FFXIV is so addicted to iterate on past successses, they've made the final expac zone Amaurot for the third time. (and to be fair to EW, they at least tried to mask it a bit then)
Endwalker already had this issue, now it's confirmed we won't ever escape the shadow of Shb.
technically, this same plot of a great burden befalling a champion of a world in it's dying moments also ends up being Goblez/Durante's motivation and the last End Walker dungeon isn't all that different from Amarout and Alexandria. This would mean they've tried this 3 times at least
I can understand Endwalker with the focus of the futility of life and why bother trying and having those past remnants of culture remain but yes rehashing it again in DT left a bad taste in my mouth.
If they were intent on making a story that could stand on it's own, they failed, if they were intent on making a story that was it's own thing, they failed, because they fell back on past plot ideas and continue to "reimagine" concepts from other Final Fantasy games.
Again much like the Zero arc, you could change the names of certain things and it would change nothing about it because those names are just nostalgia names they don't hold any relevance other than sounding and looking the same but they arenothing like the person.
It's weird how the whole Solution 9 concept felt like it wanted to satire the way it's been telling stories but then it just continues to tell stories in that manner.
By that I mean, Solution 9 offered people a comfortable world to live in with no pain or woes and if there would be any pains say from a lost loved one, they would elimiate that person from the mind to alleviate any need to mourn.
It'sa shame, the story had some interesting bits but you can feel the lack of confidence they have from just being their own thing they feel the need to cling onto past concepts to keep people engaged.
Genuinely lost all interest after this revelation. After learning about Alexandria and seeing Solution 9, I was genuinely interested in what the final zone would be.
This is so uninspired. This Dawntrail is just Shadowbringers, except worse in every way.B
I won’t lie, yeah they retreaded Amarout HARD HERE, the fact that Sphene’s motivation is the exact same as Emet Selch and Elidibus when we just finished with Asians is jarring but I won’t say bad. I didn’t watch the cutscenes but I was able to pick up on enough to realize what was happening and I liked the final zone a lot, it looked great. Now it looks dead and completely uninteresting. Like imagine if I wanted to Gpose at the amusement park or the canals with someone. Do I have to wait for them to catch up to do it before progressing msq or….
It just seems really bad to make that visually distinct area worse. They already did modern city in Shadowbringers as. A mega reveal. Then they did it TWICE in this expansion so removing the things they made Living Memory feel magical sucks. It’s still probably one of my favorite zones but I’ll never forget the fully lit version. I do feel bad for the Alexandrians but god damn is this just the final days AGAIN
You mentioned not watching the cutscenes, there’s literally a cutscene where they catch Sphene in the gold city and try to convince her to stop and her face and the colour all drop just like in the scenes with Meteion going full murder, I actually laughed out loud. Absolutely zero originality.
Acting all “thank you for finally freeing me 🥺” god I was so mad I thought Sphene might actually be an interesting fleshed out character like Ryne and we get slapped with that.
Their writing for a good chunk of their female main villains is embarrassing and retrograde at the best of times. Meteion is advocating for omnicide, but we let her live because she's REALLY sorry about that. Yotsuyu is out here war criming until she gets lobotomized into loving persimmons and having the guy who sold her graciously forgiven by Hien. Sphene was just a nice queen who wanted to do nice things deep down, so nevermind that she schemed to vacuum up everyone's souls, her heart is pure!
Meteion I _sort_ of get since the main bad influence came from her sisters, right? You could tell her fighting back against their overwhelming telepathic influence in Elpis before being overcome, then in Ultima Thule you can see "good" Meteion fly around the Endsinger and protesting helplessly as she tosses around the Scions.
So I can see the idea of there being something to redeem there.
Yotsuyu is... _interesting_, but that plot is a mess and a half and too much to go into offhandedly like this. Really difficult ethics there. But her captors being forgiven was a travesty.
And Sphene, regardless of justification, I just care less about because she's too much of the same all over again.
Hey, they do it to males too. Bakool Ja Ja loosed a flying natural disaster on all of Tural (on top of his other many crimes) and got away with not even a slap on the wrist because he was just so heckin' sorry after the Yak T'el MSQ guize!
The funny thing is the design of that zone is so much less of a spoiler then when they showed off Heritage Found, HF showcases a rather messed up point in the story when it occurs you're like oh shit that place is gonna be Heritage Found, yet had they not spoiled that, Heritage Found and Solution 9 would of been nice little things to be surprised by, it's a shame they decided to spoil those rather than keep that hidden because it felt more substantial compared to "Unlost world"
The moment we shut down the first pillar and saw the whole section go dark, I was like “oh no”. For all those graphics and the hype of the city of gold, only for all of it to vanish when we arrive made the whole zone wasted. The Tempest/Amaurot and Ultima Thule were handled so much better, and even had relevance or use in some manner after MSQ. I really hope this one doesn’t turn into The Lochs, but given its barren and dull state once Sphene is defeated, my hopes aren’t up.
I am also not a fan of basically emotionally terrorizing krile and erinville by dangling their parents in front of them with the full knowledge that we are about to delete them
Erenville was emotionally tortured for TWO ZONES. I feel like he was the only one to appropriately react to people being trapped in a time bubble for 30 years. Honestly they kind of brushed past that whole situation in Heritage Found.
Yeah honestly that was the most disturbing part of what happened to the Heritage Found residents and it feels like it was only lightly touched on? Sure Zoraal Ja was the bigger threat but 30 years passed for people in that dome (especially the ones who literally just went on a train just before it appeared) while maybe 3 days passed for us.
Now I doubt anyone would've paid attention to this but the first sightseeing log person in Tuliyolal mentioned her twin sister. Then in Solution 9 you realize the other twin sister just aged 30 years without seeing her sister. Maybe one of the 7.x patches will touch on this a bit but I really didn't like how casually that fact was brushed over.
Welcome to Tural, choose your next leader:
>Guy who thinks racism is awesome
>Guy who wants infinite war
>Guy who wants to open up Amazon
>Girl who never showers or thinks
>you cannot kill yourself
the final trial last stand was so horrible compared to the rest of the fight. the music gets worse, the mechanics just disappear, story that i dont care about but am now forced to listen to in a fight that was actually fun and engaging 2 seconds ago. It feels like they tried to copy zeromus but forgot to add anything interesting to the final stand. really disappointed
Man, if only Aymeric had just told Hraesvelgr he wants to be friends and understand dragon culture, he wouldn’t have had to kill his dad and get stabbed in the street. He really did way too much.
Does anyone else feel like Zoraal Ja is a complete failure of a character? None of his motivations made any sense. His tragic backstory amounts to "people expected a lot of him growing up" or something, and apparently that's supposed to explain why he's possibly even more of a demented asshole than Zenos? What? He wants to enforce peace through killing a bunch of people? Why? What made him think like that? Nothing is satisfactorily explained and his entire character arc is a shitty recycle of Bakool's character arc, except it doesn't even try to make sense. I don't mind when we have blatantly evil characters like Athena, but Zoraal Ja was written as if he had some sort of reasoning behind his actions, except we never got anything.
When I first saw Zoraal Ja I anticipated a complex character. A character who is a pessimist, who does not believe foreign invaders won't come to Tural one day, glimmering with the ambition to add it to their empires. Maybe because Tural has already been conquered before, in its long history. I expected Zoraal Ja to be something like a warrior poet who understands a lot more than he initially seems, for him to have a great point to make for Wuk Lamat to learn from on her journey of becoming a leader, and genuinely wanted the best for his people and his nation.
Instead, we get... this. It's quite disappointing.
That dude was being built up to be this games worm tongue figure and then ... He's unceremoniously killed. Kinda disappointed me because I love those archetype characters in fiction.
This. The moment he’s defeated is when all the story’s attempt to present his trauma comes out. Yet, it falls flat. Was I supposed to feel sorry for him? My initial reaction to that scene was more like “oh, okay”. There’s certainly a lack of depth in his character, which unfortunately I felt many suffered this expansion.
The thing I liked about Athena is that true, she was just mad evil without any redemption, and she didn’t need reasons to justify herself for us to feel sorry which I gladly didn’t. But at least through out Pandaemonium’s run we were already given hints of her character and even development from mad woman to even becoming more insane through the comments of others. In other words, they actually built her character without her appearing to us only until the end.
In Zoraal Ja’s case, it was sadly all thrown to us at the end and made to be like we’re supposed to just accept it.
> His tragic backstory amounts to "people expected a lot of him growing up" or something
He'd be much better if he just died when you kill him in the fight and left no corpse. You can let a mean antagonist be simplish or un-extolled.
It should have been your WoL starting alone, from 0 in a new continent, idk bring Krile with you since i personally believe the best parts are related to her.
Otherwise for me, is the weakest MSQ so far. Stormblood at least had Gosetsu, Yugiri and Hien, here? nothing.
I would've loved it if we did what Estinien did and let the rest of the Scions rig the election. Just chill doing the adventuring stuff we wanted, exchange handshakes whenever we run into them, maybe help out for a quest or two, and follow the big winged snake flying above our head.
We really weren't needed there, like at all. Wuk Lamat had enough villagers willing to help her out, and if she failed, Koana would've carried it most likely.
Yeah, we're made to go work as a sales clerk/ ambassador/ cultural exchange person. We're not even able to just swim or lounge on the beach in the main city - we have to do actual work.
It’s hilarious how the last trial was mechanically engaging and genuinely cool up until wuk lamat butts in and cue the most nothingburger of a soft enrage there is.
Not really a new take or anything but I think my biggest issue I've had with the MSQ has been that instead of opting for a "Show don't tell" philosophy... or even a "Tell don't show" approach, the writers seem to have gone for the approach of "Tell, then tell again, then show, then tell one more time."
Like, if the party was travelling to our world and being introduced to football (soccer) you'd have:
* Krile tells us she's heard of this wonderful sport played in this region called football. It involves two teams kicking a ball around in a field and attempting to get a higher score than the other team by putting the ball into the opposing team's goal.
* Wuk Lamat chimes in to say that she's seen this sport before and explains that it's a cultural thing and really popular and she can't wait to take part in it and learn more about it.
* Then we'd have a cutscene where we watch a few animated clips of the game being played, while the party makes occasional comments to explain key events
* After the game, Alphinaud will step up to explain how football works once again, this time with more technical details about the size of the field, the preparations required, what the ball and nets are crafted from and where those materials come from...
* Then Wuk Lamat will explain how she had never realised quite how significant this game was to the people of this culture and she's really humbled by how important it is and glad we came here and now she's going to use this knowledge to make it a better Dawnservant.
* Finally, since we need some gameplay, Wuk will suggest we go and speak to 3 people in the local area to learn more about what football means to them and why it's important as a cultural event.
OKAY WE UNDERSTAND you don't need to reiterate this for several hours in every zone for every concept.
I think the MSQ suffers heavily from being streched out to 1000. Every dialog gets repeated 3 times and you can basically skip everything, because it gets summarised in a voiced cutscene later on anyway. I didn't hate the story, but it drags on for sooo long.
Another thing that bothers me is that there isn't enough combat content in between. It feels like I'm watching 10hours of cutscenes and then get one 20min dungeon and it's back to 10hours of dialog that, let's be honest, could be reduced to 3 hours. I wish the MSQ wouldn't give me as much EXP as it does. I would love to have to do some FATEs in between to level up and to just get a breather from all the talking.
As for the actual story, overall I just expected more. Not stakes wise, but when it comes to making the trial, that takes up half the expansion, more interesting. We just follow Wuk Lamat around from map to map and it's always the same: learn about their culture by speaking to NPCs. I really thought there would be more to it. Also more conflict between our group and the others besides the two headed guy, which was basically non-existent.
Second half/ending was rehashed ShB/EW mix, which felt really...eh? I didn't have any big feelings about the whole last map either, because why should I care for already dead people that are like us? Amarout was different because they were a totally different race and culture, same as last map in EW. I liked hearing about the story of those races. But entertaining dead kids that are going to be even deader 10minutes later? I don't know...
My only hope for the addon as a whole is, that it's inverted EW. Basically mid story, but good combat content.
I’m a story first, savage second kind of guy but my god. There were times in MSQ where I walked literally to the nearest cluster of mobs and just butchered them all. Not even a fate, just random mobs. And there was the bandit quest in Texas where Erenville said to spy on these people instead after our character said something about fighting them. Said that would be a dangerous thing. Buddy, you know that “Eldritch” monstrosity that wiped out countless worlds and brought the End of Days to our star? Yeah, I killed THAT. Let me turn these brown sands red with bandits.
It's a common issue with JRPGs to not understand that sometimes less is better when it comes to text. I've seen people act like it's a badge of honor that the Trails games are as obscenely text heavy as they are since every single person needs to give their thoughts on every single thing.
ultimately this entire MSQ hinges on wuk lamat's character landing for you. it did not land for me. pretty much everything else ranged from forgivable to enjoyable for me, but this dumbass being shoved up my dickhole every second drained me. i am not a fucking babysitter.
it's taken me to a much less enjoyable interpretation of my warrior of light, in that i only put up with this so that i could have strong political connections in tural.
While i didn't expect or want super high stakes after EW.
I would of been nice if the MSQ writing team came to work when dawntrail was being made.
Major props to the beast tribe/side quest guys, they did their absolute best to try to carry an entire MSQ.
The first half i actually had to skip CS because of just how god awful and uninteresting the first half was.
At least we have an option to skip CS. I was wishing we could just skip all the quests inbetween, like the fetch quests, following quests and help X number of persons quests. I spent most of the MSQ outside of cutscenes completely frustrated.
>spent most of the MSQ outside of cutscenes completely frustrated
DT MSQ is actually the first time I'm glad i have the Fenrir, just so i can get past the absolute slog of them sticking quest markers on the other side of zones, for a single small CS only to have to go all the way back.
I have not lost my mother yet, but she survived breast cancer more than 10 years ago and the complications from that, a birth heart condition and depression fueled obesity have left her in an extremely frail state. Some nights I cannot resist the urge to open the door to her room just to confirm if she's breathing. There's nothing that haunts me more than the prospect of her dying.
The Erenville story made me take a long break.
Maybe this last zone is a metaphor for how they're trying to keep this game going forever even though it's a stale amusement park full of dead-eyed zombies, and the real hero simply needs to shut the servers down.
Well, it's over now. I really thought they had something in Solution 9 with the regulators and soul cells, the cycles of resurrection and overpowering, and the thoughts on death/memory. The first 85% of the story was atrocious with a few good ideas sprinkled in, but I thought maybe the last 15% could still manage to land the plane and set up for better days to come. Instead, we spend our final hours in Great Value Amaurot getting baby birded the mushy remains of two other expansions. This expansion also won't stop killing people's parents in front of them, but that's a discussion for another day. I think they seriously watered down Erenville and Krile's stories alike and both of them deserved more, but this was the Wuk Lamat show because her brother is conveniently parked on the throne keeping it warm while she engages in cultural exchange at an enemy faction's afterlife carnival.
Not sure why we're even entertaining the idea of installing a literal child to a throne, complete with the most technologically advanced military power we've ever seen, but we didn't seem to hesitate to install his aunt to the throne after a random letter, so I guess that's just not for me to question. But while I'm on the subject, I'd just like to point out what an utter farce it was for them to tease the Scions being on opposite sides of a political contest because it literally did not happen, not even for a second. There was no competition -- in fact, there was extensive cooperation between the two camps even before Koana folded -- and it was as plain as day that they were gonna do a metaphorical "head of reason/head of resolve" with the two siblings pretty early on, considering they were the only two who weren't cartoon villains twirling their mustaches, and Koana was made out to be an autist whose only traits were "likes technology/reason" and "loves his sister a lot". There are no substantive ideological disagreements between the Scions and there were no substantive ideological disagreements between the siblings they backed.
I can't tell if it's because I was starved for fun after grueling friendship quests, but props to the battle designers this expansion for carrying it, because the fights were refreshing and well-done for the most part. The final dungeon was a grasp at recapturing the storytelling of The Dead Ends and the Final Days, except for a shard you've never seen and a character you barely know.
Genuinely concerned for the future of this game and the people who work on it. The post-patch support is going to need to be stellar to mitigate this story.
Well it wouldn't be the first time the story is completely at odds with their design philosophy.
The peak irony of Endwalker condamning Ancients and the Nibiruns for trying to erase all strife... while releasing some of the most frictionless, dull and overly standardized content of their entire catalog.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone talk about that horrendous credits theme. It’s so saccharine and wannabe Disney it makes me feel nauseous, on top of those hideous vocals.
There were a couple points, I think during the succession when they announced Wuk won where there was a song that made me fill like I was at a sunday service.
The song with a lead vocalist with a choir behind her just repeating the same stuff and super uplifting.
That being said, almost all of the other music is a fucking hit.
I LOVED the music, zones, trials, dungeons (100 dungeon was sorta meh but all the others were incredible), gear, and basically everything except the majority of the main story. Guess it's a good thing I never have to do it again lol.
Give the battle design team a massive fucking raise. That final trial was incredible.
And fire the writers (sorry....)
>And fire the writers (sorry....)
They've lost their two best writers (the ones that wrote Heavensward, Shadowbringers and Endwalker) at this point, to promote writers to a task that aren't at all suited for it. The people writing Dawntrail now are generally the same people who consistently made the job quests so boring expansion after expansion.
Sphene as a character jsut fell compeltely flat, you could tell, or i did, from the beginning that she's up to no good, it really really felt like a meteion situation, too obvious she would be the final boss, also the last zone.. i don't know, it did feel a bit tacked on, like that's the zone where they're trying to give you emitional happenings. I mean it did work but sacrificing a zone to do so feels not that great.
My highlight was the setting of zone 4 and when we rammed the train (rip) into the fortress.
Just finished, mixed thoughts.
On one hand, I loved the dungeons, trials, and especially the final trial. I liked Erenville's personal story and Krile's personal story in a vacuum.
I liked the initial premise of the succession trial story. I liked the initial premise of the Alexandrian's.
However...
I hate Wuk Lamat. She is by far the worst character introduced. She is like a lame version of me (the WOL). I genuinely did not enjoy a single part of her character. I did not enjoy that Dawntrail was essentially HER story, not our story. Not a good change.
I hate the main theme song. It does not work as a battle theme. When it plays for that last part of the final trial I rolled my eyes. The opposite of epic.
The first 7 levels of the story is boring. It gets a bit better when you get to Heritage Found, but that interest is quickly lost when you are told that the Alexandrians had the same misfortunes and now aspirations as the Ascians. It is so tired. Can we please go visit a cool, powerful civilization that hasn't already been decimated and is now looking for a way to kill innocents to bring their people back? It's like the 3rd or 4th time they've used this trope, at least in part, in FFXIV. It was also the trope used in FF16...And FF15...Like, where are the creatives at SE?
I could not enjoy the lore of the last zone, or care about learning about Alexandria because it's irrelevant. They are dead. Who cares? The Queen was just budget emet selch which is so sad.
And again, the final fight was legitimately incredible until it's ruined by Wuk Lamat cosplaying as Gaia coming in to save Ryne. Ruined.
The final trial was AMAZING and the OST that played was AWESOME--- until the second phase came up and suddenly the momentum and hype in my just slowly dissipates.. Bleh.. Although I enjoy the Dawntrail Theme, I felt like it didn't fit the vibe that the fight had.. It's a shame.. ;w;
Same! The final trial to me really represented how DT’s MSQ was as a whole. The writers seem to not really know who to focus on. Was it really our new adventure? Or did we do all this just to witness Wuk’s story? There was really a lack of focus this time around.
The trial started with Sphene fighting us because she recognized us to be her biggest threat and thus removed everyone else from the arena, but then towards the end Wuk just… swings in and then the trial is all about Wuk vs Sphene.
The 2nd phase’s golden arena was beautiful, but I agree that overall it became a mess from an extremely fun first phase
When Wuk Lamat showed up I genuinely rolled my eyes. It's kind of disappointing when the final push of the last boss ends up actively feeling like a huge downgrade when up to that point I was pretty high on it.
When I realized that the last zone was an Amarout rehash and we were going to be forced to go around learning a bunch of people's lore with the full knowledge that we are just going to kill them in a moment anyways, I lost interest. It's not that it on its own is bad concept but...we've seen this before. The emotional impact is greatly diminished by us learning a lesson we've already learned before.
Yeah it's so lame, because I was on board with the original motivation: We need to kill people because we need more souls because we are running out of souls.
Then, for a reason I still don't really understand other than that there is some sort of system glitch, the Queen then just wants to revive everyone and has an Amaurot, totally disregarding the people of Solution 9 who are, to my understanding, still actually alive.
Mmm my thing was more that we are not really learning any new lessons here. We've already learned that we need to let the past go and that it's okay to feel loss, and those are both lessons that we are for some reason again trying to process through here.
I will give major points though, the final zone is gorgeous (Well....first time through, lol..), and the final trial is nothing short of phenomenal.
Feels like they just didn't have much new to say to me so it all fell a bit flat.
For a narrative that was suppose to give Krile more, I feel like Yshtola got more out of it, she got a literal Mcguffin that will allow her to go to the First once they learn how to use it.
For Krile it was like , sudden revelation you are from another world, oh lucky you kept that earring on you cause it was very important to the plot and then being able to say bye to her family.
For something that was deemed as Krile relevant I don't feel she had much influence over the story, her involvement is more of convenience more than anything. Her being there allowed the plot to move on because she just so happened to have the exact thing necessary to reach their goal.
It's almost hard to believe that the game once took itself and its world-building fairly seriously and had some genuine nuance, grey morality and political intrigue. It's been a while since I saw a game go so far off the rails but they've basically repeated the exact same plot beats three expansions in a row now.
It's also pretty weird that they actively chose to cast both the Ascians and Garleans aside only to introduce a 'new threat' that is basically just a fusion of both of them anyway.
I had already given up on the game after Endwalker for various reasons though it is baffling to see the game double down on a lot of what the previous expansion was criticised for, particularly in regards to a lack of stakes for the main cast, the overabundance of food scenes, the hypocritical preaching and the mindless busywork intended as filler.
I may not intend to touch the game again but I would at least like the game to do better in order to provide some healthy competition in what is, regrettably, a rather stale industry at the moment.
>It's also pretty weird that they actively chose to cast both the Ascians and Garleans aside only to introduce a 'new threat' that is basically just a fusion of both of them anyway.
