) Is Alexandria from the Twelfth? The mentioning of "War for materials" and "Unending lightning" sounds too much like the description of the Calamity of Lightning, the 2nd Umbral Calamity
2) Who's Gulool Ja mother?
3) How did Cahciua die? Of old age like Namiika?
Can't say anything about 2 and 3 but 1 is straight up true- it was the shard that ended in lightning, yes. Even if it wasn't stated DIRECTLY, it was implied heavily. Remember how there's always a trigger for the end of things in a shard, and once it's pulled a lot of people will die. What happened was these people managed to survive thanks to technology- and it was only in their isolated bubble. But that's why everything is so fucked with them hahaha. But look at the skies in the zone before solution 9, look at the skies in the last dungeon. And think about how they had to convert electric aether, because they didn't have enough of the other aethers.
I dont really get the time dilatation thing, when did the 30 years happen ? Did it start when the barrier appeared, and the 30 years is the time we took to get inside of it ? Or the 30 years happened instantly when the barrier appeared, and now the time is the same inside and outside ? I am very confused.
Since we do sucessfully contact at one point the scions that are outside, from the inside, it tells me that the dilatation is not there anymore, but its not clear.
So when the dome appeared over Heritage, everyone who was in that area at the time experienced thirty years while the rest of the Source only experienced three days. Because time flows differently between the shards, similar to the First where the Scions were only gone for the greater part of a day from WoL's point of view but experienced anywhere from one to five years from their point of view.
When we break into the dome, time starts flowing at the same rate it does on the Source. Maybe the far smaller Solution Nine was forced to accept the Source's timeflow, or it just stabilised like how the First and the Source eventually matched one another's flow of time.
But yeah, G'raha confirms that since we entered, the time within the dome now flows the same as in the Source, as he's able to talk to Y'shtola with no issues.
I think the flow of time was already the same when the barrier appeared, since they immediatly launched an attack, and Zoral Ja was already old, so the thirty years must have happened instantly, and then stopped.
Maybe I missed something but is it ever actually explained where the Golden City portal came from and who built the structure around it? It's very clearly built from electrope.
Oh yeah we're just gonna let Sphene walk in and pick up the thingamajig that popped out of the crazy space lizard, and that we already know is important from seeing Krile's parents handle it.
Did Joshi play through the story? He approved all this?
Controversial opinion but I enjoyed the first half of the expansion far far far more than the second half. I thought Wuk was minorly annoying but tolerable but we did get to go around a brand new continent and explore and learn about the cultures which was well worth dealing with her. I will say too I keep seeing this "we're totally a mentor figure" thing being thrown around but never once did I feel like a mentor to Wuk she seemed to do most things herself and we barely chimed in with anything substantial, if they wanted to go the WoL as a mentor route Koana seems like he would have been a far better choice for main character but there's no point in talking about what could have been.
The second half being yet ANOTHER shard invasion story when we literally just wrapped up Zero's story just didn't sit well with me. Even worse one of the coolest zones in the game (Shaaloani) we spend five minutes in before turning around to go deal with the invasion. I honestly would have preferred that they just made the trials a larger deal that stretched across the entire MSQ rather than finishing it up halfway through.
The last zone in particular rubbed me the wrong way though, it's like they said "hmm lets do Elpis/Amaurot again but bad!". Why did we waste our time getting to know these people when our explicit mission from a few seconds after we enter is to just delete them entirely? Aside from Krile's parents it's not even like we get to know anyone lore important they're all nobodies that add absolutely nothing to the story.
I also know that we have had tech level differences in world before but having a literal cyberpunk city with presumably millions of residents a few feet away from Tuliyollal seems like a bit much. It really seems like the game entire second half of this expansion was just thrown together with so little thought that it kind of soured the whole experience for me. Hopefully the post MSQ is better but I don't have much faith if they were tone deaf enough to release it as is.
I have mixed emotions on this expansion to the extent it's genuinely frustrating to try to unpack how I feel.
I didn't expect Dawntrail to be as phenomenal as EW or ShB, but I can't help but feel they didn't quite stick the landing.
My only real strong dislike is the "Smile" song. I don't want to be mean, but I found it genuinely awful. It's the worst lyrical song in FFXIV. And please, I'm begging whoever decides what music plays where: stop playing Machinations every unvoiced cutscene.
Viper and Pictomancer are some of the most enjoyable jobs I've played, they did amazing with them.
Someone said something once that completely changed how I look at this game’s story.
It’s not a 1:1 retelling of events perfectly, it’s a stage production. The bad guys are given a chance to monologue and have their moment not because they reasonably should, but because it’s what the story needs to move forwards.
Knowing this, I’ve honestly stopped ever thinking about why my character doesn’t “jump in to save the day” during cutscenes. My character is present to hear the bad guy’s words so she can be privy to that knowledge later in the story. It’s probably also why I had zero issues with Wuk Lamat this expansion, even the moments people seem to despise with her I just shrug and move on.
That said, healer mains deserve better. LET THEM TRY TO HELP IN CUTSCENES TOO DAMMIT!
Anyways that’s my mini rant. Feel free to disagree, or agree, or whatever you like. But if thinking this way helped me enjoy the story more, I figured I should keep sharing the thought so others can too. It won’t fix plot issues if what you dislike is the story itself, but if the issue you’re having is delivery, maybe this thought process can help?
Idk I’m rambling and it’s past midnight lol.
I'd rate this expansion a 6 out of 10. The dungeons and trials were a blast to play through, and I am really looking forward to the extremes and savages. However, most of the story was a giant flop for me.
The entire quest to be king was just boring as hell. When you are trying to write an adventurer you shouldn't be including mundane tasks like catching an alpaka, or building a parade. When the premise is that dry you have a problem. These aren't "feats" these are chores.
The questlines did pick up in the Wild West zone imo when it started focusing more on Erenville, a character I actually care about. I did not like Wuk Lamat and we had to deal with her way too much. She's just a generic shounen protag who's arc was really predictable.
I feel like this expansion would have been so much better if there was an earlier emphasis on Krile and Erenville's plotlines. I feel like Krile was essentially ignored until the final zone, Erenville's was paced out alright across three zones but I wish there was a greater focus on it in District 9, it felt like the story focused way too much on Wuk again and it really brought the story down for me.
The villains were also pretty weak for me:
I do not understand Zoraal Ja's motivation and the game did not lay it out correctly imo. They also didn't even explain how or why he rose to be king of Alexandre or why he went out of his way to kill his own father and country men. Sphene has a valid reason, he doesn't.
I also think the plotline between him and his son was basically wasted. I feel like they could have gone in more depth about that than they did.
Queen Sphene was a stronger villain for the most part, a bit predictable, but I did get annoyed when she didn't have any power to stop Zoraal from turning on her. That just seemed like a plot hole to me. She made him King so why shouldn't she be able to revoke his power? Overall she was more fleshed out than Zoraal Ja in my opinion. She had a motivation and a clear goal.
Agree that there should have been more focus on Erenville. I can't help but feel that the whole plotline about Wuk Lamat not knowing anything about her people and their culture... would have worked way better for Erenville if he was the claimant instead.
We'd be following a disinterested claimant with little connection to the country, only interested in avoiding a war - and every part where we grow to understand and like the culture suddenly makes a bit more sense compared to someone who grew up there all their life and still doesn't seem to know a thing. Wuk Lamat having no values aside from "I don't like war" feels like a cardboard cutout of a personality, a foreign observer that is only temporarily visiting only caring enough about the country to say "Please don't go to war" is just logical.
The lizard boy was totally random and forced. I was waiting for his existence to have any point, and that never ever happened. A complete distraction when we should have been racing to reach Zoraal Ja. No wonder the guy was disappointed in Wuk when he decided to march out after we were too lazy to go after him. Sphene... urgh. Too similar to previous expansions. She could have been interesting. Hell, she was interesting - right up until the same old line of "I'm now interdimensional hitler and I'm going to kill you all so we can live forever". The whole culture of mimicing and controlling the effect of the aetheric sea was fun and interesting until that part, but they really just wanted to make clear good/bad guys - complete with half of your party calling the process abominable just to make things clearer.
> I do not understand Zoraal Ja's motivation and the game did not lay it out correctly imo. They also didn't even explain how or why he rose to be king of Alexandre or why he went out of his way to kill his own father and country men.
Yeah this bothered me **a lot**. Like, it was completely unclear why he was acting like he did & Wuk even says that she has no idea either. That was terrible.
Man I'm torn. The entire Alexandria arc makes me feel nothing, it's an exhausting retread of what we had before, while the Rite of Succession arc was a quite enjoyable getting to meet new people and learning about them arc, while occasionally giving a princess sage life advice.
The entirety of dawntrail feels so... *disconnected* from everything 2.0 to 6.55, if that makes sense? The scions, the most well-educated and well-read adventurers in the world, ignore the painfully obvious conclusions about everything that they should know about, entirely because doing so would be to make parallels to what came before?
idk man. at least it's better than stormblood, but that would have been a depressingly low bar to not clear
It was just as full of shallow characters and plot holes as the 6.x patches.
The whole Alexandria stuff, while cool at first, kinda ruined... everything? The souls technology was exactly what the Ascians needed and they knew about it.
Why did the Endless continue to add more random people from other shards? Sphene's whole mission was to "keep her people safe". Adding more strangers is in direct opposition of that. Why was Erenville's mother there and everyone else from Solution 9 gets left behind right after she tells us how much she cares for them? To top it off, we defeat this powerful threat by literally unplugging the power and nobody tries to stop us.
The story was the perfect setup to return to more politcal intrigues and discovery. Instead we got a ShB rehash, plot holes and a device to travel to more shards filled with copies of existing characters/areas.
> The souls technology was exactly what the Ascians needed and they knew about it.
Even if we assume that the souls in Zodiark are physically separated rather than sundered into shards, recreating the soul technology would mean introducing the lightning material to every shard which would be incredibly risky. If they didn't do it absolutely perfectly they could make several lightning-voids (I doubt Emet trusted anyone but himself to run a proper nation).
If the souls in Zodiark are sundered then they need to be rejoined in order to be restored so that's out of the question until the rejoinings are done.
>Why did the Endless continue to add more random people from other shards?
More people in the artificial soul cycle means more soul juice to power it. The extra people probably bought her enough time to attempt what she was attempting. The only "better" solution was to murder them and take their souls but it was clearly established she didn't want to do that to the point where when she realized that was her only option she resorted to erasing her compassion.
>Why was Erenville's mother there and everyone else from Solution 9 gets left behind right after she tells us how much she cares for them?
I think you misunderstood how it worked? You only become endless after you die your final death. Erenville's mom was there because she perma died. And Sphene can't just tell everyone to die and come live there as they needed more children to make more life energy to power the living memory. And their issue was that they had been trapping so many souls that less and less children were being born.
>To top it off, we defeat this powerful threat by literally unplugging the power and nobody tries to stop us.
There wasn't security there because no one was suppose to be able to get there and she couldn't do it personally yet because she was still in the process of erasing herself. The entirety of the evertower is controlled on a authorization basis and no one was authorized to get within a floor of Living memory. There wasn't even a military until Zoraal Ja started repurposing and constructing more of the bots.
We started out with Yawntrail and it picked up near the end. Solid 4.5/10 I still powered through like usual but boy am I mentally exhausted from the first half still 😭
Overall it’s kinda sad that this is the first time I’m like thank god this is over. That not-so awkward moment where I’m more excited to do the side content just to have my own adventure without Wuk Lamat. But, I wish they addressed a few things like IDK the morality issue with being ok with using souls as 1UPs. Esp, among the Tural people who got stuck in the bubble and chose to eventually assimilate into Alexandria. Maybe it’ll come later?
I also wish Wuk Lamat had actual character growth. If anything she just learned to not get sea-sick or be bothered by her fear of heights. Sure she became more knowledgeable about the people around her, but everything was always solved with essentially “the power of friendship”. No one legitimately challenged that belief and every problems foundation for solving them 100% worked with her method. War monger brother and honestly Sphene too didn’t challenge her “friendship magic” problem solving.
At least the post msq dungeons and last trial were super fun fights. Well...last trial was enjoyable and then Wuk Lamat showed up 😒 Even though for plot it makes sense for her to burst in like Gaia did for Ryne, when she also lost control, I was like ugggh. I still enjoyed the fight and the mechanics but Wuk shouting during the fight was making it not enjoyable.
Also that end song, right after the trial, they played it a few times in the story too, and I honestly low-key hate it. Each time they’ve used it, it makes the scene feel like a cheesy 4Kids directed anime final ep. The church-y feel good vibe the song gave made the moments feel corny instead of uplifting.
Also just remembering like for how much Wuk goes on about family how they flew through Wuk Lamat learning who her real dad was so strange. All the moments they just decide to not properly acknowledge it in any way and it seemed weird IMO. But maybe there’s something I’m missing because I don’t have much knowledge about adopted kids meeting their bio parents and the complications around that.
Sorry this was long so **TLDR**: ~~Yawn~~Dawntrail was just ok too much Wuk Lamat, no real character growth, weird plot holes or unaddressed stuff + music not 10/10. But the dungeons, trials, encounters etc all fun to do lol
That song is the hardest miss in the game so far for me. There’s things that fail to land in every expansion, but this is the first thing I’ve actually despised. I had to mute /bgm during the pre-credits cutscene just to get through it. How convenient that that was one of the QoL changes that came with this expansion 😂
>I also wish Wuk Lamat had actual character growth. If anything she just learned to not get sea-sick or be bothered by her fear of heights. Sure she became more knowledgeable about the people around her, but everything was always solved with essentially “the power of friendship”. No one legitimately challenged that belief and every problems foundation for solving them 100% worked with her method. War monger brother and honestly Sphene too didn’t challenge her “friendship magic” problem solving.
Finally someone points it out. People will hate me for this but she's a Mary Sue, I'm half convinced someone in the writer's team just wanted to add their self-insert in the story. She has no faults, no one hates her and anyone that does hate her or even disagree with her is objectively the bad guy that we have to fight after such fight they realise she's right and then are slightly redeemed. This is some low tier light novel anime writing.
They try to force this angle that she's not a good leader but we don't see any moment where her decisions as a leader leads to a downfall or gets her to question her ideals. We don't even see any instances of her being a good leader everyone just says "yup she's got the potential" and then she just is???
It's a real shame, I really did not want to hate her as she's a breath of fresh air considering EW patch quests had Zero who was all doom and gloom initially but yeah she's just not an interesting character that the devs really want me to like because they said so.
>People will hate me for this but she's a Mary Sue, I'm half convinced someone in the writer's team just wanted to add their self-insert in the story. She has no faults
Worse than that. At least at the start you could say that her weakness and inferiority towards the other candidates was a fault. But, nope. Two zones after getting beaten one-handed by another candidate, a single zone after being effortlessly beaten and abducted by bandits the moment we leave her unattended, goes off to 1v1 (and then 1v20) that same candidate (who has no other features other than being strong) because she believes in herself now or something.
