Honestly - I'm gonna hold out and wait until the actual batch of gameplay content (field operations, alliance raids, space crafting, savage raids, ultimates, deep dungeons) for dawntrail to come out to give my thoughts on it fully. People focus too much on the msq, when thats like content you do once or twice. The actual bulk of the expansion has yet to come. People like to rag on stormblood for its msq, and yet its the expansion with some of the best gameplay content ever since, there they figured out both job balance and job identity. Raiding and the actual day to day mmo content was at its best despite the shoddy msq. In the same vain people like to laud Heavensward for its MSQ despite the expansion being absolute garbage everywhere else. The game economy was wack, raiding was dead, and the meta forced players to abandon what they liked playing out of necessity, most of the systems they introduced is now abandoned for how bad it was. So, yeah all in all i'm waiting for the actual meat of the expansion - the stuff you'll be doing for the rest of the patches since the msq is what 1/10 of an mmo player's actual play time
@@draco657 If they don't fire the writers, lead eng localizer, wuk's voice actor and voice director then this game is destined to be doomed regardless of the side content, remember this is FINAL FANTASY, it's about the story first for majority of the community.
@@SILVERONIN The MSQ is what? 1/10 of the game? That you only do once or twice. Most of the people coming back and paying subs are the raiders, those who do side content like fishing, deep dungeons, and field ops, and even those who RP. A shoddy MSQ will not affect those people. Stormblood is a prime example of that, despite the MSQ the game was alive and well. As those "side content" was what kept people to come back Heavensward despite all the praise the MSQ gets was unironically the only post-ARR expansion where the game almost died. Raiding was dead, and its big MMO field content failed (the diadem) The "side content" is what attracts the MMO players, despite this being a final fantasy - its also an MMO. It lives and dies by the actual content of the game which you do over and over again. As that's why people pay for subs
All the other Scions looked to be having more fun. Urianger and Thancred seemed to be having a blast chilling with their college buddy, and Estinien was having a ball, meanwhile I'm "mentoring" (aka nodding and agreeing with) the writers' waifu. Thanks, guys, you're definitely filling the void that Ishikawa left.
@@CrispBaker "mentoring" aka babysitting. Man i got so tired with people saying to me "you're a mentor!" in the first week, and im glad that people got tired of the bs and just call it for what it is. And it's nothing like mentoring.
As I saw in a FF14 forum comment. " Someone did come to Tural to have the fantastic fun vacation we were promised, and they got to have it too. His name was Estinien."
@@Kanamon22 For serious. We weren't mentoring, we were mindlessly cheerleading. We never once tried to actually influence Wuk's behavior, or use our literal godslaying reality-saving experience to give her guidance pretty much ever (excepting a few times we decided to remind her to stop being such a whiny insecure baby). Every time she did some naive, stupid, or childish thing, we nodded and smiled and cheered her on. Oh, what's that, a continent-wrecking Vidraal just escaped captivity and is threatening to lay waste to your entire homeland, but some ass-backwards giants are bitching about that mountain being holy? Ya, you're right, we can definitely stop and talk and sooth their concerns and help heal them, instead of quickly beating them senseless , then going to murder the flying deathnoodle ASAP. What's that, the queen of an attacking nation, who openly admits to being the _willing consort_ of your psychotically genocidal brother, shows up and offers to show us around? Ya, I'm _sure_ she can be trusted, nothing could possibly go wrong. What's that, the bird peeps are literally starving to death because their crops won't grow? Ya, throwing a party for them sounds like a _great_ way to handle that situation (and then, of course, the writers insisted on hamfisting in that it _was_ in fact the solution, because wittle Wukiepoo can't be allowed to _fail,_ after all)
The fact that Krile, a main character, got like two voiced cutscenes with her parents, not only fleshing out Kriles goals and ambitions and reasons for going forward, but also dropping huge Source-lore about Lalas is fucking crazy. Wuk got SO MUCH voiced screentime and they throw away so many interesting story-beats by sidelining Krile like that.
Speeeeeeeeham listen to me.. i UNDERSTAND i do.. and i know you won't be swayed from your course.. but if there is no other way to resolve this.. then face me.. not as a ff14 lorenerd but as you..
Someone created a graph that shows Wuk Lamat has over 7000 words in Dawntrail's story. Erenville has around 2000 and Krile has just above 1000. Its a real shame.
Square enix's big folly is they forget a character can be THE BIG character of the expansion without dedicating EVERY. SINGLE. SCENE. to them. let me enjoy my Krile lore drops without Wuk Lamat butting in with her "HUUUUHHHHH?"s. They did the same exact thing with Stormblood and sidelined SO MANY CHARACTERS to say "MAKE WAY FOR OUR SUPER SPECIAL UWU MC"
I get that they wanted to prop up the crafters, but you could have the crafters make special seven layer tacos while the NPCs just sell regular tacos. Crafters even include free guac! What a bargain!
Honestly : the story of dawntrail is the story of endwalker. Meiteion is Sphene, Zoral ja is Zordiack. The begining of story is garlemald style (oh we have to know their own story to resolve a war..." Gameplay : from mmo 2008... all mmo after 2013 (swtor and gw2) are much better, you are more "free", you can improvise some stuff content : the same content, dj is always a long aisle with mob and 3 boss fate/raid : the same, a plateforme and you trie to avoid aoe The worst thing is the structure of the game can't evolve... because it's too rigid. When yoshi p says an "animation" cost a lot for the studio, sorry but make FF17 online ...
Imagine this story if it had a focus on Erenville and Krile instead of fucking Wuk Lamat. Both of them had such potential to their stories yet got shafted so goddamn hard.
Fun fact: Sphene, a character not introduced until ~two-thirds of the way through the expansion plotline, had almost 3 times as many spoken words as Krile, the _only_ character other than Wuk that was there with us for _every single one_ of the MSQ dungeons, and damn near every step in between, and the character whose backstory literally defined the _entire_ Golden City and Alexandria plot background.
Simply put, the entire story needed a big rework. The rite of sucession arc would have worked way better if several narrative changes where made: - keystones completely removed, the only goal to win is to find the golden city. Now the reason the promises visit the towns is mostly to research on Tural history hoping to find clues to the golden city. - make the WOL asked to be an independant judge instead (this way the WOL can be put off the leash Wuk puts around them and actually have interactions with the other candidates). - Have the WOL and Krile and Zoraak Ja get dreams about the golden city (Sphene subtly goading us into looking for the golden city, for her advantage off course) The plot twist would be that Sphene was manipulating Zoraal Ja with these visions. We know the Yok Huy got these visions so it's not a lore break. - Make the Mamool plotline a slowly building up focal point of the first arc. Mamool had a lot of potential but it all felt so rushed, which hurt especially when the zone after is complete filler. - Remove the Disney train building song entirely. Your Dawnservant just got killed why are you singing?!? - Make it so Sphene is just an ai putting up a front to manipulate people (the queen's personality is just a front for the cold calculated software behind it). If you want you can still have the queen's personality seemingly clash with the ai (blame it on Dynamis or some such). - Have Sphene.exe actually try to stop us in the last zone from shutting down her primary directive. - Make it clear that Sphene.ai's plan had no chance to ever work. We just shut her down cause her attempt would still cause a lot of damage. - Have Koana join us into the final zones instead of Wuk
All very well said. I think far too often Dawntrail seemed to not want me, the player, to actively play the game. I think more combat encounters and minigames could have gone a long way in fixing the gameplay to cutscene ratio. Why was the train attack on Vanguard not a playable instance or minigame? What about a cooking minigame? Or having us actually fight during the assault on the capital?
I hope CS3 hears the feedback on this. While it wouldn’t have improved the narrative, being able to directly interact with the moments that you mentioned would have made the experience more enjoyable.
We have Air Force One in the Gold Saucer and have had it for a long while. But instead of getting a reskinned version of that we're just plopped down on the train in an uninteractive cutscene. And a lot of other cutscenes are like this. Absolutely baffling decision making
You know, Erenville's "reservations" about Wuk Lamat in 6.55 take on a whole new meaning now that we know the 7.0 story. Unintentional I'm sure, but it still works out.
I'm convinced the reason we're always made to go with Wuk when the group splits or why 6 fucking scions decide to defend a gate from literally nothing is because everyone else in the group is just as tired of Wuk as the player is and knows we literally can't speak up about being forced to go with her all the time lol.