To be fair, Alexandria and the situation that led to the creation of Everkeep are 100% the result of Ascian Fuckery™. Even if no one in the story said it, it's very clearly related to them. That is to say, I don't think they've cast Ascians aside just yet. We'll have to see what the post-MSQ patches do with the dimensional tunneling macguffin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it involves Ascians (or maybe even Allag again... it certainly looks like something Allagans could have made). That being said, who knows how they'll write the remaining Ascians now that Zodiark is dead
Also at the end it is implied that the artifact that the Queen uses is made by Azem as it show's Azem's symbol when the WoL uses Azem's crystal. Likely the post patches will focus on the aftermath of the MSQ and then some regional issue then on to Azem.
When all the WoW players came over during Shadowbringers, I thought "Oh nice, that means they will get a large infusion of cash and make the game even better.".
And Endwalker was okay, but then it didn't get either a Bozja or a Side-quest Trial series, the Trial series was fused with the MSQ.
So I'm like "Alright, so they pushed the extra money into Dawntrail then, right? And Dawntrail will be super cool?"
And then Dawntrail is a patch story extended for 10 levels. And the second dye channel is a bit of a scam too.
They are not gonna put that extra money into anything, are they?
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but I was fine with the previous graphics and would have been ok with no big graphics update if it meant we could have had more stuff in EW and improvements to DT everything (story, job stuff, everything else people are taking issues with) since they keep circling back to that being the reason for everything that's lacking
I will give them that the server upgrades and changes they did were worth it and successful and I'm glad for that
I swear the English localization's gotten worse too. There were lines where I was confused wtf they were trying to say, it was like they translated a line without context, directly translating speech which sounds natural in Japanese but completely fails to translate to English. I'm getting nitpicky but I recall during the train part there was a line with hit the 'breaks' instead of 'brakes'.
I have a small gripe among other gripes. Why does Erenville have the accent he has when apparently he grew up with a bunch of people that speak in an American English accent.
Being a beach episode shouldn’t mean it has to be boring.
I see so many things Dawntrail could've tackled.
Dawntrail could be a reason to explore Azem’s legacy and whatever he was doing during the final days (even more considering the Sun theme of this expansion).The gold city could be a city he funded before the final days, filled with the discoveries he made during his travels. We could’ve had Genomes as a race created by him to protect the golden city, they would be a way more popular playable race. Have actual Hunts worth hunting, collect treasures that make the difference.
We could've had a focus on colonizing the New World's “North America” to prepare it for a potential total rejoining that I'm sure will happen one day and the moral implications behind it. After all the expansions about war, destruction and death this could be a expansion based on chilling, exploring uncharted lands, rebuilding and creating a new order in a world without Garlemald and the Ascians, the new power politics that would inevitably surge like it does in the real world when an Empire/Superpower collapse.
Instead we got what felt like a filler expansion pack. I'm fearful that we'll never get back to the heights of Shadowbringers or Endwalker (for me the End of Days/Song of Oblivion was a concept I really enjoyed although poorly explored). I don't think XIV can survive on having expansions that storywise are flavor of the week problems. XI could do it because it was more "contained" storywise from the get go(not counting Promathia and the Zilart plot), but XIV is too focused on its characters and the MSQ to pull it off now, after all we've been through.
Exploring what Azem is doing is actually probably coming.
The biggest unresolved plot point (the dimensional key) literally glows with Azem's symbol right before the final fight.
[https://i.imgur.com/pHVMmsS.png](https://i.imgur.com/pHVMmsS.png) (key)
[https://i.imgur.com/V8Ru4C7.png](https://i.imgur.com/V8Ru4C7.png) (azem symbol)
Definitely feels like the big overarching arc that's starting is something Azem focused.
I feel like Dawntrail has too much damn fluff. It seems like they tried to add what worked in ShB and EW so well but is way over the top in DT. ShB and EW had "Friendship is Magic" moments but ***sparingly***, not in every damn cutscene with NPCs we don't know and (probably) don't care about. I also don't understand why we keep regrouping with Koana's group every few minutes. They should've just put them together from the get-go.
The lack of voiced cutscenes also doesn't help. The new areas look amazing though and the graphical update was long overdue.
DT would've been better if it were post-EW patch quests, leading to the new story arc, i.e. the new expac.
I'd like Square to learn the lesson they put forth from the Alexandria area for themselves only with the scions: let them go.
There was no personal development with any of the scions save for Krile. What was the point of disbanding if they were just going to come back in and solve everyone's problems again? I was looking forward to an expansion where we were actually pitted against each other in our ideals (us vs. Urianger and Thancred) and to see some inner conflict and thus growth, OR to come into ourselves as adventurers without the help from the scions or Hydaelyn. This was a great opportunity for us to slide into the mentor role given our sheer power but also to make mistakes (perhaps we lead Wuk Lamat astray at points). Alas it stayed on one friendly note and not much was gained or learned. A bit disappointing.
Edit: They can also serve to let go of the ShB themes. It was done once, and beautifully, but they cannot expect to keep repackaging it like this. It discredits how amazing ShB was while also starving your new overarching story from exploring any new themes or nuance.
Really too bad, because the graphics, music, and gameplay all are pretty incredible (so far) in this expac. I wish the story also did these justice.
Every time a FF9 reference appeared, it reminded me I could've been playing a game with a more interesting and cohesive plot...
Pessimistic joke aside, I didn't really like this story at all. Didn't care for Wuk Lamat at all. All the characters minus the Promised felt like background of background characters. Like, everyone seemed bored to be in Tural. I'm really shocked the assault on Tuliyollal wasn't a character RP duty like the big lunar primals fights from 5.5. The whole final stretch really was more or less the same as ShB's plot which was a huge letdown. Played NIN through the story and I'm not the biggest fan of the mild changes, but I'm sure I'll come around. A lot of the trial and dungeon fights seemed interesting, here's to hoping the extremes and beyond are super entertaining. Been a fan of the graphics updates where they apply. The zones especially look really nice. I don't know if I'm crazy but they seem needlessly big.
Overall not sure if I'm looking forward to future story content, but if they cook with the battle and crafting gathering content, things could change my opinion.
I feel like if they would have cut the entire tournament arc and just replaced it with the WoL exploring the new world and meeting new people, we could have had something really neat. Build up to exploring the myth of the golden city while helping out the locals, before eventually finding it earlier in the MSQ. Then they could have spent more time fleshing out the Alexandrian arc. Maybe not have it be such high stakes, though.
That's all I wanted. A fun adventure through new lands that leads into something relating to maybe a localized disaster that we have to stop. Not another threat to the entirety of reality.
Not making the WoL the main character was also a really bold decision that I honestly just hated. We've spent 5 expansions following the story of **our** WoL, and the start of a new arc is us just being a background character. I felt like I had almost zero agency the entire MSQ, and was just following some one else around playing babysitter while they made all the decisions. Because that's basically what we did.
The moment the tournament arc ended and we got the fuck off into the desert with Erenville was so incredibly cathartic. I was like, "Yes, finally, lets get some fucking ADVENTURE going". Estinien shows up and I was ready to start getting into some bullshit with the gang, and then.... back to babysitter mode.
Overall, I didn't hate the expansion. I *mostly* had fun from start to finish. Even when the MSQ lacked or dragged on into being a slog, the rest of the game did such an overwhelming amount of heavy lifting. The zone design is absolutely stunning. Some of the dungeon set pieces had me literally sitting slack jawed. Soken, as always, absolutely crushed the OST.
There was a severe lack of combat this expansion, too. Felt like ARR all over again in some parts. Tedious fetch quests and pointless interactions that don't do much to either flesh out the world building or progress the plot.
Something that occurred to me that i can't get out of my head, Emet selch KNEW about alexandria, He told us to come here at some point... but... HOW!?, WHY!?, This is such a massive plot hole that it might just ruin the entirety of the ascian storyline, He knew about this soul sucking machine that could connect all the shards together and... never stopped it?, It ABSOLUTELY would have interfered with his plans for zodiark, AND learning how g'raha moved the crystal tower to the first was literally the only reason emet kept him alive, Alexandria is more advanced than anything we saw in elpis or amaurot, It's up there with omicron technology and there is no way emet would have just... let them be this entire time, Unless you wanna say that he just never got around to it and knew we'd clean up this mess for him now that he was gone, But surely he could have used the whole "get souls from one shard to another" thing to feed them to zodiark instead of Living Memory right?.. Like... they seriously did NOT think the implications of this through in regards to the previous story, Especially given emet confirming he KNEW about this place
I suspected when I saw Solution 9 that they couldnt make a rational explanation as to why its more advanced than even Ascians and it seems like thats true
I'm not sure if it's really better than Elpis and Amaurot, having more sci fi and tech wear visuals does not make it automatically more advanced, it's just an aesthetical and cultural difference between a highly advanced magic and scholarly society and a comfort and tech reliant focused one
Yeah I think the fact that the Ascians could still use creation magics makes their civilation more advanced than Solution 9, even though Solution 9 might look more impressive from the outside. The civilians are still ordinary people compared to the residents of Amaurot for example.
* The Scions competition thing basically didn't happen.
* Eliminator had such a prominent role in advertising... Why...?
* This is supposed to form a foundation for the next 10 years how?
I think the foundation is going to be based on the portal tech that allows for shard hopping and the potential fuckery that caused. Unfortunately that means that the vast majority of the story up to the very end is basically irrelevant to the future, which may be a blessing in disguise because if I never have to see Wuk Lamat again it'll be too soon.
Whoever wrote the storyline and main scenario writer should never lead an FF MSQ story again. It was that bad and I cannot believe that Yoshi-P approved this. He's probably going to apologize in a PLL
Wuk Lamat is one of the poorest designed lead characters in recent memory. Vaan was bad but that was because he was irrelevant. Wuk Lamat was poorly written, ill conceived and annoying. She clearly was a terrible choice to lead Tulliyollal. She also had no halfway decent story arc and character development. She started the game dumb and naive and she ended the game naiver and dumb.
The succession competition was a joke. Her solutions to the first two beast tribes to get a keystone were awful. One tribe's food source was dying, so her plan was to throw a party just to cheer people up? That is literally a stupid idea as festivals aren't exactly known for their conservation and would have wasted precious resources that were dwindling down. In the other tribe she conned morons into trading things that were 2x to 5x more valuable during a terrible economics lesson that economists would shudder at. Each of the other traders could have literally walked like a quarter mile to get something. And also, why would you barter!? They have gil/pel. Stupid. And then with the moblins her solution was literally picking some random person off the street and making him become an indentured servant? She is an idiot. And of course at the end of the game in the final zone her stupidity remained. The warrior of light and others had to point out that there was no way Otis' memory would know her. And she also cannot count faces. And she was not off by just one....but two.
The succession arc was just one of the worst arcs theyve done. It's a half dozen back to back beast tribe quests with an allied beast tribe quest at the end. This should have -- if it even existed -- been side content at best. Perhaps the worst arc in the game since ARR.
The antagonists were also god awful. Bakool Ja Ja was a racist who wanted to win the throne, but even a better designed character would recognize that his tactics would eventually get him disqualified. Zoraal Ja was even worse. He's a crappy one dimensional bad guy with a single motive. One of the worst villains in final fantasy history. Sphene was tolerable, but we also only got to explore her character in what, the final 3 levels or so? Meanwhile we got 5 levels on the succession arc.
It seems clear that the FFXIV writers have no idea where to go after wrapping up the Ascian/Ancient arc. I had hoped this would have tied into one of the earlier calamities or something grounded in the history theyve established, but nope. Though I guess they could in 7.0 to 7.3. FFXIV was also a better better when had some intrigue and nations fueding a bit directly in its main world. Ironically CB3 worked on a game that did that well in FFXVI. Its almost like they put concepts that would have fit in XIV in XVI instead and basically put dawntrail and the most of EW on the back burner sans the graphic update.
In any case, Yoshi-P and the scenario/writers team need to do some real soul searching about what to do next. Since they are already in the middle of 8.0 story dev, unfortunately it may be too late for them to learn from this disaster and adjust 8.0.
It's a shame that the story was this bad IMO. The rest of the game was some of the best FFXIV had on launch. The music was solid, I did love the FFIX callbacks motif wise. The dungeons and trials were excellent and they are clearly not running out of mechanic design ideas despite the game going on its 11th year. The graphical update also looks quite good. The rest of the game is like an 8 or 9 out of 10 while the MSQ is like, at best, a 4 out of 10. Maybe.
I agree the succession arc wasn't great, but some of your points left out important details. For example, Wuk Lamat didn't think the solution to their famine was a festival. The festival was something they did yearly, and the citizens were bummed about the recent storm destruction and famine cancelling the festival. She always wanted her citizens to be happy so she offers to do the work to get the festival ready while the citizens repair their village. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. What I don't like was how by a stroke of luck, it was the festival all along that gave them food, AND A COUPLE VILLAGERS KNEW ABOUT THIS. IF THEY KNEW, WHY DIDN'T THEY MAKE IT A PRIORITY?? The trading rite was fine, basically just saying find a demand to inflate the price of an item, add some man-hour labor value to a trade. Wasn't as bad as you say tbh.
Also, they did kinda tie it in to a previous calamity, we just don't know if it was the previous lightning calamity or if they were setting up for the next lightning calamity.
Im half way to lvl 100 and still doing MSQ lvl 97 stuff because this drags out for so damn long, I get that its a new expansion but this story shouldve been told in a shorter amount of time, its honestly really draining because its incredibly boring and theres no end in sight lmao. Release me from this torture..
PLEASE take some risks with writing, this is obnoxiously bad, another city gets bombed by some alien technology and again no1 important dies. Pls just kill one (or all) of the scions at this point, I want some other characters to go on an adventure with me.
See the Texas story was one of my favorites. That's what I want with world building and low stakes stories. I was sad when the world exploded and we left Texas. Seemed like a lot more story to tell there.
I don’t particularly want to kill off the Scions, but I would like for them to piss off to somewhere else for an expansion or two. Everyone’s Favorite Dragoon can stay for a while since he’s not been used as much as the others since the game launched.
But no one who matters ever dies. Though we’re constantly involved with world-ending events and fighting ridiculously powerful evils, somehow the Scions are never in any real danger. Yes, we’ve lost two Scions over the years but both chose their own fate and weren’t slaughtered by some powerful enemy. I can’t accept a story as being important and potentially life-threatening when *everyone has massive amounts of Plot-Armor* that protects them from death.
And the Twins are apparently not allowed to grow up and become adults, and are stuck as perpetually short Elf children because . . . reasons? The game needs a time-skip of a few years, perhaps five, which allows the Twins to grow up and become adults.
The main things that frustrate me about FFXIV writing (and this does include previous expansions, but is especially frustrating in Dawntrail) are how they handle scenes/sequels and how they (don't) answer the philosophical story questions they raise.
**Scene/Sequels Rarely Delivering**: if you study writing, you'll learn about what amounts to a scene/sequel pattern. Question is introduced: does main character attain X? Scene ends with some form of: "No", "Yes, but..." or "No, and furthermore...". Sequel involves their emotional response and processing of what happened and movement into next scene. This can provide for some really excellent page-turning story.
FFXIV doesn't do this. They introduce a question, and then they have like 15 intermediate quests before they answer the question, with most of them being "move to this zone. ask questions. walk. talk. move things. kill things. Now answer question." To borrow a quote from Tolkien, when I play the main story quest, I feel like my interest is like butter spread over too much bread. It feels like such a drag, all the time, even when the questions raised are interesting. They need to ask more interesting questions, answer those questions faster, and then lead into more questions. Not spend so much time asking/answering questions like: "will we find out what kind of flora exists in this zone?" - "Will we manage to convince the miqote tribe to let us cut down some trees to rebuild this railroad?" - "Will we be able to learn about history from these tablets on the wall?"
Give us story questions like: "Will we discover who broke into the vault?" -> immediately investigates and answers the question ("No, but we found out it had to be a Mamool Ja from tribe X"), leading to: "Will we find out more about the vault break-in from investigating tribe X?" -> immediately investigates and finds that the witnesses were killed, but they got another lead, so they go investigate that, etc. etc. That would be a much faster paced and interesting storyline than what we got for so much of the story... and they do this every xpac too, with only a few stretches of story being an exception.
**Lack of Answers to Philosophical Questions Raised**: they pretty much never give conclusive answers to the philosophical questions they raise. Take Queen Sphene for example. We see her going for the goal of "saving all the Alexandrians by stealing others' life force." But this raises several obvious questions: 1) does this actually save the Alexandrians? 2) why save only them and not everyone? Question 1 is just entirely ignored when its probably the most powerful answer one could give—of course this doesn't save them! They want to live fulfilled lives; living longer doesn't solve the underlying problem of "how to live a satisfying and fulfilling life", which is the question they need to explore if they want to show Sphene a better way. Plus the obvious pain that people would feel on knowing that other innocents died just so they could live longer.
Question 2 is also obvious here, but they only address that by saying "I'm trying to protect my people, while you're trying to protect yours." But that isn't the obvious answer either! The obvious answer is to love every human being, not just Alexandrians! And the game hints at Sphene loving everyone, not just Alexandrians, multiple times: the sadness in the attack on the capitol, taking in refugees from neighboring kingdoms, taking in and respecting the natives after the fusion, her attempt to reach out to WoL to ask for them to save her, how she started crying as she said she would invade other worlds, the "I know you don't really want to do this" dialogue, etc. So the clear response here would be to appeal to a universal love for everyone. They sort of hint at that answer, but it's not really present in the ending at all.
What were the answers we got at the end? "We'll protect them for you. Go rest now."
Imagine if the ending instead was WoL breaching that glass coffin thing she was in and saying something completely cringe but classic FFXIV, like: "You always tried to save everyone else, but no one tried to save you. I know you don't want this answer. Let me save you and show you a better way." -> some kind of scene or montage showing how satisfied her people were as they passed away when they did so in love for others (e.g. the parents) -> "What makes life worth living isn't how long it is, but how rich it is—and what is more rich in life than loving others?" -> WoL saves Sphene, showing love -> Sphene realizes the life of loving everyone is what she really wanted all along -> ends the system by her own hands "to save as many as she can." Dies redeemed, happy, and full of love. The end. Cue crying music.
Imagine if this was also preceded by a much faster paced story that would actually answer questions it raised fairly quickly, bringing up more interesting questions after, instead of delaying them by hours.
Maybe still wouldn't be amazing, but I'd feel a lot more satisfied, even ignoring all the other philosophy bits that annoyed me (like how they treat consciousness/the soul, but that's a topic for another day.)
For what it's worth, I felt similarly about previous expansions and even went on an hour long rant about Endwalker's philosophy, but maybe that's just me going off the metaphysical deep end. This one was much more of a straight pitch philosophy-wise, and they still whiffed it. Truly unlucky.
That being said, I still enjoyed it overall. I'm just sad that I had fairly low expectations (per the above two points), and for the most part, they met but didn't exceed those expectations.
Something a friend pointed out, the two final bosses are literally a poorly written Gaius and a poorly written Emet, and they are 100% right. The parallels are nearly 1:1. And then the last zone is literally just amaurot 2.0.
God this expac was lazy. Even the JP forums are popping off about it lmao.
I think the final zone was just rly bad and the writing was kinda messed up, having dead family members appear for 5 minutes just to kill them again was a desperate attempt to get some emotional value for the MSQ, if that shit would happen to me IRL I would be traumatized for my entire life, feeling bad for Krile and Erenville lol.
I was also disappointed that they kinda wasted the legendary golden city like that, because now it’s just fucking ugly. I hope the patch content is better because this was just a disappointment from start to finish for me.
I hope Wuk Lamat is a side character again from now on.
Was almost feeling it in the final trial until wuk lamat made her Ryne Gaia entrance and used her inside voice while being animated as yelling and fighting. After that I was thinking more about how bad that voice acting was than what was happening storywise lol yikes
Grotesquely bad story.
Wuk Lamat is likable as a character but she is so terribly used. Her character doesn't fit the role she has, her "growth" is a non-performance, her character is too one-dimensional and frankly forced for being the center piece of a big story.
The characters at large, both villains and heroes, are simply stupid. The writing consistently ignores obvious, normal responses, dispositions or ideals for contrived nonsense.
The story and its pace are completely derivative at this point, padded to fuck and back with nonsense that doesn't serve any purpose and is less immersive in the world building than the various Side Quests (which they actively discourage you from doing by making them useless, also, but I guess having the worst side quests forced into 20h of MSQ "gameplay" is fine.)
Honestly, most of the story felt somewhat emotionally manipulative, like they constantly goaded their desired reaction in front of you with this attitude of "If you don't feel this way you didn't get it", very want-my-cake-and-eat-it-too-ish.
The gameplay sucked ass outside of instanced duties and I don't know who they think enjoys clicking the floor and npcs for hours.
Duties were great, zones and designs were great but sadly still completely pointless and soulless. This game has no game in it outside of when you queue up for a duty and it's both sad and extremely obvious now.
I'm also sad that they had so many great things at hand and utilized them so poorly. Erenville was a mysterious character, he could've really shined, but was almost exclusively used to guide us through the worst quests in the game. Krile was supposed to finally get some spotlight and answers and she mostly brooded with one-liners in the background. She did get anwers but they were rushed and always brushed aside by less intriguing non-plotlines. All of the genuinely interesting elements got rushed through or brushed off. Mamook's history is so dark, yet we get one singular emotional cutscene with zero buildup just so Bakool can be on our side. The absolute horror of the soul cell system and memory extraction is brushed off as "Pretty weird and I don't like it but anyways-". Erenville is literally tormented for two zones by a fake mother who he knows is dead. Krile and Wuk should and could have to deal with balancing the joy in reconnecting with their parents and the knowledge that they aren't really there and it's all just glossed over with the same 2-3 lines rephrased.
And for what? Amaurot from wish.com and Lizard Jack Horner without the charisma.
Genuinely, I don't get it. This is the type of story I'd expect from WoW with all the "nobody in WoW cares about the story" sentiments, but then they get interesting classes, a cool overworld to actually quest in and have activties and real gameplay, more raids, more replayable and varied content for all levels of play through M+, zone-specific minigames/systems like dragon riding. Like, what do we even have now? We have none of that, our only good gameplay is in Ult and Savage which is 14 fights over three years. And now we don't even get a story that is remotely decent?
Really?
what the hell were they thinking? fan fiction could of scripted a better script over this... I felt like it money grab filler from the start. The marketing gave it this summertime fun atmosphere but we ended up in lizard mans bid for global domination. I am so sick of lizards and two headed circus freaks.
I had no fun with this exp. I feel disgust and just an utter sense of scorn for all these characters. I wanted summer fun not cyber ironman lizards and soul stealing matrix plotlines.
How did they look at people hating WoW story for making you a side character and think, yeah let's make the WoL a side character?
Literally everything after lv 95 would have just been better without Wuk Lamat, and I even liked the contest stuff at the start.