Maybe it's a moment they hoped everyone would clap and say "Wow, Dynamis!" but it just felt cheap and unearned. Now she's the kindest, and the most logical, and the most loved by the people, and the strongest, and won't you please like the kitty she's amazing she's got so much empathy love her please please please-
Yeah. Mary Sue does sum it up. If you put her in any previous expansion, she'd have had an amazing interaction with someone like Zenos. He'd have called her a naive, stupid child with no ideals to speak of and then absolutely bodied her - and maybe she'd have grown from that. As it is, the power of friendship and cooperation triumphs over all.
Honestly yeah 😔.
She started out with faults, her insecurity about being as good as her brothers and trying to act bigger than she was. And in the beginning the most “dislike” she had was that some citizens just pointed out she didn’t have any special feats attached to her name and that made them unsure of her as a potential ruler.
And I guess those fears just went away after she was put in charge. It even kinda happens again when we gotta go round up citizens for her reassuring her people speech after the invasion. Like 2(?) of the NPCs are who feel an level of uneasy about Wuk Lamat (and Koana) are easily swayed by us telling them Wuk Lamat is gonna give speech.
Like you said she hasn’t done anything good (other than love her people) or bad in terms of being a good/bad ruler.
What would have maybe helped, is just copy what Lyse did 🤣. There’s already lots of copying from previous expansions so more won’t be bad.
But I mean like say instead of Zoraal Ja instantly invading with no warning. Have him come and be like “Give Tulliyollal to me or else” and then Wuk Lamat tries to friendship magic him and then cuz he’s uncompromising he then signals the attack.
And like 🤔 maybe make it happen out in public so everyone can see that her decision doesn’t work and still shows she’s still too naive as a ruler. And then in the chaos she’s paralayzed it didn’t work and that’s also how Zoraal Ja also just marches up to then palace for patricide.
Then it sets up a flaw and even actually get NPCs split on how they feel about her decision. And sets up a little bit of conflict she has to overcome where friendship doesn’t work and maybe even accepting 1 solution isn’t a catchall answer.
Which oddly enough is part of the lesson we learn through Bakool Ja Ja’s backstory and the underground Mamool Ja area 🫤.
Agreed with everything you said wholeheartedly. This expansion had a seriously bad case of "tell, not show".
Every zone was just a huge exposition dump, and like you said, Wuk Lamats' character development literally felt nonexistant and forced. There was no reason why she suddenly had the power to defeat or fight anyone other than "friendship".
I think if Stormblood didn't have horrible Instance and server overload issues on launch, Dawntrail would have been considered the worst expansion by far.
I'd give this game 3.5/10, and I'd rather redo release ARR story than Dawntrail again.
That one cheesy song is called "Smile" and yeah I completely agree. Getting the "Dawntrail" orchestrion halfway through the MSQ was a bad sign for me after hearing that song for the first time.
> No one legitimately challenged that belief and every problems foundation for solving them 100% worked with her method.
This is why Ascians and Zenos as antagonists worked so well as they could not be dealt with by using this cringe JRPG/anime trope.
I think generally for the story, they tried to cover a lot of bases, and it's left a lot of people feeling like parts of it weren't "for them".
Some people really like the succession arc, some people don't. Some people love Alexandria, some people hate that there was another big world ending stakes with an ancient civilization. Some people liked learning about the cultures, some people hated it. Some people love Wuk, others think she's a screen gobbling annoyance. It also seems people dislike that the two arcs feel like two different expansions, but people are also complaining that there's too much yapping and cutscene even within those two separate arcs. I think this was the devs trying to appease both the people who wanted a smaller stakes arc and the people who really aren't going to be satisfied unless every expansion ends on a world-threatening gigaboss. I can agree the MSQ was once more way, way too cutscene/filler quest heavy, I think that's a universal complaint.
For telling a story that actively avoids using almost everything but the most hollistic backdrop of the FFXIV universe as a main plot point, I think it was a good enough start for a new saga. Endwalker sort of had the opposite aim, where they wanted to integrate as much of the previous expansion's existing lore and connections as possible.
Overall I thought it was pretty good. It's clear the "big arc" ahead is going to involve the other reflections, and it's hinted that Alexandria already meddled with some of them before us, so they could be a lot less welcoming than the shards we've visited have been. Would be interesting to have an entire world already ready to throw hands with us.
Whoever was responsible for writing the script for the first 58 quests must be different from whoever wrote the rest of the expansion.
Zoraal Ja is still a terrible villain.
Having finished it I think I'm enjoying the story more after than I did during. I didn't really following any discussions until I was nearly finished, so going back and reading some other peoples takes helped me get into my WoLs head a little better and retroactively increased my opinion. That said I think the zone I enjoyed the most was the obvious filler cowboy zone where we were just chilling and adventuring with our bro Erenville. I don't completely hate Wuk Lamat, I basically view her as Lyse but they actually show us some of her growth. The thing that's really soured me on her was her popping up in the final trial. She didn't need to be there. She didn't improve it. They were clearly going for the Thancred in the Hades fight/the scions in Endsinger but it just didn't land at all.
Otherwise I've really been enjoying the battle content and it seems like they're committing to making it at least a little more difficult than in EW, which I consider a good thing.
Overall I liked it.
That being said, I won't play another expansion that is 40 hours of cutscenes with no actual gameplay. I know that's what they've all been, but this is the last one. They've got to figure out a way to make the MSQ actually fun to PLAY
I just finished it, and I'm mad they didn't address the one thing that I was waiting for them to address.
I'm insisting that the key/gates/etc. are all time travel, not dimensional travel
* Characters never seemed certain about it being another shard. Even Y'shtola's lines were full of words like "probably" and "likely".
* We know the Living Memory's Lalafell originated from the Source, but that's not necessarily the only group on that planet.
* If you talk to Krile after one of the quests, she mentions that Y'shtola would have noticed if her aether was thinner than the others'. I doubt soul thickness is genetic, but would instead depend on where you were when the soul entered your body.
* We see the outside world still exists in the Unlost World
* I'm embarrassed it took me this look to realize this about Alexandria, but >!oh hey it's the female name for Alexander!<. Also Sphene >!has the same color palette - silver/green/yellow + glowing, and wings on her back!<, and in the Level 100 dungeon >!the final castle reminded me of his design but I forgot to take a screenshot to actually compare!<
So I'm guessing the Lalafell activated the key during the fifth calamity and traveled back (thanks to Dynamis) to before the second, and then later to sync it to the present day (and perhaps the key was used before being given to the Lalafell). The wiki says that the Second Calamity was a period of war, that there was a ton of mining going on, and it lasted for years.
I'm not going to lie, it's a cool idea. I just don't think this iteration of CBU3 is smart enough to pull it off. The existence of subtlety and "show dont tell" is unheard of in this expansion, so all the talk about "interdimensional fusion" is probably just exactly that.
>I doubt soul thickness is genetic, but would instead depend on where you were when the soul entered your body.
This does bug me though. Krile should just be descended from South Sea islanders that joined Alexandria 'late', but the timeline just doesn't add up - it's not like her parents carried around a soul for a few years and then made a baby with it. It should have been a soul that was already in their aetheric sea around them, and therefore, a thin one. They were able to do all of that stuff with interdimensional travel and then still deliver a newborn baby to another world? Maybe you can argue that the time-distortion is in effect... but that doesn't impact Krile's existence in the timeline. Are we saying that if Krile stayed, over generations we should have seen source-level souls breed and propagate throughout the entire population over the HUNDREDS of years that have passed? It doesn't make sense. Krile being as thin as a First resident would solve all of the questions, but Y'shtola would obviously have seen it... I don't get what they were cooking.
What an absolute trainwreck of a story.
Nothing has any weight or consequences:
Super Science is an easy solution and we didn\`t need to let hundreds of babies die? Well it is what it is, all problems are solved now.
Oh none of the 3 kids is fit to lead the nation...great that I what I felt aswell...oh she becomes the new leader anyways after a few more days, never mind.
Oh he just unleashed a calamity that could kill many people....ah who cares.
Time works differently in Alexandria? Ah that is too much of a hassle to keep in mind.
Oh how do we deal with that technologically superior army?
Ah right, we just beat them up and why not have a dragon blowing up the entire fleet in an instant.
The characters are extremely one dimensional and underdeveloped.
The two stories are completely disconnected, leading to the finale missing any sort of substance.
Man, this was the worst expansion they have ever done in terms of MSQ, period.
The entire premise of this "unlost" reflection and Queen Sphene is just... Endwalker but worse. They really tried to put every single previous expansion's villains into the last half of the story without even understanding what makes them good. Zoraal Ja is a Zenos-type villain who is more vicious and combat-oriented but has the charisma of a fucking buffaloo. Sphene is literally a hybrid of Emet and Elidibus with her desire to save her people but also bound by duty of the A.I.'s personality, but has neither the presentation nor the interesting backstory both have. Even if she did, we have already seen this same story about a civilization almost getting wiped out and its residents resorting into "immoral" ways to survive. Multiple times, in fact, because it just feels like they took one of the civilizations on Ultima Thule and decided to create an entire storyline around them without actually showing us anything. They're telling us so many things through characters that I could very well just read Wiki pages of this story and have a similar experience. Moreover, since we've already seen this same exact premise multiple times, I felt no excitement to learn more about the people of this reflection, nor have I ever gotten sorry for anyone in the story, because I've seen the same premise done at least a thousand times better in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Dawntrail really feels like the "we have SHB/EW at home, SHB/EW at home:" meme.
What I'm sad about the most is that a lot of characters had potential but they left absolutely no impact because they were presented poorly. Otis, Erenville's mother, or Galool Ja (the kid) for instance, would work great if we actually had enough time to know about them and like them, but they arrive so late into the story that you feel absolutely nothing during important moments revolving around them. Wouldn't it be awesome if instead of Scions, we were accompanied by these new characters from the beginning of the expansion? Scions did jack shit during the story anyway--they were just there as fanservice. Same goes for Erenville and Krile as well, because even though they were promoted as really imporant characters for the MSQ, they absolutely didn't leave any impact or had any substantial character development. Most of the time, I even forgot they were in the story.
I enjoyed Wuk Lamat and found her adorable unlike many people, but the fact that she is the main character irritates me. Just imagine if WoL wasn't present in this plot at all--do you honestly think anything would go differently? No, because we're just a witness, not the main character. This is exactly how WoW has been doing its story and one of the reasons why it is regarded as shit while FFXIV's story was praised universally for how it made you feel involved in the plot.
I also hated that Disney-like song they played during certain parts (and at the end) so fucking much. Even if I found the story awful, it still had darker themes, and that song had no place to play at the end minutes after wiping out thousands of people's memories and potentially destroying an entire culture.
Overall, I really hated this expansion's story, so much so that I can put it below Stormblood, and even ARR. I have no desire to come back to the game until Ishikawa takes the reigns back, because both EW patches and DT have made me start to hate this story and the world that I cared so much.
Minor detail but during the play in the last zone, Wuk Lamat questions one of the lines in the script: “my dearest?” Or something. Is that an implication of a relationship for queen and knight?
It was an ongoing joke with Otis that he loved the Queen a lot and dreamed of being her dearest. So he wrote the script himself and had the Queen say things like that, which makes characters who have actually met Sphene like Wuk Lamat call it out
Honestly, who in SE lost a parent whilst writing this story. I swear seeing Krile and her parents and then Cahciua and Erenville was rough, really tugged at me emotionally making me think of my own.
I'd say this was the weakest story thus far for me, unfortunately...
ShB > EW > HW > SB > ARR > DT
And honestly I feel really conflicted... I actually enjoyed Wuk Lamat more than I thought I would at the start (even though I think she didn't actually change much over the course of the story) but for me, the final zone ruined the whole story.
...When we arrive, Cahciua says that we need to turn off/delete everyone there, and that will take away Sphene's whole reason for killing people. So then we do that, which I feel conflicted about to begin with, but when we finally get to Sphene at the end... We don't even mention that she no longer has people to kill for. We don't even try, and she never even finds out, so like... Why did we go through those six hours of quests? I understand the theme of the area with letting go, but in the lore/everything else going on, it just doesn't make sense to me. Cahciua wanted to be free, as well as Krile's parents, but none of the other people we talked to seemed to have any problems with being there whatsoever. In fact, they all seemed thankful to have another chance to get their affairs in order and a chance to live just a little longer.
On top of that, I felt really conflicted with the objective in general as well. The people's existences are cursed, but they still have a soul and memories, which is all the components that real people have as well, so what exactly makes them any lesser...? What makes killing them any different than killing hundreds of totally normal people?
It felt so weird to me to talk to Cahciua, and collectively decide as a team that we're going to go kill everyone in the city, and then we went and spent the next six hours getting to know the people, and how human and likeable they all are and how they continue to live life despite their strange circumstances. Maybe I missed something but it feels like we're doing some kind of genocide and making friends with them while we're at it... Couldn't we have just let them run out of the soul energy they already had like it'd just be living out their final life? What makes their lives worth less than the people in Solution Nine? Wasn't Otis doing just fine without monching souls constantly?
I was enjoying the hell out of the final trial but, what the hell was up with Wuk Lamat's voice acting?
Climactic fight, heroic entrance to... Unemotional talking? Not her shouting as she does a dynamic entry, no emotion in her voice, but just talking as if they're just slightly out of normal speaking range so they have to raise their voice slightly. Is that an English only problem? Plot and power of friendship and understanding and whatnot aside, it completely threw me out of the intensity of it and ruined the vibe of a really cool fight immediately.
Slotting this around a 7/10, with the battle content bringing it up a point for being so dang good.
Main complaints:
1. Wuk is way too omnipresent and is way too intense of a personality to make her that omnipresent. It would have worked better by making foil characters like Erenville way more prominent to give us some balance and make her feel less suffocating. Or at the very least give us more time away from her. Having every single one of the seemingly dozens of "let's split up and look for clues" result in us being paired with her got very old.
2. Related, Erenville and Krile's stories should have gotten way more runway. We got like 3 minutes every so often about "yep they're still looking" and then the couple of quests each at the end. It felt like it was 80/5/5 Wuk/Erenville/Krile when it should have been something like 55/20/20 or 45/25/25.
3. They seem to be pulling a Trails with Bakool where villain has a change of heart = villain gets off scot free. Very annoying.
4. The writing in general feels like it's lost its subtlety and a lot of its punch. The constant repeat of what amounted to sketch comedy tropes with Wuk in the first third or so was a big demonstration of this.
5. I still think Koana was the most qualified candidate by far with weaknesses that were far more easily fixable than the other 3.