After rolling credits and spending some time in the endgame all I can say is that I really wish they just made Arcadion a giant anime tournament arc and focused on that instead
That was the most disappointing part to me. It's the whole MCU endgame discussion yet again. "You guys don't like it because you just want bigger and bigger stakes!" NO! We fucking wanted smaller stakes, more personal stories. We wanted to be involved. Instead, we could be replaced by anyone of the Scions and nothing would change for 90% of the story, then it fucking ends with ALL THE REFLECTIONS BEING IN DANGER. Stupid nonsense.
@@babaXIII It really feels like they think the community are all shonen weebs who NEEDS this gigantic threat to even feel any semblance of enjoyment, when really, those people would've already tuned out 50 quests ago lmfao Though i think it's not THAT bad considering the WoL basically just solos her, meaning she's not exactly a big leap in danger compared to Hades and Endsinger, her plan never would've worked and if it would NEVER gotten to the point where she'd destroy all the reflections unimpeded when every reflection still around would probably have heroes like the Scions to try and stop her. But it's still very cheap the way they build it up as such when it wasn't really necessary
@@fredy2041 Sphene literally says she is going to wipe out all life on our earth and the earths of every reflection to keep powering her purgatory. Yes, it was a world ending threat.
I am actually haunted by that sound. It comes to me in my dreams. You know when a kid calls their mom over and over and the mom finally says, "WHAT?" and the kid has nothing to say? That's what that scene reminded me of. Even Sphene asks, "Why are you telling me this?" No one cares if you understand them when you're beating them to death with your axe, Wuk.
The game aside, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate how well you articulate your points. Whether one agrees with your purview or not, the depth and construction of your critiques leave only room for real conversation. That's a skill I wish other content creators for this game took more seriously, but sets you apart. Thanks for the video and look forward to more from you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to make this video. I've been playing XIV since the release of 1.0 so I am a HUGE fan but I couldn't agree with you more about DT. There are just a few things I need to get off my chest: 1. Simply walking away from the Golden City and going sightseeing. Y'shtola would never have left an unopened gate. I blame Wuk Lamat. 2. Galuf Baldesion and his crew were given the key but couldn't figure out what it was so Gulool Ja Ja simply puts it in his vault. Bearing in mind Galuf was the founder of the Students of Baldesion whose purpose is research and discovery of new phenomena. Zoraal Ja's sidekick not only knows where the key is but also what it does. 3. Ketenramm didn't think it was worth mentioning he got attacked and his tablet thingies stolen. Also, why did his face look human if he was a roegadyn but in the flashback he had a roegadyn face? 3. Our character sees Sphene in Tuliyolal and doesn't mention it. Sloppy and illogical just so the plot can progress. I'm not mad, just disappointed. I blame ChatGPT. And Wuk Lamat.
I have to agree with most of the points raised in the video. I liked fantasy Texas though, if only because it gave me a breather from Wuk Lamat. It's probably the worst part of the MSQ because it made me keenly aware of how much more I enjoyed the narrative when she wasn't around. Even if the plot was nonsensical (rubber bullets? REALLY???) I didn't really register it as bad because of how relieved I felt.
The kidnapping when we were with Koana made me want to switch sides. He had more and better development during that short sequence than Poochie Lamat had during the entire runtime. Much better voice performance, too. Senna wasn't ready for this.
The worst part about the rubber bullets is that they emphasized it at least 4 times.... only for it to mean ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING. The duel ended with the gun being shot out of his hand; meaning that it literally would not have mattered if the ammunition was real. All that was needed was a tiny blood splatter from his hand and no mention of rubber bullets and bam. Giant contrived mess is gone and nothing would have changed. If anything it would have improved that part as it shows the kid is the better man by winning the duel AND sparing the Vulture.
I couldn't stop laughing at that remark. What kind of mentality do you need to have to say, in a cowboy place that is riddle with bandits and later on an invasion, that their guns ARE FREAKING TOYS. It was so dumb I couldn't believe they had actually wrote that.
@@StartouchArts I think its part of the disneyficiation. See how we barely kill anyone in the fates for example? We make them RUN AWAY. But this is just my tinfoil theory, rubber bullets, what a dumb idea.
I like how the prevailing sentiment was exactly that, that we can't have a universe-ending threat for every expansion, and then Hiroi did it anyway. Your review actually got me thinking again about WoL's duty as a side character and low stake threats, since it did happen quite a few times in DT, it's just that it was in the side quests. The quest that stuck out most for me was the quest with Shunye and Uvlo, the mining/botany role quest givers. You were presented with a problem to solve, and then that problem led into a more personal problem for the involved characters, and you were also presented with reasons and background lore for why the characters are there in the first place, and ON TOP OF THAT it included nice touches to make it personal to your character if you were also a Viera. It stayed focused and didn't overstay its welcome. It was genuinely wrapped up like a nice little package.
DT has introduced two new ways for me to play. One: Skipping cutscenes and story. Two: learning how to switch to Japanese voice acting The train scene should have been playable as well as the invasion ala the lunar primals
The MSQ was baffling to me. It felt like they hired writers from a morning cartoon for children aged 3-7. The way things were framed and executed, almost every major plot point falls apart if you just think about for a minute or 2 or think back to other plot points that contradict them and should not be possible if other plot elements and characters exist as the story presents them. And the audio problems, from the very glaringly bad voice acting from Wuk Lamat even though they know she has like 95% of all the screen time in the story and enjoyment of the MSQ very heavily was on her shoulders to carry as a result, it felt like no care went into the voice acting and direction. And I love Soken, most of the music was great, but for the main theme to be so jarring with terrible vocals and mixing, I just cannot wrap my head around how that could even happen. That woman singing the verses sounded insane, there is no world where that does not sound awful, it was pitchy AF and it's the main song, it closes out the MSQ and it's a disaster. I'm so mixed on DT because it's like half of it was amazing but arguably the biggest thing they needed to nail, in the MSQ, almost couldn't have been worse. I could forgive it if there were some plot holes that you really had to seek out to realize but so much of it was nonsense. It felt like the writers and whoever decided how to set up the scenes, didn't care or even try to make it make sense.
The way they obviously sidelined all the actual Scions for Living Memory was just atrocious, at least one of them would have said "THIS IS GENOCIDE ARE YOU KIDDING ME" and the writers didn't know how to handle that so they just sidelined the lot of them
@@TheAsj97 The fact that they had a "but thou must!" railroad prompt for committing an actual genocide is probably the most egregious moment in the entire MSQ, going back to the start of ARR. I'd take the weakest part of Doma over the dog's breakfast they made of that. You can tell Ishikawa was nowhere near that mess.
@@CrispBaker It hurts how badly they screwed Krile over especially. She's the one character that actually had a direct tie to what was happening in the second half but no, everything is Wuk Lamat. All her contributions were sidelined to force Wuk Lamat or baby Gulool, she got a cute, tiny story section and then nothing. Genuinely, she could have been cut completely and it would have changed nothing. And the other Scions literally just felt like they put them there just to make a narrative excuse for duty support NPCs.
@@mismismism The second half should have had about half as much Wuk and 3x as much Krile and Erenville. Problem is that the writers were too fixated on their OC waifu to bother with the characters that somebody else created.
I mostly agree but Shaaloani is my favorite zone. The bad voice acting, the obvious story, it was a spaghetti western exactly like you'd expect from a non-American making a Western, and after the weirdness of the Rite arc it was nice to actually get a beach episode.
The music and visuals in that zone are honestly incredible as well. Really hard to make a desert area look that good, just take Thanalan for example. I was having a blast in that zone finally getting away from Wuk. Estinien with his ridiculous cameos, and traveling with Erenville, a character who actually understood we could absolutely END anyone who stood in our way. It wasn't until we just randomly let the enemy get away and the whole thing with rubber bullets that I started to roll my eyes again.
Koana was the rightful Dawnservant, he just needed a course in social interaction. Kinda like how Ascians should have invented Mental Health support and counselling for Fandaniel.
The more I think on it, the more unbelievable it is that Koana wasn’t the main character. He was already in Sharlayan while we were, why didn’t we journey with him instead?
@@embersarcade Plus, he seemed more approriate to bring into the high-tech environment of the last 2 zones. It would have been intresting to see the character that had put his hopes in technology rather than humanity and tradition see how far technology can be used to pervert the human and spiritual existance that alexandrian tech does to memories, the soul, and the cycle of life. Would have been neat to see how he would react and reflect on this. But Axe and friendship go burr I guess...
100% Corporate DEI slop. I could imagine this song in a Coca Cola commercial being sung during the BLM protests by a fat black woman with an afro holding up the Black Power fist the entire time; maybe a crystal flute too. This song was WWWWAAAYYYYYYYY TOO MUCH "black church gospel" for no reason at all
I dunno, for some reason i get the idea of some kind of Telethon where they get a bunch of celebrities together to answer phones for donations and then at the end they all get up together to sing some sappy song for some cause like saving the rain forest or the whales or something like that.