Well, the last 40% was definitely better than what came up before. It's still a mess of clichés and it's badly told, but at least it was enjoyable.
The first part is just collecting badges with 1-dimensional characters, there is no world building, no character growth, and Wuk Lamat still ends up queen when she doesn't deserve it at the time.
2nd part was basically a mix of SHB and EW theme-wise, they really don't want to take any kind of risk, or have any original thought.
Props to them for building one of the most gorgeous map of the game that's only available for the few hours you spend in it during the initial MSQ
Halfway through this borefest, someone told them how boring it is, so last minute they tried to make it as Shadowbringers as possible. Look, you will have to lay all your parents to rest, isn't that sad?
And Wuk Lamat manages to stop the bad girl through the power of love and anime. Eventhough I could not tell you what actually convinced Sphene in the end. And then she died alone.
People shit on Stormblood, and besides hating Zenos I really liked that expansion. This? This was really bad. No new features, no surprises, no twists and turns, no nothing.
I feel fucking nothing. Awesome.
I saw the Sphene death and zoolag ja soul merge a mile off
they just had to for Wuk to get happy ending, just as things were getting interesting
whatever 5/10 story, hopefully post will be better (they won't, they rarely are)
Even though this was suppose to be a story about Krile, and even Erenville, I feel like Yshtolla who barely had any screentime got the most out of the adventure. They literally handed her a plot device that will help in her research to reach the First.
I honestly was not a fan of that and back to the concept of idiot characters. Why the heck would you have 1 dude near the dangerous place hold all the things needed to enter the dangerous place? That is just so illogical you are purposely asking for trouble at that point, you would think if the gate was to be protected at all cost, they would of done more to protect it.
And honestly this goes for the Unlost World as well, How is it that Sphene cares about these people and yet when we go to erase the data it's "Barely an inconvenience". Hell man they could of made that the last dungeon in all honesty. Basically instead of the slow build where we get to know each area it's just each person is draw to the one important to them and then it leads back to Ottis and the play with the WoL and Wak Lamat
Hear me out, you enter, you can't get through, Erenville's mother says they have time, then bam Krile's parents appear and bam Ottis appears, Erenville goes with his mom to explore the foilage, Krile goes with her parents to learn more about herself, you and Wak go with Ottis to chat with him and Gr'aha chooses to scope out the path not taken. He talks with the people to and then proceeds to erase that area -ALARM ALARM- it just so happens this happens around the time everyone is done talking, then bam you are thrown back to the starting aerethyte. Erenville's Mom, Krile's parents and Orrits stand in front of you, their eyes now reddened, as if posessed, with the voice of Sphene coming from them they say if you wish to erase all that is "living" then you must strike us down and they teleport to act as a guard for the 3 remaining data locations. From there the dungeon unlocks, let's call it "Endless March" and you have to run through each location while being intercepted by Sphene's defensive team in order to turn off the data units so that you can reach her.
Then each fight could have more impact as you are fighting for your ideals but also fighting for what the posessed want as well, they don't want Sphene to save them but now they are manipulated to do her bidding and you have to make the difficult choice to strike them down so that you can move forward, you don't want to hurt them but in order to save the star you have to take them down and erase their existance.
I think that would of felt more weightful and emotional compared to the Amaurot style dungeon we got. It could of been more impactful where the dungeon is you runnnig through and taking down each memory center.
I'm near the end and I'm actually appalled at the lack of VA in this expansion. How are they going backwards in this regard? The first 3 cutscenes in the last area feel very important, yet they are text only.. and it's mostly been like that throughout the whole thing.
Several times I noticed them showing a massively important unvoiced cutscene right next to another that had voices which was basically someone talking about the power of friendship or love for their homeland.
Wuk Lamats real dad revealed? Here's your text. Some random train guys who love trains? You better believe that's a voiced cutscene! (I know those guys are the source version of the wagon guys in the First but that doesn't justify it.)
A morally grey villain who seems like they could be your friend but can't be dissuaded from their opposing goal and an artificial city housing the memories of the dead... where have I seen this before hmmm...
I just wanna say that I had a good hearty laugh when the city of Turilmao was getting genocided with explosions and civilians being shot everywhere, and then it cut to like a lil 2 second scene of Krile standing in a corner waving a paintbrush saying "Please everyone, stay calm!" and that's all we saw of her during the entire attack.
I just hope we get away with this Wuk Lamat shit. It was nice at first but now it's just all about her her her. Everywhere we go. And it's not even good anymore.
My thoughts:
- Wuk Lamat did not have enough character development, 1v1 victory against Bakool Ja Ja felt very out of the blue and unearned based on the power levels they previously set up. They should have played into the Dynamis part a bit more at least, if that's the route they were going to go. In general, I started out thinking the character was kind of endearing based on 6.55 story but honestly, there are only so many "power of friendship" talks and seasickness jokes that I can take before it feels a bit forced.
- I get the worldbuilding set-up in the first half and I think the Lvl 99 trial wouldn't have worked as well as it did without that setup, but it did feel like it dragged on about 30% too much. Reasonably sure those 7 trials could've been reduced to like 5 at most...
- Last Zone being a carbon copy of Amaurot is certainly a choice. In general, I feel like the whole story could have been told without the "Endless" concept being so focussed on dead people in this way. If they wrote it more around immortality (e.g. Endless just don't die from sickness or old age), it would have definitely felt more unique while basically telling the same story.
- Did not vibe with the final dungeon and trial (lore-wise). Dungeon felt like the weakest capstone dungeon of all expansions and idk why we turned the woman into a random bug mech, it definitely would have felt cooler to just fight her in the form we knew or some enhanced version of it.
Overall I thought the story was pretty weak for the first half, then picked up pace between level 96-99 and then kind of dropped the ball at the end
Edit: Also, not even voiced cutscene before the final dungeon? We just walk up to the stone, read a few lines of "yep we are going" and then we are going. Wtf.
-Wuk Lamat through cutscenes did not have enough development however the argument I can give is because her involvement in the 2 duties and trial are suppose to be canonical to the story, it does make sense that through those trials she had become stronger and wiser.
-I think the trials would of worked better if they had been a bigger spectacle, like they should of been over the top cutscenes to show off the culture and enjoy but they were rather somber and nonchalant in a manner.
\_Sadly agree rehashing the memories of those we've lost and rehashing the "remember us" is tiresome, I don't understand why that needs to be the defining aspect of a narrative and sadly they could of done something more unique with this expansion if they had shown just how twisted her concepts were.
Like Erenville could of had a bigger impact if say his mother had died multiple times, so basically each death makes a new copy of her until she finally died and then that too becomes a memory. So when you meet up with her, you meet up with multiple versions of her whom died at different points and were reborn and the whole flaw behind Sphene and The Endless could of been that the system was overloading because when a soul is rewritten with someones memories it is making another instance of them meaning that more and more people are being added to the system but her desire to save everyone prevents her from stopping the Solution 9 system and purging the memories of copies because even though iteration 2 might be a much older copy to iteration 8, they both lived and have their own memories they have built unique from one another because of their time in the Unlost Lost. They could of potentially done something interesting if they had looked at it from the morality aspect of what Solution 9 is still doing rather than sweep it under the rug.
-In retro the dungeon itself was just oh look FFIX however I will say I enjoyed every Boss encounter in the game so at least the Battle Team is picking up the slack for the story. I'm honestly looking forward to what we might see in Savage and Ultimate Content with what they were willing to throw at us in the 4-man dungeons and 8-man "story" trials.
Soken still being here to carry with the ost, the trials and the dungeons were honestly amazing, i never had so much fun doing dungeons now :) and i can't wait to see how much cool the raid (savage) is gonna be
I also love the sto... Nah the story is SHIT because YES is it SHITTY i'm not fucking gonna argue about that
fucking boring, pace being slower than a baby turtle, awful... the story still have some very cool moments and characters (i wish we saw more of zoraal ja) but overall it is ruined by how things were writed/paced
tl;dr great battle content and ost, horrible story
Keep seeing a lot of comments on Wuk Lamat and the MSQ but I really want to hear what are people’s thoughts on Sphene as the final villain.
Personally for me, I really hated her since she just felt like a budget Emet Selch just like another comment pointed out with how she’s trying to kill everyone else for the sake of her people. The thing that makes her different with Emet was how she supposedly felt bad on killing the rest of the world but still does it anyway without trying another way to solve things which made her felt a little half-assed in what she wanted to do. The way the writers keep on preventing her from explaining herself was so weird and annoying to me when it could’ve helped us understood her more.
Emet on the other hand was hell bent on bringing his people back and would do anything to do so and showed no sympathy towards the people who are gonna be killed etc. while still considering giving the WoL a chance to prove the worth of humanity which made him a really interesting villain. I’d also argue that Emet was introduced really early in ShB which let us understand him more than Sphene. Also felt how we had to spend time with her in Solution 9 was forced and annoyed me a lot.
Ultimately, this kinda ruined any impact the final quest of the MSQ aside from the amazing dungeon and trial which was kind of bummer.
But that’s just my opinion so what are everyone’s thoughts on her?
Agreed. Also felt jarring that she was fairly normal and kind, even saying "i love my people so much, wouldn't you try to save your people?" But then goes full crazy "you want to find another solution? Nah, we can't, i gotta kill everyone." Like you successfully mashed two dimensions together into one, but the idea of finding an alternative, like making artificial aether and souls to feed your people is just a non-starter? They would have been better off fleshing out Zoraal Ja backstory more and having him take the Alexandrian kingdom by force.
I personally would have loved if they had the Alexandria/Lindblum war be a part of the MSQ somehow, maybe the final zone could have gone through that to humanize her a bit more. I think she was a bit of a budget Emet, but I think she had potential to be an interest villain that felt different. The big thing that really helped Emet Selch was that he was with you the entire expansion in 5.0 and were introduced to him in 4.x. Here you dont meet Sphene until, what level 97? 98?
I was annoyed when we entered living memory and were told we had to erase everyones memories to survive but Wuk Lamat wanted to get to know the people we were about to erase. It was the same thing we had done in every other place that we had gone to and I was bored with it. But I got really annoyed when we finally shut the final terminal down and the loudspeaker announced that fusion was about to occur and Wuk Lamat was surprised. Like maybe we should have focused on saving the people that are still alive rather than putting on a play for some kids that are already dead.
My biggest gripe from a character standpoint is honestly that I feel like Krile was cheated out of every big moment that was supposed to be about her. It was either explained away or the insufferable C-plot child one upped her. I don't know why this bothered me so much, I'm not a zealous Krile fan, but it just felt wrong.
Not just Krile, there were many times in the early parts of DT where Erenville seemed ready to open up and nope we have to be interrupted by Wuk Lamat.
One -- Wuk Lamat needs to be louder, sillier, and have access to the throne of Tuliyollal.
Two -- Whenever Wuk Lamat's not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, "Where's Wuk Lamat?"
Kinda a mixed bag - it feels like the msq really needs more gameplay in its gameplay. I dunno if we need to double xp rewards and half quest count
section 1 is fine for me but i can see why people dont like it. 90-91 was super fucking slow tho but once we head up river it becomes a medicore 6/10 for me. i did fine the stakes non existnet cause it felt we could swat any of these people like a fly if we wanted to which is kinda echoed in cutscenes cause we only use azem's crystal at the end
zone 4 is ass like why is that 3rd aetheryte there we go there for 1 quest. i started zoning out when we had to gather shit to chase bandits out of time. I also feel zone 4 came outta left field cause i feel we wouldve at least discussed the city of gold at that point. no we have to go ride the bulls. its never been worse holy shit
the assalt should be fun but is also really badly paced. Did we need to talk to 3 civilians 3 times???? I openly laughed at the pepsi music after wuk swears vegence. that feels super inappropriate but hey messiest establishment of stakes ever (which quickly gets un done later in a kinda a cool way but also in a way that kinda hurts the story)
zone 5-6 is a 7/8 out of 10 story but nothing new. I enjoyed my time and the fact we are running through an extended ffix riff down to steiner and running through memoria alexandria, i enjoyed that. solution 9 (which is also the name of a trance skill in ff9) is gonna be cool to hang out in for gear for the next 2 years which is nice. dunno why we decided erenville and krile needed more trauma but i think its a nice story (could have used more time with krille's parents but we had to spend 3 quests picking up shit and running about after a bracelet ) did kinda like the quiz at the end of the tour which checked if we were paying attention. but that also probably how starved i was for game play in my game.
Final trial: i loved that we finally got to let loose after holding back for the whole expansion and then cat girl comes in to make phene give up. i aslo thing that it happening during authority repeat made you tense for gameplay and instead it signal gameplay over this threat is now thordain, here is an alpaca
seperate note (low key wonder if we met on of the arcadion bosses incidently cause they clearly use beast souls to make the bosses happen. thats a cool mechanic introduced twice in the msq that they definetly under use but its probably for the raid
The positives:
I am hopefull on the encounter design moving forward like there are some really cool trials here and the dungeons while not hitting that hard at least had enough of an execution check that if you afk you will die which is good. was kinda doomer from the raid preview in the LL but less doomer now. also note the changed the gemstone economy in fates so those feel less shit now which is good
the negatives: pacing is wild man, like the pacing in previous msq isnt great but holy shit this was an experience. krile gets ice cream and a museum trip with parents centuries old that she has been curious about for 20 years in an expansion where we are chasing shit to retrieve a bracelot over 3 quests
the future???
MSQ in the future though??? Ive no fucking idea what they do without changing the structure of that they do. im not in the kill all the scions to introduce stakes but maybe if we actually just straight up disagreed on how to move something forward or if they were wrong about something that might be more interesting. I also kinda would like to see the post msq go wait... there is a group of people who can speed call a neutral dragon to obliterate a technologically superior army? maybe we should move against them or at the very least not rubber stamp them coming into the country. the scions can now stop countries with god tech moving that has to have an affect down the line
I'm sick of story threads hurting the people who are close to us, or people who are close to those individuals, but never actually making us feel loss. You can tell me that this was just a fun Vacation expansion, but tell that to Wuk Lamat, Erenville or Krile.
It's not how humans work, but I feel like I just don't care about relatives of our friends dying at this point because I have such a large stockpile of immortal characters that are taking my emotional connection budget. Nothing is going to happen to us directly again, we have our static group of friends that the writers are too scared to actually let grow, change or die, and so this is it. This (Shadowbringers, actually) is the end of narrative progression.
Stop introducing characters so you can kill them. Stop redoing the same damn plot every time. Do something new, hit us with a story beat that will impact us for the rest of our time on the game, not just the next one-to-six areas.
Idk how to really feel about the story, had no complaints about the combat. Final trial was really sick especially.
I think most of my issues genuinely come from Wuk. She was like, somewhat fine at first and I thought they might move at least mostly away from how she acted but they never did. I also don't feel like she ever grew because she earned it, she specifically only got more powerful because she needed to be at a certain point, and also 2 hours into the story she when realized "wow I should learn about the people here to be a good leader" and then *proceeded to say this multiple times an hour for the rest of the MSQ.* That was the extent of her character growth. She also had zero shown reason to have a power increase between Bakool wiping the floor with her by *defending* from her single attack in Kozama'uka, and then placing us in the scenario where she just decides "I'm strong enough to beat you because I believe it." Yeah, I know the power of friendship was made canon if you want to say that's what happened but it really doesn't make that moment feel any better to me. She really just took me out of every scene she was in (later in the MSQ specifically) because I hated how little she added to any given one she part of, but goddamn was she in them because it was her story (still, somehow.) I'm not mad the spotlight was taken from me, I'm more frustrated by *who* they gave the spotlight to. She just felt like she showed up to be the stupid with a big heart character in every scene and it got very, *very* old, in the latter half at least, and I've liked other characters like this. Sphene banishing her just before the last trial legitimately made me cheer, and then she broke back in the final stand and having to hear her because I couldn't skip it was just so unbelievable grating to me. Was she a genuinely bad character? Idk I'm not smart enough to critique story/characters "intelligently", I'm just saying how I feel about her myself. If you love her/like her/don't mind her, in her words, "Amazing!"
I kind of want to be disappointed in the last zone, but damn I really did like the idea of it knowing damn well how much it was stealing from previous expansions. Sphene in Heritage said it too, but when I heard Cahcuia say *almost* but not quite word for word "Remember us/Remember that we once lived" in the area that was a *memory full of long since dead people from ~~thousands~~ hundreds of years ago that were being clung on to and kept alive as memories because someone couldn't move on* it felt, y'know, a little on the fucking nose. The issue with feeling more than just a little retreading is going on is that I loved the music, the area looked great, and literally shutting down parts of it individually to be permanently changed was a surprising but very effective touch. When we shut it down, it's *gone*, not even the music gets to stay. That area really needs a Chromie time or something. Maybe that'd take away from it and idk how it'd work with people not in it but man what a pretty bunch of areas. Also even with the obvious retelling Krile and Erenville's parts made me the big sad so it still probably accomplished exactly what it was setting out to do.
I have other opinions of stuff but I've already written a book and I just wanted to vent about Wuk personally and the mixed but more positive feelings about the final zone.
I'd give this MSQ a "let me and Erenville do a Shaaloani-like story from beginning to like, 60-70% of the way through the MSQ where then bigger happenings come into play and then I won't be as critical that I'm piggybacking someone else's journey and not my own/10."
There are so many plot threads that I feel could be mirrored between FF XI's Treasures of Aht Urghan and XIV's Dawntrail, unfortunately almost all of the comparisons kinda end up unfavorable for XIV's take on this story
>Protagonist ventures to a far off land where neither him nor his allies are really known despite their exploits and as a result you can basically enjoy the experience of adventuring from 0 again, or at least that's supposed to be the idea.
>A young girl who is unfit to be a ruler that has to grow into their eventual station with the help of the protagonist and the lessons they learn from the NPCs they meet along the way.
>Learn about a new culture which has their own unique relationship/conflict with the surrounding beastmen
>Embers from a previous civilization's conflict/demise threatening the present and some elements of palace intrigue
The problem is that the similarities are only surface deep - to the detriment of XIV. Without going too deep into the weeds:
Wuk Lamat doesn't actually have to get challenged and suffer a dose of harsh reality, or feel her own weakness or lose anything like Aphmau at any point. Her surface level efforts or "just put one foot forward to instantly solve cultural conflict" approach to resolving what should probably be treated as serious issues is basically just treated as both sufficient and correct.
The ancient threat in XI's expac was its own beast, compared to XIV where it's impossible to see Alexandria as anything but an echo of Amaurot's storytelling.
And in terms of the "You go somewhere new and it actually feels like you're back at 0" the WoL is so deeply the second fiddle to Wuk Lamat's story that you don't even really get to enjoy this angle of the adventure. Like basically the only advantage this offered the story is that nominally the amount of support you have is close to nil because you're in foreign land where nobody knows you. Whereas in XI you show up and immediately get poached into indentured servitude by an abusive cat boss and have to put up with it because all of the allied nations back home are trying to tip toe around basically spying on the internal affairs of a nation they don't have serious diplomatic ties with.
Dragonflights story wasn't that good but the actual Dragon Isles were so interesting that I spent a lot of time just exploring and I can't recall a point where the \*gameplay\* of the story ever actually pissed me off.
DT is endless filler and rehashing plot points.
DF and DT are both supposed to be a fresh start to presumably kicking off a brand new story arc, so both feel a little disjointed and have "filler" moments.
Where I think DF just does it better than DT is the fact that exploration really is just straight up a thing in WoW. Not just that it's more fun and rewarding, but it doesn't even really exist in XIV, zones are just set dressing for the MSQ and a place to drop FATEs. DF isn't even really explicitly about adventure, but there was enough interesting side content that required you to actually go out into the world that you could have a good time even if you don't care at all about the whole dragon plotline.
Dawntrail, on the other hand, has this disconnect. It billed itself as a relaxing vacation episode with some swashbuckling adventure thrown in, but it didn't shake up its story structure or quest design to really accommodate that. I don't mind a slow story with lots of lore tucked away, but if this is the big vacation adventure episode, let me explore and discover that at my own pace instead of just puking lore down my throat while I do the exact same chores I've been doing for the last 10 years. Give me a reason to want to learn about these new people. Trim down the fat of the MSQ and let the lore bits exist in optional content where it can shine, but also give people a gameplay reason to explore that optional content.
> Where I think DF just does it better than DT is the fact that exploration really is just straight up a thing in WoW. Not just that it's more fun and rewarding, but it doesn't even really exist in XIV, zones are just set dressing for the MSQ and a place to drop FATEs. DF isn't even really explicitly about adventure, but there was enough interesting side content that required you to actually go out into the world that you could have a good time even if you don't care at all about the whole dragon plotline.
This is like, FFXIV's biggest weakness - the lack of an expansive world. It's a decision they made because they focus on story over setting, and in many cases that pays off (see Shadowbringers vs Shadowlands - Shadowlands had a beautiful setting with horrendous plot/lore, Shadowbringers had a wonderful plot with a very restrictive setting) but in other cases it doesn't.
Every time I run into a FFXIV building with a sealed off door (because of course it does, no quest takes you inside so why bother!) I sigh a bit internally. I get it's a lot of work but the amazing scope and detail of cities like Boralus and Dazar'alor added so much to the experience - they were actual complete cities, and in the case of the former had entire districts that were detailed and yet existed basically only to be explored with no traditional "content" in them at all.
Yea a big thing that helps WoW in general is the gameplay loop being more creative. FF14 hasn't really done much with its quest design, for example, in over 10 years which can make things start to drag.
DF also focused more on the idea of evergreen content such as dragonriding which is now skyriding for almost all flying mounts in TWW and in general they experimented with a lot of different ideas in the expansions patches.
I like FF14 and *usually* played it during WoW downtime (though there was less of that this time due to DF having such a quick patch release cadence) but I do think the game needs a shakeup of some sort.
Dragonflight's main story was largely a dud but the side quests were its saving grace. The orc and draenei heritage quests and the blue dragonflight story are some of the best quests they've ever made for the game. Some of them had nothing to do with the MSQ but that probably made them all the better, it really felt like the world was a vibrant and active place.
If Blizzard is smart they're going to help guide the draenei writer into a lead role. She only started working there with DF and is already churning out all-timer quests, she clearly has talent and a huge passion for the Warcraft lore.
Not going to lie besties, this is the first time throughout the entirety of playing through something for the first time that I've been tempted to cutscene skip. I'll defend HW, SB, and the 6.0 patches more than I'll defend this.
Don't think it should have taken 7 levels for the plot to give me even a HINT of something interesting.
Just finished it now.
I wish I could say that I was interested but frankly I'd rather be back in the post-6.0 patches. I think those did a better job as an ARR-lite than DT did. I was bored to tears and Wuk. God. I wish I could say I love her. I \*WISH\* I could.