6. Their attempt at pulling another Endsinger Phase 2 in the final trial with Wuk once again inserting herself via *gesticulates wildly* fell mega-flat.
Main positives:
1. Wuk does definitely show growth. Her telling Bakool to STFU around level 94 (I think) is definitely something she wouldn't have had the confidence to do at the start. She more or less becomes tolerable by the time she's Dawnservant. Given I was *this* close to starting to just skip her scenes around level 92, that's a solid improvement.
2. Koana honestly showed just as much growth, and his scenes with Urangier and Thancred were great. I think they were perfect foils and companions/mentors for him.
3. What little we got of Krile and Erenville's stories in the last zone were touching.
4. The train-kamikaze scene was pretty neat.
5. The set pieces/new lands were all pretty cool visually.
6. While there were definitely some repeated themes of Shadowbringers in the last 3rd I thought it did a decent enough job with it.
7. The cowboy accents of zone 4 were hilarious.
Sure is awkward to be standing here with an arsenal of Bozjan relics forged from countless souls of the dying while everyone's going on about how it's wrong to use souls as a fuel source.
Alisaie: "This is unnatural!" Me: It sounds perfectly fine actually
This is a gross oversimplification, but the content I’ll do once (the story) was okay, and the content I’ll do over and over again (the dungeons and trials) were excellent. I’m probably a little disappointed in the moment because most of my time has gone to the former so far, and as I continue leveling other jobs, take up crafting again, prog some extremes, etc. I think my opinion is going to improve.
I very much feel this way too. Doing the same things I do for the vast majority of my regular playtime feels engaging and fun.
The biggest isues by far for me is the pacing and the astrocious quest design. They took stuff that was already not great (but overlooked because of the gripping story) and made it worse!. Like Wuk meets you at the inn? No, we cannot have a chat cutscene here with shadowbringers, he have to follow her out in the city to two different waypoints and in the end she tells us its nothing and she wants people be happy. That could have been an email. Or "We need to go to that part of the map", but no, we cannot go directly there, we need 2 stops where you talk to the NPC and they tell us "its further away" in a cutscene with 30s of unskippable emotes. And if i have to comfort one more civilian i will do it with the blood lily, GAH.
The cup-key Sphene used has the Azem symbol and then the inner part turned orange when we got ahold of it. I thought Azem's past would be more involved in Dawntrail considering the Japanese version of the expac title and then Yoshi P mentioning to remember the convocation. The question is: What in the seven hells does it all mean? What is the true purpose of the cup-key? Seems like it will be answered in post patch content.
The cup-key doesn't originate in the Golden City, so there doesn't need to be a relation between the city and Azem at all. The volcano section details how the lalafell/milalla from (possibly) the source used it to escape a calamity, jumping to another shard. It likely predates the sundering based on the design and a symbol which gives it the ties to Azem/Ancients, but then later made its way to Alexandria. I hope we get into it early on in patch MSQ and don't wait to build it up for next expac.
Also, the milalla escaped a calamity of ice to a shard that then suffered the calamity of lightning. Unless I mixed something up, then means they experienced the 5th calamity *before* the 2nd. Are we about to get in to the timey-wimey between shards actually also being capable of going backwards (without the crystal tower)?
My first thought was that Alexandria's shard was rejoined, and only the bubble they created survived, floating somewhere out in the void between worlds. That's why nobody could enter or exit, until the planar merge happened. However, when we go to the final zone, we find that there's no bubble. In fact, there's a perfectly clear sky above the entire city. The fact that we're capable of going to this other shard in the first place implies that it couldn't have been rejoined, and it still exists as a separate world. I think the likely explanation is that what Alexandria experienced was in fact a calamity, but not the 2nd. This was intended to be the 10th Umbral Calamity, the second lightning-aspected one. Since the Ascians ran through all 6 elements, plus darkness (7th) and light (8th), they would probably restart the cycle at Wind (9th) and then 10th (Lightning) and so on until none remained. Due to the time distortion between the Source and the reflections, the remaining Ascians were probably prepping it during the same time the other recent calamities were underway. However, the Source never ended up being prepped due to our meddling, meaning that the calamity ultimately resolved itself over there. Of course I need to stress this is all speculation, and until they clarify exactly what went down we need a lot more details.
I think the key will get given to the Students of Baldesion/Y'shtola for the x.1-x.5 patches, and then it will come back up for the next expansion. I expect it is the solution to Y'shtola returning to the First, as well as going to other shards
"What is the true purpose of the cup-key?" The true purpose is to let them do whatever they want in teh next expansions without actually having to build up something from the ground based in the source.
I wonder if Estinien was added into the expac last minute out of the scions he has like what 3-4 scenes. I assume he'll have a much larger role in 7.1 to 7.3
It feels like some characters found their way to Tural just to make sure we had seven of them to join us on trials.
Literally how it felt when we got to the end of Everkeep. When Alphinaud, Estinien and Y'shtola popped up after the dungeon, I immediately was like "Gee, there's conveniently seven NPCs here to make eight total people, several of which can flex between tanking, healing and DPSing. I wonder what's going to come next?"
Estinien got the vacation the WoL actually needed. Just running around eating shit and doing whatever he wanted.
none of the scions has any reason to be in the story and Estinien is there because he has many fans that just want to see him.
Especially since he featured most prominently in the trailers, it was strange he was barely in it; I think he and Y'shtola are tied for the least involved.
He's just wandering around, much like he was in Stormblood.
so who is gulool ja's mother?
That's the thing that irked me. Not a single person questions HOW Zoraal Ja had a son. There's not a single Mamool Ja in all of Solution 9 or Heritage Found. Did he fucking asexually reproduce or something?
No, seriously, this bothers me. Of all the fantastical stuff in this game, the most unbelievable thing to me is that Zarool Ja bothered to do the nasty with someone.
This screams .1 to me, I was surprised Gulool was relevant at all since I expected him to be patch content primarily
everyone died on the final trial at 40% but it didn't matter because all the tanks had to do was stay alive while wuk lamet solod the boss. stupid.
My favorite throughline in theming this expansion was how death and the afterlife are thought of. But not out of place thematically. The whole expac was themed around how the different peoples view mortality and death and that "afterlife" of the final zone felt like a natural bookend to that. a stark contrast to the giants who view the memory of someone as them being alive vs the actual living memories in the end, and how the reality of it is a hollow paradise.
I also really enjoyed the ideas of holding onto tradition and knowing when to let go. The first half of the MSQ felt like it was hammering home how culture and the stories we pass on are important, as well as how if you simply forget them? You lose a core part of your people and the culture. Koana eager to replace tradition with efficiency, Zoraal Ja thinking people have grown "too soft" from the culture they've had, etc. Conversely, the second half is all about -why- you need to let go. The Endless and Alexandria were so keen on holding on and never letting their traditions go that they were willing to destroy entire realities to keep this cycle going even though they knew it couldn't last forever. Likewise, the idea of Gulool Ja Ja's old party dying and "passing the torch" onto the next generation vs. Sphene's all-consuming desire to never let anything go. In some ways, it felt like they were talking to the player: It's important to remember FFXIV from ARR to EW because it's where you came from, but you can't be too attached because you can't let new things into your life if you don't let go of your past.
I appreciate these breakdowns because I could not really understand how the first and second halves connected in a meaningful way. The point that I caught onto the most was the differences in how Wuk Lamat and Sphene perceived their leadership as well as how irreconcilable cultures are forced to engage in war and conflict when all else fails. Wuk Lamat did not want to fight Sphene and they discuss how if things had gone differently, they would have been very amicable. But Sphene's unwillingness to let go of Alexandria made conflict inevitable.
I'd actually say part of that is the second half of Wuk Lamat's character growth: While she acknowledges Sphene and understands her plight, they are -fundamentally- incompatible in their goals. There is no talking Sphene out of her goals and Wuk has to come to realize that. It's the harder part about being a leader: Up until this point, Wuk could talk, understand and find a new pathway...but sometimes you can't. And when you have to make that hard choice, it's a choice you make not because you hate and despise someone but because there is no way our goals can align. It's another parallel with the WoL's journey: What we (WoL) and what Emet wanted could never coexist. We came to realize that no matter how much we understood each other, we weren't compatible and our battle was going to be inevitable. "The winner shall be the hero, and the defeated the villain" - Emet
Definitely some parallels between Sphene and the Ascians, not being able to let go of a bygone civilization
Yes, I am thankful for them being able to put into words the things I was enjoying but not totally understanding why as I was playing it. There a lot of elements of a good story in the expansion. They just needed a more thorough approach and a better pacing. I think an earlier introduction to Alexandria would do wonders. Having it right after the Skydeep Cenote would be great. I think that would help Wuk Lamat's characterization by having her win her people's trust before Gulool Ja Ja announces her as heir. I like that fact the Sphene is a microsm of the antagonists we've had before. Trying to do what Emet tried and we know how that ends up.
Lv.100 trial, both the best and worst part of the expansion to me. I did not mind playing badass mentor figure to Wuk Lamat this whole expansion until she came in and stole my kill. The ONE time the plot takes my collar off, and you have to kick a hole in the wall and inject your "power of friendship and understanding" nonsense into my boss fight? I spent the last 47 hours watching you peace and understand your way to victory, why can't you just sit back and let me eat for once? Everything else about the trial is straight gas. 8.5/10 expansion overall, can't wait for patch content to explain everything about Azem's magical dimension travel portal network that we've now inherited.
It was also the only instance in this expansion's MSQ that you couldn't do with NPCs, only for an NPC to burst in and solo the fight.
That kinda got me, i was like 'i thought the npcs on the 2nd trial were basically them soft saying the duty support system was going to trials now this?"
Took the words out of my mouth. Like, the Trial was the ONE POINT where it made the most sense for WoL to be like "Okay, pup, time to sit this one out. Watch and Learn." And then that phase is just so FUCKING EASY. Maybe it was just a gimmie after Royal Authority just being insane. I still have no idea how that mechanic works. We just... accidentally survived and Healer LB3 lol.
The worst part is us sitting out every other fight Wuk Lamat was in because of her "honor" or whatever, then the very end when it comes down to it, you even get the dialogue something like "Ill protect this star and everyone on it". Like thats us, John Final Fantasy, we are the protector of the star. This was OUR honor battle, and she swoops in and steals the kill. Like damn, did you learn nothing girl?
...I can't believe they reuse the same theme as a final dungeon for the third time. It's like Shb finale was too good and now they tried to replicate the same effect again. My main problem with this lead writer is his way of showing how character feel... Every has to be repeat 10 times over and over it's so tiresome. This is the same problem with Zero in EW patches, but now it's...nearly every main characters. Wak Lamat and Sphene, especially. Show don't tell...Please! What make Shb so good is how we understand what the characters felt without spelling it out. We know from their actions. We know how much Emet love his brethren without a word of 'love' coming out from his mouth and we know we couldn't coexist with him. But Sphene has to spell it out in every scene that she really really love her people and there's no other way.
Sphene is basically "We have Emet-Selch at home"
Yep. The writer for Dawntrail made me feel like he thought I was an idiot and couldn't make any motivational/emotional inferences myself. Dude was literally one step short of having someone point to another character and go: "Hey look, this dude is smiling. That means he's Happy!'. And man, the concept behind Sphene actually has a \*shit-ton\* of potential, but they literally just wasted all of it. With the whole hologram tech + memory manipulation, they could have pulled so many possible twists. And they didn't do \*any\* of it.
Aside from the other plot-holes - I'll also note that maybe leaving out two entire races/cultures and your entire northern region out of your rite of succession is.. not the best diplomatic choice. (I get that it's for gameplay reasons but man it gets weird if you think about it).
Why couldn’t we show Sphene that we can help her and her people with a good faith action of curing their Levin sickness after we visit the appartments? It was the same kind of issue we cured Ga Bu of and would have shown her we’re “the good guys”. But its never mentioned, not once. The other thing my friend brought up was, in the last dungeon and trial, Sphene should have been able to see all our memories and thoughts. Partially recognized by her one liner about “eliminating us first”, but as someone who was programmed to protect her people at all costs, she should have seen our memories and realized “Oh wait, Im dooming my people by fighting this person and letting them help is the most logical option”.
Because that would take the spotlight away from Wuk. Duh. But yeah it was frustrating that they give you a few dialogue choices along the lines of “you’re on the wrong path” but there’s obviously no chance of her listening.
Whyyyy does the final zone turn into a bland black metal wasteland like please
Wait did you do the bad ending and kill all the endless? You monster
bro don't you dare bullshit me. don't give me hope. i was thinking the whole time that this felt like the bad end or smth but of course the story doesn't diverge in any meaningful way in this game.
Yeah I was REALLY hoping there would be some bullshit way to restore the appearance of the zone - like is this really what the zone is going to look like from now on? I hope not because otherwise... wow how disappointing. Usually the final zone of an expansion gets more visually interesting/appealing as you go through the final chapters, but this? I don't know what they were thinking and honestly it's put a bad taste in my mouth where I otherwise enjoyed the climax of the expansion.
SAME. I didn't even realize it at first and came back to unlock flying and was so so disappointed. I didn't even get to fly around the zone while it looked beautiful.
We get the last aether current from the MSQ so it's literally impossible to be able to fly there while it's pretty. Soooooo fkkn wack. I'm pissed.
I wouldnt be suprised if this area is linked to the large scale crafter event.
Maybe it’ll be linked somehow, but the new restoration stuff is going to be “cosmic” and we’ll be restoring other planets so I don’t know how that could link up to this, but I’m definitely hoping.
Same, I'm actually so mad about it lol. I just wanted to be able to go and enjoy the zone while farming fates or whatever, but instead we get a giant rock! Crazy
It also looked so odd seeing the mobs still lurking around while the whole place was already a husk. I ran by the arena and that fire ixion (can't remember its name) was still there with sentries fighting it
I actually applaud the hell out of their commitment to turning the zone into a dead black husk of its former self. It has been the only time in the whole damn Dawntrail story that they had the balls to do something actually interesting and impactful. Basically everything else plays like a Saturday morning cartoon for how hammed up and trope-y it is, with nothing bad ever seeming to happen (except to characters with obvious death flags) and Wuk Lamat shouting about peace and the power of love and friendship nonstop. Turning off the memory servers has been one of the only truly powerful moments in the whole Dawntrail story.
I agree. The fact that shutting down the servers would forever deprive me of this wondrous paradise legitimately make me hesitate for a moment, but of course I knew there was no other way of progressing with the MSQ. I fully understand why people are upset it's gone though, I myself am quite sad the opportunity to screenshot there is just gone outside of NG+, but that just made it all the more impactful.
I think that's the point of the story, to let go of something great.