I completely agree with all you said here, minus one thing. Shaaloni was actually the best part of the expansion because wuk lamat wasn't present. And the fact that I felt her presence so overbearing, that I actually enjoyed the low point simply because of her absence, you know it's kinda of a shitty character. Also mate, fantastic video!
Shaaloani felt like how the level 90-91 quests should've been. Slightly all over the place but should lead you to characters that move the story forward, not only for tbis expansion, but future ones too. Kind of like ARR was at the beginning and the you met the 1 Scion and then the whole group, etc. They should "get rid" of the Scions and move us to be with a new group with fresh new chars and have a cameo here and there with the old team, maybe a few of them that didn't have much development or weren't Scions, like Krile and Erenville, could be a part of that new team too.
Same lmao. I have been saying the exact same thing. The fact that Shaaloani was amongst my favourite parts of the game simply because I got to adventure around a bit with Erenville really speaks volumes as to how suffocating Wuk Lamat is.
Also like how you can’t go into Shaaloni or anywhere north in the beginning thinking it’s some crazy stuff up there. Only to find out it’s a bunch of cat guys playing a western (with zero tension) while talking in “murican” voices that are more stereotypical than believable. Koji you should know better man you had to have heard these characters before this shipped.
I actually liked Shaaloani when playing through the expansion, but in hindsight I think that's mostly because it felt like I was finally free of the ball and chain that was Wuk. That part of the main quest was mostly just filler until they could throw the actual plot at the player.
What I believe is that Dawntrail's story was put into the backseat as Final Fantasy XVI was in its storyboarding phases. The main writers for Dawntrail both came from writing beast tribe scenarios, with one of them helming the story of the Sorrow of Werlyt. Meanwhile, XVI got the writer of Heavensward.
...XVI was in production actively during Stormblood and Shadowbringers, so it's storyboard was done way before Dawntrail was even a neuron firing off in anyone's mind. The writers were chosen because Ishikawa wanted to pass the torch (and because she was promoted, and the JP business promotion stuff is a whole other can of worms in regards to "stop doing what you're good at and love doing to manage other people not as good at what you do.")
The worst part is that the core narrative of 16 is the same as for 14. The villain is an ancient life-form who seeks to regain his lost glory by sacrificing the world that his kind created. Now that Yoshi P is the head honcho for both of the games it really leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Dawntrail story checklist Speak with Wuk Lamat Ignore Krile Speak with Wuk Lamat Turn the player character into an npc Speak with Wuk Lamat Ignore Erenville Speak with Wuk Lamat Turn Sphene into a giant missed opportunity Speak with Wuk Lamat And do not forget the most important thing SPEAK WITH WUK LAMAT
Damn you for making me listen to that gawd-awful midpoint interruption in the last trial, lmao. I agree with you 100%. You nailed pretty much everything that is good, bad, and ugly with this expansion. I never disliked anyone so much as Wukface. And I literally asked my screen at the credits "wtf is this music" lol. I was all ready to explore a new continent with Krile and help her find her grandfather and to visit Erenville's home town, and bump into the locals along the way. Really didn't want to get involved with more political shenanigans and all the rot that came with it. I can only pray that someone from Yoshi's team sees this video. Your criticisms and observations are on point. I know it takes time to build up to the heights we just left, but this is not how you do it. 😑
One thing that still blew my mind was after following Cahciua while she's controlling the outrunner, we don't know anything else at all about her except her distinct voice and cheery personality. Later on when you see her in Living Memory for the first time, that cutscene isn't voiced and really dulled the moment. Sure, you've probably figured out that's where she was, but it felt like a completely different character after getting to Living Memory. Any cutscene after meeting her, there's zero personality that she had before and comes off almost monotone and dull. And also, it felt like her audio was just way louder than everyone else overall.
Still not having voice acting for all the scenes while other MMOs way smaller than Ff14 have even side quests voice acted in 2024 is criminal in my opinion.... They always make up excuses for it, but the real reason is just because it's cheaper this way and nothing else... Same thing with Viera hats... In 6 years even if they do 1/day,they would be done, we are at a point where they don't even talk about that.... Square Enix runs this game with the bare minimum budget while the profit is being put in their other projects...
Also she creates a central conflict: she says that the Endless aren't sentient and real, but her own existence and behavior calls that into question. At least Erenville should have said "uh, you seem pretty real, are you sure that you aren't just delusional", but the writers didn't know how to answer that so they kept it out
I'm guessing that the game went through extensive rewrites, and while "animating" those cutscenes is really simple as it's all canned animations, the voicework is a bigger problem. They couldn't get people back into the booth to re-record the audio for all the different localized voices, so they had to just go with what they had. Still, it's a bad look considering that even Genshin Impact manages to have fully-voiced cutscenes, and you don't have to pay a monthly fee for that, let alone the base game and expansion costs. Just more proof that Square uses FF14 to pay for all its dumb experiments with NFTs and AI, and starves the actual game of resources. (Like, say, competent writers to replace Ishikawa.)
Your review pretty much mirrors my own sentiments about Dawntrail so far as a whole. There were flashes of brilliance peppered in the MSQ and the locales were pretty nice, but story is a literal make or break because it has to bend over for the narrative black hole that was Wuk Lamat. Also, in terms of VAs, this is the reason I stuck to using JP voices since ARR. The other problem I've had is that the story beats Dawntrail tries to tread were things we already went through. Our WoL sets foot in a brave new land, giving us a chance to learn of the cultures and people? Shadowbringers. A new female character introduced that is thrust into a role of responsibility they probably aren't the least bit ready for? Lyse. A new male character who wants to do what is best for his people in his country? Hien. There's also the fact that when we later find out about Sphene's "immortality" it feels like a bit of an odd choice to have Otis sacrifice himself. It feels like a cheap ploy for tugging at our heartstings.
@@kleeneonigiri Sadly that can only get them so far, considering the MSQ... It's night and day how much effort was put into the voice acting direction between all the available voice options... except for the EN version of Wuk Lamat's. Like, she got spat on by a llama and all she showed was mild annoyance. Every other VA? They were screaming in sheer disgust which sold me on the scene more. Even for the last trial, as much as I hated her butting in, every other VA? They nailed the emotion they wanted to convey. EN version? "SPEEEN!" XD
After finishing the MSQ, I've realized two things: 1) Wuk Lamat needs to be louder, more happy-go-lucky, and have access to a time machine, and 2) Any time Wuk Lamat's not on screen, everybody should be asking "Where's Wuk Lamat?"
A big problem in DT as well I think is it cribbed too hard into XIV's own tropes like 'friendship is power', as well as severe weaknesses in its MSQ gameplay flow such as poor cutscene pacing and lack of interactivity. Probably the BIGGEST issue is it's just... too damn long. It has some not bad parts but as a whole I do not want to play it on my alt, which is crazy. The silver lining of DT's very 'divisive' response is that so many of these issues which have existed for so long are now so squarely in the spotlight that, hopefully, they will finally be addressed and we can move on in patch content to better stuff. I'm PARTICULARLY glad that there has been such a strong (although 'relative') rejection of how sidelined the WoL was in the story. Hopefully they re-discover their courage to put us out there again in 7.X and 8.0.
its genuinely insane to me how people who have gotten to dawntrail still think shit like friendship is power is ffxivs big trope please exercise some media literacy before preaching about it
@siduxjxhdgzhdjxhxuuxxyhgg1079 I'm using friendship is power here in a very broad sense, obviously there's more angles but in general if the stories message can be boiled down to "we are stronger together" that is something that has been treaded out way too often in ff to carry an MSQ.
Honestly, I kind of enjoyed not being the main focus for part of the expansion. After how heavy the last xpac was narratively I thought of the first half of this as kind of a fun vacation thing, focused more on exploring a new land and it's peoples while helping a possible friend. And with that view in mind, it kind of fit. I get it wasn't for everyone and obviously anyone who dislikes it is free to do so, but I just super enjoyed that take.
"I'm tired of a story that was written to conclusion long before the Warrior of Light set foot on the boat." I don't mind that the Warrior of Light wasn't the focus. What I do take major issue with is how little our existence mattered for any of the story. The only times we even mattered were the 99 and 100 Trials. If you are going to make us sit through 20+ hours of cutscenes, I damn well expect to be doing something to make my presence here more than a simple formality.