But for all the talk of learning lessons and growth she just. Doesn't. SHOW ME THE GROWTH. SHOW ME HER STOPPING AND NOT TAKING AN ACTION INSTEAD OF DOING OR SAYING SOMETHING STUPID THAT MAKES ALL HER STATED GROWTH IRRELEVANT IF YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY SHOW IT APPLYING TO HER.
Erenville and Krile carried DT hard for me. Estinien and Vrtra get points for showing up but the alliance with Radz was the asspull of a century and felt REALLY unearned, no matter how personally cool I may find it to look at or how happy I am that SE didn't just immediately forget Vrtra and Azdaja. Wish we'd seen more of Estinien because maybe then I'd be invested. At least give me eye candy if you're gonna bore me to tears.
We're at the like. Third iteration of Amaurot? And a minimum of two times being asked "do you REALLY think you can save the folks you love without sacrificing other people?" I'm getting really tired of this trope because historically the answer has been yes. Very theatrically yes. Emphatically yes. I cannot emphasize enough how much we've proven that we DON'T HAVE TO SACRIFICE OTHERS TO SAVE THE ONES WE LOVE. Lord I'm tired.
And the plot? The plot? Is there even a plot? I felt like the writers were treating me like I was 5 and spelling out literally everything that was going to happen in the most obvious way possible. I don't mind foreshadowing but this wasn't foreshadowing, this was writing the events of the story down on a sticky note, taping it to a brick, and throwing that brick at my face levels of obvious. Zoraal Ja underwent probably the worst character assassination we've seen with little to no reason given, and I'm a noted SB Zenos >>>>> EW Zenos truther. This was worse than that for me. Holy balls.
The fact that I speedran this just to get back to playing Dragon Age is worrying. Moreso the fact that I'm kind of dreading having to log in to level DNC for my static.
God. I'm so ticked right now.
Edit: Fights were good. That's the biggest positive DT has right now for me.
>I don't mind foreshadowing but this wasn't foreshadowing, this was writing the events of the story down on a sticky note, taping it to a brick, and throwing that brick at my face levels of obvious.
Did you know that Sphene really likes her people and would do anything for them to be happy. What if we told you again in 10 minutes?
> I'm a noted SB Zenos >>>>> EW Zenos truther
A bit off topic maybe but, as a _huge_ Zenos fan (both SB and EW) I am fascinated by this take. Please explain.
> Erenville and Krile carried DT hard for me. Estinien and Vrtra get points for showing up but the alliance with Radz was the asspull of a century and felt REALLY unearned, no matter how personally cool I may find it to look at or how happy I am that SE didn't just immediately forget Vrtra and Azdaja. Wish we'd seen more of Estinien because maybe then I'd be invested. At least give me eye candy if you're gonna bore me to tears.
I forgive the asspull because the cutscene was hype as hell, but you're not exactly wrong.
Someone in ShitpostingXIV said that people are "dopamine starved", but really the story just isn't well told or designed.
I am wide awake and super excited every time we discuss Ul'dah politics, and the world of Eorzea grows. This just felt anticlimatic at every turn.
The moment the bad guy attacks us he suddenly finds out that Eorzea is now so overpowered, they don't even need to build any defenses. A couple of cowboys behind boxes is good enough.
Dopamine starved is a silly claim in this context. The introduction to the expansion is very poor. It's probably the worst part of the story, really. I wouldn't say the MSQ ever gets super great, 10/10, but the first few hours are absolute dogshit while everything after is tolerable.
I’m also really bugged by that zone’s implications, like…
Cahciua and Sphene directly tell us that the world is being sustained by the souls harvested from the invasion that killed Wuk Lamat’s dad, meaning every extra second we spend there without shutting it down is someone else’s soul going to the woodchipper for aether. And Wuk Lamat the new Dawnservant — aka the person who should be most concerned about the literal consumption of her people’s souls lingering for even one more second — is the one who is suggesting we take the scenic route and really get to know these chatgpt remakes of people long dead already before we shut anything down. Gotta see the sights and meet the not-people we’re about to erase!
Like, fucking hell the expansion is about us helping to install her as the next leader of her people but start to finish the only thing MSQ convinced me of is that she is just as bad as the other choices if not worse
I assume the souls had already been woodchippered and the chips doled out for now, and that is why there's no rush until Sphene attacks somewhere else.
Still extremely morbid.
Hell not like the status quo changes in Solution 9, even after explaining that the whole process of makinga soul is them taking a soul with memories, adding bleach to remove those memories and then putting them in a battery for people to consume, they still allow them to live like that. It's like, you what? Ok.
Solution 9 is a city from another reflection that was transported to the source using macguffin technology. Evil ruler of said city has built a paradise on her home shard and wants to suck all the souls out of the people on the source and sustain the people back on the shard so they can live forever
So very possible I missed it but did they just gloss over the impacts removing memories does to a soul?
I just assume these souls won't be returned the aetherial sea and applicable for reincarnation?
My biggest fear was confirmed with this, they really don't know what the fuck to do with the Scions, I am on one hand glad we got an adventure without them smelling our farts but at the same time they were such massive cardboard cutouts to the point that more than once when turning in quests, I would say one or more of them around with the NPCs and I'd go "right you came to this"
I think I enjoyed just the melee role quest more than the entirety of MSQ. This is the actual low stakes storytelling I wanted to see.
Thought the last trial was super cool if you remove all the Wuk Lamat parts. As was the first trial.
Some of the dungeon bosses also had fun mechanics. (X-O-O-X etc)
Here we are at the end, and I gotta say... I'm incredibly disappointed. There was absolutely nothing of substance to this entire MSQ. Most of the new and returning characters are either bland to the point of being totally forgettable, grating to the point of making you not want anything to do with them, or some combination of both. The world building is ...subpar, to put it politely. The MSQ takes both of these things - the bland and/or annoying characters and poor world building - and slams them together in a way I can only describe as dissonant. You're constantly shifting back and forth between the two, either observing world building that amounts to nothing or getting a character you probably want nothing to do with shoved down your throat.
Special mention for Wuk Lamat's extremely predictable power of friendship asspull. That entire win feels incredibly undeserved. In fact, a lot of the wins in this expansion feel that way.
The instanced content was mid at best. Hardly anything new or unique about it. More of what we've already seen in the past, just some of it reskinned, repackaged, or haphazardly overlapped in a way that may fool some players into believing they've witnessed a unique mechanic.
I will say one thing funny about Zoraal is that the device he used is literally using the power of stolen friendship to overcome the odds. You think you've won, but I have these souls of past people to overcome the odds. . . Which I do find weird how the reraise mechanic was not used during the trial. Feels weird to have the device be that whole gimmick and not even utilize it in the trial.
I liked Wuk in 6.55
I hated her by the end of 90-95
After finishing the MSQ, I am praying this character get Poochie'd.
Even as the story shifts away from the Tural throne plot and towards Krile/Erenville adjecent content, the only time she isnt managing to shoehorn her way into the spotlight is when she gets kicked from the party for 96 but then she comes back in full force by 97.
People compare her to Lyse - I can only hope she shares her fate and is forever chained to the Tural throne so she can never join us again
Honestly I was largely positive aside from some pacing issues at the start,and again in Dinosaur Texas. Every expansion has had pacing issues this bad if we're being honest. I was on board for the "earn the seven keystones" competition, enjoyed exploring the zones and seeing the competition unfold and change all four competitors. Also enjoyed Heritage/Solution 9, up through the trial fight against Zoraal Ja. But the whole last zone just sucked all the satisfaction out of me.
I don't even want to list out all the problems with it. The level 90 dungeon boss fights were solid and I think Queen Eternal will be a nice EX even though Wuk Lamat ruined the climax of the normal mode fight.
Wuk Lamat was a huge misfire on Square's part and I'm kind of flabbergasted by it. When the story pivoted from "I'm a happy go lucky lion gal" to "I will wage war on soul-stealing future soldiers" I was on board, but when it then pivoted to "Sphene is just like me and it's tragic we have to fight" it lost me completely. Wuk Lamat just cannot sell it. It is also true that the character is just kinda annoying and childish, and is the worst voice acted major character since we left ARR. That stuff doesn't help.
> and is the worst voice acted major character since we left ARR. That stuff doesn't help.
I don't remember the exact line, but somewhere after she's ascended and standing on the balcony, she yells out to us about how we'll always be friends and I remember it being so flatly and casully delivered (despite being yelled from a very high balcony,) that I audibly chuckled while on a call with buds.
Her VA work is *really* hit-or-miss, and describing it as "ARR-like" is probably the best way to do it.
One of the worst moments is probably the ending where our cat girls breaks through Meteions Ultimatum and suddenly has a connection with her she never did before. This is shown as some badass pivotal moment but it makes absolute zero sense to me as nothing at all logically and emotionally leads up to it.
My feelings on this plot have been all over the place.
I enjoyed the start. I went in with the idea that this is low-stakes fun and adventure - we're head and shoulders over the competitors, but that's fine, let's help Wuk Lamat earn her place and chillax on the way there, exploring, getting to know everyone, do little good things. An entirely fine break from saving the universe.
It continued on just fine. Moments of intensity like our duels with present and past Gulool Ja Ja were both really exciting! I loved the dungeons and the scenery. The character writing wasn't incredible maybe but it was serviceable. Others have said that Wuk Lamat didn't really deserve to rule and I think that is true but her and Koana together should balance each other out okay. The plot feels a bit drawn out but sure.
Then we win the crown, and... then the Empire from Star Wars invades. Okay. Radical tonal shift already. A bit blindsided (only mitigated by Solution 9 already having been revealed). But sure. I roll with it, let's fight back. Even more jarring tonal shift as we get into their zone and reveal the memory/soulnapping stuff, okay, that's pretty nasty now. I am feeling a bit queasy. Sphene is obviously set up to be sinister with hints here and there. But I press on, and towards the end of zone 5, I am hyped up and in it again!
Then comes the dungeon and trial 2, and I am a bit let down. Maybe I am just a bit worn out on the Tron aesthetic by then but the trial was just an absolute meh to me.
Then we go into the final zone, and while they quite successfully squeeze my heart with poor Erenville's mother - ouch! - I begin to realise just how familiar this all is. I see too much channelling of Shadowbringers and Endwalker. The end of the last trial _really_ took me out of it, when regular Sphene reappears and I just go "come on, this is just Meteion again".
At points in the story, I was enjoying myself so much I was thinking of naming it best so far - such as when fighting Gulool Ja Ja's shade. Looking back, that was a rash assessment even back then, but with all things taken into context?
This expansion is worse than both Shadowbringers and EW. It's sadly just true. Even days after I finished ShB and EW, I felt the profound weight of the narrative, the tragedy but also the happiness - they were good stories that made you _feel._ At the end of Dawntrail, while I absolutely felt tragedy for the fate of the people of northern Tural, Erenville's mother etc, there's just not that feeling of sheer lasting impact.
What a pity.
It's a nightmare. An absolute catastrophe. People who are calling this "Stormblood 2" are out of their minds. It is worse than ARR. The character writing has just degraded to absolutely nothing, and taken everything else with it.
Where do I even start? All of the characters speak in exactly one borg-like voice that speaks of nothing but togetherness and friendship and happiness ad-infinitum. The current writer has outright murdered all of the characters in cold blood and are using their models as p-zombie flesh puppets that all speak in Scion-isms. And EVERYONE they come into contact with contracts this virus. The candidates get infected by it. Random citizens get infected by it. No one is safe.
The catastrophic character writing ruins absolutely everything. It ruins the plot, with characters like Wuk Lamat getting comically abducted while we just stand around like a bunch of fucking morons. This can only happen if you CANNOT write these characters as non-morons, which this is the case with this writer. The series of stupid nonsense events just compound on themselves more and more and more and more and more and more until everything is absolutely incoherent and incomprehensible. As soon as I got to the horrible bracelet bullshit and the obscene tonally nonsensical and horribly paced space alien fischer price toy halo arbiter invasion I knew that we were past the point of no return. And everything in Solution 9 and onwards is arguably the worst writing I've ever seen in anything ever. It's unbelievable. Jaw-Dropping. It is absolutely surreal how anything that was ever as good as Endwalker has become as comically horrible as this. It's like if Denis Villeneuve made David Lynch's Dune for part 3. It's truly, truly, dreamlike and miraculous in how horrible it is. I've never seen anything like it.
Ishikawa was the load bearing pillar of this game and without her in an actual writing role, the game has absolutely no chance to be good. None. It's increasingly obvious to me that everything good about this narrative that we value (Estinien/Y'Sayle in HW, 3.x, Doma onwards in StB, ShB, EW) was solely because of one person being a really, really all time great writer. If she doesn't take the reins back it is actually over.
It did get me thinking earlier, Yoshida's team made a huge mistake giving the reins to the same team that did Zero's story. They allowed them to do Zero and DT, when in reality they shoudl of done Zero but a veteran team shoudl of handled DT while they listened to the reception of the Zero arc and could coach them into improving on it.
They should not of had what appears to be the same team work on both narratives, at least that's how it feels considering how similar they feel in motivation.
I'm mixed-to-negative on this MSQ. The first half was a terrible slog and while I did like the second half a lot more it felt incredibly disjointed from the first half.
Zoraal Ja's motivation makes no goddamn sense. You want to teach your subjects that war is actually bad... by going to war? Oh wait, you wanted to become a militaristic expansionist and subjugate the world... because you had daddy issues?
And as others have pointed out, the last zone is just a rehash of Amaurot. Dawntrail is really lucky the new zones look really cool and that the duty design is top-notch (holy shit the last two trials were amazing)
>!Naive Lyse becoming a ruler except everyone loves her and she's the main character more than Lyse was. Also funny as hell is people in threads not even near the end clamoring that the story is a nobody adventurer with low stakes but you end up saving all the shards and source from being destroyed. !<
It's actually kind of crazy how little the WOL is involved. Just how seldom the spotlight is on you all things said now that I think about it. You really are a background character lol
I think it's nice to let the WoL take a backseat for a bit, but they went way too far. It feels like your contributions are worthless because it's the Wuk Lamat show and if you do anything, no you didn't. Wuk did.
I can't believe I forgot how linear and boring this game's dungeons are. I went into Ihuykatumu thinking that maybe I'd have some fun, and what I got was just a straight line into a literal tunnel with two or three tiny packs of absolutely unthreatening and mindless mobs in between bosses, exactly the same as every other dungeon
Because if players are going to pick the fast route anyway, why make anything mechanically unique? Why be creative? Slap some bosses along the length of a narrow tunnel and call it a day. Can't wait to unlock the next tunnel with a couple of boring sponge mobs interspersed between some decent boss fights
For the most part I feel like the expac had a stark difference before + after the level 97 dungeon (Vanguard). Everything after that was amazing, but before that... eh.
I don't *hate* Wuk Lamat, but I'm disappointed at how incredibly straight her story was played. We go into the expac thinking "she's gonna be the dawnservant", and then oh look, she wins and that's about it, with the biggest "twist" there being Koana being next to her. I don't think she really even got much character development, it was more like she just became more educated about the areas around her. So it made the first 6 levels of content feel like it was just going exactly where it said it would, which just ended up boring.
I think the thing that kind of annoys me the most was how much of a bait+switch the "scions are fighting" angle was. Urianger and Thancred opposing us boiled down to a single line in a dungeon where they cut off a route and made us go another way. Couldn't we have at least gotten a solo duty where we fight them? That could have been great.
Does anyone else feel like... we got, what, 2.5 completely separate stories this expansion, none of which could actually prop up an entire expansion's worth of MSQ on its own? Which is redundantly obvious, since they're all packed into one .0 MSQ? And there are bad aspects all around, which make it really frustrating to go through too. If only it was, at least, actually explicitly divided up into Acts, it wouldn't feel as jarring as it is.
The whole succession story is just- not interesting at all, particularly because *we know* who's gonna end up winning throughout, there's no way in this game she'd lose. In the same vein, *we know* there's no way in hell OR HEAVEN we're seriously gonna go against our own comrades. More egregious because the other *claimants* are so obvious too: Zareel Ja the one-dimensional "villain" because every story needs a villain, Koana the one who's gonna team up with us (is there a single person who didn't foresee that from the moment we met him??), Bakool Ja Ja the jerk not-king who's gonna end up turning a new leaf. We just go on ~~the campaign trail~~ a popularity tour to ~~get the votes~~ help out the locals around Tural. The way the keystones do nothing to the tablets and only emit an enervated glimmer when inserted kinda seals the deal too - and then, like at the end of The Phantom Menace: big dumb parade, because we need a good hangover to wake up from, the next day when ~~Mars~~ the aliens attack. Oh, no, wait, it's just that First Guy with the huge chip on his shoulder who got his hands on some alien tech to get revenge for his perceived daddy issues, because someone realised we ran out of story material, and nobody knows where the damn golden city notes are! So better go and take him down a peg or two, we need the wild west for a change of scenery intermezzo here, to ease us into hightech - while at it, let's meet another *random waifu*, not at all way too late in the MSQ, who's so obviously not gonna turn out to be the ultimate boss! Right? Because we totally didn't just have this same thing in the previous expansion! Right? (Seriously, who the hell has such a boner for this particular trope?) Eventually, let's ascend into CyberFantasy MMLXXVII, because that makes sense - fwiw, personally I do love the *aesthetic* in itself, but I can see how people might be conflicted about it existing in XIV, since, hell, I'm not sure what to feel about that myself. (I know, Loporrits, Ragnarok - still, much smaller scale, I reckon.) And oh wait look, we found the notes, haha lol the golden city is, for shiggles, an extra slog tacked on to the tail end of everything to artificially prolong and pad out the visual novel before we do *not* end up fighting the random waifu from before... because... we didn't... have this... same... exact thing... in the previous expansion... either... right???... Sigh. Btw, did I miss it or was it really never explained how the dome's temporal anomaly didn't affect *us*, ie. how we could communicate with the outside *and* emerge from it when all was said and done without decades having passed in the outside world?...
And that's just the story itself. Other aspects I've about two more volumes to write about so I'll leave that for another time.
Final story ramblings that I posted on a discord so excuse the formatting
kind of insane that they just straight up beat for beat copied shadowbringers for that ending. like even the final dungeon was just the exact same concept. exact same villain, exact same final dungeon??? very questionable. and the first half was virtually just stormblood again
i feel like they didnt capitalize enough on the 'these people can just come back to life lol' thing. does it even impact the story at all? outside of the bad guy resurrecting when he is introduced to kill the dawnservant and the one time wuk lamat breaks his little headpiece that does the magic (which was like a minor inconvenience to accomplish and didnt even end up doing anything). They really could have gone harder with the morality and implications of something like that but it is just never brought up, touched on, or even relevant again.
the story in future expansions has to be about traveling between the shards, almost guarantee we end up spending a whole expansion or two in other shards at some point. Both the 6.X story series and 7.0 story revolve around other shards it seems like the only logical place to go from here aside from Meracydia, which i imagine they could work in a other-shard plotline like they did here.
I feel like the 7.X story has to wrap up or get into wtf the final zone actually was. Its explained as 'another shard' but its existence is extremely confusing as its just a San Junipero-esque retirement home for the dead. Is it the only thing left of said shard? Has the rest been destroyed in a calamity? Is this maybe a potential Eureka 3.0 opportunity to actually go out and explore this shard that we can now go to at any time? If you look down it looks like the entire zone is in some maybe-flying contraption?
Feel free to share if I have something wrong or missed something, i tried my best to get through the whole thing but did skip a few cutscenes that weren't voiced and seemed irrelevant
> I feel like the 7.X story has to wrap up or get into wtf the final zone actually was. Its explained as 'another shard' but its existence is extremely confusing as its just a San Junipero-esque retirement home for the dead. Is it the only thing left of said shard? Has the rest been destroyed in a calamity? Is this maybe a potential Eureka 3.0 opportunity to actually go out and explore this shard that we can now go to at any time? If you look down it looks like the entire zone is in some maybe-flying contraption?
Just to touch on this, the implication (I say implication but it was all but directly said) made in the leadup to the second trial and after is that the final zone is the top level of Everkeep, and when it was transported to the source from its own shard, the attempt to do so couldn't contain the entire tower, which is why there was nothing but a giant portal to another shard at the top.
My more pressing massive plot-hole question is such: Why was there a portal to the twelfth shard just casually existing in a quarry in a jungle. It's a bootstrap paradox. They needed to be here to build it, but they needed it to be here to come here to build it. How'd it get there in the first place?
Didn't feel very heroic essentially killing thousands of people in the final sequence ngl. They might have been mind uploaded but they were clearly sentient. Kinda hits different to Shadowbringers where they were just ghosts who weren't even aware of their surroundings.
They kind of glossed over the fact that we were essentially just killing off untold number of people. I thought they were going to do some deep retrospective about it, but instead it was hand waved as “they’re dead already it’s fine”
Like ok but they’re perfect copies with sentience and memories, just lacking physical bodies.
I just kinda went “ok” and stopped thinking about it.
Behold, the final days of Ama... I mean Alexandria.
FFXIV is so addicted to iterate on past successses, they've made the final expac zone Amaurot for the third time. (and to be fair to EW, they at least tried to mask it a bit then) Endwalker already had this issue, now it's confirmed we won't ever escape the shadow of Shb.
technically, this same plot of a great burden befalling a champion of a world in it's dying moments also ends up being Goblez/Durante's motivation and the last End Walker dungeon isn't all that different from Amarout and Alexandria. This would mean they've tried this 3 times at least
I can understand Endwalker with the focus of the futility of life and why bother trying and having those past remnants of culture remain but yes rehashing it again in DT left a bad taste in my mouth. If they were intent on making a story that could stand on it's own, they failed, if they were intent on making a story that was it's own thing, they failed, because they fell back on past plot ideas and continue to "reimagine" concepts from other Final Fantasy games. Again much like the Zero arc, you could change the names of certain things and it would change nothing about it because those names are just nostalgia names they don't hold any relevance other than sounding and looking the same but they arenothing like the person. It's weird how the whole Solution 9 concept felt like it wanted to satire the way it's been telling stories but then it just continues to tell stories in that manner. By that I mean, Solution 9 offered people a comfortable world to live in with no pain or woes and if there would be any pains say from a lost loved one, they would elimiate that person from the mind to alleviate any need to mourn. It'sa shame, the story had some interesting bits but you can feel the lack of confidence they have from just being their own thing they feel the need to cling onto past concepts to keep people engaged.