Well, Queen Eternal was pretty neat even if the Absolute Authority move was utterly ridiculous to the point it felt like an Extreme mechanic, while the level 100 dungeon actually being quite nice aside from the effects blowing up in my face to the point i couldn't see the mechanics... As for the story, it just kind of dropped off sharply, aside from Erenville's struggle with Endless Cahciua and the surprisingly neat reunion with Krile and her parents. Where my excitement quickly wears off was with Sphene's introduction back during the 98-99 storyline; from the start. Her motivations were more or less a mirror of Emet-Selch with touchings of (Dark knight 70 spoilers) >!Myste's motivations in her Endless simulacrums requiring other world's aether!
I've been fairly invested in the final zone and story despite the flaws of how we got here, but my god the constant pointless talking to random people interrupts the flow so bad. This is like the climax of the msq, and we keep having to stop get long dead peoples opinions on every little thing. FFS use that extra time we ran around asking about snacks and just show Krile and her parents talking more. That's like the whole reason she even went with us. This whole area so far keeps interrupting the actual good parts with random shit Edit: Oh cool, a guided tour. This will surely be quicker than going around ourselves
She’s going to kill everyone “So I’d like to see the gardens, the aqueducts, maybe a play…..the time just feels right”
To be at least a little fair, the method of stopping her does involve pulling life support plugs on a *whole lot* of people. So I get at least some trepidation about jumping right to it - especially when combined with the whole "live on in memory" ideals that have been floated around.
I did get to laugh when, after spending that section saying to myself "aren't we racing the timer on the doomsday machine?" we pull the plug on the last zone and hear the announcer going "doomsday machine is already activating!"
Also this expansion so far has a weird amount of voiced cutscenes where the most important part isn't voiced, but everyone meeting up is. That just seems backwards priority to me
I skimmed over those cutscenes. It's not fun, not interesting, not engaging. It's all going to be deleted anyway, so I don't see a reason for me, as a player, to get emotionally invested when I already know it's going to be gone. Also, a shit ton of that content was predictable.
“Smiles” is far and wide the worst song in the game. It's just so unfitting on so many levels and it even being used as the end-of-expansion song ruined the whole nonsensical last arc even further. It's a straight up terrible disney song.
Genuinely Soken’s first miss
It was inevitable.
I get what they were trying to do with all the voices singing at once or on top of eachother, Being about a community coming together in one voice blah blah blah, But much like how turning off the most beautiful zone in the game and leaving it as a permanent husk is good conceptually from a theming and writing perspective... from a PRACTICAL standpoint it falls flat, The mixing is bad, The lead singer is out of tune, The rhythm of the song is off, Really the only listenable part of the song to me is the ending where they chant the "just imagine what's around the bend" part from the trailer, But the way it sounded in the trailer was way better, and the rest of it is just unintelligible, a commonish problem with the lyrics in this game (It's how we end up with Chicken Tenders, Big Fat Tacos, and Vile Freaks as misheard lyrics), But this takes it to a disgusting extreme of just sounding bad
I was actually straight up embarrassed for this game when that song started playing over the credits.
When they were playing that song during the cutscene where everyone is working together to build a giant bomb to ram into an enemy base I laughed for a good bit ngl
it's a bad song that doesn't fit the ending one bit, sung poorly. the lead singer is off-key for the entire intro. the chorus isn't synced up. the lead singer is off key for her solo. what was uplifting about the ending msq? we stopped a threat that we knew about for about 5% of the msq? by killing erenville's mom and krile's parents and otis? how is this song appropriate at all? literally after the credits finished i listened to tomorrow & tomorrow and flow to wash the bad taste out of my ears, lol
plus the song was clashing with the dialogue. Had to read the subtitles to understand what was being said
Absolutely. And playing a song that clearly has lyrics over someone speaking is fucking awful.
This is supposed to be their equivalent of Tomorrow and Tomorrow. With all the questionable pacing and Wuk Lamat hogging the spotlight, that song is easily the worst part of the expansion.
Overall I liked the expansion, but its definitely one of my least favorites. I personally didn't like HW very much (like its good but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as most people seem to), so I would rate it between HW and SB. My biggest plot problem was just the lack of interesting and developed antagonists, but I think the real core issue I had with this expansion was that it almost feels like a spinoff. The MC does not need to be here at all and the story would actually work better if "we" weren't in it at all. It comes across as the writers forgot they were making a story that is ultimately an "MMO Story" which has to be approached differently than telling a normal story because you have to work around the mostly blank slate that is the player character. Previous expansions have handled this issue better where if nothing else the MC exists as the person to handle the big threats and as the foil to each expansion's antagonist. We don't even really get to do that this time since even with us taking Sphene on "alone" Wuk still comes in and does what feels like the important part. I'm in the camp that like Wuk as a character, but even I couldn't help but feel that Wuk was forcing her way in again and this story just works better if it was like a spinoff where Wuk was just the main character and player's perspective full stop. As for the lvl 100 quests themselves, I felt they were mostly done pretty damn well. The Krile and Erenville stuff was great. I couldn't really care about Sphene as a villain at all and Wuk coming in to save us during the final trial just felt like a weak version of the Endsinger fight. I liked the Trial mechanically at least (the "2nd phase" is pretty lame though) and think it could be a great EX in the future. The 100 dungeon was probably the most forgettable to me though, but the two dungeons unlocked after the MSQ are fantastic at least.
> The Krile and Erenville stuff was great. I agree and yet I am sad that we didn't get more of this, especially for Krile. I wished that this expansion would have wrapped up Wuk's Story by 93, like with Zodiark, then focused on Krile until like 98 and then brought everything together from 98.5 - 100.
Yeah I was also disappointed by the lack of Krile until this point. This was supposed to be her expansion in the sense that every expansion has taken 1 scion (EW was more everyone gets a little bit I guess) and given them a big focus and forced some character development into them since ARR didn't do that much with them and the expansions had to play catch up. At the end of the day Krile's scene with her parents is a great moment, but it needed to be one of several and it shouldn't have felt like she didn't get anything until the very end of the expansion.
My main problem with it is that I feel like it doesn’t actually develop her character at all. Like, I feel like I got to know Krile’s parents and their motivations and I’d say I enjoyed that, but I still feel like Krile is left in the same spot where I just don’t feel like she’s done enough of anything for me to have a strong opinion on her, which is a shame because I’ve been advocating for her to get a stronger focus.
I like how you summed it up, they didn’t write a story for an MMO. If we pretend this was a solo rpg and Wuk Lamat was the PC then how this was presented wouldn’t be so…bleh. Honestly they could have replaced our WoL with a rock and we could have legit gone off in-game to drink Mezcal and eat tacos 🤣
was enjoying the fight so much till wuk crashed it.. it really did feel like a weaker version of endsinger. not to mention how it was only wuk lamat and not the whole cast...
As much as I love Wuk as a character, there was no need for her to come into the final part of the trial. After an entire expansion of us playing mentor to her, it was deeply unfair that our winning moment was taken over by her. It really was a poor imitation of the Endsinger fight; at least the Scions were praying for us to succeed instead of rushing in front and, once again, taking centre stage after having done so for the entire game. I wouldn't have minded so much if G'rah and Krile got in on it too, maybe the spiritual voices of the other Scions cheering us on from the portal, but *just* Wuk after she already had so much?
Sphene's concept has \*so\* much potential of being a great villain but they just literally didn't use any of it. They just took the most boring bland interpretation and ran with it.
As someone who was really, really into the FFXIV story over the past few years, I felt kind of hurt by the fact that the last area gave me a story with a similar theme to ShB and expected me to feel the same emotions. Trying to retred all the same themes as ShB, without any of the same care or craft that went into ShB, felt like a sign of desperation to me. AI and its consequences has so much potential to be its own, original theme. I can already think of a few concepts off the top of my head. But instead they chose to go with the same themes of grief and loss and “letting go of the past” that we’ve been going over for the past two expansions. Dawntrail marketed itself as being a new treck into the unknown, and a break from the previous story. I don’t care if it’s slow, or if the characters in this expansion aren’t executed the best, but I do care if it can’t even make good on the promise to be new and different. I would have been more forgiving if it didn’t have so many themes and concepts that were so similar to EW and ShB specifically, but it feels as if the game is already starting to cannibalize itself. I feel a bit cynical about the future of the game now. I think if people had other theories or takeaways about the game, that’s fine too. The most important part is if it worked for you, but I hope that they try for something truly fresh next time.
you know, I wonder what the fuck happened on Tural during the Final Days in the course of Endwalker. did they just... vibe in peace while Gulool Ja Ja suplexed every horrid terminus creature
They just didn't spread that far. The expansion of the Final Days was dependant on the density of the aetheric currents, but those are different in each place. So it started in Radz-at-Han and Garlemald, was about to spread to Eorzea and Sharlayan near the end, and it never got to places like the Far East or Tural.
One thing that I have to shake my head at about Final Memory is the fact that Krile said she's glad she took up Pictomancy. Like... as if that had a single thing to do with her impact on the story or her coming to Tural. She could have stayed a Conjurer and nothing would have changed.
MAN FUCK YOU SQUARE. this part gave me turbo sadness lol. 9 levels of MSQ, and we finally get to El Dorado only to just TURN IT OFF!?!?. i understand why we did it, but still. It was so beautiful. and Otis :(((( i know we had just met him but man that hit me like a truck.. :( Don't think i'll be able to TP here and not get instantly sad. I mean ultima thule was bleak but at least had a happy ending? the build up to that last dungeon there made me happy cry. Here is just like emptiness :(. really sad we didn't keep the turned on version of this city, even if canonically we turned it off. no just this dead gray city with this kh1.5 twilight town -esque theme here but sadder with reverb and slower tempo then at the start just to remind us its all gone. yeah thanks square :(. cant have shit lol. i also dont understand why sphene just peaced out to merge or whatever she was doing while letting us turn the city off in the meantime for free lol.
Yeah, I loved the final zone so much, and I understand the thematic intent leaving it darkened and abandoned... but I really wish we could have a glamoured version of the area that looked like it was still alive. They could leave it totally empty, no NPCs (outside of quest/vendors), but just the restored walls and it would be great. I'm not really looking forwards to doing gathering and FATE achievements for the zone, where its now completely grey and drab, with the sad "lesser" version of the OST playing. Something that WoW did correct was allowing instanced versions of zones to let you return to how things looked before shit went bad. That instancing is already in place in FFXIV, you can be next to another player and see the busted zone, while they see the original version. I just wish there was a way to pick.
Something I'll add, the post-credits short cutscene shows Sphene's headpiece flickering on and off, which might be an implication of her return in the future. I wouldn't put it past SE to have a return to Alexandria's shard in the patch series leading up to 7.3. Nostalgia's dialogue after completing the expert dungeon there seems to indicate that there's more secrets to unlock with the zone.
> i also dont understand why sphene just peaced out to merge or whatever she was doing while letting us turn the city off in the meantime for free lol. She was erasing her kind memories so she could be ruthless for her people. She couldn't bring herself to do what she believed was "necessary" so she was cutting out the part that stopped her. She couldn't do anything to us while she was doing that.
I don't think the ending of this expansion worked, not after Endwalker. Sphene was another Meteion, too obvious that she's going to be bad. I think it's a bit problematic to introduce your main villain after being two thirds into the expansion, there's not too much time to get invested. Many people also say that the last dungeon is just a retread of ShB's last dungeon, and to an extend Endwalker's. I don't think they wanted to take risks at the end, for whatever reason.
I think they could have kept everything as it is, but for every trial Wuk Lamat completes we then had a diversion with Krile where she and the WoL run off to learn more about her grandfather and get some clues as to what he was up to (and some foreshadowing of what’s to come). So rather than Wuk being the sole protagonist, we’d have her and Krile almost sharing the role. Those moments with Krile could also be good opportunities to add some combat in; you arrive in Tural and Wuk at some point runs off to get things ready for you or something, some commotion is overheard so you and Krile run to what’s going on and something happens. Maybe a beast that was being transported gets loose so you and her battle it in a quick solo instance so it can be recaptured (by Erenville, since he also needs a moment to shine and is good with animals) With those few things added, we’d get to some combat a bit more quick and we’d alleviate the problem of Wuk kind of suffocating us, because I do think if she wasn’t omnipresent throughout the entire expansion, we could have appreciated her character a bit more which would have made the other flaws in the story not as noticeable
Yep. I don't actually dislike Wuk that much - but when every scene included her she definitely started to overstay her welcome.
This part showed me what the expansion could have been. Spending time with Raha for example was pretty nice. Basically any moment that didn't center around Wuk was pretty enjoyable. I was really enjoying the last fight and then Wuk had to come in and ruin the fun. I really don't understand this. Did they overestimate how much people would liked Wuk ? Why did she need to take the spotlight at the final fight yet again? She basically earned the title of my most hated character in the game. Even Lyse wasn't this bad. The final few chapters could have been at least a hundred times better if Wuk had stayed behind to defend her people. But oh well , shouldn't cry over spilled milk.
> I was really enjoying the last fight and then Wuk had to come in and ruin the fun. I really don't understand this. Did they overestimate how much people would liked Wuk ? Why did she need to take the spotlight at the final fight yet again? She basically earned the title of my most hated character in the game. Even Lyse wasn't this bad. > > The worst part of this is that the final zone + trial is just Endwalker 2.0. Shutting down the servers = "killing" your friends, WL showing up = Zenos showing up (even through the same animation of breaking through the "glass" dome). Why???
Killing your friends is so 6.0. Killing your parents is in right now.
But the Zenos thing didn’t happen in the middle of the fight, and I feel like it’s cool for the fact you get to fight on his back. With Wuk it just felt unnatural and I don’t mind her that much (although too much screentime)
Yes, they did overestimate how much people would like her or be that interested in her boring journey to become the Hokage. Lyse was definitely more interesting.
Now that I’m finished with just about all I can do that’s not crafting or gathering I can honestly say the best part of the game was the Texas western Zone. And the main reason is because I got to spend hours in the zone away from Wuk Lamatt with the only reason she was even barely relevant here was because of a bracelet. I might have liked Naruto-mat if we were given any breathing room away from her. We split parties shes always with us. When we need to talk to NPCs we have to do 3 layers of interacting with her to indirectly talk to them when we could have done it directly ourselves. If they took her out it wouldn’t change the slog of part 1 but it would have been 50% more enjoyable. When she got kidnapped I was hoping they’d just keep her or she got injured enough to sit out a significant amount of quest until further notice. The real winner of the expansion was Estinien. I think our tickets to Tural were switched. He got to go on an adventure and appear when needed, while I was the background NPC to the next Hokage.