You say that Smile plays after a genocide. But the game refused to even entertain the moral complexity and themes of transhumanism it itself sets up, so it doesn't even consider what we did a genocide at all. These memories can hear, feel, think. They can experience new things and even turn against their own creator. BUT THEY'RE NOT ALIVE SILLY, THEY HAVE NO SOULS. It's just a cemetery. It baffles me how people can just go along with this idea so easily, after playing Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Are *we* not the fragmented, incomplete shadow versions of an original? But we still have value? Pale imitations. That's what Emet called us. And he was wrong. DIDN'T WE SPEND THE ENTIRETY OF THE LAST TWO EXPANSION EXPLORING THIS?
To be fair we are FRAGMENTED versions of the original pieces of that same entity. These were just stored memories like basic AI, basically guessing how one might react to people as they WERE. So in essence they are but of a shell of the person, whereas Emet THINKS were are shells despite just being fragmented versions of the original. Also the fact that they made stopping them so urgent due to what it costs to keep them like that is why they had to go. But who knows, maybe they might explore it more in the patch quests.
@@Akantorz They are simulacra created by the AI based on the memories. The AI does not control them. How do we know this? The AI tries to stop us from shutting down the terminals while the citizen of Living Memory are largely OK with it that. And simulacra based on memories *are* people, at least if the Omicron Society quests are anything to go by.
@@zerocold1924 Yes, the AI doesn't control them, but that doesn't mean that some AI using memories hasn't crafted them into existence. The difference between the Omicron and these living memories is that the Omicron seem to be replicas of these beings given life by Dynamis, which could be rebirthing them given that they are not in the Aether lifestream. The memories can only exist by STEALING life from others to continue and then move on, whereas souls in the lifestream can be reborn, they might not have their old memories, but they can access their same persona. As someone grows in the world, their experiences can shape how they behave, whereas the memories can only behave the way THAT specific person would have done things. So as explained before, they are just copies, unable to formulate something new, only make choices based on what knowledge their old memories had. That's why all the quests involved completing tasks based on what they knew that they always wanted to do and then they were fine with dissipating.
They’re more like the memory crystal phantoms that you encounter in the final Pandemonium raid series or the shades in the DRK Stormblood quests. But yes, it would have been nice to have a discussion about it with everyone, perhaps with the player’s WoL chiming in with those examples depending on your side quest progress.
There's a whole arc in Endwalker's post-game about how the Dynamis-generated beings in Ultima Thule are actually sentient and worth helping and protecting. The Endless have a much better claim to existence than they do, enough that we really do have to question if the game forces the players to commit a genocide. But the writers weren't competent enough to handle that question, so they just ignored it and sidelined all the characters who'd logically bring it up.
Succinct and accurate. Like most, I was confused, if not stunned by the narrative choices made here. Who's our antagonist now? I think this is the first time in the game's history where we have almost nothing to go off of for what the patches are going to hold. We have one MacGuffin. That's it. We barely learned about the three antagonists we were presented with, one per trial (gotta stick to a formula), and now we have nothing left of intrigue. It's impressive that they were able to write such a solid story for the raid series, but miss by such a margin on the MSQ. Why is it that they felt the need to hastily tell and wrap up two complete stories, when one left on a small cliffhanger would have been more than sufficient? A lot of "What ifs" to follow, but I've been struggling with understanding how they went about things, in light of some alternatives. Wuk Lamat, bless her soul, was the wrong protagonist here. This was Krile and Erenville's story, through and through. I welcome the WoL taking a back seat, but to whom? I didn't even like the premise in 6.55 -- since when was the WoL interested in politics? They gave us the decision to say we didn't wanna go, and we got G'raha to drop us a "hear, feel, think" reference? It all feels so forced, in a bad way. Why couldn't we spend the expansion working with Krile to uncover the mysteries of her grandfather? Maybe seed some info of her parents along the way -- maybe Galuf actually had some sort of prolonged contact or something and left us notes. Why wasn't this Galuf's guiding Krile to uncover her history? Give Erenville more limelight as we uncover a history he has on Tural, visiting old friends and struggling with his estrangement. Have us meet his mom at least once before everything goes down, so we actually feel some sort of way about her too. She's just as intrigued about the world, why couldn't we run into her on occasion as we ran about following Galuf's footsteps with Krile with Erenville as our guide? Use the Societies system to innovate on the MSQ a little. Have Wuk Lamat be the B-story, and if you do 2-3 questlines per area, you build enough rep to get Wuk Lamat support from the societal delegation. If you don't get enough, Koana wins Dawnservant for the time being, some repercussions are felt during some cutscenes, but nothing so drastic that CB3 can't manage it. Not looking for a Visual Novel level of branching, just, small stuff to shake things up a bit. Wuk Lamat could eventually rise to be the Dawnservant along side Koana like they established, just, shake up the path to get there a little. The decision for us to not be involved in the attack on Tuliyollal? Why? We could easily have had that as a dungeon or MSQ story-mode (could you imagine role-playing as Bakool Ja Ja?), with a trial to fight off Zoraal Ja. Break the formula, make it a pyrrhic victory, still let major characters meet the long sleep, but then we'd feel something, any sort of attachment to these antagonists. Give Sphene 3 patches of content to simmer, let us grow to like her a bit, there was no need to end it here. They had threads of gold to weave this story with, and they binned it all for the sake of rushing through two stories, front to back, with new everything. It's just so strange. I wonder if we'll ever touch on the lightning-sick kids again. I'm just, baffled. ... ... ... But the combat? The combat. So good. See you workers out there when we strike down Queen Honey B. Lovely. /bgm 100000000
Dawntrail felt like it wanted to have its cake and eat it too. It tried so hard to crib off the emotional impact, crescendos, and narrative highs of Shadowbringers, without any of the necessary development that ShB got prior to release, and in the span of only 1/3 of the MSQ's runtime at that. I remember how Heavensward ended the base expac's MSQ with Thordan slain, but Nidhogg was still out there body-napping Estinien. There were hooks and places left to go that they couldn't just cram into the base release, so they allowed it to stretch into the patch content, and it was marvelous. I hope and pray that these dullard writers get sacked and Yoshida steps in to right this ship before we move on to the next expac.
call me weird but i pretty much stopped caring when i got to the quest to pick up bird shit. i dont know why but after that i just gave up on DT altogether, like there was a button that just switched on or something
I don't recall collecting birdshit in DT, I do however recollect collecting dung in Stormblood while we were waiting for the Naadam to start. Least there it was interesting seeing how they cope with lack of wood.
@@Zriatt funny how the xaela tribes in stormblood were more entertaining/lore enriched than almost all of dawntrail. I’ve never wanted to skip a cutscene so much in 11 years of playing this game until DT. Makes me wonder what was going through the writers minds when they wrote this atrocious mess.
It was that moment you realized they were starting to cater more to the WoW transplants than the players that grew the game and kept it alive. DT is spit in the eye for everyone who kept XIV alive from original release to ARR, especially players that stayed during the end of HW and Stormblood when this game should have died.
@@GuruGodPlays But is it right to say "should have died" when it actually grew into MMORPG that is still presently arguably better than the all other alternatives. Even despite some story mishaps of DT.
That's how I felt when playing it: I, the player, the character, I was just a camera. A camera that focus on Wuk Lamat, she is the central character, she is the mighty, she is the coolest. Me, the player, I'm just a follower of her, a side character like all the other scions. I did not teach her anything, don't give her any help, she is totally capable of everything herself. Square Enix should remove that character with a sword on its shoulder in the expansion logo and place Wuk Lamat there instead, because the game is all about her. I, player, I'm completely appalled on how unimportant and trivial my presence in this expansion is. I'm sure I'm not going to buy another expansion for this game. The thing that would bring me back to this game is if Wuk Lamat dies, preferable in my hands and no other. Nothing else will bring peace to me.
I was putting up with it right up to the major scene which leads to you heading to the Night City location. That one scene where no one does anything for no reason literally killed all ability to take this expansion seriously. There was no explanation given to letting HIM walk away after that event. Not even the flimsiest of excuses. Not one.
I just beat Dawntrail like 30 minutes ago, and this video sums up pretty much all my thoughts. Although, I will say a huge thing is the writer, Hiroi, is completely incapable of putting himself in the characters' shoes when writing their dialogue, making everybody sound samey and devoid of personality. Everybody speaks in a unique way thanks to their past experiences and personalities and who they are as people; but no one in Dawntrail is like this, everyone's interchangeable and nothing in the story would be altered for it.
"I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you". Emet-Selch lied. I felt like a genocidal during the Living Memory bit.
those were esentially really convincing AI avatars. So no, you're not actually guilty of murder for killing them. You were esentially turning off a video game console when you did the whole living memory thing.