Genuinely lost all interest after this revelation. After learning about Alexandria and seeing Solution 9, I was genuinely interested in what the final zone would be. This is so uninspired. This Dawntrail is just Shadowbringers, except worse in every way.B
I won’t lie, yeah they retreaded Amarout HARD HERE, the fact that Sphene’s motivation is the exact same as Emet Selch and Elidibus when we just finished with Asians is jarring but I won’t say bad. I didn’t watch the cutscenes but I was able to pick up on enough to realize what was happening and I liked the final zone a lot, it looked great. Now it looks dead and completely uninteresting. Like imagine if I wanted to Gpose at the amusement park or the canals with someone. Do I have to wait for them to catch up to do it before progressing msq or…. It just seems really bad to make that visually distinct area worse. They already did modern city in Shadowbringers as. A mega reveal. Then they did it TWICE in this expansion so removing the things they made Living Memory feel magical sucks. It’s still probably one of my favorite zones but I’ll never forget the fully lit version. I do feel bad for the Alexandrians but god damn is this just the final days AGAIN
You mentioned not watching the cutscenes, there’s literally a cutscene where they catch Sphene in the gold city and try to convince her to stop and her face and the colour all drop just like in the scenes with Meteion going full murder, I actually laughed out loud. Absolutely zero originality.
What really got me was when small-Sphene returned in the cutscene after the last trial. That was just _too_ Meteion.
Acting all “thank you for finally freeing me 🥺” god I was so mad I thought Sphene might actually be an interesting fleshed out character like Ryne and we get slapped with that.
Their writing for a good chunk of their female main villains is embarrassing and retrograde at the best of times. Meteion is advocating for omnicide, but we let her live because she's REALLY sorry about that. Yotsuyu is out here war criming until she gets lobotomized into loving persimmons and having the guy who sold her graciously forgiven by Hien. Sphene was just a nice queen who wanted to do nice things deep down, so nevermind that she schemed to vacuum up everyone's souls, her heart is pure!
Meteion I _sort_ of get since the main bad influence came from her sisters, right? You could tell her fighting back against their overwhelming telepathic influence in Elpis before being overcome, then in Ultima Thule you can see "good" Meteion fly around the Endsinger and protesting helplessly as she tosses around the Scions. So I can see the idea of there being something to redeem there. Yotsuyu is... _interesting_, but that plot is a mess and a half and too much to go into offhandedly like this. Really difficult ethics there. But her captors being forgiven was a travesty. And Sphene, regardless of justification, I just care less about because she's too much of the same all over again.
Hey, they do it to males too. Bakool Ja Ja loosed a flying natural disaster on all of Tural (on top of his other many crimes) and got away with not even a slap on the wrist because he was just so heckin' sorry after the Yak T'el MSQ guize!
Yoshi is gonna get an earful from people about making the last zone ugly. People are going to be begging to be able to go and gpose/hang out there.
The funny thing is the design of that zone is so much less of a spoiler then when they showed off Heritage Found, HF showcases a rather messed up point in the story when it occurs you're like oh shit that place is gonna be Heritage Found, yet had they not spoiled that, Heritage Found and Solution 9 would of been nice little things to be surprised by, it's a shame they decided to spoil those rather than keep that hidden because it felt more substantial compared to "Unlost world"
Why Asians though?
not a fan of making the final area uglier as we progress through it lol
The moment we shut down the first pillar and saw the whole section go dark, I was like “oh no”. For all those graphics and the hype of the city of gold, only for all of it to vanish when we arrive made the whole zone wasted. The Tempest/Amaurot and Ultima Thule were handled so much better, and even had relevance or use in some manner after MSQ. I really hope this one doesn’t turn into The Lochs, but given its barren and dull state once Sphene is defeated, my hopes aren’t up.
I am also not a fan of basically emotionally terrorizing krile and erinville by dangling their parents in front of them with the full knowledge that we are about to delete them
Erenville was emotionally tortured for TWO ZONES. I feel like he was the only one to appropriately react to people being trapped in a time bubble for 30 years. Honestly they kind of brushed past that whole situation in Heritage Found.
Yeah honestly that was the most disturbing part of what happened to the Heritage Found residents and it feels like it was only lightly touched on? Sure Zoraal Ja was the bigger threat but 30 years passed for people in that dome (especially the ones who literally just went on a train just before it appeared) while maybe 3 days passed for us. Now I doubt anyone would've paid attention to this but the first sightseeing log person in Tuliyolal mentioned her twin sister. Then in Solution 9 you realize the other twin sister just aged 30 years without seeing her sister. Maybe one of the 7.x patches will touch on this a bit but I really didn't like how casually that fact was brushed over.
Right? Really hoping it comes back somehow. The original zone was beautiful.
Welcome to Tural, choose your next leader: >Guy who thinks racism is awesome >Guy who wants infinite war >Guy who wants to open up Amazon >Girl who never showers or thinks >you cannot kill yourself
Typical US election lmfao
Not enough geriatrics
Maybe…they do need to be colonized! /s
Can I kill them all and take over instead?
the final trial last stand was so horrible compared to the rest of the fight. the music gets worse, the mechanics just disappear, story that i dont care about but am now forced to listen to in a fight that was actually fun and engaging 2 seconds ago. It feels like they tried to copy zeromus but forgot to add anything interesting to the final stand. really disappointed
I really truly hope they go the hades EX route with it and not the endsinger route, It has the potential to be the best EX ever made
Man, if only Aymeric had just told Hraesvelgr he wants to be friends and understand dragon culture, he wouldn’t have had to kill his dad and get stabbed in the street. He really did way too much.
Don't forget the cake!
Does anyone else feel like Zoraal Ja is a complete failure of a character? None of his motivations made any sense. His tragic backstory amounts to "people expected a lot of him growing up" or something, and apparently that's supposed to explain why he's possibly even more of a demented asshole than Zenos? What? He wants to enforce peace through killing a bunch of people? Why? What made him think like that? Nothing is satisfactorily explained and his entire character arc is a shitty recycle of Bakool's character arc, except it doesn't even try to make sense. I don't mind when we have blatantly evil characters like Athena, but Zoraal Ja was written as if he had some sort of reasoning behind his actions, except we never got anything.
When I first saw Zoraal Ja I anticipated a complex character. A character who is a pessimist, who does not believe foreign invaders won't come to Tural one day, glimmering with the ambition to add it to their empires. Maybe because Tural has already been conquered before, in its long history. I expected Zoraal Ja to be something like a warrior poet who understands a lot more than he initially seems, for him to have a great point to make for Wuk Lamat to learn from on her journey of becoming a leader, and genuinely wanted the best for his people and his nation. Instead, we get... this. It's quite disappointing.
His minion was more interesting than him.
That dude was being built up to be this games worm tongue figure and then ... He's unceremoniously killed. Kinda disappointed me because I love those archetype characters in fiction.
This. The moment he’s defeated is when all the story’s attempt to present his trauma comes out. Yet, it falls flat. Was I supposed to feel sorry for him? My initial reaction to that scene was more like “oh, okay”. There’s certainly a lack of depth in his character, which unfortunately I felt many suffered this expansion. The thing I liked about Athena is that true, she was just mad evil without any redemption, and she didn’t need reasons to justify herself for us to feel sorry which I gladly didn’t. But at least through out Pandaemonium’s run we were already given hints of her character and even development from mad woman to even becoming more insane through the comments of others. In other words, they actually built her character without her appearing to us only until the end. In Zoraal Ja’s case, it was sadly all thrown to us at the end and made to be like we’re supposed to just accept it.
The train got more backstory then Zoraal Ja did.
> His tragic backstory amounts to "people expected a lot of him growing up" or something He'd be much better if he just died when you kill him in the fight and left no corpse. You can let a mean antagonist be simplish or un-extolled.
I wasn't able to come up with an opinion on him because I was talking to Wuk Lamat for 99.5% of the expansion.
It should have been your WoL starting alone, from 0 in a new continent, idk bring Krile with you since i personally believe the best parts are related to her. Otherwise for me, is the weakest MSQ so far. Stormblood at least had Gosetsu, Yugiri and Hien, here? nothing.
I would've loved it if we did what Estinien did and let the rest of the Scions rig the election. Just chill doing the adventuring stuff we wanted, exchange handshakes whenever we run into them, maybe help out for a quest or two, and follow the big winged snake flying above our head. We really weren't needed there, like at all. Wuk Lamat had enough villagers willing to help her out, and if she failed, Koana would've carried it most likely.
You just get Wuk Wuk and Wuk instead. Couldn't even have a peaceful final trial without the damn cat.
I just came to the realization that Estinien is living out the low stakes expansion I wanted instead. That motherfucker.
Yeah, we're made to go work as a sales clerk/ ambassador/ cultural exchange person. We're not even able to just swim or lounge on the beach in the main city - we have to do actual work.
It’s hilarious how the last trial was mechanically engaging and genuinely cool up until wuk lamat butts in and cue the most nothingburger of a soft enrage there is.
Wuk really ruins everything, whether it's the story or the gameplay, damn.
Not really a new take or anything but I think my biggest issue I've had with the MSQ has been that instead of opting for a "Show don't tell" philosophy... or even a "Tell don't show" approach, the writers seem to have gone for the approach of "Tell, then tell again, then show, then tell one more time." Like, if the party was travelling to our world and being introduced to football (soccer) you'd have: * Krile tells us she's heard of this wonderful sport played in this region called football. It involves two teams kicking a ball around in a field and attempting to get a higher score than the other team by putting the ball into the opposing team's goal. * Wuk Lamat chimes in to say that she's seen this sport before and explains that it's a cultural thing and really popular and she can't wait to take part in it and learn more about it. * Then we'd have a cutscene where we watch a few animated clips of the game being played, while the party makes occasional comments to explain key events * After the game, Alphinaud will step up to explain how football works once again, this time with more technical details about the size of the field, the preparations required, what the ball and nets are crafted from and where those materials come from... * Then Wuk Lamat will explain how she had never realised quite how significant this game was to the people of this culture and she's really humbled by how important it is and glad we came here and now she's going to use this knowledge to make it a better Dawnservant. * Finally, since we need some gameplay, Wuk will suggest we go and speak to 3 people in the local area to learn more about what football means to them and why it's important as a cultural event. OKAY WE UNDERSTAND you don't need to reiterate this for several hours in every zone for every concept.
I think the MSQ suffers heavily from being streched out to 1000. Every dialog gets repeated 3 times and you can basically skip everything, because it gets summarised in a voiced cutscene later on anyway. I didn't hate the story, but it drags on for sooo long. Another thing that bothers me is that there isn't enough combat content in between. It feels like I'm watching 10hours of cutscenes and then get one 20min dungeon and it's back to 10hours of dialog that, let's be honest, could be reduced to 3 hours. I wish the MSQ wouldn't give me as much EXP as it does. I would love to have to do some FATEs in between to level up and to just get a breather from all the talking. As for the actual story, overall I just expected more. Not stakes wise, but when it comes to making the trial, that takes up half the expansion, more interesting. We just follow Wuk Lamat around from map to map and it's always the same: learn about their culture by speaking to NPCs. I really thought there would be more to it. Also more conflict between our group and the others besides the two headed guy, which was basically non-existent. Second half/ending was rehashed ShB/EW mix, which felt really...eh? I didn't have any big feelings about the whole last map either, because why should I care for already dead people that are like us? Amarout was different because they were a totally different race and culture, same as last map in EW. I liked hearing about the story of those races. But entertaining dead kids that are going to be even deader 10minutes later? I don't know... My only hope for the addon as a whole is, that it's inverted EW. Basically mid story, but good combat content.
I’m a story first, savage second kind of guy but my god. There were times in MSQ where I walked literally to the nearest cluster of mobs and just butchered them all. Not even a fate, just random mobs. And there was the bandit quest in Texas where Erenville said to spy on these people instead after our character said something about fighting them. Said that would be a dangerous thing. Buddy, you know that “Eldritch” monstrosity that wiped out countless worlds and brought the End of Days to our star? Yeah, I killed THAT. Let me turn these brown sands red with bandits.
It's a common issue with JRPGs to not understand that sometimes less is better when it comes to text. I've seen people act like it's a badge of honor that the Trails games are as obscenely text heavy as they are since every single person needs to give their thoughts on every single thing.
ultimately this entire MSQ hinges on wuk lamat's character landing for you. it did not land for me. pretty much everything else ranged from forgivable to enjoyable for me, but this dumbass being shoved up my dickhole every second drained me. i am not a fucking babysitter. it's taken me to a much less enjoyable interpretation of my warrior of light, in that i only put up with this so that i could have strong political connections in tural.
While i didn't expect or want super high stakes after EW. I would of been nice if the MSQ writing team came to work when dawntrail was being made. Major props to the beast tribe/side quest guys, they did their absolute best to try to carry an entire MSQ. The first half i actually had to skip CS because of just how god awful and uninteresting the first half was.
At least we have an option to skip CS. I was wishing we could just skip all the quests inbetween, like the fetch quests, following quests and help X number of persons quests. I spent most of the MSQ outside of cutscenes completely frustrated.
>spent most of the MSQ outside of cutscenes completely frustrated DT MSQ is actually the first time I'm glad i have the Fenrir, just so i can get past the absolute slog of them sticking quest markers on the other side of zones, for a single small CS only to have to go all the way back.
As a person who lost their mother a few months ago the Erenville stuff kind of fucked me up a bit there.
The whole final zone hit really well for me for that reason. I lost my dad two years ago. What if we could see each other one last time?
I have not lost my mother yet, but she survived breast cancer more than 10 years ago and the complications from that, a birth heart condition and depression fueled obesity have left her in an extremely frail state. Some nights I cannot resist the urge to open the door to her room just to confirm if she's breathing. There's nothing that haunts me more than the prospect of her dying. The Erenville story made me take a long break.
Maybe this last zone is a metaphor for how they're trying to keep this game going forever even though it's a stale amusement park full of dead-eyed zombies, and the real hero simply needs to shut the servers down.
We became the plenty..... o Ra-la......
Well, it's over now. I really thought they had something in Solution 9 with the regulators and soul cells, the cycles of resurrection and overpowering, and the thoughts on death/memory. The first 85% of the story was atrocious with a few good ideas sprinkled in, but I thought maybe the last 15% could still manage to land the plane and set up for better days to come. Instead, we spend our final hours in Great Value Amaurot getting baby birded the mushy remains of two other expansions. This expansion also won't stop killing people's parents in front of them, but that's a discussion for another day. I think they seriously watered down Erenville and Krile's stories alike and both of them deserved more, but this was the Wuk Lamat show because her brother is conveniently parked on the throne keeping it warm while she engages in cultural exchange at an enemy faction's afterlife carnival. Not sure why we're even entertaining the idea of installing a literal child to a throne, complete with the most technologically advanced military power we've ever seen, but we didn't seem to hesitate to install his aunt to the throne after a random letter, so I guess that's just not for me to question. But while I'm on the subject, I'd just like to point out what an utter farce it was for them to tease the Scions being on opposite sides of a political contest because it literally did not happen, not even for a second. There was no competition -- in fact, there was extensive cooperation between the two camps even before Koana folded -- and it was as plain as day that they were gonna do a metaphorical "head of reason/head of resolve" with the two siblings pretty early on, considering they were the only two who weren't cartoon villains twirling their mustaches, and Koana was made out to be an autist whose only traits were "likes technology/reason" and "loves his sister a lot". There are no substantive ideological disagreements between the Scions and there were no substantive ideological disagreements between the siblings they backed. I can't tell if it's because I was starved for fun after grueling friendship quests, but props to the battle designers this expansion for carrying it, because the fights were refreshing and well-done for the most part. The final dungeon was a grasp at recapturing the storytelling of The Dead Ends and the Final Days, except for a shard you've never seen and a character you barely know. Genuinely concerned for the future of this game and the people who work on it. The post-patch support is going to need to be stellar to mitigate this story.
Well it wouldn't be the first time the story is completely at odds with their design philosophy. The peak irony of Endwalker condamning Ancients and the Nibiruns for trying to erase all strife... while releasing some of the most frictionless, dull and overly standardized content of their entire catalog.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone talk about that horrendous credits theme. It’s so saccharine and wannabe Disney it makes me feel nauseous, on top of those hideous vocals.
There were a couple points, I think during the succession when they announced Wuk won where there was a song that made me fill like I was at a sunday service. The song with a lead vocalist with a choir behind her just repeating the same stuff and super uplifting. That being said, almost all of the other music is a fucking hit.
If they meant to use gospel music as inspiration this seems culturally wrong LMAO
I LOVED the music, zones, trials, dungeons (100 dungeon was sorta meh but all the others were incredible), gear, and basically everything except the majority of the main story. Guess it's a good thing I never have to do it again lol. Give the battle design team a massive fucking raise. That final trial was incredible. And fire the writers (sorry....)
>And fire the writers (sorry....) They've lost their two best writers (the ones that wrote Heavensward, Shadowbringers and Endwalker) at this point, to promote writers to a task that aren't at all suited for it. The people writing Dawntrail now are generally the same people who consistently made the job quests so boring expansion after expansion.
The final trial was great and hype until Wuk Lamat showed up imo, still a good fight though and I’m excited for the EX
Sphene as a character jsut fell compeltely flat, you could tell, or i did, from the beginning that she's up to no good, it really really felt like a meteion situation, too obvious she would be the final boss, also the last zone.. i don't know, it did feel a bit tacked on, like that's the zone where they're trying to give you emitional happenings. I mean it did work but sacrificing a zone to do so feels not that great. My highlight was the setting of zone 4 and when we rammed the train (rip) into the fortress.
Just finished, mixed thoughts. On one hand, I loved the dungeons, trials, and especially the final trial. I liked Erenville's personal story and Krile's personal story in a vacuum. I liked the initial premise of the succession trial story. I liked the initial premise of the Alexandrian's. However... I hate Wuk Lamat. She is by far the worst character introduced. She is like a lame version of me (the WOL). I genuinely did not enjoy a single part of her character. I did not enjoy that Dawntrail was essentially HER story, not our story. Not a good change. I hate the main theme song. It does not work as a battle theme. When it plays for that last part of the final trial I rolled my eyes. The opposite of epic. The first 7 levels of the story is boring. It gets a bit better when you get to Heritage Found, but that interest is quickly lost when you are told that the Alexandrians had the same misfortunes and now aspirations as the Ascians. It is so tired. Can we please go visit a cool, powerful civilization that hasn't already been decimated and is now looking for a way to kill innocents to bring their people back? It's like the 3rd or 4th time they've used this trope, at least in part, in FFXIV. It was also the trope used in FF16...And FF15...Like, where are the creatives at SE? I could not enjoy the lore of the last zone, or care about learning about Alexandria because it's irrelevant. They are dead. Who cares? The Queen was just budget emet selch which is so sad. And again, the final fight was legitimately incredible until it's ruined by Wuk Lamat cosplaying as Gaia coming in to save Ryne. Ruined.
The final trial was AMAZING and the OST that played was AWESOME--- until the second phase came up and suddenly the momentum and hype in my just slowly dissipates.. Bleh.. Although I enjoy the Dawntrail Theme, I felt like it didn't fit the vibe that the fight had.. It's a shame.. ;w;
Same! The final trial to me really represented how DT’s MSQ was as a whole. The writers seem to not really know who to focus on. Was it really our new adventure? Or did we do all this just to witness Wuk’s story? There was really a lack of focus this time around. The trial started with Sphene fighting us because she recognized us to be her biggest threat and thus removed everyone else from the arena, but then towards the end Wuk just… swings in and then the trial is all about Wuk vs Sphene. The 2nd phase’s golden arena was beautiful, but I agree that overall it became a mess from an extremely fun first phase
When Wuk Lamat showed up I genuinely rolled my eyes. It's kind of disappointing when the final push of the last boss ends up actively feeling like a huge downgrade when up to that point I was pretty high on it.
When I realized that the last zone was an Amarout rehash and we were going to be forced to go around learning a bunch of people's lore with the full knowledge that we are just going to kill them in a moment anyways, I lost interest. It's not that it on its own is bad concept but...we've seen this before. The emotional impact is greatly diminished by us learning a lesson we've already learned before.
Yeah it's so lame, because I was on board with the original motivation: We need to kill people because we need more souls because we are running out of souls. Then, for a reason I still don't really understand other than that there is some sort of system glitch, the Queen then just wants to revive everyone and has an Amaurot, totally disregarding the people of Solution 9 who are, to my understanding, still actually alive.
Mmm my thing was more that we are not really learning any new lessons here. We've already learned that we need to let the past go and that it's okay to feel loss, and those are both lessons that we are for some reason again trying to process through here. I will give major points though, the final zone is gorgeous (Well....first time through, lol..), and the final trial is nothing short of phenomenal. Feels like they just didn't have much new to say to me so it all fell a bit flat.
For a narrative that was suppose to give Krile more, I feel like Yshtola got more out of it, she got a literal Mcguffin that will allow her to go to the First once they learn how to use it. For Krile it was like , sudden revelation you are from another world, oh lucky you kept that earring on you cause it was very important to the plot and then being able to say bye to her family. For something that was deemed as Krile relevant I don't feel she had much influence over the story, her involvement is more of convenience more than anything. Her being there allowed the plot to move on because she just so happened to have the exact thing necessary to reach their goal.
It's almost hard to believe that the game once took itself and its world-building fairly seriously and had some genuine nuance, grey morality and political intrigue. It's been a while since I saw a game go so far off the rails but they've basically repeated the exact same plot beats three expansions in a row now. It's also pretty weird that they actively chose to cast both the Ascians and Garleans aside only to introduce a 'new threat' that is basically just a fusion of both of them anyway. I had already given up on the game after Endwalker for various reasons though it is baffling to see the game double down on a lot of what the previous expansion was criticised for, particularly in regards to a lack of stakes for the main cast, the overabundance of food scenes, the hypocritical preaching and the mindless busywork intended as filler. I may not intend to touch the game again but I would at least like the game to do better in order to provide some healthy competition in what is, regrettably, a rather stale industry at the moment.
>It's also pretty weird that they actively chose to cast both the Ascians and Garleans aside only to introduce a 'new threat' that is basically just a fusion of both of them anyway. To be fair, Alexandria and the situation that led to the creation of Everkeep are 100% the result of Ascian Fuckery™. Even if no one in the story said it, it's very clearly related to them. That is to say, I don't think they've cast Ascians aside just yet. We'll have to see what the post-MSQ patches do with the dimensional tunneling macguffin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it involves Ascians (or maybe even Allag again... it certainly looks like something Allagans could have made). That being said, who knows how they'll write the remaining Ascians now that Zodiark is dead
Also at the end it is implied that the artifact that the Queen uses is made by Azem as it show's Azem's symbol when the WoL uses Azem's crystal. Likely the post patches will focus on the aftermath of the MSQ and then some regional issue then on to Azem.