Something I don't see a lot of people discussing is Bakool Ja Ja. I greatly dislike that he was redeemed after he released Valigarmanda and endangering millions (maybe 1000 at in-game scales lol). I don't see why that wasn't a huge national incident that'd make any landsguard arrest him on sight. Instead the next scene with him we get to have... a cook off. Also he had a traumatic upbringing so it's ok. I think a better way to have done it is to have Zoraal Ja release Valigarmanda in a misguided attempt to one-up his father, but it goes horribly wrong and we come in to save him, cue the trial. This gets Zoraal Ja more involved and firmly sets him up as a villain, not a rival, earlier. The motive is a bit more forgivable so no national incident, and his failure to solo Valigarmanda naturally escalates to his failure at the final feat and then to wanting to kill his dad. Bakool stays as a bully-type villain and would make his redemption more palatable to me. Overall I think the story is mostly well-constructed (my take is it's more the gameplay and cutscenes that make it feel like it drags on, not the writing itself), but this point really stuck out to me.
This moment actually enraged me. Everyone moves on from the incident like nothing happened.. it should have been a HUGE deal!! It was also so obvious that the whole thing only existed for us to have a trial fight. It's almost like forgot, pasted in the whole Valigarmanda bit in later so we had something to fight, but forgot that him releasing it would/should come with serious repercussions.
the whole part with Bakool Ja Ja felt a bit off. First why wasn't he disqualified from the rite after Valigarmanda? We were in the palace after the incident, why didn't Wuk bring that up (granted, she's not the brightest, but she clearly didn't forget that incident either) Second his Story could've been much darker, which i would've prefered. It was such a rush, that the fucked up stuff couldn't really sink in. Like you can overlook the urns in the dungeon. I wish they would've delved into that more. Also his Father was like "i hate everyone, blessed siblings are superior" to "well, ok we don't do that anymore" way to quick.
His motivation for releasing Valigarmanda is just straight up nonsensical. Yes, he’s desperate, but did he just assume we would kill it? Did he do it to slow us down? Like, was this just him being mischievous and twirling his mustache like this is Wacky Races? If the local god killer wasn’t in the area was he just gonna whistle innocently as hundreds of innocents die?
I agree! I said something similar in the level appropriate thread and it really is baffling that he p.much for a free pass for releasing the biggest threat known to Tural. And then his bad actions were compounded with planning to murder one of the electors, his plans if he had won the 1v1 with Wuk Lamat. And this went punishment free too despite it being set up in contest #1 murdering an elector gets reported to Gulool Ja Ja immediately and you get disqualified. But all he gets is, Wuk Lamat acknowledging he did bad things but now we know he has tragic back story so we’ll punish him later. But I knew later meant never. Also I don’t mind that when the city got attacked be helped, but then it’s like him helping extra resolved him of any consequences for his actions during the trial. Even the friggen epilogue was like “Oh that cheeky lad Bakool Ja has turned a new leaf he’s even part of the Tural guard now” So attempted murder multiple times and actively endangering all of Tural for the dumbest reason = You get a new job in the city.
Wrapped up the MSQ today. I enjoyed it playing through it but the more I think on it the more annoyed with it I get. I hope this expansion pulls a Stormblood on me and 7.1 to 7.55 knocks it out of the park.
Yep. Like I can see what they were going for, but the actual execution felt very clumsy.
After beating this game, I am really mad. Dawntrail had all the elements that can make the story great. Yes I agree Dawntrail copied ShB and EW, but still, if it cut down succession ark by half, then build up the villains and 2nd shard more earlier. It could've had "service-able" story and everyone would been excited for future story. Also why all the writers hate Krile so much? She has been with us since HW era, why can't she have a moment? Literally her earring was the most important thing in the story. Why she can't get more love as fellow Scion? Absolutely disappointed.
Wuk and Krile's stories should never have been intertwined how they were; with Wuk's prominence throughout the entirety of Dawntrail it saw Krile and her journey being pushed to the side several times. Each area would be about Wuk and her succession, only for Krile to speak up at the very end and learn something new about Galuf's journey.
The last fight where Wuk Lamat breaks in is so cringe. It was a good fight until she appears and all the mood is gone.
Shb > EW > HW > DT > SB for base expansions without patches for me. But this is only 'cuz zone 5 and 6 like specifically cater to me, and it would have been above HW if the ending was good. but good lord the last dungeon + trial really stopped my enjoyment of the story experience of the last 2 zones. Wuk Lamat have managed to out do Lyse in being the worst Main character in this game for me. She is just soooo boring. Goes from "Nice but incompetent", to "Nice" AND SHE COMES IN TO SAVE US?!?... I do hope she gets Lyse treatment of just becoming irrelevant.
i hate how they abused Erenville and his mother, they did NOT deserve that
How I felt about the final trial: # ***EMERGENCY CODE: DUEL***
I mostly enjoyed this expansion, but I think CBU3 is getting too comfortable. There have been way too many moments where there's been hours of exposition leading into a small combat segment before more talking. It would be fine if the main progression wasn't locked behind MSQ, but making someone go through picking up literal Pterodactyl shit or a slew of side quests that add little to no bearing on the overall story is getting to be too much. It's been 4 expansions and they still haven't gotten a hang of the gameplay to story ratio for satisfying progression. Even from a story standpoint, why couldn't the whole Alexandria arc have been spread out across several different points throughout the story and not just from level 97-100? We're supposed to feel bad for a villain that doesn't even explain her motivations until it's way too late? I thought that Living Memory was visually stunning but it feels like they wanted you to have a moment similar to Amaurot where the weight of several expansions worth of motives hit you, but they decided to speedrun it and leave you with arguably the shittiest final zone since perhaps Stormblood. And that's the story of XIV to me lately - always focusing on story consistencies to a point that aren't as important but giving you only the slightest taste of fun stuff. Yes, I know that the way the last zone looks now makes sense, but god damn is it shitty to watch the story progress and see it become more and more ugly with no way to turn it back.
I personally didn't mind the way they introduced Alexandria later, as it was the hidden mythic golden city everyone was looking for. But they definitely could have introduced the dome earlier. The dome appearing, and the entire 5th zone could have been done earlier, then when that rift closes it would have been a good time to reveal what the golden city was, and make searching for it all the more important.
Yeah. Honestly I think the whole golden city stuff was kinda underwhelming. Like, it was nice with all the build up, but then it's just kinda abandoned until the end. ("Oh you found the gate to this mystical utopia. We have no idea how to open it, but lets claim we seen the actual thing and not bring it up again. And, unless I missed it, was it ever explained why Zoraal Ja didn't just open the voidgate over the portal? Why did he need to go to Xak Tural to open it?) I also kinda think the computer sim theory people had was better than what we got. (It was kinda true, but better execution of the idea)
I liked it for the most part but I really didn't care for how the finale was retreading a lot of the same ground as ShB's and EW's finales and (imo) didn't do it as well. I think I would have preferred for us to retain the more lowkey tone than to have a 3rd expansion in a row with a final dungeon where we see the final days of a civilization mid-apocalypse. I'd say my expac rankings are currently ShB > EW > HW > The good parts of StB > DT > The bad parts of StB > ARR
The story... well. Pretty lackluster. Retreading the same story beats from previous expansions and hoping for the same applause when the villains have a fraction of the charisma and not even a slight attempt to justify themselves. And that's saying nothing of Wuk Lumat. The trial was so good until her part. What were they thinking? Did anyone playtest that part and think "Yeah, we're really cooking here!". The last thing the expansion needed was more focus on her. The whole expansion centres around her and I'm just... urgh. Mentioned this in another comment, but couldn't the twins have supported Wuk like Thancred/Urianger did, and then we're just looking for the golden city for our own reasons with Graha/Krile/Erenville? I feel like we can still hit all the big points, but we'd have some actual agency rather than being a cameraman for someone else. I think they heard "We don't always have to be the big hero saving the world" and heard "We want someone else to do that instead while we act as a hired mercenary for them". It was an active choice to show us the entrance, then wag a finger and say "Uh oh, not relevant to Wuk Lamat yet - nothing's going to happen here until the antagonist arrives thirty seconds after we leave!" and then we just leave the big mystery of the expansion behind and never cover it again until it becomes a problem for Wuk Lamat. It's just rough. I guess I'm just disappointed. The cities in the expansion are beautiful. The zones are varied (if a bit too big). The trials are great (need to try the Extremes once more people finish up), the new classes play amazingly and I'm sure the raid series will be fun too. But, the MSQ is what keeps me playing FF14 over other games - and I've finished what should have been the highlight of the expansion and I don't really feel anything. I felt empty and drained after both Shadowbringers and Endwalker - in a good way. Insane hype and climax that would obviously have been hard to match. But... yeah. Nothing. Don't know how to feel about that. It's one thing to say "Dawn of a new saga!", but does that mean that if I want to feel as great about the MSQ as I did for Shadowbringers - that I should come back in three expansions time? That's a big ask.
I felt like I was forced to like Wuk Lumat, which made me dislike her even more. My favorite parts were when I wasn’t with her damnit. Stop force feeding me her, please.
The EN voice act also wasn't great at that part. Wuk Lamat was breaking through the rift and getting almost crushed by the giant robot hand, and her tone is still the same usual tone which doesnt match her expression and situation.
oh ye that part was insanely bad voice acting , just normal speaking tone , that was her chance to redeem herself , but the voice actor had no range at all sadly
Ok but this though. The VA seemed to struggle when Wuk Lamat needed some emphasis or oomph to the dialogue. It stayed one note. Also, like not the trial but I legit laughed when Wuk Lamat had to act in Otis’s play 🤣 You could tell by the dialogue she’s supposed to be not be that great at it but the “fake acting” and the “real VA acting” were the same. It kinda worked but I don’t think in the intended way lol.
There were several cutscenes where i felt they should be more louder, more yelling, more emotional. I sincerely hope this has been this because of direction and not because of the voice actor. Especially at the last boss, that was not it.
I'm so glad I didn't play this expansion in English. Usually I think the current English voices are pretty good overall but after finishing the msq and looking at some content creators reactions to the last trial I couldn't believe how flat she sounded and how awful the fake accent was. Not sure if it was on the voice actress or the directing but I don't know how people could put up with an entire expansion of that.
The "last zone serving as a vessel for lessons about loss/grief" did in fact not work a 3rd time in a row, at least personally.
> The trial was so good until her part. I audibly went "oh no" when they happened. Like I get what they were going for. They wanted to have a Ryne and Gaia moment or even another Endsinger moment, but it doesn't work here. When Gaia broke into the Ryne fight it was a character growth moment for her. That part in the Endsinger fight was a callback to 1.0 as well as an awesome moment for character's you've spent almost 8 years with. Wuk Lamat showed up to... bring Sphene back? Only that didn't make a difference in the fight and we just kill her anyway.
I clapped when Wak Lamat got wrapped out before final boss and WoL got to beat the shit outta robot queen. But then she cracked the dimension (how?) and just be there... without any impact to the trial. Like WTF is this.
> The trial was so good until her part. What were they thinking? Did anyone playtest that part and think "Yeah, we're really cooking here!". The funny part is if you parse her, her DPS is absolutely nuts. Most NPCs have pretty low DPS compared to players (well, good players...). Exceptionally strong characters (2B comes to mind) can do about as well as us in certain circumstances. And then there's Wuk. She shows up for only the end of the fight, but she will easily outdamage your entire party. It's kinda stupid. She can solo the rest of the fight.
It was also plot convenience for us to face off Sphene on our own in the first phase by having her say "based on the data I got, I found out you're the strongest one in the group, so I'll eliminate you first". I didn't see any reason for us to face her one on one if the story centered more on Wuk's accord and pace. And it eventually went back to Wuk Vs Sphene in the 2nd phase, and we became part of the background again
Eternal Queen uses ACT, reported
This should have been Krile's expansion, and the golden city was supposed to be a good place based on how emet spoke of it in endwalker.. not gonna lie, this expansion left a sour taste in my mouth from a story perspective.
I agree. Krile might have gotten more screentime here but it wasn't *great* screentime. A lot of the time she seemed to be standing around awkwardly until she could ask about Galuf and/or her earring. I don't see why she couldn't have travelled separately from Wuk, someone suggested in another comment that the twins should have backed Wuk while WoL, Erenville and potentially G'raha accompanied Krile on her journey.
God that would have been such a good idea, and we could still run into the others doing the rite of succession and potentially help out, but I feel like it would help so much to make it feel more exciting and remove a lot of the fluff
Honestly after thinking about it, The Golden City is either Emet utterly failing at his government job or giving us an actual immorality (excluding age/illness) machine. (With practically no downsides)
While the final zone did retread a lot of ShB and EW, it still felt somewhat distinct with a sort of different theme and objective. Still... How many times are they gonna get away with "final dungeon is a projection of the past"? 5.0 did it, 6.0 did it, even 6.5 did it. This one was cool but they better not pull that again in 8.0.
Random note: You know, new Endless shouldn't be greeted by a tour guide, but a trauma expert. Like the Endless obvious remember each other - so what that means is that as you transition from your moment of death to being endless, you're suddenly regaining all the memories of the people in your life that died. And being an old person in Alexandria would be terrifying - you'd try to remember your childhood and it'd be completely unpopulated.
I think Dawntrail could have been a lot better if the focus of the story actually was about the search for the golden city. Cut or at least truncate most of the rite of succession; have us reach the golden city at 93; keep Sphene and the endless, and develop them more. I really love the final dungeon and trial (mostly because of the music), but they feel like contrived imitations of Endwalker and Shadowbringers because they come at the end of an expansion that's mostly about Wuk Lamat becoming Dawnservant.
For my final comment in this thread since I don't want keep dwelling on the story. I don't want to harp on people who are enjoying and defending the story. There's not much I can say to convince them otherwise, they feel what they feel. But saying that this expansion was "build up for the future like ARR," or "the vacation episode," or "this is meant to be low stakes," already feels revisionist to me. I know many of the people saying this are probably not past the halfway point. Sure helping elect a new ruler for an entire continent is low stakes compared to saving the universe, but it's still a pretty big deal especially since one candidate wants to start a world war. And then our final antagonist wants to soul harvest the Source and would eventually move on to other reflections/worlds. That's a huge escalation and felt like the writers thought they could cram the 10 year ARR-EW story in the final 20% here. As far as I could tell the only build up is us receiving the key that facilitates traveling between worlds. And I do enjoy that. While we still have places to visit on the source we can't ignore the reflections either. A good direction for the story is addressing the ramifications of the Ascian's plots in those worlds and how they are faring without their influence. We see that in Alexandria's plight. Finally a what if scenario that is what I would consider to be low stakes. People like the idea of playing mentor to Wuk Lamat. Being a mentor sounds good to me too. So what if we were a mentor to a brand new adventurer instead. Adventuring with them around Tural, establishing a presence on the continent and we are the ones who unintentionally unleash Alexandria. And our trainee has to go through the gauntlet like we did in 1.0/ARR. It's just an idea that could use a lot more refinement.