God damn. People are siding with chatgpt/AIs with input memories. Meanwhile everyone is ignoring all those souls still trapped in the regulators and soul cells. Sheesh.
@@fredy2041not nearly as bad as Lyse because Lyse made space for other characters. Stormblood wasn’t about Lyse, she was just a part of it. Dawntrail is about Wuk Lmao and only about her pretty much.
It’s a shame when the MSQ gets “good”, Final “Fantasy” XIV proceeded to spit in the face of FFIX fans. No real bosses from the old game, the references often weren’t directly from the game to begin with, making Lindblum some mustache twirling super power, playing IX tracks while sitting in “We have Night City at Home”. And to top all that off? They went out back behind Heritage Found and old yeller’d my childhood with those ruined Alexandrian remains, and literally turned the rest of the callbacks into a netrunner theme park. The one thing I can appreciate them doing from IX that I didn’t even catch right away, was the frog out in the “marshes” in Kozama’uka, the rest of it just… ugh. Even Alexandria the dungeon, reskin of the last dungeon in 6.0 that it was, could’ve been awesome. Instead we fight an antivirus. No Antlion, no Beatrix, no Cleyrans, no Meltigemini, nooottthhhiiiinnnnggggg from IX to call back to. Such a shame. Oh and Wuk Lamat really irritated the crap out of me 😂
There were 2 main writers for Dawntrail. One of them specialized in Beast Tribe Quests and the other one was the one who wrote The Sorrow of Werlyt. You can pretty much guess which half was written by who...
@@gzuskreist1021 yet more proof that a man shouldn't be voice acting a female. for some reason females can do male characters fine, but men can't do female characters. Wuk just sounded like a 13 year old boy the entire time and it actively made me hate her until i switched to JP and then hated her ideology and worldview
The city is under attack! Every MMO: Time for a battle 14: Never take out your weapon, run away. There's corrupt sheriffs in Texas! Every MMO: Raid the bandit hideout 14: Put bird feces in a bag. The main villain has been revealed! Every MMO: Time to fight! 14: Let's learn about their culinary history!
I argue that Wuk Lamat actually starts out in danger of not winning the rite. I feel that feeling is negated a fair bit just because we're the ones who are accompanying her, so we know exactly what the result will be later. I agree there should have been more emphasis on threats to her success, and yeah the xibruq pibil section could have been an interesting opportunity. I don't think a lot of people minded just because Koana is such a likeable character, so the opportunity for more time with him was liked. Second half really needed so much less Wuk Lamat, especially in the final trial because my reaction was surprise, but unlike when Zenos came to our rescue in Endwalker, it quickly changed to "why is it just Wuk Lamat?" like where are the other scions? I get she's the main character basically but there's way too much of her second half.
Damn bro this was such a thorough review. Good that you came at it from so many angles positively and critically - musically, tone of the story, characters, raid/dungeon content, etc.
I hear a lot of my friends absolutely coping about "This expansion was never gonna measure up to Endwalker" As if thats an acceptable excuse for why the msq is absolute garbage. As if its some kind of obvious rule that a new saga has to be painfully boring, horribly paced and childish before it can be interesting and exciting. Frankly I was embarrassed at quite a lot of the cutscenes, especially when smile played. Also Wuk Lamat sounds like my Prison girlfriend
@@DTCTVP okay but that's voice direction problem her voice acting is fine and I would argue her direction is also fine there is nothing wrong. yes you can personal not like the voice but that is a you problem.
@@DTCTVP he didn't sound like a woman "foreign" or not. sounded straight up like a 17 year old boy trying to do a female voice. real women should feel insulted
I agree with most of what you have to say here (I don't think the voice acting was 'that' horrible, but then the story was so bad I probably didn't notice.) But I think what sums my feelings up for Dawntrail is that I have played all of the MSQ up to this point multiple times, with no story skips, and I enjoyed it. Even Stormblood and ARR have their moments and while points can be frustrating, that's still engagement. I have absolutely no desire to play through Dawntrail again and watch my Warrior of Light make vapid smiles at Wuk Lamat through the entire narrative. They should have left her back at the castle in part two and let us explore the final zones with Erenville and Krile alone.
I will say, as a personal gripe, I can't stand how FF9 was treated. FF12 has it's entire lore, plot, and characters just copy pasted into Eorzea. FF6 has several bosses, a kingdom, and the child of a major character. FF8 had an entire raid series around it, thematically speaking. FF4 had the entirety of the patch content. And all of them felt done with love and adoration for the source content. FF9? You get a broken down, destroyed model of one city, lip service to another one, and that's it. Why was Otis not named Adelbert? Why did we never get any mention a knight who single handedly defeated 100 foes? Why was the play not named 'I want to be your Canary'? So many endless possible ways to show love to the source, and we get nothing. It's really heart breaking to me, who watched all of these other games get so much love and respect, and when it comes time to our turn, we get a middle finger.
The anime tropes were egregiously bad this expansion even down to the "let's go fight somewhere empty" while I felt like I was playing as Krillin just standing there watching everything, probably got half of Solution Nine killed because we let Wuk Lamat "solo" her brother even let him chat it up while he slaughtered people in front of us. After that they even tried to moralize him because his dad was a boomer who didn't leave him any inheritance so clearly he could be excused. Awful mess of a saturday morning kids anime. I just want an expansion where it's just the WoL going around doing quests, so tired of the scions, Wuk's et al at this point.
The scions honestly need a break I agree totally. I honestly thought like you that this was going to be a questing exploring adventure expansion, but no. It just solidified Wuk Lamat. In my opinion they are trying create the larger than faction leader like in WoW but failed miserably because this is not what ff14 built itself on then they dared to say this expansion is for us.
Rarely felt the need to skip scutscenes of an expansion. Last time was in Stormblood and I didn't, fearing to skip major scene. Here I was upset by Lamat, the endless cycle of "let's go to that village, for talk and learn how these people make her food, monuments, for like.... 3 hours without a fight, dungeon or trial.
Completely agree. I was big on story, and I first started this game all the way back in ARR, I very rarely skipped any cutscenes in all my years of playing this game, if ever. When I heard ppl say that the beginning of the story was boring, I thought it was maybe exaggerated. But then I played it myself and I finally got it. I found myself not give a single crap about the endless Wuk Lamat fetch quests and tedious dialogue. I also, honestly didn't give a rats ass about the succession battle. I only just finished the first dungeon, and honestly I feel (emphasis on feel) like dropping the game altogether since its so boring. It also doesn't help that I'm a summoner main, and they didn't change anything in 7.0.
100% agreed. I actually started to hate her because of it. When we reach Solution 9 and Krile mentions finding out about her earring I thought we'd go with her. But no, we're stuck with Lamat again in the most boring shit ever. They dangle good story threads infront of you and use her to block you off to go do something else.
I love Shalooani as a western type land to visit. But indeed the story in it is..useless to be polite And oh god.. the english voice of Wuk Lamat... damn i'm glad to have switched in japanese from the get go, i swear the Japanse voice are top notch.
Agreed. I love Shalooani as an area as well. The story there is just to remind us of Namikka which is relevant in the next area. But at that point, I didn't care because it's just another boring filler.
@@einschwartz Unfortunatly i didn't care about Namikka either..Non that she's uninterested, but she's someone Wuk Lamat care about. And unfortunatly i don't care about Wuk Lamat. I don't know why but i didn't like her. Koana was much much much more interesting.
This is by far the worst MSQ in 14. Wuk Lamat was obnoxious and unfit to rule (peace and happiness is not a basic domestic or foreign policy) and NO we were NOT her mentor but her yes man. I think Koana should have been focused on more who had more flaws and grew over time and showed leadership skills (signing a trade agreement with Vitra and defending Tuliyolal) and Zoral Ja's views and motivations were stupid. So overall the Rite of Succession was cringe and shallow. 2nd part should have heavily focused on Krile and Erenville but surprise surprise the low IQ clown lioness shows up and sucks the life out of the story again. Sphene was weak sauce, her plan was dumb cause if she absorbed the source then that would shatter other reflections and then what? no energy source. I am a huge FF9 fan (my fav FF ever) and they way they used 9 was kinda cheap, I felt nothing when I finished the MSQ. The final fight was ruined by Wuk Lamat and her disgusting voice (that voice actor definitely got the job through nepotism, no doubt). I never want to see Wuk Lamat ever again, send her away like Poochie the Dog. The writers need to be demoted, get some forward thinking, convicted writers that understand basic things like 'Show don't tell'. The music overall was great except for the opening song and Smile (that song makes me cringe into a pretzel), the dungeons/ trials and raids are fun. The locations are coo, I love Shaloani the most cause of the music and just love the western setting. Overall if the devs/writers don't course correct, this game will collapse, never seen the community so pissed off.