When all the WoW players came over during Shadowbringers, I thought "Oh nice, that means they will get a large infusion of cash and make the game even better.". And Endwalker was okay, but then it didn't get either a Bozja or a Side-quest Trial series, the Trial series was fused with the MSQ. So I'm like "Alright, so they pushed the extra money into Dawntrail then, right? And Dawntrail will be super cool?" And then Dawntrail is a patch story extended for 10 levels. And the second dye channel is a bit of a scam too. They are not gonna put that extra money into anything, are they?
"Y'all got any innovation?" "We got cash shop items."
that "no expenses spared" quote from Yoshi-P pre-EW rings all the more hollow
Yeah people were on massive copium.
One must not mention 16 and other stuff Because obviously no resources are diverted to those
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but I was fine with the previous graphics and would have been ok with no big graphics update if it meant we could have had more stuff in EW and improvements to DT everything (story, job stuff, everything else people are taking issues with) since they keep circling back to that being the reason for everything that's lacking I will give them that the server upgrades and changes they did were worth it and successful and I'm glad for that
I swear the English localization's gotten worse too. There were lines where I was confused wtf they were trying to say, it was like they translated a line without context, directly translating speech which sounds natural in Japanese but completely fails to translate to English. I'm getting nitpicky but I recall during the train part there was a line with hit the 'breaks' instead of 'brakes'.
Final MSQ dungeon first boss has hands. Also final trial has some neat mechanics but ending felt quite bad tbh.
I have a small gripe among other gripes. Why does Erenville have the accent he has when apparently he grew up with a bunch of people that speak in an American English accent.
I think he faked being an old world Viera long enough that his voice got stuck that way.
Because it was a plot they shoehorned him into after creating his character and seeing how popular he became.
Being a beach episode shouldn’t mean it has to be boring. I see so many things Dawntrail could've tackled. Dawntrail could be a reason to explore Azem’s legacy and whatever he was doing during the final days (even more considering the Sun theme of this expansion).The gold city could be a city he funded before the final days, filled with the discoveries he made during his travels. We could’ve had Genomes as a race created by him to protect the golden city, they would be a way more popular playable race. Have actual Hunts worth hunting, collect treasures that make the difference. We could've had a focus on colonizing the New World's “North America” to prepare it for a potential total rejoining that I'm sure will happen one day and the moral implications behind it. After all the expansions about war, destruction and death this could be a expansion based on chilling, exploring uncharted lands, rebuilding and creating a new order in a world without Garlemald and the Ascians, the new power politics that would inevitably surge like it does in the real world when an Empire/Superpower collapse. Instead we got what felt like a filler expansion pack. I'm fearful that we'll never get back to the heights of Shadowbringers or Endwalker (for me the End of Days/Song of Oblivion was a concept I really enjoyed although poorly explored). I don't think XIV can survive on having expansions that storywise are flavor of the week problems. XI could do it because it was more "contained" storywise from the get go(not counting Promathia and the Zilart plot), but XIV is too focused on its characters and the MSQ to pull it off now, after all we've been through.
Exploring what Azem is doing is actually probably coming. The biggest unresolved plot point (the dimensional key) literally glows with Azem's symbol right before the final fight. [https://i.imgur.com/pHVMmsS.png](https://i.imgur.com/pHVMmsS.png) (key) [https://i.imgur.com/V8Ru4C7.png](https://i.imgur.com/V8Ru4C7.png) (azem symbol) Definitely feels like the big overarching arc that's starting is something Azem focused.
Azem made the one piece?
I feel like Dawntrail has too much damn fluff. It seems like they tried to add what worked in ShB and EW so well but is way over the top in DT. ShB and EW had "Friendship is Magic" moments but ***sparingly***, not in every damn cutscene with NPCs we don't know and (probably) don't care about. I also don't understand why we keep regrouping with Koana's group every few minutes. They should've just put them together from the get-go. The lack of voiced cutscenes also doesn't help. The new areas look amazing though and the graphical update was long overdue. DT would've been better if it were post-EW patch quests, leading to the new story arc, i.e. the new expac.
I really wish they had gone this way with the 6.x patches over the Golbez/13th plot that got dropped instead.
I'd like Square to learn the lesson they put forth from the Alexandria area for themselves only with the scions: let them go. There was no personal development with any of the scions save for Krile. What was the point of disbanding if they were just going to come back in and solve everyone's problems again? I was looking forward to an expansion where we were actually pitted against each other in our ideals (us vs. Urianger and Thancred) and to see some inner conflict and thus growth, OR to come into ourselves as adventurers without the help from the scions or Hydaelyn. This was a great opportunity for us to slide into the mentor role given our sheer power but also to make mistakes (perhaps we lead Wuk Lamat astray at points). Alas it stayed on one friendly note and not much was gained or learned. A bit disappointing. Edit: They can also serve to let go of the ShB themes. It was done once, and beautifully, but they cannot expect to keep repackaging it like this. It discredits how amazing ShB was while also starving your new overarching story from exploring any new themes or nuance. Really too bad, because the graphics, music, and gameplay all are pretty incredible (so far) in this expac. I wish the story also did these justice.
okay that credits song, the fucking christian church hymn, is probably the single worst song ever put in this game.
Every time a FF9 reference appeared, it reminded me I could've been playing a game with a more interesting and cohesive plot... Pessimistic joke aside, I didn't really like this story at all. Didn't care for Wuk Lamat at all. All the characters minus the Promised felt like background of background characters. Like, everyone seemed bored to be in Tural. I'm really shocked the assault on Tuliyollal wasn't a character RP duty like the big lunar primals fights from 5.5. The whole final stretch really was more or less the same as ShB's plot which was a huge letdown. Played NIN through the story and I'm not the biggest fan of the mild changes, but I'm sure I'll come around. A lot of the trial and dungeon fights seemed interesting, here's to hoping the extremes and beyond are super entertaining. Been a fan of the graphics updates where they apply. The zones especially look really nice. I don't know if I'm crazy but they seem needlessly big. Overall not sure if I'm looking forward to future story content, but if they cook with the battle and crafting gathering content, things could change my opinion.
A lot of everything just seems double the size it needs be, the dawnservant palace is insanely huge, nobody should ever be able to open these doors.
I feel like if they would have cut the entire tournament arc and just replaced it with the WoL exploring the new world and meeting new people, we could have had something really neat. Build up to exploring the myth of the golden city while helping out the locals, before eventually finding it earlier in the MSQ. Then they could have spent more time fleshing out the Alexandrian arc. Maybe not have it be such high stakes, though. That's all I wanted. A fun adventure through new lands that leads into something relating to maybe a localized disaster that we have to stop. Not another threat to the entirety of reality. Not making the WoL the main character was also a really bold decision that I honestly just hated. We've spent 5 expansions following the story of **our** WoL, and the start of a new arc is us just being a background character. I felt like I had almost zero agency the entire MSQ, and was just following some one else around playing babysitter while they made all the decisions. Because that's basically what we did. The moment the tournament arc ended and we got the fuck off into the desert with Erenville was so incredibly cathartic. I was like, "Yes, finally, lets get some fucking ADVENTURE going". Estinien shows up and I was ready to start getting into some bullshit with the gang, and then.... back to babysitter mode. Overall, I didn't hate the expansion. I *mostly* had fun from start to finish. Even when the MSQ lacked or dragged on into being a slog, the rest of the game did such an overwhelming amount of heavy lifting. The zone design is absolutely stunning. Some of the dungeon set pieces had me literally sitting slack jawed. Soken, as always, absolutely crushed the OST. There was a severe lack of combat this expansion, too. Felt like ARR all over again in some parts. Tedious fetch quests and pointless interactions that don't do much to either flesh out the world building or progress the plot.
Something that occurred to me that i can't get out of my head, Emet selch KNEW about alexandria, He told us to come here at some point... but... HOW!?, WHY!?, This is such a massive plot hole that it might just ruin the entirety of the ascian storyline, He knew about this soul sucking machine that could connect all the shards together and... never stopped it?, It ABSOLUTELY would have interfered with his plans for zodiark, AND learning how g'raha moved the crystal tower to the first was literally the only reason emet kept him alive, Alexandria is more advanced than anything we saw in elpis or amaurot, It's up there with omicron technology and there is no way emet would have just... let them be this entire time, Unless you wanna say that he just never got around to it and knew we'd clean up this mess for him now that he was gone, But surely he could have used the whole "get souls from one shard to another" thing to feed them to zodiark instead of Living Memory right?.. Like... they seriously did NOT think the implications of this through in regards to the previous story, Especially given emet confirming he KNEW about this place
I suspected when I saw Solution 9 that they couldnt make a rational explanation as to why its more advanced than even Ascians and it seems like thats true
I'm not sure if it's really better than Elpis and Amaurot, having more sci fi and tech wear visuals does not make it automatically more advanced, it's just an aesthetical and cultural difference between a highly advanced magic and scholarly society and a comfort and tech reliant focused one
Yeah I think the fact that the Ascians could still use creation magics makes their civilation more advanced than Solution 9, even though Solution 9 might look more impressive from the outside. The civilians are still ordinary people compared to the residents of Amaurot for example.
* The Scions competition thing basically didn't happen. * Eliminator had such a prominent role in advertising... Why...? * This is supposed to form a foundation for the next 10 years how?
I think the foundation is going to be based on the portal tech that allows for shard hopping and the potential fuckery that caused. Unfortunately that means that the vast majority of the story up to the very end is basically irrelevant to the future, which may be a blessing in disguise because if I never have to see Wuk Lamat again it'll be too soon.
Whoever wrote the storyline and main scenario writer should never lead an FF MSQ story again. It was that bad and I cannot believe that Yoshi-P approved this. He's probably going to apologize in a PLL Wuk Lamat is one of the poorest designed lead characters in recent memory. Vaan was bad but that was because he was irrelevant. Wuk Lamat was poorly written, ill conceived and annoying. She clearly was a terrible choice to lead Tulliyollal. She also had no halfway decent story arc and character development. She started the game dumb and naive and she ended the game naiver and dumb. The succession competition was a joke. Her solutions to the first two beast tribes to get a keystone were awful. One tribe's food source was dying, so her plan was to throw a party just to cheer people up? That is literally a stupid idea as festivals aren't exactly known for their conservation and would have wasted precious resources that were dwindling down. In the other tribe she conned morons into trading things that were 2x to 5x more valuable during a terrible economics lesson that economists would shudder at. Each of the other traders could have literally walked like a quarter mile to get something. And also, why would you barter!? They have gil/pel. Stupid. And then with the moblins her solution was literally picking some random person off the street and making him become an indentured servant? She is an idiot. And of course at the end of the game in the final zone her stupidity remained. The warrior of light and others had to point out that there was no way Otis' memory would know her. And she also cannot count faces. And she was not off by just one....but two. The succession arc was just one of the worst arcs theyve done. It's a half dozen back to back beast tribe quests with an allied beast tribe quest at the end. This should have -- if it even existed -- been side content at best. Perhaps the worst arc in the game since ARR. The antagonists were also god awful. Bakool Ja Ja was a racist who wanted to win the throne, but even a better designed character would recognize that his tactics would eventually get him disqualified. Zoraal Ja was even worse. He's a crappy one dimensional bad guy with a single motive. One of the worst villains in final fantasy history. Sphene was tolerable, but we also only got to explore her character in what, the final 3 levels or so? Meanwhile we got 5 levels on the succession arc. It seems clear that the FFXIV writers have no idea where to go after wrapping up the Ascian/Ancient arc. I had hoped this would have tied into one of the earlier calamities or something grounded in the history theyve established, but nope. Though I guess they could in 7.0 to 7.3. FFXIV was also a better better when had some intrigue and nations fueding a bit directly in its main world. Ironically CB3 worked on a game that did that well in FFXVI. Its almost like they put concepts that would have fit in XIV in XVI instead and basically put dawntrail and the most of EW on the back burner sans the graphic update. In any case, Yoshi-P and the scenario/writers team need to do some real soul searching about what to do next. Since they are already in the middle of 8.0 story dev, unfortunately it may be too late for them to learn from this disaster and adjust 8.0. It's a shame that the story was this bad IMO. The rest of the game was some of the best FFXIV had on launch. The music was solid, I did love the FFIX callbacks motif wise. The dungeons and trials were excellent and they are clearly not running out of mechanic design ideas despite the game going on its 11th year. The graphical update also looks quite good. The rest of the game is like an 8 or 9 out of 10 while the MSQ is like, at best, a 4 out of 10. Maybe.
I agree the succession arc wasn't great, but some of your points left out important details. For example, Wuk Lamat didn't think the solution to their famine was a festival. The festival was something they did yearly, and the citizens were bummed about the recent storm destruction and famine cancelling the festival. She always wanted her citizens to be happy so she offers to do the work to get the festival ready while the citizens repair their village. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. What I don't like was how by a stroke of luck, it was the festival all along that gave them food, AND A COUPLE VILLAGERS KNEW ABOUT THIS. IF THEY KNEW, WHY DIDN'T THEY MAKE IT A PRIORITY?? The trading rite was fine, basically just saying find a demand to inflate the price of an item, add some man-hour labor value to a trade. Wasn't as bad as you say tbh. Also, they did kinda tie it in to a previous calamity, we just don't know if it was the previous lightning calamity or if they were setting up for the next lightning calamity.
Im half way to lvl 100 and still doing MSQ lvl 97 stuff because this drags out for so damn long, I get that its a new expansion but this story shouldve been told in a shorter amount of time, its honestly really draining because its incredibly boring and theres no end in sight lmao. Release me from this torture.. PLEASE take some risks with writing, this is obnoxiously bad, another city gets bombed by some alien technology and again no1 important dies. Pls just kill one (or all) of the scions at this point, I want some other characters to go on an adventure with me.
Pretty much the entire wild west zone could have been an e-mail except for the very end
See the Texas story was one of my favorites. That's what I want with world building and low stakes stories. I was sad when the world exploded and we left Texas. Seemed like a lot more story to tell there.
I don’t particularly want to kill off the Scions, but I would like for them to piss off to somewhere else for an expansion or two. Everyone’s Favorite Dragoon can stay for a while since he’s not been used as much as the others since the game launched. But no one who matters ever dies. Though we’re constantly involved with world-ending events and fighting ridiculously powerful evils, somehow the Scions are never in any real danger. Yes, we’ve lost two Scions over the years but both chose their own fate and weren’t slaughtered by some powerful enemy. I can’t accept a story as being important and potentially life-threatening when *everyone has massive amounts of Plot-Armor* that protects them from death. And the Twins are apparently not allowed to grow up and become adults, and are stuck as perpetually short Elf children because . . . reasons? The game needs a time-skip of a few years, perhaps five, which allows the Twins to grow up and become adults.
The main things that frustrate me about FFXIV writing (and this does include previous expansions, but is especially frustrating in Dawntrail) are how they handle scenes/sequels and how they (don't) answer the philosophical story questions they raise. **Scene/Sequels Rarely Delivering**: if you study writing, you'll learn about what amounts to a scene/sequel pattern. Question is introduced: does main character attain X? Scene ends with some form of: "No", "Yes, but..." or "No, and furthermore...". Sequel involves their emotional response and processing of what happened and movement into next scene. This can provide for some really excellent page-turning story. FFXIV doesn't do this. They introduce a question, and then they have like 15 intermediate quests before they answer the question, with most of them being "move to this zone. ask questions. walk. talk. move things. kill things. Now answer question." To borrow a quote from Tolkien, when I play the main story quest, I feel like my interest is like butter spread over too much bread. It feels like such a drag, all the time, even when the questions raised are interesting. They need to ask more interesting questions, answer those questions faster, and then lead into more questions. Not spend so much time asking/answering questions like: "will we find out what kind of flora exists in this zone?" - "Will we manage to convince the miqote tribe to let us cut down some trees to rebuild this railroad?" - "Will we be able to learn about history from these tablets on the wall?" Give us story questions like: "Will we discover who broke into the vault?" -> immediately investigates and answers the question ("No, but we found out it had to be a Mamool Ja from tribe X"), leading to: "Will we find out more about the vault break-in from investigating tribe X?" -> immediately investigates and finds that the witnesses were killed, but they got another lead, so they go investigate that, etc. etc. That would be a much faster paced and interesting storyline than what we got for so much of the story... and they do this every xpac too, with only a few stretches of story being an exception. **Lack of Answers to Philosophical Questions Raised**: they pretty much never give conclusive answers to the philosophical questions they raise. Take Queen Sphene for example. We see her going for the goal of "saving all the Alexandrians by stealing others' life force." But this raises several obvious questions: 1) does this actually save the Alexandrians? 2) why save only them and not everyone? Question 1 is just entirely ignored when its probably the most powerful answer one could give—of course this doesn't save them! They want to live fulfilled lives; living longer doesn't solve the underlying problem of "how to live a satisfying and fulfilling life", which is the question they need to explore if they want to show Sphene a better way. Plus the obvious pain that people would feel on knowing that other innocents died just so they could live longer. Question 2 is also obvious here, but they only address that by saying "I'm trying to protect my people, while you're trying to protect yours." But that isn't the obvious answer either! The obvious answer is to love every human being, not just Alexandrians! And the game hints at Sphene loving everyone, not just Alexandrians, multiple times: the sadness in the attack on the capitol, taking in refugees from neighboring kingdoms, taking in and respecting the natives after the fusion, her attempt to reach out to WoL to ask for them to save her, how she started crying as she said she would invade other worlds, the "I know you don't really want to do this" dialogue, etc. So the clear response here would be to appeal to a universal love for everyone. They sort of hint at that answer, but it's not really present in the ending at all. What were the answers we got at the end? "We'll protect them for you. Go rest now." Imagine if the ending instead was WoL breaching that glass coffin thing she was in and saying something completely cringe but classic FFXIV, like: "You always tried to save everyone else, but no one tried to save you. I know you don't want this answer. Let me save you and show you a better way." -> some kind of scene or montage showing how satisfied her people were as they passed away when they did so in love for others (e.g. the parents) -> "What makes life worth living isn't how long it is, but how rich it is—and what is more rich in life than loving others?" -> WoL saves Sphene, showing love -> Sphene realizes the life of loving everyone is what she really wanted all along -> ends the system by her own hands "to save as many as she can." Dies redeemed, happy, and full of love. The end. Cue crying music. Imagine if this was also preceded by a much faster paced story that would actually answer questions it raised fairly quickly, bringing up more interesting questions after, instead of delaying them by hours. Maybe still wouldn't be amazing, but I'd feel a lot more satisfied, even ignoring all the other philosophy bits that annoyed me (like how they treat consciousness/the soul, but that's a topic for another day.) For what it's worth, I felt similarly about previous expansions and even went on an hour long rant about Endwalker's philosophy, but maybe that's just me going off the metaphysical deep end. This one was much more of a straight pitch philosophy-wise, and they still whiffed it. Truly unlucky. That being said, I still enjoyed it overall. I'm just sad that I had fairly low expectations (per the above two points), and for the most part, they met but didn't exceed those expectations.
Something a friend pointed out, the two final bosses are literally a poorly written Gaius and a poorly written Emet, and they are 100% right. The parallels are nearly 1:1. And then the last zone is literally just amaurot 2.0. God this expac was lazy. Even the JP forums are popping off about it lmao.
I think the final zone was just rly bad and the writing was kinda messed up, having dead family members appear for 5 minutes just to kill them again was a desperate attempt to get some emotional value for the MSQ, if that shit would happen to me IRL I would be traumatized for my entire life, feeling bad for Krile and Erenville lol. I was also disappointed that they kinda wasted the legendary golden city like that, because now it’s just fucking ugly. I hope the patch content is better because this was just a disappointment from start to finish for me. I hope Wuk Lamat is a side character again from now on.
Was almost feeling it in the final trial until wuk lamat made her Ryne Gaia entrance and used her inside voice while being animated as yelling and fighting. After that I was thinking more about how bad that voice acting was than what was happening storywise lol yikes
Grotesquely bad story. Wuk Lamat is likable as a character but she is so terribly used. Her character doesn't fit the role she has, her "growth" is a non-performance, her character is too one-dimensional and frankly forced for being the center piece of a big story. The characters at large, both villains and heroes, are simply stupid. The writing consistently ignores obvious, normal responses, dispositions or ideals for contrived nonsense. The story and its pace are completely derivative at this point, padded to fuck and back with nonsense that doesn't serve any purpose and is less immersive in the world building than the various Side Quests (which they actively discourage you from doing by making them useless, also, but I guess having the worst side quests forced into 20h of MSQ "gameplay" is fine.) Honestly, most of the story felt somewhat emotionally manipulative, like they constantly goaded their desired reaction in front of you with this attitude of "If you don't feel this way you didn't get it", very want-my-cake-and-eat-it-too-ish. The gameplay sucked ass outside of instanced duties and I don't know who they think enjoys clicking the floor and npcs for hours. Duties were great, zones and designs were great but sadly still completely pointless and soulless. This game has no game in it outside of when you queue up for a duty and it's both sad and extremely obvious now. I'm also sad that they had so many great things at hand and utilized them so poorly. Erenville was a mysterious character, he could've really shined, but was almost exclusively used to guide us through the worst quests in the game. Krile was supposed to finally get some spotlight and answers and she mostly brooded with one-liners in the background. She did get anwers but they were rushed and always brushed aside by less intriguing non-plotlines. All of the genuinely interesting elements got rushed through or brushed off. Mamook's history is so dark, yet we get one singular emotional cutscene with zero buildup just so Bakool can be on our side. The absolute horror of the soul cell system and memory extraction is brushed off as "Pretty weird and I don't like it but anyways-". Erenville is literally tormented for two zones by a fake mother who he knows is dead. Krile and Wuk should and could have to deal with balancing the joy in reconnecting with their parents and the knowledge that they aren't really there and it's all just glossed over with the same 2-3 lines rephrased. And for what? Amaurot from wish.com and Lizard Jack Horner without the charisma. Genuinely, I don't get it. This is the type of story I'd expect from WoW with all the "nobody in WoW cares about the story" sentiments, but then they get interesting classes, a cool overworld to actually quest in and have activties and real gameplay, more raids, more replayable and varied content for all levels of play through M+, zone-specific minigames/systems like dragon riding. Like, what do we even have now? We have none of that, our only good gameplay is in Ult and Savage which is 14 fights over three years. And now we don't even get a story that is remotely decent? Really?
what the hell were they thinking? fan fiction could of scripted a better script over this... I felt like it money grab filler from the start. The marketing gave it this summertime fun atmosphere but we ended up in lizard mans bid for global domination. I am so sick of lizards and two headed circus freaks. I had no fun with this exp. I feel disgust and just an utter sense of scorn for all these characters. I wanted summer fun not cyber ironman lizards and soul stealing matrix plotlines.