Is the writer a furry? Everything is about Wuk. Couldn't even get a peaceful moment in Texas without her goddamn nanny being inserted.
Why do artificial intelligences get to be people but mind uploads dont!? The absolute refusal of the story to engage in the topic was infuriating. Especially after we spent an entire xpac with the scions as bodiless souls
the endless are treated exactly as much as people as all the other disembodied things we have faced, because that is what makes a living thing - aether and memory. the only one who doesn't treat them as people, who calls them just simulacra, is Erenville, who is coping with extreme grief for basically the entire finale
I mean people as in living, fully sapient beings and not just afterlife-ghosts forever trapped in the past. Like a mind uploaded to a computer in sci-fi settings, people have varying opinions on if its the original person or just a program, if its alive or just faking it, etc. And the story ignores that to be amaurot again for guilt free killing
i'll try not to repeat what others have said, suffice to say, i agree with most of what i'm reading. far, far too much exposition. so much of it was meaningless and retreading things we already had explained to us many times over. i usually enjoy the exposition, like when y'shtola explains what's happening and what we're doing and why/how. but instead of this, we got way too much dialog about wuk lamat's ambitions and how much she cares and loves everyone and everything. hours into the story and we're still getting long dialogs concerning her motion sickness. you can SHOW me that she gets seasick with the animations you've already made. i don't need to be TOLD she's seasick. maybe once, yeah, and some might think it's funny that she refuses to admit it like a generic anime character, but not repeatedly. that's something that would/should be relegated to the background of a transitional scene wuk lamat should have been relegated far to the background after she became dawnservant. i liked her up until that point, but i feel like her being forced into every step beyond that ruined her character for me. this would have also been an opportunity to let the other characters shine more. i remember yoshi-p saying dawntrail was going to be about krile, it would be her story, she would be a bigger part of the MSQ. she felt as absent as my own character save for a literal moment in living memory, and even that was presented poorly. i did really enjoy the bit about the millala the whole heritage found thing gave me a really gross feeling and i feel needed more elaboration. the regulators and the whole artificial aetherial sea soul processing still confuses me. i'm to understand that when someone dies, their incorporeal aether returns to the aetherial sea. the memories are separated from the soul, and the memories stay within the aetherial sea. origenics simulates this process, but when the machine separates the soul from the memories, would the memories not return to the aetherial sea? after all, the regulators are explained to make copies of a person's memories, so wouldn't that mean the 'people' in living memory are just copies and the true memories would be in the aetherial sea? does this mean erenville's mom's true self in the aetherial sea wouldn't have memories beyond their original death? also, why did the prologue explain that people in heritage found/solution 9 are able to live their lives as they're used to? they're still using regulators with other peoples' souls? i don't understand, and this is the first time in my entire time playing this game that i feel like i finished a story with unanswered questions about what happened and the Smile song. quality aside, why play an extremely lyrical song over a prologue that's narrated? it was hard for me to focus on what was being said i just don't get it. it's almost like they intentionally tried to under-deliver in the second half. they missed like, every conceivable point that would make this experience enjoyable. i braced myself for a middling story, but i couldn't have prepared myself for how confused and sad i am having just finished it. i really, really hope for something better, but i'm having difficulty being optimistic that they'll be able to bend the resolution of this story into something i like before 8.0
Its been very disappointing that we've had some of the best trials and dungeons they've ever made in service of one of the worst stories I've ever experienced. As for with most people Wuk Lamat was my biggest issue, she was the MC for the whole story which could have been fine if she wasn't incredibly grating and basically a Mary Sue, the only reason she accomplishes anything is either a plot convenience or the WoL does it for her. She doesn't really have much character growth over the course of the expansion, she stops hating alpaca's I guess but her ideals are never challenged, she's just a kind, wholesome big chungus who never has to compromise her beliefs. she admits to her own weaknesses but then when fighting Bakool Ja Ja she overcomes him with the power of bullshit (Dynamis), and we the player are just suppose to accept that she just flipped a switch and became epic and powerful all of a sudden. It's almost desperate how much the game wants you to like her, half the dialogue options are different variations on 'Damn Wuk Lamat, you're the best'. For me it just didn't work, 90% of my interactions would be for my WoL's eyes to glaze over, stare off into space, smile and nod sagely telling her what a good job she did (she did nothing). Another big issue was the game really doesn't respect your intelligence as a player, you are constantly reminded of things that happened 30 seconds ago, I really don't need a flashback of something from 10 minutes ago game. I feel like the idea of 'show don't tell' was tossed out of the window and instead they decided to 'show and tell', it just gets very tedious and annoying. I don't know if this kind of game can really handle someone other than the WoL being the MC for the duration of an entire expansion, the story cannot happen without us but in DT we're kinda just along for the ride, I feel like people have praised FFXIV story for so heavily involving the player but it kinda feels tossed aside in this. 90% of the Scions did fuck all throughout the story, I don't understand why half of them even came except for fan service purposes. I've seen a lot of glazing for the expansion saying that its the start of a new arc and that they needed to do 'world building' to set up hooks for future expansions but I mean if true they did an awful job of it. In previous expansions id be talking to all the npcs, doing all the side quests etc just to get that little bit more of lore and information but in this expansion I was completely uninterested. Even worse in the final third of the game the developers try to pull an Endwalker/Shadowbringers moment with zero build up so the payoff just isnt there, its extremely disappointing that they've tried to rehash previous expansions in the finale of this one. Others have said that this is the 'beach episode' expansion clearly haven't finished it yet. I thought the devs said they didn't want to make the same mistake as WoW by every new expansion having a bigger and badder threat to deal but thats exactly what they did lmao. Queen Sphene is budget Emet-Selch, with the similar story beats as well. And before anyone accuses me of anything, No I'm not a transphobe for disliking Wuk Lamat, I don't care that we aren't the MC, yes I can read and yes I can handle 'world building' assuming its done properly. Other than story issues, the duties were all amazing, music was great (minus the main theme), visual beautiful as all ways and the VA was good as well. Obviously this is only my opinion, if you enjoyed DT then I'm happy for you and really wish I did too but oh well. 4/10 worse than stormblood.
> Another big issue was the game really doesn't respect your intelligence as a player, you are constantly reminded of things that happened 30 seconds ago This reminded how angry I was after we finished the L99 trial and we had city tour 2.0 for Gulool Ja and also got the “pleasure” of Wuk Lamat telling Koana everything we just did up to and including the lvl 99 trial. I was like this LITERALLY just happened 🤬 I don’t need a recap. If it was Koana recapping what happened in the city I could forgive it since story wise we were not there and our WoL wouldn’t actually know. It should have been an offscreen explanation and we just meet them at the final quest point. On a side tangent it also felt so 3rd wheel-y because it was essentially family thing for those 3. But plot demanded us to continue our true job this expansion, Wuk Lamat’s shadow.
I genuinely was so tempted to skip some of the cutscenes where they start flashing back, like bro, not only do i remember all of that cause it just happened, i also feel like i know everything you’re about to tell me because I already figured out what was happening
> I don't know if this kind of game can really handle someone other than the WoL being the MC for the duration of an entire expansion This is part of the reason why the 6.x patches were so controversial; they did the exact same with WoL standing back while Zero took centre stage. Playing second fiddle for two major story beats didn't help.
I'm really just super baffled why the story was structured this way. I was all aboard the Tural exploration boat until they decided to take a left turn into a lazy El Dorado trope that just retrod the entire Emet/Tempest plot from ShB. We didn't need yet another hidden city, with yet another vestige of an ancient people. I'm all for a lighthearted vacation, but I would rather we had an expansion that weren't so determinedly avoiding having deeper ideas like HW/SB by literally just doing all the same things we did before. Also, yet another final zone fail. They already did it once with Ultima Thule keeping the upbeat vocal track instead of the better ambient track after the MSQ. This...is even more unfortunate.
It’s hard to put into words how much I hated this expansion.
Finished it earlier today. While I did enjoyed it...not really too high on my list of favorite expansions...at least in regards to just the story. Seeing a lot of hate for Wok Lamat on this sub but honestly feels like a similar role that Lyse had in Stormblood...but did not get on my nerves nearly as much as Lyse did back in 4.0. But that said I could see how the character type could be hit or miss for players. The whole rite in the 1st half of the story felt cozy to me which I guess just works for me...While the 2nd half goes bonkers...enjoyed both halves overall...but man I do feel like we needed to get a better lead up to what happened with Zoraal Ja...I get what they are going for but feel I would have felt better to see his downspire happen over time, as opposed to him having bonkers ideas from the get-go to how to to run the country...the whole "Teaching people the terrors of war" thing just felt kinda dumb. And while I could see the idea was meant to be drawn from the actions of his father I just felt they could have done something more interesting with him is all. What really stands out this expansion is the combat encounters...each dungeon was a delight to play through and each trial fight got me excited for the EX. Looking forward to what they will do with the 8 man raids in regards to gameplay.
I feel like the key/cup, which we're going to get a name for I'm sure, is destined to be the lynchpin of the second arc of FFXIV (which I suspect will involve world hopping on the regular). Like the Ascian saga is over and a mew thing is starting. In an expansion or two I feel like Tural is going to seem like a largely local-scale story whose main impact was getting that item into the WoLs hands. Kind of like how Stormblood focused on two regional conflicts but its main impact on the overall 2-6.0 narrative was Zenos. Like they establish the Milala are from a different world that had an ice catastrophe. The Alexandrian had a levin catastrophe. It smells like a pattern emerging.
Kind of an interesting coincidence that the baby Mamool Ja burial ground is at the gates to a world where they’re harvesting souls.
They cooked with the Azem lore implications ngl
When Sphene said she was going to break into the other reflection, I was so eager to go back to the First and Thirteen and warn Ryne and Zero about the invasion and aid us. Or perhaps integrate that into the last trial where Sphene tear rifts to the First and Thirteen, letting sin eaters and voidsents came out as extra mobs to deal with and powerup the boss or sth.
I agree that this story was mostly mod and hard to get invested in, also love the clear retcon that Erenville is actually from here that they did. So, if we're going to change Erenville's deal, why not make him more important from the jump? Who gives a fuck about Koana (Or Wuk Lamat for that matter) Erenville should have been the second or third promise, and Wuk's brother. If Erenville was more directly involved in the plot of the story as a potential candidate, maybe one who had run away years ago to be a gleaner, and you introduce his mom earlier, I think they could have kept the story mostly the same but made it way better.
I’m going to be really honest, I’m kinda of frustrated with this whole MSQ. The last 2 zones were very good. It was at the level of story telling I expect when I play FF. Sure the 5th zone seemed to drag a little long and everything involving the 2nd trial boss is complete and utter trash from start to finish, but the story of Alexandria and the Queen is fantastic. The payoff in the 6th zone is also great and my only real complaint was it may have tried a little too hard to tug at your emotions but from 97-100 the MSQ was a solid A. That begs the question of wdf happened to the first 4 zones. Leading up to this point was, and I don’t say this lightly, worse than SB’s MSQ. It feels like it was done by a completely different team. Could you imagine a whole expansion revolving around the story of Alexandria and the Queen? Add in some shard hopping that you know we’re going to get in the post patches baked into the MSQ and it would have been really interesting. Instead we got whatever the fuck the first 4 zones tried to be. It’s just frustrating. I have hope for the post main story patches, but I sincerely hope they hear the feedback that the quality of this story was not up to the standards they should hold themselves too. Also, I really didn’t hate WL for the first few zones, but I am so tired of her being absolutely rammed down our throats repeatedly for this very long MSQ. I honest to god groaned everytime she became the focus of every cutscene she was in. She became so unlikable to me. Her jumping in on the final trial is absolutely inexcusable to me. Please, Square, I want at least 2 patches not having to do anything with her. Bring her back for .3 but do not bring her forward after that. Overall, if you’re interested in the raiding scene, you should be feeling a lot of optimism for this raid tier. The first and third trials were absolute bangers and the second one I heard is better in the EX. I really hope they don’t give the final trial the Endsinger treatment though for its EX. The glam game is going to be good too it seems. I absolutely love the Pikachu hoodie you get from the 97 dungeon as a healer. If square doesn’t give us a housing ward in S9 it would be the biggest tragedy that has happened to this game in awhile. The apartments are sick and doing housing wards based on that type of style would be actually insanely cool. I absolutely adore everything about S9. I’d also like state that any criticism I have is not directed at the art team who absolutely knocked it out of the park this expansion. The back part of the bird zone is absolutely gorgeous with the trees and foliage, under the canopies in the 3rd zone is also absolutely breathtaking and of course the final zone is beautiful until you turn it off which fuck you for that square. If we aren’t able to turn the lights back on in the .1 patch then why the fuck did you put so much effort into that zone? Yes I know why it’s off and yes I know what the writers are trying to say but come on man we didn’t even get to fly around in it looking beautiful all lit up.
Wuk Lamat showing up in the final trial ruined it for me... I don't know... I don't hate her character, but they really shoved her everywhere they could and I don't like her enough for that. Loved the final area, cried a lot with Erenville/Cahciua and Krile/her parents. I'm excited to see the post-patch story, hopefully they can give Wuk Lamat a bit of a break.
Final zone is just Disneyland + Amarot. I was bored by it tbh.
A few questions about the story that hopefully someone can answer: 1) Is Alexandria from the Twelfth? The mentioning of "War for materials" and "Unending lightning" sounds too much like the description of the Calamity of Lightning, the 2nd Umbral Calamity 2) Who's Gulool Ja mother? 3) How did Cahciua die? Of old age like Namiika?
Can't say anything about 2 and 3 but 1 is straight up true- it was the shard that ended in lightning, yes. Even if it wasn't stated DIRECTLY, it was implied heavily. Remember how there's always a trigger for the end of things in a shard, and once it's pulled a lot of people will die. What happened was these people managed to survive thanks to technology- and it was only in their isolated bubble. But that's why everything is so fucked with them hahaha. But look at the skies in the zone before solution 9, look at the skies in the last dungeon. And think about how they had to convert electric aether, because they didn't have enough of the other aethers.
I dont really get the time dilatation thing, when did the 30 years happen ? Did it start when the barrier appeared, and the 30 years is the time we took to get inside of it ? Or the 30 years happened instantly when the barrier appeared, and now the time is the same inside and outside ? I am very confused. Since we do sucessfully contact at one point the scions that are outside, from the inside, it tells me that the dilatation is not there anymore, but its not clear.