Ouch. And you hate to say that about a character cuz you want them to always be good and well written and when they aren't it's a letdown. Also how did she get the job via nepotism? Like how would you know that?
The VA of Krile was robbed. She has barely had a chance to shine for years now. They could have devoted the whole second half of the expansion to her and Sphene, especially due to what her parents did. Instead she gets 1/4 of disney land. I hate this expansion so much. Worst expansion by far.
The only thing that saved my sanity (a bit...) with how much WUK LAMAT we got through this expansion was theorizing that she was a brain parasite hallucination and we were all helpless in indulging in its fantasies. Hence the excessive nodding to things most WoL's probably wouldn't care about or cheerleading... It would also explain why the Scions acted all off.
One thing I really dislike about the story is that basically learning about different cultures is summed up to "let's try their food"... and that's it. As if culture is only food.
And they didn't even get good food variety either, you get Tacos, mezcal, and a version of yerba mate that is so thoroughly inaccurate you might as well call a peanut butter and jelly sandwich a taco "because it's filling inside a thing made out of flour".
great video. I will say, I liked the Texas part of the story just because it was goofy and actually felt like an adventure again. It was nice to get away from Wuk for a bit.
I was really upset with how they handled the endless. The question of what makes someone alive, is one that has been debated for hundreds if not thousands of years. There’s no way any human can truly prove themselves sentient and not just biological computers, and that ultimately leads to the question of what the difference between a biological computer and a classical computer is. Moreover they simply hand waved away the issue of powering these things. They say they “need life aether” and it’s never really questioned. Don’t forget we also “couldn’t cure the tempered” for almost 10 years until they suddenly could so for them to not even try honestly made me pretty mad in the moment lol. And sure we had the blessings of a few people we met to turn them off, but what of the potentially thousands that we didn’t? And we turned them off so sphene wouldn’t have a need to fight anymore and we just fought her anyway. Honestly it was just really lazily handled and made no sense.
Honestly, the talk-to-them-and-learn-their-culture part of Living Memory started to _rankle_ me. You have a massive computerized archive of the lives of everyone who has died in Alexandria, comprehensive enough to actually reconstruct them into living(ish), emotive people with inner lives... ...and you think you can understand what they're about by talking to them for half an hour and storing that information in your fallible rotting meat brain? And that makes it okay to shut them down and destroy the archive? _Arrogance._ Sheer, absolute _arrogance._ Not that different from the sheer arrogance of deciding you can understand and resolve a generational conflict by talking to people for half an hour and getting an Amazon package from Sharlayan, actually, but I don't think the sheer unbridled arrogance of people who profess a love for multiculturalism without actually putting in any work to enculturate is an _intended_ theme of Dawntrail.
@@Geesaroni yeah the whole thing really struck me as “moral masturbation”. Like the writers were beating us over the head with how immoral and unnatural it was for these things to continue to exist. So much so that we had the god given right to decide that they don’t deserve to be around anymore. Maybe they believed it was a mirror to the ascians holding onto the past, but to me it was more like we were the ones who had become the ascians and passing judgement on all of our lessers.
After being thoroughly disappointed by almost every minute of the MSQ, I've watched many reviews to see how others feel about the state of the game so far. I can safely say that this review pretty much sums up all of my feelings towards Dawntrail. From the childish story, boring to nonexistent gameplay throughout said story, bland or even cringeworthy voiceacting, all the way to the actual dungeon and raid style gameplay being the best it's ever been (fingers crossed for savage!). This review sums up my thoughts pretty much perfectly. Also, crazy how you're the first I hear pointing out the thematic mismatch between Tuliyollal's visuals and music! I felt exactly the same way. Having played Battle for Azeroth (Yeah... I know xD) at least I can say that that game did the soundtrack for an ancient Mesoamerican city, that being Zandalar, 10000x better. I have no clue why the theming between visuals and soundtrack are such a complete mismatch here.
@@embersarcade agreed. Zandalar is actually one of my favourite zones in WoW. Tuli cannot even remotely compare. I find everything about Tuli annoying. It’s as if Wuk Lamat was a city…
The feeling i got from tulliyolal's sound track(both tracks) was that i was visiting a modern central/south american tourist resort. While not unpleasant per se, it is a little jarring to be thrust out of my fantasy escapism every time the music starts.
25:00 hu? Who would disagree with your take on EW themes? It's OBVIOUSLY about putting something forward against Nihilism. Not only that it's also heavy in themes of "taken on the burdon of life and moving forward". Like EW is basically Jordon Peterson's 12 Rules for Life the videogame. You'd have to pretty inept to not see the strong themes presented. It just doesn't draw as much from biblical corpus but it's the same message. Venat literally goes "I will force humans to experience strife to temper them against Nihilism/ whatever warped Meteon into the Endsinger)
I really wish they didn't back track on what Guool Ja Ja said about how it was to see the contestants grow. Cause Koana made the biggest stride in developing as a character and honestly made for a better dawnservant. If Wuk Lamat wasn't written poorly, the second half would have been a great way to see her fully grow and realize that her views were shallow along with why her brother was chosen. A lot of missed story opportunities, along with how the story was deaf to it's own message. Wuk Lamat claiming to want to understand others but refused to learn why Zuool Ja did what he did or even why he wanted war that badly. On top of that, apparently the writers forgot about his help the moment he got axed.
If you as an american don't want to hear an american accent in XIV every again, as a south american, I don't want to ever hear anyone attempting what CBU3 thinks it's a "latin american" accent. You praised Koana's va, but I can assure you, despite his tone being good, south americans don't sound as if we're making a bad impression of Antonio Banderas.
Great review! I was honestly shocked at how little I was enjoying the story but the encounter design almost makes up for it. I know I had to set my expectations low after EW concluded that saga but damn :/
It's kinda hard to top that 10 years worth of story building tbh. Starting from end of ARR going through Heavensward all the way to the last expansion was absolutely amazing! One of the best gaming exp I had ever
Music: Oh cool, I'm not the only one who thinks Tuliyollal's night theme doesn't fit the setting. Also not really a fan of of the main theme itself, but the way Soken pulls motifs out of it for all the other themes is still masterful. I also think the vocalized musical numbers inspire a sense of unity, something that felt fitting for the train scene (maybe too Southern Church and not enough South America, but that's preference), but falls very flat by the end when all attempts at unity and understanding fail to bridge the gap between two supposedly incompatible needs. Story (part 1): Every time you discover someone's motivation, their actions make less sense in retrospect. Bakool Ja Ja's sob story is not consistent with the glee in which he attempts mass murder. Zarool Ja's attempt to "prove the miracle" is not consistent with relying on someone else's power to harvest his own people. I could believe the Hanuhanu didn't know about the aetheric effect of their ritual... until that cutscene showed those effects were excessively blatant. However, I can see why they'd consider fighting Valigarmanda way too risky and while the Mamool Ja could have found crops to better suit their soil in other lands, I think they were appropriately presented as too spiteful to coordinate that effort. And yeah, Wuk Lamat is way too Mary Sue. They pretend to give her weaknesses, but none of them ever matter as she proceeds to make every correct decision and win every fight. Imagine if she lost the fight to Bakool Ja Ja who, throughout the fight, gradually goes from a mocking "haha I won't lose" to "I can't afford to lose" until he pulls off an LB3 to win which by itself hints there's more going on than meets the eye. We would then go through a section of story where there's finally some question as to whether Wuk will win. Heck, maybe she doesn't win. Maybe Koana wins, but he has grown enough to realize he needs Wuk to cover his own weaknesses. Same result, more meaningful conflict. Story (part 1.5): The Western section was the absolute worst. I have no idea who thought they were being smart by trying to squeeze as many cliches as possible in that one zone. That might've been okay if it made sense. Instead, we spend the first half of the zone collecting evidence to set up a duel that apparently renders that same evidence unnecessary. Then in the second half, our help makes it possible to... gather wood that has already been prepared? Oh, I guess it's been prepared by Indians because we really needed to continue that Cowboy cliche. Story (part 2): My biggest issue here is that I spent 4/5 of the MSQ having "understanding begets unity" yelled at me (though I do like and agree with the message), only for it to have less than zero impact on this otherwise neat section of story. I thought we were gonna cure the Levin sickness with porxies. I thought the solution to the Endless was to only have as many activated as could be sustained. Nah. The characters all decided genocide was the answer. So long as you're sad about it. The overall lore of part 2 was absolutely fantastic though. Overall, I still enjoyed as I played through it (except part 1.5). Still had all of the neat surface-level moments. It just lacked the "ohmygosh THAT'S why that previous thing happened that way" moments, many of which players would miss the first time, but a theorycrafter puts 7 and 7 together and everyone else agrees that result makes way too much sense to be coincidence. Maybe this is what happens when you finally put an average story next to the greatness of the other expansions. There was also just... a weird focus on parents/caretakers? Bakool Ja Ja, Zarool Ja, Krile, Gulool Ja, Erenville, and especially Wuk Lamat all have massive parent issues.