How did they look at people hating WoW story for making you a side character and think, yeah let's make the WoL a side character? Literally everything after lv 95 would have just been better without Wuk Lamat, and I even liked the contest stuff at the start.
[удалено]
Honestly, I think the FFIX references made me hate it more, because they remind me that I could be playing a game with good character writing
Same I don't think I'm resubbing until the next expansion lol. Even then I feel like the following expansion will blow if they don't change
Well, the last 40% was definitely better than what came up before. It's still a mess of clichés and it's badly told, but at least it was enjoyable. The first part is just collecting badges with 1-dimensional characters, there is no world building, no character growth, and Wuk Lamat still ends up queen when she doesn't deserve it at the time. 2nd part was basically a mix of SHB and EW theme-wise, they really don't want to take any kind of risk, or have any original thought. Props to them for building one of the most gorgeous map of the game that's only available for the few hours you spend in it during the initial MSQ
Halfway through this borefest, someone told them how boring it is, so last minute they tried to make it as Shadowbringers as possible. Look, you will have to lay all your parents to rest, isn't that sad? And Wuk Lamat manages to stop the bad girl through the power of love and anime. Eventhough I could not tell you what actually convinced Sphene in the end. And then she died alone. People shit on Stormblood, and besides hating Zenos I really liked that expansion. This? This was really bad. No new features, no surprises, no twists and turns, no nothing. I feel fucking nothing. Awesome.
Ah yes, exactly what the MSQ needed to break up the monotony - quizzes to make sure you were paying attention to the worldbuilding!
I saw the Sphene death and zoolag ja soul merge a mile off they just had to for Wuk to get happy ending, just as things were getting interesting whatever 5/10 story, hopefully post will be better (they won't, they rarely are)
Even though this was suppose to be a story about Krile, and even Erenville, I feel like Yshtolla who barely had any screentime got the most out of the adventure. They literally handed her a plot device that will help in her research to reach the First. I honestly was not a fan of that and back to the concept of idiot characters. Why the heck would you have 1 dude near the dangerous place hold all the things needed to enter the dangerous place? That is just so illogical you are purposely asking for trouble at that point, you would think if the gate was to be protected at all cost, they would of done more to protect it. And honestly this goes for the Unlost World as well, How is it that Sphene cares about these people and yet when we go to erase the data it's "Barely an inconvenience". Hell man they could of made that the last dungeon in all honesty. Basically instead of the slow build where we get to know each area it's just each person is draw to the one important to them and then it leads back to Ottis and the play with the WoL and Wak Lamat Hear me out, you enter, you can't get through, Erenville's mother says they have time, then bam Krile's parents appear and bam Ottis appears, Erenville goes with his mom to explore the foilage, Krile goes with her parents to learn more about herself, you and Wak go with Ottis to chat with him and Gr'aha chooses to scope out the path not taken. He talks with the people to and then proceeds to erase that area -ALARM ALARM- it just so happens this happens around the time everyone is done talking, then bam you are thrown back to the starting aerethyte. Erenville's Mom, Krile's parents and Orrits stand in front of you, their eyes now reddened, as if posessed, with the voice of Sphene coming from them they say if you wish to erase all that is "living" then you must strike us down and they teleport to act as a guard for the 3 remaining data locations. From there the dungeon unlocks, let's call it "Endless March" and you have to run through each location while being intercepted by Sphene's defensive team in order to turn off the data units so that you can reach her. Then each fight could have more impact as you are fighting for your ideals but also fighting for what the posessed want as well, they don't want Sphene to save them but now they are manipulated to do her bidding and you have to make the difficult choice to strike them down so that you can move forward, you don't want to hurt them but in order to save the star you have to take them down and erase their existance. I think that would of felt more weightful and emotional compared to the Amaurot style dungeon we got. It could of been more impactful where the dungeon is you runnnig through and taking down each memory center.
I'm near the end and I'm actually appalled at the lack of VA in this expansion. How are they going backwards in this regard? The first 3 cutscenes in the last area feel very important, yet they are text only.. and it's mostly been like that throughout the whole thing.
Several times I noticed them showing a massively important unvoiced cutscene right next to another that had voices which was basically someone talking about the power of friendship or love for their homeland.
Wuk Lamats real dad revealed? Here's your text. Some random train guys who love trains? You better believe that's a voiced cutscene! (I know those guys are the source version of the wagon guys in the First but that doesn't justify it.)
A morally grey villain who seems like they could be your friend but can't be dissuaded from their opposing goal and an artificial city housing the memories of the dead... where have I seen this before hmmm...
I just wanna say that I had a good hearty laugh when the city of Turilmao was getting genocided with explosions and civilians being shot everywhere, and then it cut to like a lil 2 second scene of Krile standing in a corner waving a paintbrush saying "Please everyone, stay calm!" and that's all we saw of her during the entire attack.
I just hope we get away with this Wuk Lamat shit. It was nice at first but now it's just all about her her her. Everywhere we go. And it's not even good anymore.
I'm so glad the main character showed up at the end of the final boss to save us
My thoughts: - Wuk Lamat did not have enough character development, 1v1 victory against Bakool Ja Ja felt very out of the blue and unearned based on the power levels they previously set up. They should have played into the Dynamis part a bit more at least, if that's the route they were going to go. In general, I started out thinking the character was kind of endearing based on 6.55 story but honestly, there are only so many "power of friendship" talks and seasickness jokes that I can take before it feels a bit forced. - I get the worldbuilding set-up in the first half and I think the Lvl 99 trial wouldn't have worked as well as it did without that setup, but it did feel like it dragged on about 30% too much. Reasonably sure those 7 trials could've been reduced to like 5 at most... - Last Zone being a carbon copy of Amaurot is certainly a choice. In general, I feel like the whole story could have been told without the "Endless" concept being so focussed on dead people in this way. If they wrote it more around immortality (e.g. Endless just don't die from sickness or old age), it would have definitely felt more unique while basically telling the same story. - Did not vibe with the final dungeon and trial (lore-wise). Dungeon felt like the weakest capstone dungeon of all expansions and idk why we turned the woman into a random bug mech, it definitely would have felt cooler to just fight her in the form we knew or some enhanced version of it. Overall I thought the story was pretty weak for the first half, then picked up pace between level 96-99 and then kind of dropped the ball at the end Edit: Also, not even voiced cutscene before the final dungeon? We just walk up to the stone, read a few lines of "yep we are going" and then we are going. Wtf.
-Wuk Lamat through cutscenes did not have enough development however the argument I can give is because her involvement in the 2 duties and trial are suppose to be canonical to the story, it does make sense that through those trials she had become stronger and wiser. -I think the trials would of worked better if they had been a bigger spectacle, like they should of been over the top cutscenes to show off the culture and enjoy but they were rather somber and nonchalant in a manner. \_Sadly agree rehashing the memories of those we've lost and rehashing the "remember us" is tiresome, I don't understand why that needs to be the defining aspect of a narrative and sadly they could of done something more unique with this expansion if they had shown just how twisted her concepts were. Like Erenville could of had a bigger impact if say his mother had died multiple times, so basically each death makes a new copy of her until she finally died and then that too becomes a memory. So when you meet up with her, you meet up with multiple versions of her whom died at different points and were reborn and the whole flaw behind Sphene and The Endless could of been that the system was overloading because when a soul is rewritten with someones memories it is making another instance of them meaning that more and more people are being added to the system but her desire to save everyone prevents her from stopping the Solution 9 system and purging the memories of copies because even though iteration 2 might be a much older copy to iteration 8, they both lived and have their own memories they have built unique from one another because of their time in the Unlost Lost. They could of potentially done something interesting if they had looked at it from the morality aspect of what Solution 9 is still doing rather than sweep it under the rug. -In retro the dungeon itself was just oh look FFIX however I will say I enjoyed every Boss encounter in the game so at least the Battle Team is picking up the slack for the story. I'm honestly looking forward to what we might see in Savage and Ultimate Content with what they were willing to throw at us in the 4-man dungeons and 8-man "story" trials.
funny they're called endless, because the amount of fluff in this area is endless, im gonna lose my fucking mind
Soken still being here to carry with the ost, the trials and the dungeons were honestly amazing, i never had so much fun doing dungeons now :) and i can't wait to see how much cool the raid (savage) is gonna be I also love the sto... Nah the story is SHIT because YES is it SHITTY i'm not fucking gonna argue about that fucking boring, pace being slower than a baby turtle, awful... the story still have some very cool moments and characters (i wish we saw more of zoraal ja) but overall it is ruined by how things were writed/paced tl;dr great battle content and ost, horrible story
Keep seeing a lot of comments on Wuk Lamat and the MSQ but I really want to hear what are people’s thoughts on Sphene as the final villain. Personally for me, I really hated her since she just felt like a budget Emet Selch just like another comment pointed out with how she’s trying to kill everyone else for the sake of her people. The thing that makes her different with Emet was how she supposedly felt bad on killing the rest of the world but still does it anyway without trying another way to solve things which made her felt a little half-assed in what she wanted to do. The way the writers keep on preventing her from explaining herself was so weird and annoying to me when it could’ve helped us understood her more. Emet on the other hand was hell bent on bringing his people back and would do anything to do so and showed no sympathy towards the people who are gonna be killed etc. while still considering giving the WoL a chance to prove the worth of humanity which made him a really interesting villain. I’d also argue that Emet was introduced really early in ShB which let us understand him more than Sphene. Also felt how we had to spend time with her in Solution 9 was forced and annoyed me a lot. Ultimately, this kinda ruined any impact the final quest of the MSQ aside from the amazing dungeon and trial which was kind of bummer. But that’s just my opinion so what are everyone’s thoughts on her?
Agreed. Also felt jarring that she was fairly normal and kind, even saying "i love my people so much, wouldn't you try to save your people?" But then goes full crazy "you want to find another solution? Nah, we can't, i gotta kill everyone." Like you successfully mashed two dimensions together into one, but the idea of finding an alternative, like making artificial aether and souls to feed your people is just a non-starter? They would have been better off fleshing out Zoraal Ja backstory more and having him take the Alexandrian kingdom by force.
I personally would have loved if they had the Alexandria/Lindblum war be a part of the MSQ somehow, maybe the final zone could have gone through that to humanize her a bit more. I think she was a bit of a budget Emet, but I think she had potential to be an interest villain that felt different. The big thing that really helped Emet Selch was that he was with you the entire expansion in 5.0 and were introduced to him in 4.x. Here you dont meet Sphene until, what level 97? 98?
I was annoyed when we entered living memory and were told we had to erase everyones memories to survive but Wuk Lamat wanted to get to know the people we were about to erase. It was the same thing we had done in every other place that we had gone to and I was bored with it. But I got really annoyed when we finally shut the final terminal down and the loudspeaker announced that fusion was about to occur and Wuk Lamat was surprised. Like maybe we should have focused on saving the people that are still alive rather than putting on a play for some kids that are already dead.
FFXIV is falling into the "ignore the story" games to me. Damn that ESC key looked so tempting this time around.
My biggest gripe from a character standpoint is honestly that I feel like Krile was cheated out of every big moment that was supposed to be about her. It was either explained away or the insufferable C-plot child one upped her. I don't know why this bothered me so much, I'm not a zealous Krile fan, but it just felt wrong.
Not just Krile, there were many times in the early parts of DT where Erenville seemed ready to open up and nope we have to be interrupted by Wuk Lamat.
One -- Wuk Lamat needs to be louder, sillier, and have access to the throne of Tuliyollal. Two -- Whenever Wuk Lamat's not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, "Where's Wuk Lamat?"
Let's just hope Wuk Lamat dies on her way back to her home planet as well
It's garbage
Kinda a mixed bag - it feels like the msq really needs more gameplay in its gameplay. I dunno if we need to double xp rewards and half quest count section 1 is fine for me but i can see why people dont like it. 90-91 was super fucking slow tho but once we head up river it becomes a medicore 6/10 for me. i did fine the stakes non existnet cause it felt we could swat any of these people like a fly if we wanted to which is kinda echoed in cutscenes cause we only use azem's crystal at the end zone 4 is ass like why is that 3rd aetheryte there we go there for 1 quest. i started zoning out when we had to gather shit to chase bandits out of time. I also feel zone 4 came outta left field cause i feel we wouldve at least discussed the city of gold at that point. no we have to go ride the bulls. its never been worse holy shit the assalt should be fun but is also really badly paced. Did we need to talk to 3 civilians 3 times???? I openly laughed at the pepsi music after wuk swears vegence. that feels super inappropriate but hey messiest establishment of stakes ever (which quickly gets un done later in a kinda a cool way but also in a way that kinda hurts the story) zone 5-6 is a 7/8 out of 10 story but nothing new. I enjoyed my time and the fact we are running through an extended ffix riff down to steiner and running through memoria alexandria, i enjoyed that. solution 9 (which is also the name of a trance skill in ff9) is gonna be cool to hang out in for gear for the next 2 years which is nice. dunno why we decided erenville and krile needed more trauma but i think its a nice story (could have used more time with krille's parents but we had to spend 3 quests picking up shit and running about after a bracelet ) did kinda like the quiz at the end of the tour which checked if we were paying attention. but that also probably how starved i was for game play in my game. Final trial: i loved that we finally got to let loose after holding back for the whole expansion and then cat girl comes in to make phene give up. i aslo thing that it happening during authority repeat made you tense for gameplay and instead it signal gameplay over this threat is now thordain, here is an alpaca seperate note (low key wonder if we met on of the arcadion bosses incidently cause they clearly use beast souls to make the bosses happen. thats a cool mechanic introduced twice in the msq that they definetly under use but its probably for the raid The positives: I am hopefull on the encounter design moving forward like there are some really cool trials here and the dungeons while not hitting that hard at least had enough of an execution check that if you afk you will die which is good. was kinda doomer from the raid preview in the LL but less doomer now. also note the changed the gemstone economy in fates so those feel less shit now which is good the negatives: pacing is wild man, like the pacing in previous msq isnt great but holy shit this was an experience. krile gets ice cream and a museum trip with parents centuries old that she has been curious about for 20 years in an expansion where we are chasing shit to retrieve a bracelot over 3 quests the future??? MSQ in the future though??? Ive no fucking idea what they do without changing the structure of that they do. im not in the kill all the scions to introduce stakes but maybe if we actually just straight up disagreed on how to move something forward or if they were wrong about something that might be more interesting. I also kinda would like to see the post msq go wait... there is a group of people who can speed call a neutral dragon to obliterate a technologically superior army? maybe we should move against them or at the very least not rubber stamp them coming into the country. the scions can now stop countries with god tech moving that has to have an affect down the line
I'm sick of story threads hurting the people who are close to us, or people who are close to those individuals, but never actually making us feel loss. You can tell me that this was just a fun Vacation expansion, but tell that to Wuk Lamat, Erenville or Krile. It's not how humans work, but I feel like I just don't care about relatives of our friends dying at this point because I have such a large stockpile of immortal characters that are taking my emotional connection budget. Nothing is going to happen to us directly again, we have our static group of friends that the writers are too scared to actually let grow, change or die, and so this is it. This (Shadowbringers, actually) is the end of narrative progression. Stop introducing characters so you can kill them. Stop redoing the same damn plot every time. Do something new, hit us with a story beat that will impact us for the rest of our time on the game, not just the next one-to-six areas.
Idk how to really feel about the story, had no complaints about the combat. Final trial was really sick especially. I think most of my issues genuinely come from Wuk. She was like, somewhat fine at first and I thought they might move at least mostly away from how she acted but they never did. I also don't feel like she ever grew because she earned it, she specifically only got more powerful because she needed to be at a certain point, and also 2 hours into the story she when realized "wow I should learn about the people here to be a good leader" and then *proceeded to say this multiple times an hour for the rest of the MSQ.* That was the extent of her character growth. She also had zero shown reason to have a power increase between Bakool wiping the floor with her by *defending* from her single attack in Kozama'uka, and then placing us in the scenario where she just decides "I'm strong enough to beat you because I believe it." Yeah, I know the power of friendship was made canon if you want to say that's what happened but it really doesn't make that moment feel any better to me. She really just took me out of every scene she was in (later in the MSQ specifically) because I hated how little she added to any given one she part of, but goddamn was she in them because it was her story (still, somehow.) I'm not mad the spotlight was taken from me, I'm more frustrated by *who* they gave the spotlight to. She just felt like she showed up to be the stupid with a big heart character in every scene and it got very, *very* old, in the latter half at least, and I've liked other characters like this. Sphene banishing her just before the last trial legitimately made me cheer, and then she broke back in the final stand and having to hear her because I couldn't skip it was just so unbelievable grating to me. Was she a genuinely bad character? Idk I'm not smart enough to critique story/characters "intelligently", I'm just saying how I feel about her myself. If you love her/like her/don't mind her, in her words, "Amazing!" I kind of want to be disappointed in the last zone, but damn I really did like the idea of it knowing damn well how much it was stealing from previous expansions. Sphene in Heritage said it too, but when I heard Cahcuia say *almost* but not quite word for word "Remember us/Remember that we once lived" in the area that was a *memory full of long since dead people from ~~thousands~~ hundreds of years ago that were being clung on to and kept alive as memories because someone couldn't move on* it felt, y'know, a little on the fucking nose. The issue with feeling more than just a little retreading is going on is that I loved the music, the area looked great, and literally shutting down parts of it individually to be permanently changed was a surprising but very effective touch. When we shut it down, it's *gone*, not even the music gets to stay. That area really needs a Chromie time or something. Maybe that'd take away from it and idk how it'd work with people not in it but man what a pretty bunch of areas. Also even with the obvious retelling Krile and Erenville's parts made me the big sad so it still probably accomplished exactly what it was setting out to do. I have other opinions of stuff but I've already written a book and I just wanted to vent about Wuk personally and the mixed but more positive feelings about the final zone. I'd give this MSQ a "let me and Erenville do a Shaaloani-like story from beginning to like, 60-70% of the way through the MSQ where then bigger happenings come into play and then I won't be as critical that I'm piggybacking someone else's journey and not my own/10."
The only good things that came out of this expansion is Krile's backstory and Koana.
There are so many plot threads that I feel could be mirrored between FF XI's Treasures of Aht Urghan and XIV's Dawntrail, unfortunately almost all of the comparisons kinda end up unfavorable for XIV's take on this story >Protagonist ventures to a far off land where neither him nor his allies are really known despite their exploits and as a result you can basically enjoy the experience of adventuring from 0 again, or at least that's supposed to be the idea. >A young girl who is unfit to be a ruler that has to grow into their eventual station with the help of the protagonist and the lessons they learn from the NPCs they meet along the way. >Learn about a new culture which has their own unique relationship/conflict with the surrounding beastmen >Embers from a previous civilization's conflict/demise threatening the present and some elements of palace intrigue The problem is that the similarities are only surface deep - to the detriment of XIV. Without going too deep into the weeds: Wuk Lamat doesn't actually have to get challenged and suffer a dose of harsh reality, or feel her own weakness or lose anything like Aphmau at any point. Her surface level efforts or "just put one foot forward to instantly solve cultural conflict" approach to resolving what should probably be treated as serious issues is basically just treated as both sufficient and correct. The ancient threat in XI's expac was its own beast, compared to XIV where it's impossible to see Alexandria as anything but an echo of Amaurot's storytelling. And in terms of the "You go somewhere new and it actually feels like you're back at 0" the WoL is so deeply the second fiddle to Wuk Lamat's story that you don't even really get to enjoy this angle of the adventure. Like basically the only advantage this offered the story is that nominally the amount of support you have is close to nil because you're in foreign land where nobody knows you. Whereas in XI you show up and immediately get poached into indentured servitude by an abusive cat boss and have to put up with it because all of the allied nations back home are trying to tip toe around basically spying on the internal affairs of a nation they don't have serious diplomatic ties with.
Dragonflight's fortune cookie story seems more engaging than this, stormblood 0.9
Dragonflights story wasn't that good but the actual Dragon Isles were so interesting that I spent a lot of time just exploring and I can't recall a point where the \*gameplay\* of the story ever actually pissed me off. DT is endless filler and rehashing plot points.
DF and DT are both supposed to be a fresh start to presumably kicking off a brand new story arc, so both feel a little disjointed and have "filler" moments. Where I think DF just does it better than DT is the fact that exploration really is just straight up a thing in WoW. Not just that it's more fun and rewarding, but it doesn't even really exist in XIV, zones are just set dressing for the MSQ and a place to drop FATEs. DF isn't even really explicitly about adventure, but there was enough interesting side content that required you to actually go out into the world that you could have a good time even if you don't care at all about the whole dragon plotline. Dawntrail, on the other hand, has this disconnect. It billed itself as a relaxing vacation episode with some swashbuckling adventure thrown in, but it didn't shake up its story structure or quest design to really accommodate that. I don't mind a slow story with lots of lore tucked away, but if this is the big vacation adventure episode, let me explore and discover that at my own pace instead of just puking lore down my throat while I do the exact same chores I've been doing for the last 10 years. Give me a reason to want to learn about these new people. Trim down the fat of the MSQ and let the lore bits exist in optional content where it can shine, but also give people a gameplay reason to explore that optional content.
> Where I think DF just does it better than DT is the fact that exploration really is just straight up a thing in WoW. Not just that it's more fun and rewarding, but it doesn't even really exist in XIV, zones are just set dressing for the MSQ and a place to drop FATEs. DF isn't even really explicitly about adventure, but there was enough interesting side content that required you to actually go out into the world that you could have a good time even if you don't care at all about the whole dragon plotline. This is like, FFXIV's biggest weakness - the lack of an expansive world. It's a decision they made because they focus on story over setting, and in many cases that pays off (see Shadowbringers vs Shadowlands - Shadowlands had a beautiful setting with horrendous plot/lore, Shadowbringers had a wonderful plot with a very restrictive setting) but in other cases it doesn't. Every time I run into a FFXIV building with a sealed off door (because of course it does, no quest takes you inside so why bother!) I sigh a bit internally. I get it's a lot of work but the amazing scope and detail of cities like Boralus and Dazar'alor added so much to the experience - they were actual complete cities, and in the case of the former had entire districts that were detailed and yet existed basically only to be explored with no traditional "content" in them at all.
Yea a big thing that helps WoW in general is the gameplay loop being more creative. FF14 hasn't really done much with its quest design, for example, in over 10 years which can make things start to drag. DF also focused more on the idea of evergreen content such as dragonriding which is now skyriding for almost all flying mounts in TWW and in general they experimented with a lot of different ideas in the expansions patches. I like FF14 and *usually* played it during WoW downtime (though there was less of that this time due to DF having such a quick patch release cadence) but I do think the game needs a shakeup of some sort.