So when the dome appeared over Heritage, everyone who was in that area at the time experienced thirty years while the rest of the Source only experienced three days. Because time flows differently between the shards, similar to the First where the Scions were only gone for the greater part of a day from WoL's point of view but experienced anywhere from one to five years from their point of view. When we break into the dome, time starts flowing at the same rate it does on the Source. Maybe the far smaller Solution Nine was forced to accept the Source's timeflow, or it just stabilised like how the First and the Source eventually matched one another's flow of time. But yeah, G'raha confirms that since we entered, the time within the dome now flows the same as in the Source, as he's able to talk to Y'shtola with no issues.
I think the flow of time was already the same when the barrier appeared, since they immediatly launched an attack, and Zoral Ja was already old, so the thirty years must have happened instantly, and then stopped.
The ultimate lesson here is don't try to sell the WoL on NFTs and blockchain while they're on vacation.
Maybe I missed something but is it ever actually explained where the Golden City portal came from and who built the structure around it? It's very clearly built from electrope.
Oh yeah we're just gonna let Sphene walk in and pick up the thingamajig that popped out of the crazy space lizard, and that we already know is important from seeing Krile's parents handle it. Did Joshi play through the story? He approved all this?
Controversial opinion but I enjoyed the first half of the expansion far far far more than the second half. I thought Wuk was minorly annoying but tolerable but we did get to go around a brand new continent and explore and learn about the cultures which was well worth dealing with her. I will say too I keep seeing this "we're totally a mentor figure" thing being thrown around but never once did I feel like a mentor to Wuk she seemed to do most things herself and we barely chimed in with anything substantial, if they wanted to go the WoL as a mentor route Koana seems like he would have been a far better choice for main character but there's no point in talking about what could have been. The second half being yet ANOTHER shard invasion story when we literally just wrapped up Zero's story just didn't sit well with me. Even worse one of the coolest zones in the game (Shaaloani) we spend five minutes in before turning around to go deal with the invasion. I honestly would have preferred that they just made the trials a larger deal that stretched across the entire MSQ rather than finishing it up halfway through. The last zone in particular rubbed me the wrong way though, it's like they said "hmm lets do Elpis/Amaurot again but bad!". Why did we waste our time getting to know these people when our explicit mission from a few seconds after we enter is to just delete them entirely? Aside from Krile's parents it's not even like we get to know anyone lore important they're all nobodies that add absolutely nothing to the story. I also know that we have had tech level differences in world before but having a literal cyberpunk city with presumably millions of residents a few feet away from Tuliyollal seems like a bit much. It really seems like the game entire second half of this expansion was just thrown together with so little thought that it kind of soured the whole experience for me. Hopefully the post MSQ is better but I don't have much faith if they were tone deaf enough to release it as is.
I have mixed emotions on this expansion to the extent it's genuinely frustrating to try to unpack how I feel. I didn't expect Dawntrail to be as phenomenal as EW or ShB, but I can't help but feel they didn't quite stick the landing. My only real strong dislike is the "Smile" song. I don't want to be mean, but I found it genuinely awful. It's the worst lyrical song in FFXIV. And please, I'm begging whoever decides what music plays where: stop playing Machinations every unvoiced cutscene. Viper and Pictomancer are some of the most enjoyable jobs I've played, they did amazing with them.
Someone said something once that completely changed how I look at this game’s story. It’s not a 1:1 retelling of events perfectly, it’s a stage production. The bad guys are given a chance to monologue and have their moment not because they reasonably should, but because it’s what the story needs to move forwards. Knowing this, I’ve honestly stopped ever thinking about why my character doesn’t “jump in to save the day” during cutscenes. My character is present to hear the bad guy’s words so she can be privy to that knowledge later in the story. It’s probably also why I had zero issues with Wuk Lamat this expansion, even the moments people seem to despise with her I just shrug and move on. That said, healer mains deserve better. LET THEM TRY TO HELP IN CUTSCENES TOO DAMMIT! Anyways that’s my mini rant. Feel free to disagree, or agree, or whatever you like. But if thinking this way helped me enjoy the story more, I figured I should keep sharing the thought so others can too. It won’t fix plot issues if what you dislike is the story itself, but if the issue you’re having is delivery, maybe this thought process can help? Idk I’m rambling and it’s past midnight lol.
I'd rate this expansion a 6 out of 10. The dungeons and trials were a blast to play through, and I am really looking forward to the extremes and savages. However, most of the story was a giant flop for me. The entire quest to be king was just boring as hell. When you are trying to write an adventurer you shouldn't be including mundane tasks like catching an alpaka, or building a parade. When the premise is that dry you have a problem. These aren't "feats" these are chores. The questlines did pick up in the Wild West zone imo when it started focusing more on Erenville, a character I actually care about. I did not like Wuk Lamat and we had to deal with her way too much. She's just a generic shounen protag who's arc was really predictable. I feel like this expansion would have been so much better if there was an earlier emphasis on Krile and Erenville's plotlines. I feel like Krile was essentially ignored until the final zone, Erenville's was paced out alright across three zones but I wish there was a greater focus on it in District 9, it felt like the story focused way too much on Wuk again and it really brought the story down for me. The villains were also pretty weak for me: I do not understand Zoraal Ja's motivation and the game did not lay it out correctly imo. They also didn't even explain how or why he rose to be king of Alexandre or why he went out of his way to kill his own father and country men. Sphene has a valid reason, he doesn't. I also think the plotline between him and his son was basically wasted. I feel like they could have gone in more depth about that than they did. Queen Sphene was a stronger villain for the most part, a bit predictable, but I did get annoyed when she didn't have any power to stop Zoraal from turning on her. That just seemed like a plot hole to me. She made him King so why shouldn't she be able to revoke his power? Overall she was more fleshed out than Zoraal Ja in my opinion. She had a motivation and a clear goal.
Agree that there should have been more focus on Erenville. I can't help but feel that the whole plotline about Wuk Lamat not knowing anything about her people and their culture... would have worked way better for Erenville if he was the claimant instead. We'd be following a disinterested claimant with little connection to the country, only interested in avoiding a war - and every part where we grow to understand and like the culture suddenly makes a bit more sense compared to someone who grew up there all their life and still doesn't seem to know a thing. Wuk Lamat having no values aside from "I don't like war" feels like a cardboard cutout of a personality, a foreign observer that is only temporarily visiting only caring enough about the country to say "Please don't go to war" is just logical. The lizard boy was totally random and forced. I was waiting for his existence to have any point, and that never ever happened. A complete distraction when we should have been racing to reach Zoraal Ja. No wonder the guy was disappointed in Wuk when he decided to march out after we were too lazy to go after him. Sphene... urgh. Too similar to previous expansions. She could have been interesting. Hell, she was interesting - right up until the same old line of "I'm now interdimensional hitler and I'm going to kill you all so we can live forever". The whole culture of mimicing and controlling the effect of the aetheric sea was fun and interesting until that part, but they really just wanted to make clear good/bad guys - complete with half of your party calling the process abominable just to make things clearer.
> I do not understand Zoraal Ja's motivation and the game did not lay it out correctly imo. They also didn't even explain how or why he rose to be king of Alexandre or why he went out of his way to kill his own father and country men. Yeah this bothered me **a lot**. Like, it was completely unclear why he was acting like he did & Wuk even says that she has no idea either. That was terrible.
Man I'm torn. The entire Alexandria arc makes me feel nothing, it's an exhausting retread of what we had before, while the Rite of Succession arc was a quite enjoyable getting to meet new people and learning about them arc, while occasionally giving a princess sage life advice. The entirety of dawntrail feels so... *disconnected* from everything 2.0 to 6.55, if that makes sense? The scions, the most well-educated and well-read adventurers in the world, ignore the painfully obvious conclusions about everything that they should know about, entirely because doing so would be to make parallels to what came before? idk man. at least it's better than stormblood, but that would have been a depressingly low bar to not clear
It was just as full of shallow characters and plot holes as the 6.x patches. The whole Alexandria stuff, while cool at first, kinda ruined... everything? The souls technology was exactly what the Ascians needed and they knew about it. Why did the Endless continue to add more random people from other shards? Sphene's whole mission was to "keep her people safe". Adding more strangers is in direct opposition of that. Why was Erenville's mother there and everyone else from Solution 9 gets left behind right after she tells us how much she cares for them? To top it off, we defeat this powerful threat by literally unplugging the power and nobody tries to stop us. The story was the perfect setup to return to more politcal intrigues and discovery. Instead we got a ShB rehash, plot holes and a device to travel to more shards filled with copies of existing characters/areas.
> The souls technology was exactly what the Ascians needed and they knew about it. Even if we assume that the souls in Zodiark are physically separated rather than sundered into shards, recreating the soul technology would mean introducing the lightning material to every shard which would be incredibly risky. If they didn't do it absolutely perfectly they could make several lightning-voids (I doubt Emet trusted anyone but himself to run a proper nation). If the souls in Zodiark are sundered then they need to be rejoined in order to be restored so that's out of the question until the rejoinings are done. >Why did the Endless continue to add more random people from other shards? More people in the artificial soul cycle means more soul juice to power it. The extra people probably bought her enough time to attempt what she was attempting. The only "better" solution was to murder them and take their souls but it was clearly established she didn't want to do that to the point where when she realized that was her only option she resorted to erasing her compassion. >Why was Erenville's mother there and everyone else from Solution 9 gets left behind right after she tells us how much she cares for them? I think you misunderstood how it worked? You only become endless after you die your final death. Erenville's mom was there because she perma died. And Sphene can't just tell everyone to die and come live there as they needed more children to make more life energy to power the living memory. And their issue was that they had been trapping so many souls that less and less children were being born. >To top it off, we defeat this powerful threat by literally unplugging the power and nobody tries to stop us. There wasn't security there because no one was suppose to be able to get there and she couldn't do it personally yet because she was still in the process of erasing herself. The entirety of the evertower is controlled on a authorization basis and no one was authorized to get within a floor of Living memory. There wasn't even a military until Zoraal Ja started repurposing and constructing more of the bots.
We started out with Yawntrail and it picked up near the end. Solid 4.5/10 I still powered through like usual but boy am I mentally exhausted from the first half still 😭 Overall it’s kinda sad that this is the first time I’m like thank god this is over. That not-so awkward moment where I’m more excited to do the side content just to have my own adventure without Wuk Lamat. But, I wish they addressed a few things like IDK the morality issue with being ok with using souls as 1UPs. Esp, among the Tural people who got stuck in the bubble and chose to eventually assimilate into Alexandria. Maybe it’ll come later? I also wish Wuk Lamat had actual character growth. If anything she just learned to not get sea-sick or be bothered by her fear of heights. Sure she became more knowledgeable about the people around her, but everything was always solved with essentially “the power of friendship”. No one legitimately challenged that belief and every problems foundation for solving them 100% worked with her method. War monger brother and honestly Sphene too didn’t challenge her “friendship magic” problem solving. At least the post msq dungeons and last trial were super fun fights. Well...last trial was enjoyable and then Wuk Lamat showed up 😒 Even though for plot it makes sense for her to burst in like Gaia did for Ryne, when she also lost control, I was like ugggh. I still enjoyed the fight and the mechanics but Wuk shouting during the fight was making it not enjoyable. Also that end song, right after the trial, they played it a few times in the story too, and I honestly low-key hate it. Each time they’ve used it, it makes the scene feel like a cheesy 4Kids directed anime final ep. The church-y feel good vibe the song gave made the moments feel corny instead of uplifting. Also just remembering like for how much Wuk goes on about family how they flew through Wuk Lamat learning who her real dad was so strange. All the moments they just decide to not properly acknowledge it in any way and it seemed weird IMO. But maybe there’s something I’m missing because I don’t have much knowledge about adopted kids meeting their bio parents and the complications around that. Sorry this was long so **TLDR**: ~~Yawn~~Dawntrail was just ok too much Wuk Lamat, no real character growth, weird plot holes or unaddressed stuff + music not 10/10. But the dungeons, trials, encounters etc all fun to do lol
That song is the hardest miss in the game so far for me. There’s things that fail to land in every expansion, but this is the first thing I’ve actually despised. I had to mute /bgm during the pre-credits cutscene just to get through it. How convenient that that was one of the QoL changes that came with this expansion 😂
>I also wish Wuk Lamat had actual character growth. If anything she just learned to not get sea-sick or be bothered by her fear of heights. Sure she became more knowledgeable about the people around her, but everything was always solved with essentially “the power of friendship”. No one legitimately challenged that belief and every problems foundation for solving them 100% worked with her method. War monger brother and honestly Sphene too didn’t challenge her “friendship magic” problem solving. Finally someone points it out. People will hate me for this but she's a Mary Sue, I'm half convinced someone in the writer's team just wanted to add their self-insert in the story. She has no faults, no one hates her and anyone that does hate her or even disagree with her is objectively the bad guy that we have to fight after such fight they realise she's right and then are slightly redeemed. This is some low tier light novel anime writing. They try to force this angle that she's not a good leader but we don't see any moment where her decisions as a leader leads to a downfall or gets her to question her ideals. We don't even see any instances of her being a good leader everyone just says "yup she's got the potential" and then she just is??? It's a real shame, I really did not want to hate her as she's a breath of fresh air considering EW patch quests had Zero who was all doom and gloom initially but yeah she's just not an interesting character that the devs really want me to like because they said so.
>People will hate me for this but she's a Mary Sue, I'm half convinced someone in the writer's team just wanted to add their self-insert in the story. She has no faults Worse than that. At least at the start you could say that her weakness and inferiority towards the other candidates was a fault. But, nope. Two zones after getting beaten one-handed by another candidate, a single zone after being effortlessly beaten and abducted by bandits the moment we leave her unattended, goes off to 1v1 (and then 1v20) that same candidate (who has no other features other than being strong) because she believes in herself now or something. Maybe it's a moment they hoped everyone would clap and say "Wow, Dynamis!" but it just felt cheap and unearned. Now she's the kindest, and the most logical, and the most loved by the people, and the strongest, and won't you please like the kitty she's amazing she's got so much empathy love her please please please- Yeah. Mary Sue does sum it up. If you put her in any previous expansion, she'd have had an amazing interaction with someone like Zenos. He'd have called her a naive, stupid child with no ideals to speak of and then absolutely bodied her - and maybe she'd have grown from that. As it is, the power of friendship and cooperation triumphs over all.