I have to disagree with your Sequel to Dawntrail part. I really loved Shaaloani. As a native Texan, the zone really hit close to home and I would say it was the better part of Dawntrail's story.
Speak with Wuk Lamat again. The American accents sounded like I was playing Fallout 3 again. Most of the voice problems I had were with the horrible or nonexistent voice direction. I do agree that Caciua's voice didn't fit. Why is she the only voiced Viera that isn't Icelandic? Over all, I sense something severely rotten deep inside CBU3.
I think a lot of the rot is on the new localization, when it's about the weird accents and non-existent direction. Honestly I think DT is pretty abominable because they praise the inclusivity on Twitter and then gave the role of Wuk Lamat to one of the localization head's inexperienced, American voice actress friend and have her force a fake accent and then talk about how great tacos are, it feels like racial parody. Of course, this has little impact on the writing itself, that has it's own problems of putting the wrong people in charge of it.
@@bobbobberson4295 The VA is apparently Puerto Rican so it's not a terrible parody. At least not in this regard but definitely in others. The actual writers were the ones responsible for the repeated look into the camera and tell us that they are better now that they understand their people and their culture over and over and over. They're responsible for the hilarity of Bakool Ja Ja's instantaneous sympathetic turn into a good guy making him the only character in the MSQ that has any development. They're the ones that are responsible for the BS of Wuk Lamat knowing a hologram projected by an AI for a day and a half before "I feel your pain as if it were my own! I feel like I know them all! I finally understand what Sphene was trying to protect!" They are also responsible for the final trial being marred until the end of time in roulettes always and forever having a Wuk Lamat intermission so she can "Say what she needed to say" to the murder robot AI.
It's because Cachiua comes from fantasy American Southwest. The oddness stems from why Erenville would sound Nordic if he was born there too. His story doesn't match up
@@embersarcade To all comments here, attencion. This guy is a phobe, he has being harassing the voice actor of Wuk Lamat all over social media, saying awfull things of her. He has also being harassing anyone with agreedy of optimism of DT, and other known content creators. This is just not acceptable. If you dont believe, look on his social media, see the comments he does.
Good god why do FF knuckle draggers not understand that an expansion is more than the mediocre level up story you do for the first few days lmao. This is the game for the next 2 years and the content has been great.
15:05 His story arc is summarized by Yoshi-P in ex2 trial opening quest which implies that to get whats the deal with him you must read between the lines, but when story is too much into your face you can't possibly understand or see small nuances when elephants with cat years running into your room :D Like it was with Yotsuyu, Zoraal Ja is a victim of society he lived in but from another angle: where attention to his role as 'miracle' was too much and he became overburdened with expectations, right to the point when he started to hate everything that connects him with his father be it his desire for peace or how people view Zoraal Ja as extention of his father, you also can see similarities with problem raised in DRK questline, where Fray emerges as manifestation of protest and anger that We experienced being everyone's 'Weapon of Light', a savior and a slave who is obliged to live up to status of a hero and from whom something is always demanded no matter what. In other words, Zoraal Ja is Warrior of Light who lost fight to his inner darkness and that's what should've been explored more in MsQ or handed over to Ishikawa for resolving.
Dude that is some excellent insight. I quite get the Yotsuyu comparison but it's been a while since SB. However the DRK quest is still one of my favorite job quests and I did get that vibe that he lost the battle to expectations. And that would've been a much better story than go to x village and learn about y people and do z thing.
@@jg2096 I love DRK questline myself and absolutely convinced it should be part of msq because writers, mainly Ishikawa, likes addressing to its themes from time to time, and thats why I was kinda disappointed that they never let Wol to bring some insite on what's happening with Zoraal Ja because back in Stormblood we actually had a moment with Fordola about burdens and etc. To me it's looked like current writer just doesn't really know much about important details and role that Wol playes and experience that we possess and absolutely should demonstrate, but instead we just " :) " all the time in DT msq, ugh
Even more reason I'm 100% convinced the Dawnservant should have brought us as a neutral party who interacted with the claimants and only later chose one. Zoraal Ja finds a kindred spirit and actually tries to open up to us a little, making this more of a tragedy. Like, the basic structure of this story was very promising, the pieces were just placed in an unsatisfying way. Gives Three Houses vibes.
Honestly I didn't even see that. For me Zoraal Ja was a character I couldn't figure out at all. Yeah he couldn't live up to all the fame but apart from that that guy is a ghost. No character, no way to understand why he wants war for the whole world only to show them the importance of peace ( I mean that makes no sense?!)... honestly he's the worst written enemy ever so far. Yeah he might've been a victim... but that's just a minor side fact.
I suspect that a lot of the bad decisions of both _Endwalker_ and _Dawntrail_ stem from the overwork that came with Yoshi-P and his key people handling both 14 and 16 at the same time. The understudies were not properly supervised, leading to plenty of things that should have been caught (and would have been) slipping through.
@@Arabassassin13 yes, that's the reason why so many people criticize it, it's because I'm narrow minded. Oh wise one, tell me more about why DT is actually really good.
@@adognamedsally there’s a clear bias here because everyone was cheering zero for playing main character for post EW getting the story stolen from Uk and the shadow keeper but when it a trans lady with an accent everyone’s up in arms
I agree with everything in your review except for anything related to Shaaloani. Both the zone and the voice acting felt like the old west. I found the setting a blast so much so I want a normal horse in game now to just ride through the zone.
Dawntrail really does have amazing dungeons and trials, it’s a shame the MSQ and quest design sour that experience. Thankfully I don’t have to play through the MSQ again. Going forward raids and roulettes will be fun. Arcadian has been awesome so far and it feels like the post game is going to be a winner.
My main question for the expansion is mainly who actually made this? Cause I dont believe it was the team we've had for the last 10 years. The only part that felt like it was actually made by the 14 team was Living Memory and the Solution 9 stuff
Feels like staff were distracted with another game - like FF16, which only released a year ago, and they were still building content for. 14 feels like it was entrusted entirely new staff at the helm without much checking.
Insane that they forced Wuk Lamat to be part of the story after the rite of succession. How could they not see how trash Wuk Lamat was as a character? Her VA could have been Scarlet Johansson or Dame Judy Dench and it would have been terrible.
This is why I stuck to JP voices ever since ARR. Their voices are not only consistent, they have far better voice direction. As much as I hate Wuk Lamat butting into the final battle, at least there she screams and shouts at Sphene. The English VA just sounds like she's mildly emoting while having dentures stuck in her mouth with how muffled her tone is.
I randomly stumbles on this channel on a different video but i gotta say i completely agree with all the points you made ! Great analysys and great videos!
What I wish we got with the Endless is a definition of what it is to be alive in Etheris repeated. We have been given explanations on what a living thing is in FFXIV in the past, specifically how the soul works. This is all the way back in ARR and obvious not many people will remember this scene. And why Alexandria's new society is a bad thing for the world as a whole. The way the lifestream works is everything living has a soul that returns to the planet once they pass away. Once the soul is cleansed in the lifestream, it is then recycled to form new life. It's why Black Rose is such a devastating chemical weapon for the world as a whole. As it halts the aether in the body and in theory stops the soul from returning to the lifestream. The way the Alexandrians use souls is very similar to the lifestream but is a perversion of the process. We're also not told how use of the soul even works. Is it released once it's used? Or is it gone and will never be reincarnated? Also showing us the results of Zoraal Ja's actions would have gone a long way of making Living Memory a murkier grey situation. It runs on souls, Zoraal Ja nearly completely drained their reserves in his fight against us. Show us the results of that. Have us try to talk to an Endless only for that Endless to be turned off mid conversation. Have it happen to multiple NPCs in the background. Show us why Sphene needs to act on her genocidal plan now and why we can't get outside help to find an alternate solution rather than tell us we don't have another choice. People praise Living Memory when in all honesty, it's probably one of the weaker parts of the expansion as a whole story telling wise.
@@theztav You and many others. If that's what the goal of the story was supposed to be then I suppose they succeeded. But I don't get the impression that's what was supposed to be taken away. It's poorly written and what even is the Endless in relation to life? It's very poorly defined.