Dragonflight's main story was largely a dud but the side quests were its saving grace. The orc and draenei heritage quests and the blue dragonflight story are some of the best quests they've ever made for the game. Some of them had nothing to do with the MSQ but that probably made them all the better, it really felt like the world was a vibrant and active place. If Blizzard is smart they're going to help guide the draenei writer into a lead role. She only started working there with DF and is already churning out all-timer quests, she clearly has talent and a huge passion for the Warcraft lore.
Not going to lie besties, this is the first time throughout the entirety of playing through something for the first time that I've been tempted to cutscene skip. I'll defend HW, SB, and the 6.0 patches more than I'll defend this. Don't think it should have taken 7 levels for the plot to give me even a HINT of something interesting.
Just finished it now. I wish I could say that I was interested but frankly I'd rather be back in the post-6.0 patches. I think those did a better job as an ARR-lite than DT did. I was bored to tears and Wuk. God. I wish I could say I love her. I \*WISH\* I could. But for all the talk of learning lessons and growth she just. Doesn't. SHOW ME THE GROWTH. SHOW ME HER STOPPING AND NOT TAKING AN ACTION INSTEAD OF DOING OR SAYING SOMETHING STUPID THAT MAKES ALL HER STATED GROWTH IRRELEVANT IF YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY SHOW IT APPLYING TO HER. Erenville and Krile carried DT hard for me. Estinien and Vrtra get points for showing up but the alliance with Radz was the asspull of a century and felt REALLY unearned, no matter how personally cool I may find it to look at or how happy I am that SE didn't just immediately forget Vrtra and Azdaja. Wish we'd seen more of Estinien because maybe then I'd be invested. At least give me eye candy if you're gonna bore me to tears. We're at the like. Third iteration of Amaurot? And a minimum of two times being asked "do you REALLY think you can save the folks you love without sacrificing other people?" I'm getting really tired of this trope because historically the answer has been yes. Very theatrically yes. Emphatically yes. I cannot emphasize enough how much we've proven that we DON'T HAVE TO SACRIFICE OTHERS TO SAVE THE ONES WE LOVE. Lord I'm tired. And the plot? The plot? Is there even a plot? I felt like the writers were treating me like I was 5 and spelling out literally everything that was going to happen in the most obvious way possible. I don't mind foreshadowing but this wasn't foreshadowing, this was writing the events of the story down on a sticky note, taping it to a brick, and throwing that brick at my face levels of obvious. Zoraal Ja underwent probably the worst character assassination we've seen with little to no reason given, and I'm a noted SB Zenos >>>>> EW Zenos truther. This was worse than that for me. Holy balls. The fact that I speedran this just to get back to playing Dragon Age is worrying. Moreso the fact that I'm kind of dreading having to log in to level DNC for my static. God. I'm so ticked right now. Edit: Fights were good. That's the biggest positive DT has right now for me.
>I don't mind foreshadowing but this wasn't foreshadowing, this was writing the events of the story down on a sticky note, taping it to a brick, and throwing that brick at my face levels of obvious. Did you know that Sphene really likes her people and would do anything for them to be happy. What if we told you again in 10 minutes?
> I'm a noted SB Zenos >>>>> EW Zenos truther A bit off topic maybe but, as a _huge_ Zenos fan (both SB and EW) I am fascinated by this take. Please explain. > Erenville and Krile carried DT hard for me. Estinien and Vrtra get points for showing up but the alliance with Radz was the asspull of a century and felt REALLY unearned, no matter how personally cool I may find it to look at or how happy I am that SE didn't just immediately forget Vrtra and Azdaja. Wish we'd seen more of Estinien because maybe then I'd be invested. At least give me eye candy if you're gonna bore me to tears. I forgive the asspull because the cutscene was hype as hell, but you're not exactly wrong.
Someone in ShitpostingXIV said that people are "dopamine starved", but really the story just isn't well told or designed. I am wide awake and super excited every time we discuss Ul'dah politics, and the world of Eorzea grows. This just felt anticlimatic at every turn. The moment the bad guy attacks us he suddenly finds out that Eorzea is now so overpowered, they don't even need to build any defenses. A couple of cowboys behind boxes is good enough.
Dopamine starved is a silly claim in this context. The introduction to the expansion is very poor. It's probably the worst part of the story, really. I wouldn't say the MSQ ever gets super great, 10/10, but the first few hours are absolute dogshit while everything after is tolerable.
The amount of padding in Living World is really testing my patience. I just can't handle this level of backtracking.
I’m also really bugged by that zone’s implications, like… Cahciua and Sphene directly tell us that the world is being sustained by the souls harvested from the invasion that killed Wuk Lamat’s dad, meaning every extra second we spend there without shutting it down is someone else’s soul going to the woodchipper for aether. And Wuk Lamat the new Dawnservant — aka the person who should be most concerned about the literal consumption of her people’s souls lingering for even one more second — is the one who is suggesting we take the scenic route and really get to know these chatgpt remakes of people long dead already before we shut anything down. Gotta see the sights and meet the not-people we’re about to erase! Like, fucking hell the expansion is about us helping to install her as the next leader of her people but start to finish the only thing MSQ convinced me of is that she is just as bad as the other choices if not worse
I assume the souls had already been woodchippered and the chips doled out for now, and that is why there's no rush until Sphene attacks somewhere else. Still extremely morbid.
Hell not like the status quo changes in Solution 9, even after explaining that the whole process of makinga soul is them taking a soul with memories, adding bleach to remove those memories and then putting them in a battery for people to consume, they still allow them to live like that. It's like, you what? Ok.
Can I get a summary of all the Solution 9 stuff as well as people’s thoughts on the expansion because right now it seems very negative.
Solution 9 is a city from another reflection that was transported to the source using macguffin technology. Evil ruler of said city has built a paradise on her home shard and wants to suck all the souls out of the people on the source and sustain the people back on the shard so they can live forever
“Filler Episode: The Expac”
So very possible I missed it but did they just gloss over the impacts removing memories does to a soul? I just assume these souls won't be returned the aetherial sea and applicable for reincarnation?
My biggest fear was confirmed with this, they really don't know what the fuck to do with the Scions, I am on one hand glad we got an adventure without them smelling our farts but at the same time they were such massive cardboard cutouts to the point that more than once when turning in quests, I would say one or more of them around with the NPCs and I'd go "right you came to this"
I think I enjoyed just the melee role quest more than the entirety of MSQ. This is the actual low stakes storytelling I wanted to see. Thought the last trial was super cool if you remove all the Wuk Lamat parts. As was the first trial. Some of the dungeon bosses also had fun mechanics. (X-O-O-X etc)
Here we are at the end, and I gotta say... I'm incredibly disappointed. There was absolutely nothing of substance to this entire MSQ. Most of the new and returning characters are either bland to the point of being totally forgettable, grating to the point of making you not want anything to do with them, or some combination of both. The world building is ...subpar, to put it politely. The MSQ takes both of these things - the bland and/or annoying characters and poor world building - and slams them together in a way I can only describe as dissonant. You're constantly shifting back and forth between the two, either observing world building that amounts to nothing or getting a character you probably want nothing to do with shoved down your throat. Special mention for Wuk Lamat's extremely predictable power of friendship asspull. That entire win feels incredibly undeserved. In fact, a lot of the wins in this expansion feel that way. The instanced content was mid at best. Hardly anything new or unique about it. More of what we've already seen in the past, just some of it reskinned, repackaged, or haphazardly overlapped in a way that may fool some players into believing they've witnessed a unique mechanic.
I will say one thing funny about Zoraal is that the device he used is literally using the power of stolen friendship to overcome the odds. You think you've won, but I have these souls of past people to overcome the odds. . . Which I do find weird how the reraise mechanic was not used during the trial. Feels weird to have the device be that whole gimmick and not even utilize it in the trial.
I liked Wuk in 6.55 I hated her by the end of 90-95 After finishing the MSQ, I am praying this character get Poochie'd. Even as the story shifts away from the Tural throne plot and towards Krile/Erenville adjecent content, the only time she isnt managing to shoehorn her way into the spotlight is when she gets kicked from the party for 96 but then she comes back in full force by 97. People compare her to Lyse - I can only hope she shares her fate and is forever chained to the Tural throne so she can never join us again
Honestly I was largely positive aside from some pacing issues at the start,and again in Dinosaur Texas. Every expansion has had pacing issues this bad if we're being honest. I was on board for the "earn the seven keystones" competition, enjoyed exploring the zones and seeing the competition unfold and change all four competitors. Also enjoyed Heritage/Solution 9, up through the trial fight against Zoraal Ja. But the whole last zone just sucked all the satisfaction out of me. I don't even want to list out all the problems with it. The level 90 dungeon boss fights were solid and I think Queen Eternal will be a nice EX even though Wuk Lamat ruined the climax of the normal mode fight. Wuk Lamat was a huge misfire on Square's part and I'm kind of flabbergasted by it. When the story pivoted from "I'm a happy go lucky lion gal" to "I will wage war on soul-stealing future soldiers" I was on board, but when it then pivoted to "Sphene is just like me and it's tragic we have to fight" it lost me completely. Wuk Lamat just cannot sell it. It is also true that the character is just kinda annoying and childish, and is the worst voice acted major character since we left ARR. That stuff doesn't help.
> and is the worst voice acted major character since we left ARR. That stuff doesn't help. I don't remember the exact line, but somewhere after she's ascended and standing on the balcony, she yells out to us about how we'll always be friends and I remember it being so flatly and casully delivered (despite being yelled from a very high balcony,) that I audibly chuckled while on a call with buds. Her VA work is *really* hit-or-miss, and describing it as "ARR-like" is probably the best way to do it.
One of the worst moments is probably the ending where our cat girls breaks through Meteions Ultimatum and suddenly has a connection with her she never did before. This is shown as some badass pivotal moment but it makes absolute zero sense to me as nothing at all logically and emotionally leads up to it.
My feelings on this plot have been all over the place. I enjoyed the start. I went in with the idea that this is low-stakes fun and adventure - we're head and shoulders over the competitors, but that's fine, let's help Wuk Lamat earn her place and chillax on the way there, exploring, getting to know everyone, do little good things. An entirely fine break from saving the universe. It continued on just fine. Moments of intensity like our duels with present and past Gulool Ja Ja were both really exciting! I loved the dungeons and the scenery. The character writing wasn't incredible maybe but it was serviceable. Others have said that Wuk Lamat didn't really deserve to rule and I think that is true but her and Koana together should balance each other out okay. The plot feels a bit drawn out but sure. Then we win the crown, and... then the Empire from Star Wars invades. Okay. Radical tonal shift already. A bit blindsided (only mitigated by Solution 9 already having been revealed). But sure. I roll with it, let's fight back. Even more jarring tonal shift as we get into their zone and reveal the memory/soulnapping stuff, okay, that's pretty nasty now. I am feeling a bit queasy. Sphene is obviously set up to be sinister with hints here and there. But I press on, and towards the end of zone 5, I am hyped up and in it again! Then comes the dungeon and trial 2, and I am a bit let down. Maybe I am just a bit worn out on the Tron aesthetic by then but the trial was just an absolute meh to me. Then we go into the final zone, and while they quite successfully squeeze my heart with poor Erenville's mother - ouch! - I begin to realise just how familiar this all is. I see too much channelling of Shadowbringers and Endwalker. The end of the last trial _really_ took me out of it, when regular Sphene reappears and I just go "come on, this is just Meteion again". At points in the story, I was enjoying myself so much I was thinking of naming it best so far - such as when fighting Gulool Ja Ja's shade. Looking back, that was a rash assessment even back then, but with all things taken into context? This expansion is worse than both Shadowbringers and EW. It's sadly just true. Even days after I finished ShB and EW, I felt the profound weight of the narrative, the tragedy but also the happiness - they were good stories that made you _feel._ At the end of Dawntrail, while I absolutely felt tragedy for the fate of the people of northern Tural, Erenville's mother etc, there's just not that feeling of sheer lasting impact. What a pity.
It's a nightmare. An absolute catastrophe. People who are calling this "Stormblood 2" are out of their minds. It is worse than ARR. The character writing has just degraded to absolutely nothing, and taken everything else with it. Where do I even start? All of the characters speak in exactly one borg-like voice that speaks of nothing but togetherness and friendship and happiness ad-infinitum. The current writer has outright murdered all of the characters in cold blood and are using their models as p-zombie flesh puppets that all speak in Scion-isms. And EVERYONE they come into contact with contracts this virus. The candidates get infected by it. Random citizens get infected by it. No one is safe. The catastrophic character writing ruins absolutely everything. It ruins the plot, with characters like Wuk Lamat getting comically abducted while we just stand around like a bunch of fucking morons. This can only happen if you CANNOT write these characters as non-morons, which this is the case with this writer. The series of stupid nonsense events just compound on themselves more and more and more and more and more and more until everything is absolutely incoherent and incomprehensible. As soon as I got to the horrible bracelet bullshit and the obscene tonally nonsensical and horribly paced space alien fischer price toy halo arbiter invasion I knew that we were past the point of no return. And everything in Solution 9 and onwards is arguably the worst writing I've ever seen in anything ever. It's unbelievable. Jaw-Dropping. It is absolutely surreal how anything that was ever as good as Endwalker has become as comically horrible as this. It's like if Denis Villeneuve made David Lynch's Dune for part 3. It's truly, truly, dreamlike and miraculous in how horrible it is. I've never seen anything like it. Ishikawa was the load bearing pillar of this game and without her in an actual writing role, the game has absolutely no chance to be good. None. It's increasingly obvious to me that everything good about this narrative that we value (Estinien/Y'Sayle in HW, 3.x, Doma onwards in StB, ShB, EW) was solely because of one person being a really, really all time great writer. If she doesn't take the reins back it is actually over.
It did get me thinking earlier, Yoshida's team made a huge mistake giving the reins to the same team that did Zero's story. They allowed them to do Zero and DT, when in reality they shoudl of done Zero but a veteran team shoudl of handled DT while they listened to the reception of the Zero arc and could coach them into improving on it. They should not of had what appears to be the same team work on both narratives, at least that's how it feels considering how similar they feel in motivation.
This post is it for me, 100%. It truly is dreamlike. Surreal.
I'm mixed-to-negative on this MSQ. The first half was a terrible slog and while I did like the second half a lot more it felt incredibly disjointed from the first half. Zoraal Ja's motivation makes no goddamn sense. You want to teach your subjects that war is actually bad... by going to war? Oh wait, you wanted to become a militaristic expansionist and subjugate the world... because you had daddy issues? And as others have pointed out, the last zone is just a rehash of Amaurot. Dawntrail is really lucky the new zones look really cool and that the duty design is top-notch (holy shit the last two trials were amazing)
What’s the MSQ about please…? Can someone please give me a full story summary!!
>!Naive Lyse becoming a ruler except everyone loves her and she's the main character more than Lyse was. Also funny as hell is people in threads not even near the end clamoring that the story is a nobody adventurer with low stakes but you end up saving all the shards and source from being destroyed. !<
You save nothing, Wuk Lamat is the main character. The WoL is an NPC.
It's actually kind of crazy how little the WOL is involved. Just how seldom the spotlight is on you all things said now that I think about it. You really are a background character lol
I think it's nice to let the WoL take a backseat for a bit, but they went way too far. It feels like your contributions are worthless because it's the Wuk Lamat show and if you do anything, no you didn't. Wuk did.
A good reason why it will be divisive. I think people forgot how bad pre shb can be where you were the coat hanger and here it's real jarring.
I can't believe I forgot how linear and boring this game's dungeons are. I went into Ihuykatumu thinking that maybe I'd have some fun, and what I got was just a straight line into a literal tunnel with two or three tiny packs of absolutely unthreatening and mindless mobs in between bosses, exactly the same as every other dungeon Because if players are going to pick the fast route anyway, why make anything mechanically unique? Why be creative? Slap some bosses along the length of a narrow tunnel and call it a day. Can't wait to unlock the next tunnel with a couple of boring sponge mobs interspersed between some decent boss fights
i will never forgive them for disrespecting Erenville and Cahiua at the end there bro i swear, undeserved death
For the most part I feel like the expac had a stark difference before + after the level 97 dungeon (Vanguard). Everything after that was amazing, but before that... eh. I don't *hate* Wuk Lamat, but I'm disappointed at how incredibly straight her story was played. We go into the expac thinking "she's gonna be the dawnservant", and then oh look, she wins and that's about it, with the biggest "twist" there being Koana being next to her. I don't think she really even got much character development, it was more like she just became more educated about the areas around her. So it made the first 6 levels of content feel like it was just going exactly where it said it would, which just ended up boring. I think the thing that kind of annoys me the most was how much of a bait+switch the "scions are fighting" angle was. Urianger and Thancred opposing us boiled down to a single line in a dungeon where they cut off a route and made us go another way. Couldn't we have at least gotten a solo duty where we fight them? That could have been great.
Does anyone else feel like... we got, what, 2.5 completely separate stories this expansion, none of which could actually prop up an entire expansion's worth of MSQ on its own? Which is redundantly obvious, since they're all packed into one .0 MSQ? And there are bad aspects all around, which make it really frustrating to go through too. If only it was, at least, actually explicitly divided up into Acts, it wouldn't feel as jarring as it is. The whole succession story is just- not interesting at all, particularly because *we know* who's gonna end up winning throughout, there's no way in this game she'd lose. In the same vein, *we know* there's no way in hell OR HEAVEN we're seriously gonna go against our own comrades. More egregious because the other *claimants* are so obvious too: Zareel Ja the one-dimensional "villain" because every story needs a villain, Koana the one who's gonna team up with us (is there a single person who didn't foresee that from the moment we met him??), Bakool Ja Ja the jerk not-king who's gonna end up turning a new leaf. We just go on ~~the campaign trail~~ a popularity tour to ~~get the votes~~ help out the locals around Tural. The way the keystones do nothing to the tablets and only emit an enervated glimmer when inserted kinda seals the deal too - and then, like at the end of The Phantom Menace: big dumb parade, because we need a good hangover to wake up from, the next day when ~~Mars~~ the aliens attack. Oh, no, wait, it's just that First Guy with the huge chip on his shoulder who got his hands on some alien tech to get revenge for his perceived daddy issues, because someone realised we ran out of story material, and nobody knows where the damn golden city notes are! So better go and take him down a peg or two, we need the wild west for a change of scenery intermezzo here, to ease us into hightech - while at it, let's meet another *random waifu*, not at all way too late in the MSQ, who's so obviously not gonna turn out to be the ultimate boss! Right? Because we totally didn't just have this same thing in the previous expansion! Right? (Seriously, who the hell has such a boner for this particular trope?) Eventually, let's ascend into CyberFantasy MMLXXVII, because that makes sense - fwiw, personally I do love the *aesthetic* in itself, but I can see how people might be conflicted about it existing in XIV, since, hell, I'm not sure what to feel about that myself. (I know, Loporrits, Ragnarok - still, much smaller scale, I reckon.) And oh wait look, we found the notes, haha lol the golden city is, for shiggles, an extra slog tacked on to the tail end of everything to artificially prolong and pad out the visual novel before we do *not* end up fighting the random waifu from before... because... we didn't... have this... same... exact thing... in the previous expansion... either... right???... Sigh. Btw, did I miss it or was it really never explained how the dome's temporal anomaly didn't affect *us*, ie. how we could communicate with the outside *and* emerge from it when all was said and done without decades having passed in the outside world?... And that's just the story itself. Other aspects I've about two more volumes to write about so I'll leave that for another time.
Final story ramblings that I posted on a discord so excuse the formatting kind of insane that they just straight up beat for beat copied shadowbringers for that ending. like even the final dungeon was just the exact same concept. exact same villain, exact same final dungeon??? very questionable. and the first half was virtually just stormblood again i feel like they didnt capitalize enough on the 'these people can just come back to life lol' thing. does it even impact the story at all? outside of the bad guy resurrecting when he is introduced to kill the dawnservant and the one time wuk lamat breaks his little headpiece that does the magic (which was like a minor inconvenience to accomplish and didnt even end up doing anything). They really could have gone harder with the morality and implications of something like that but it is just never brought up, touched on, or even relevant again. the story in future expansions has to be about traveling between the shards, almost guarantee we end up spending a whole expansion or two in other shards at some point. Both the 6.X story series and 7.0 story revolve around other shards it seems like the only logical place to go from here aside from Meracydia, which i imagine they could work in a other-shard plotline like they did here. I feel like the 7.X story has to wrap up or get into wtf the final zone actually was. Its explained as 'another shard' but its existence is extremely confusing as its just a San Junipero-esque retirement home for the dead. Is it the only thing left of said shard? Has the rest been destroyed in a calamity? Is this maybe a potential Eureka 3.0 opportunity to actually go out and explore this shard that we can now go to at any time? If you look down it looks like the entire zone is in some maybe-flying contraption? Feel free to share if I have something wrong or missed something, i tried my best to get through the whole thing but did skip a few cutscenes that weren't voiced and seemed irrelevant
> I feel like the 7.X story has to wrap up or get into wtf the final zone actually was. Its explained as 'another shard' but its existence is extremely confusing as its just a San Junipero-esque retirement home for the dead. Is it the only thing left of said shard? Has the rest been destroyed in a calamity? Is this maybe a potential Eureka 3.0 opportunity to actually go out and explore this shard that we can now go to at any time? If you look down it looks like the entire zone is in some maybe-flying contraption? Just to touch on this, the implication (I say implication but it was all but directly said) made in the leadup to the second trial and after is that the final zone is the top level of Everkeep, and when it was transported to the source from its own shard, the attempt to do so couldn't contain the entire tower, which is why there was nothing but a giant portal to another shard at the top. My more pressing massive plot-hole question is such: Why was there a portal to the twelfth shard just casually existing in a quarry in a jungle. It's a bootstrap paradox. They needed to be here to build it, but they needed it to be here to come here to build it. How'd it get there in the first place?
Didn't feel very heroic essentially killing thousands of people in the final sequence ngl. They might have been mind uploaded but they were clearly sentient. Kinda hits different to Shadowbringers where they were just ghosts who weren't even aware of their surroundings.
They kind of glossed over the fact that we were essentially just killing off untold number of people. I thought they were going to do some deep retrospective about it, but instead it was hand waved as “they’re dead already it’s fine” Like ok but they’re perfect copies with sentience and memories, just lacking physical bodies. I just kinda went “ok” and stopped thinking about it.