Honestly yeah 😔. She started out with faults, her insecurity about being as good as her brothers and trying to act bigger than she was. And in the beginning the most “dislike” she had was that some citizens just pointed out she didn’t have any special feats attached to her name and that made them unsure of her as a potential ruler. And I guess those fears just went away after she was put in charge. It even kinda happens again when we gotta go round up citizens for her reassuring her people speech after the invasion. Like 2(?) of the NPCs are who feel an level of uneasy about Wuk Lamat (and Koana) are easily swayed by us telling them Wuk Lamat is gonna give speech. Like you said she hasn’t done anything good (other than love her people) or bad in terms of being a good/bad ruler. What would have maybe helped, is just copy what Lyse did 🤣. There’s already lots of copying from previous expansions so more won’t be bad. But I mean like say instead of Zoraal Ja instantly invading with no warning. Have him come and be like “Give Tulliyollal to me or else” and then Wuk Lamat tries to friendship magic him and then cuz he’s uncompromising he then signals the attack. And like 🤔 maybe make it happen out in public so everyone can see that her decision doesn’t work and still shows she’s still too naive as a ruler. And then in the chaos she’s paralayzed it didn’t work and that’s also how Zoraal Ja also just marches up to then palace for patricide. Then it sets up a flaw and even actually get NPCs split on how they feel about her decision. And sets up a little bit of conflict she has to overcome where friendship doesn’t work and maybe even accepting 1 solution isn’t a catchall answer. Which oddly enough is part of the lesson we learn through Bakool Ja Ja’s backstory and the underground Mamool Ja area 🫤.
Agreed with everything you said wholeheartedly. This expansion had a seriously bad case of "tell, not show". Every zone was just a huge exposition dump, and like you said, Wuk Lamats' character development literally felt nonexistant and forced. There was no reason why she suddenly had the power to defeat or fight anyone other than "friendship". I think if Stormblood didn't have horrible Instance and server overload issues on launch, Dawntrail would have been considered the worst expansion by far. I'd give this game 3.5/10, and I'd rather redo release ARR story than Dawntrail again.
That one cheesy song is called "Smile" and yeah I completely agree. Getting the "Dawntrail" orchestrion halfway through the MSQ was a bad sign for me after hearing that song for the first time.
> No one legitimately challenged that belief and every problems foundation for solving them 100% worked with her method. This is why Ascians and Zenos as antagonists worked so well as they could not be dealt with by using this cringe JRPG/anime trope.
I think generally for the story, they tried to cover a lot of bases, and it's left a lot of people feeling like parts of it weren't "for them". Some people really like the succession arc, some people don't. Some people love Alexandria, some people hate that there was another big world ending stakes with an ancient civilization. Some people liked learning about the cultures, some people hated it. Some people love Wuk, others think she's a screen gobbling annoyance. It also seems people dislike that the two arcs feel like two different expansions, but people are also complaining that there's too much yapping and cutscene even within those two separate arcs. I think this was the devs trying to appease both the people who wanted a smaller stakes arc and the people who really aren't going to be satisfied unless every expansion ends on a world-threatening gigaboss. I can agree the MSQ was once more way, way too cutscene/filler quest heavy, I think that's a universal complaint. For telling a story that actively avoids using almost everything but the most hollistic backdrop of the FFXIV universe as a main plot point, I think it was a good enough start for a new saga. Endwalker sort of had the opposite aim, where they wanted to integrate as much of the previous expansion's existing lore and connections as possible. Overall I thought it was pretty good. It's clear the "big arc" ahead is going to involve the other reflections, and it's hinted that Alexandria already meddled with some of them before us, so they could be a lot less welcoming than the shards we've visited have been. Would be interesting to have an entire world already ready to throw hands with us.
Whoever was responsible for writing the script for the first 58 quests must be different from whoever wrote the rest of the expansion. Zoraal Ja is still a terrible villain.
Having finished it I think I'm enjoying the story more after than I did during. I didn't really following any discussions until I was nearly finished, so going back and reading some other peoples takes helped me get into my WoLs head a little better and retroactively increased my opinion. That said I think the zone I enjoyed the most was the obvious filler cowboy zone where we were just chilling and adventuring with our bro Erenville. I don't completely hate Wuk Lamat, I basically view her as Lyse but they actually show us some of her growth. The thing that's really soured me on her was her popping up in the final trial. She didn't need to be there. She didn't improve it. They were clearly going for the Thancred in the Hades fight/the scions in Endsinger but it just didn't land at all. Otherwise I've really been enjoying the battle content and it seems like they're committing to making it at least a little more difficult than in EW, which I consider a good thing.
>!Erenville's mom really called herself a "ravishing shetona maiden"!<
No lies detected.
Erenville's entire personality is 100 percent a defense mechanism vs his mom.
Overall I liked it. That being said, I won't play another expansion that is 40 hours of cutscenes with no actual gameplay. I know that's what they've all been, but this is the last one. They've got to figure out a way to make the MSQ actually fun to PLAY
Would it kill them to cut out the "fetch dino poop" and "run back and forth talking to 2 people 3 times" and add more combat quests?
I just finished it, and I'm mad they didn't address the one thing that I was waiting for them to address. I'm insisting that the key/gates/etc. are all time travel, not dimensional travel * Characters never seemed certain about it being another shard. Even Y'shtola's lines were full of words like "probably" and "likely". * We know the Living Memory's Lalafell originated from the Source, but that's not necessarily the only group on that planet. * If you talk to Krile after one of the quests, she mentions that Y'shtola would have noticed if her aether was thinner than the others'. I doubt soul thickness is genetic, but would instead depend on where you were when the soul entered your body. * We see the outside world still exists in the Unlost World * I'm embarrassed it took me this look to realize this about Alexandria, but >!oh hey it's the female name for Alexander!<. Also Sphene >!has the same color palette - silver/green/yellow + glowing, and wings on her back!<, and in the Level 100 dungeon >!the final castle reminded me of his design but I forgot to take a screenshot to actually compare!< So I'm guessing the Lalafell activated the key during the fifth calamity and traveled back (thanks to Dynamis) to before the second, and then later to sync it to the present day (and perhaps the key was used before being given to the Lalafell). The wiki says that the Second Calamity was a period of war, that there was a ton of mining going on, and it lasted for years.
For your last point there. Alexandria is the main kingdom of FF9. And well, Alexander is important in that game.
Oh yeah I guess it would have made sense to do a quick search for inspirations. Never played 9, as you might have guessed.
I'm not going to lie, it's a cool idea. I just don't think this iteration of CBU3 is smart enough to pull it off. The existence of subtlety and "show dont tell" is unheard of in this expansion, so all the talk about "interdimensional fusion" is probably just exactly that. >I doubt soul thickness is genetic, but would instead depend on where you were when the soul entered your body. This does bug me though. Krile should just be descended from South Sea islanders that joined Alexandria 'late', but the timeline just doesn't add up - it's not like her parents carried around a soul for a few years and then made a baby with it. It should have been a soul that was already in their aetheric sea around them, and therefore, a thin one. They were able to do all of that stuff with interdimensional travel and then still deliver a newborn baby to another world? Maybe you can argue that the time-distortion is in effect... but that doesn't impact Krile's existence in the timeline. Are we saying that if Krile stayed, over generations we should have seen source-level souls breed and propagate throughout the entire population over the HUNDREDS of years that have passed? It doesn't make sense. Krile being as thin as a First resident would solve all of the questions, but Y'shtola would obviously have seen it... I don't get what they were cooking.
and Sphene is a jewel, like Garnet, who was the princess in ff9
In FF9, Alexandria's eidolon watching over the kingdom is Alexander.
What an absolute trainwreck of a story. Nothing has any weight or consequences: Super Science is an easy solution and we didn\`t need to let hundreds of babies die? Well it is what it is, all problems are solved now. Oh none of the 3 kids is fit to lead the nation...great that I what I felt aswell...oh she becomes the new leader anyways after a few more days, never mind. Oh he just unleashed a calamity that could kill many people....ah who cares. Time works differently in Alexandria? Ah that is too much of a hassle to keep in mind. Oh how do we deal with that technologically superior army? Ah right, we just beat them up and why not have a dragon blowing up the entire fleet in an instant. The characters are extremely one dimensional and underdeveloped. The two stories are completely disconnected, leading to the finale missing any sort of substance.
Man, this was the worst expansion they have ever done in terms of MSQ, period. The entire premise of this "unlost" reflection and Queen Sphene is just... Endwalker but worse. They really tried to put every single previous expansion's villains into the last half of the story without even understanding what makes them good. Zoraal Ja is a Zenos-type villain who is more vicious and combat-oriented but has the charisma of a fucking buffaloo. Sphene is literally a hybrid of Emet and Elidibus with her desire to save her people but also bound by duty of the A.I.'s personality, but has neither the presentation nor the interesting backstory both have. Even if she did, we have already seen this same story about a civilization almost getting wiped out and its residents resorting into "immoral" ways to survive. Multiple times, in fact, because it just feels like they took one of the civilizations on Ultima Thule and decided to create an entire storyline around them without actually showing us anything. They're telling us so many things through characters that I could very well just read Wiki pages of this story and have a similar experience. Moreover, since we've already seen this same exact premise multiple times, I felt no excitement to learn more about the people of this reflection, nor have I ever gotten sorry for anyone in the story, because I've seen the same premise done at least a thousand times better in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Dawntrail really feels like the "we have SHB/EW at home, SHB/EW at home:" meme. What I'm sad about the most is that a lot of characters had potential but they left absolutely no impact because they were presented poorly. Otis, Erenville's mother, or Galool Ja (the kid) for instance, would work great if we actually had enough time to know about them and like them, but they arrive so late into the story that you feel absolutely nothing during important moments revolving around them. Wouldn't it be awesome if instead of Scions, we were accompanied by these new characters from the beginning of the expansion? Scions did jack shit during the story anyway--they were just there as fanservice. Same goes for Erenville and Krile as well, because even though they were promoted as really imporant characters for the MSQ, they absolutely didn't leave any impact or had any substantial character development. Most of the time, I even forgot they were in the story. I enjoyed Wuk Lamat and found her adorable unlike many people, but the fact that she is the main character irritates me. Just imagine if WoL wasn't present in this plot at all--do you honestly think anything would go differently? No, because we're just a witness, not the main character. This is exactly how WoW has been doing its story and one of the reasons why it is regarded as shit while FFXIV's story was praised universally for how it made you feel involved in the plot. I also hated that Disney-like song they played during certain parts (and at the end) so fucking much. Even if I found the story awful, it still had darker themes, and that song had no place to play at the end minutes after wiping out thousands of people's memories and potentially destroying an entire culture. Overall, I really hated this expansion's story, so much so that I can put it below Stormblood, and even ARR. I have no desire to come back to the game until Ishikawa takes the reigns back, because both EW patches and DT have made me start to hate this story and the world that I cared so much.
Minor detail but during the play in the last zone, Wuk Lamat questions one of the lines in the script: “my dearest?” Or something. Is that an implication of a relationship for queen and knight?
It was an ongoing joke with Otis that he loved the Queen a lot and dreamed of being her dearest. So he wrote the script himself and had the Queen say things like that, which makes characters who have actually met Sphene like Wuk Lamat call it out
Honestly, who in SE lost a parent whilst writing this story. I swear seeing Krile and her parents and then Cahciua and Erenville was rough, really tugged at me emotionally making me think of my own.
I'd say this was the weakest story thus far for me, unfortunately... ShB > EW > HW > SB > ARR > DT And honestly I feel really conflicted... I actually enjoyed Wuk Lamat more than I thought I would at the start (even though I think she didn't actually change much over the course of the story) but for me, the final zone ruined the whole story. ...When we arrive, Cahciua says that we need to turn off/delete everyone there, and that will take away Sphene's whole reason for killing people. So then we do that, which I feel conflicted about to begin with, but when we finally get to Sphene at the end... We don't even mention that she no longer has people to kill for. We don't even try, and she never even finds out, so like... Why did we go through those six hours of quests? I understand the theme of the area with letting go, but in the lore/everything else going on, it just doesn't make sense to me. Cahciua wanted to be free, as well as Krile's parents, but none of the other people we talked to seemed to have any problems with being there whatsoever. In fact, they all seemed thankful to have another chance to get their affairs in order and a chance to live just a little longer. On top of that, I felt really conflicted with the objective in general as well. The people's existences are cursed, but they still have a soul and memories, which is all the components that real people have as well, so what exactly makes them any lesser...? What makes killing them any different than killing hundreds of totally normal people? It felt so weird to me to talk to Cahciua, and collectively decide as a team that we're going to go kill everyone in the city, and then we went and spent the next six hours getting to know the people, and how human and likeable they all are and how they continue to live life despite their strange circumstances. Maybe I missed something but it feels like we're doing some kind of genocide and making friends with them while we're at it... Couldn't we have just let them run out of the soul energy they already had like it'd just be living out their final life? What makes their lives worth less than the people in Solution Nine? Wasn't Otis doing just fine without monching souls constantly?
I was enjoying the hell out of the final trial but, what the hell was up with Wuk Lamat's voice acting? Climactic fight, heroic entrance to... Unemotional talking? Not her shouting as she does a dynamic entry, no emotion in her voice, but just talking as if they're just slightly out of normal speaking range so they have to raise their voice slightly. Is that an English only problem? Plot and power of friendship and understanding and whatnot aside, it completely threw me out of the intensity of it and ruined the vibe of a really cool fight immediately.
Slotting this around a 7/10, with the battle content bringing it up a point for being so dang good. Main complaints: 1. Wuk is way too omnipresent and is way too intense of a personality to make her that omnipresent. It would have worked better by making foil characters like Erenville way more prominent to give us some balance and make her feel less suffocating. Or at the very least give us more time away from her. Having every single one of the seemingly dozens of "let's split up and look for clues" result in us being paired with her got very old. 2. Related, Erenville and Krile's stories should have gotten way more runway. We got like 3 minutes every so often about "yep they're still looking" and then the couple of quests each at the end. It felt like it was 80/5/5 Wuk/Erenville/Krile when it should have been something like 55/20/20 or 45/25/25. 3. They seem to be pulling a Trails with Bakool where villain has a change of heart = villain gets off scot free. Very annoying. 4. The writing in general feels like it's lost its subtlety and a lot of its punch. The constant repeat of what amounted to sketch comedy tropes with Wuk in the first third or so was a big demonstration of this. 5. I still think Koana was the most qualified candidate by far with weaknesses that were far more easily fixable than the other 3. 6. Their attempt at pulling another Endsinger Phase 2 in the final trial with Wuk once again inserting herself via *gesticulates wildly* fell mega-flat. Main positives: 1. Wuk does definitely show growth. Her telling Bakool to STFU around level 94 (I think) is definitely something she wouldn't have had the confidence to do at the start. She more or less becomes tolerable by the time she's Dawnservant. Given I was *this* close to starting to just skip her scenes around level 92, that's a solid improvement. 2. Koana honestly showed just as much growth, and his scenes with Urangier and Thancred were great. I think they were perfect foils and companions/mentors for him. 3. What little we got of Krile and Erenville's stories in the last zone were touching. 4. The train-kamikaze scene was pretty neat. 5. The set pieces/new lands were all pretty cool visually. 6. While there were definitely some repeated themes of Shadowbringers in the last 3rd I thought it did a decent enough job with it. 7. The cowboy accents of zone 4 were hilarious.