The main problem is that they never really say what part of the game's "souls" is the seat of consciousness. Is it the soul, or is it the "memories"? If it's the former, then Erenville's mom (and all the rest) are totally annihilated and Erenville will never see her again. No afterlife, no aetherial sea, nothing. Grim. On the other hand, if the consciousness is actually part of the "memories", then the whole process is pretty much uploading. The Endless are already arguably conscious AIs, despite what the mom kept insisting, and she herself certainly ACTS like a conscious being albeit a suicidal one. If they're uploaded consciousnesses, though, then we really did do a genocide of the Alexandrians, and did it without sufficient cause as we never bothered to check and see if regular Aether would work. (Which there is an abundance of in the Source and its reflections. The First alone could sustain the Endless indefinitely.)
_Valigarrrrrrrmanda._
Honestly - I'm gonna hold out and wait until the actual batch of gameplay content (field operations, alliance raids, space crafting, savage raids, ultimates, deep dungeons) for dawntrail to come out to give my thoughts on it fully.
People focus too much on the msq, when thats like content you do once or twice. The actual bulk of the expansion has yet to come.
People like to rag on stormblood for its msq, and yet its the expansion with some of the best gameplay content ever since, there they figured out both job balance and job identity. Raiding and the actual day to day mmo content was at its best despite the shoddy msq.
In the same vain people like to laud Heavensward for its MSQ despite the expansion being absolute garbage everywhere else. The game economy was wack, raiding was dead, and the meta forced players to abandon what they liked playing out of necessity, most of the systems they introduced is now abandoned for how bad it was.
So, yeah all in all i'm waiting for the actual meat of the expansion - the stuff you'll be doing for the rest of the patches since the msq is what 1/10 of an mmo player's actual play time
@@draco657 If they don't fire the writers, lead eng localizer, wuk's voice actor and voice director then this game is destined to be doomed regardless of the side content, remember this is FINAL FANTASY, it's about the story first for majority of the community.
@@SILVERONIN The MSQ is what? 1/10 of the game? That you only do once or twice. Most of the people coming back and paying subs are the raiders, those who do side content like fishing, deep dungeons, and field ops, and even those who RP.
A shoddy MSQ will not affect those people. Stormblood is a prime example of that, despite the MSQ the game was alive and well. As those "side content" was what kept people to come back
Heavensward despite all the praise the MSQ gets was unironically the only post-ARR expansion where the game almost died. Raiding was dead, and its big MMO field content failed (the diadem)
The "side content" is what attracts the MMO players, despite this being a final fantasy - its also an MMO. It lives and dies by the actual content of the game which you do over and over again. As that's why people pay for subs
Your nothing but a transohobe
What about that valley girl?
I wish we could've traveled with Estinien on his random adventures instead of Wuk Lamat. That man looked like he had more fun than I did in the MSQ.
All the other Scions looked to be having more fun. Urianger and Thancred seemed to be having a blast chilling with their college buddy, and Estinien was having a ball, meanwhile I'm "mentoring" (aka nodding and agreeing with) the writers' waifu. Thanks, guys, you're definitely filling the void that Ishikawa left.
@@CrispBaker "mentoring" aka babysitting. Man i got so tired with people saying to me "you're a mentor!" in the first week, and im glad that people got tired of the bs and just call it for what it is. And it's nothing like mentoring.
As I saw in a FF14 forum comment. " Someone did come to Tural to have the fantastic fun vacation we were promised, and they got to have it too. His name was Estinien."
@@Kanamon22 For serious. We weren't mentoring, we were mindlessly cheerleading. We never once tried to actually influence Wuk's behavior, or use our literal godslaying reality-saving experience to give her guidance pretty much ever (excepting a few times we decided to remind her to stop being such a whiny insecure baby). Every time she did some naive, stupid, or childish thing, we nodded and smiled and cheered her on. Oh, what's that, a continent-wrecking Vidraal just escaped captivity and is threatening to lay waste to your entire homeland, but some ass-backwards giants are bitching about that mountain being holy? Ya, you're right, we can definitely stop and talk and sooth their concerns and help heal them, instead of quickly beating them senseless , then going to murder the flying deathnoodle ASAP. What's that, the queen of an attacking nation, who openly admits to being the _willing consort_ of your psychotically genocidal brother, shows up and offers to show us around? Ya, I'm _sure_ she can be trusted, nothing could possibly go wrong. What's that, the bird peeps are literally starving to death because their crops won't grow? Ya, throwing a party for them sounds like a _great_ way to handle that situation (and then, of course, the writers insisted on hamfisting in that it _was_ in fact the solution, because wittle Wukiepoo can't be allowed to _fail,_ after all)
Like, can I just go on cowboy adventures with estinien and erenville????
When I finished Dawntrail, I simply thought: "Alright, Dawntrail is over. I can finally begin my own adventure."
That's exactly how 99% of players play WoW 😂
@@shakewellerExcept the story is not a mandatory component of WoW.
The fact that Krile, a main character, got like two voiced cutscenes with her parents, not only fleshing out Kriles goals and ambitions and reasons for going forward, but also dropping huge Source-lore about Lalas is fucking crazy. Wuk got SO MUCH voiced screentime and they throw away so many interesting story-beats by sidelining Krile like that.
Speeeeeeeeham listen to me.. i UNDERSTAND i do.. and i know you won't be swayed from your course.. but if there is no other way to resolve this.. then face me.. not as a ff14 lorenerd but as you..
ikr?
Hmm, it's almost like Wuk Lamat is THE protagonist of the expansion!
Someone created a graph that shows Wuk Lamat has over 7000 words in Dawntrail's story. Erenville has around 2000 and Krile has just above 1000. Its a real shame.
Square enix's big folly is they forget a character can be THE BIG character of the expansion without dedicating EVERY. SINGLE. SCENE. to them. let me enjoy my Krile lore drops without Wuk Lamat butting in with her "HUUUUHHHHH?"s. They did the same exact thing with Stormblood and sidelined SO MANY CHARACTERS to say "MAKE WAY FOR OUR SUPER SPECIAL UWU MC"
The worst part is that the tacos place does not have a seller of tacos.
They left that to the crafters to make, but honestly being able to buy tacos from a vendor would help the immersion!
I get that they wanted to prop up the crafters, but you could have the crafters make special seven layer tacos while the NPCs just sell regular tacos. Crafters even include free guac! What a bargain!
@@MahalGC and the players over price them to boot. I mean they aren't Chipotle levels of insanity but its pretty close.
Honestly :
the story of dawntrail is the story of endwalker. Meiteion is Sphene, Zoral ja is Zordiack. The begining of story is garlemald style (oh we have to know their own story to resolve a war..."
Gameplay : from mmo 2008... all mmo after 2013 (swtor and gw2) are much better, you are more "free", you can improvise some stuff
content : the same content, dj is always a long aisle with mob and 3 boss
fate/raid : the same, a plateforme and you trie to avoid aoe
The worst thing is the structure of the game can't evolve... because it's too rigid. When yoshi p says an "animation" cost a lot for the studio, sorry but make FF17 online ...
@@tuduermestrop8474 Endwalker at least had better writing. The guys they got to replace Ishikawa are atrocious.
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE KRILE'S TURN
Maybe next expansion…or the one after that…or the one after that…
Imagine this story if it had a focus on Erenville and Krile instead of fucking Wuk Lamat. Both of them had such potential to their stories yet got shafted so goddamn hard.
Wuk Lamat is a crappy protagonist. I wanted more Krile and Erenvile story!
Fun fact: Sphene, a character not introduced until ~two-thirds of the way through the expansion plotline, had almost 3 times as many spoken words as Krile, the _only_ character other than Wuk that was there with us for _every single one_ of the MSQ dungeons, and damn near every step in between, and the character whose backstory literally defined the _entire_ Golden City and Alexandria plot background.
@@KaedysKor Krile deserved better...
Simply put, the entire story needed a big rework. The rite of sucession arc would have worked way better if several narrative changes where made:
- keystones completely removed, the only goal to win is to find the golden city. Now the reason the promises visit the towns is mostly to research on Tural history hoping to find clues to the golden city.
- make the WOL asked to be an independant judge instead (this way the WOL can be put off the leash Wuk puts around them and actually have interactions with the other candidates).
- Have the WOL and Krile and Zoraak Ja get dreams about the golden city (Sphene subtly goading us into looking for the golden city, for her advantage off course) The plot twist would be that Sphene was manipulating Zoraal Ja with these visions. We know the Yok Huy got these visions so it's not a lore break.
- Make the Mamool plotline a slowly building up focal point of the first arc. Mamool had a lot of potential but it all felt so rushed, which hurt especially when the zone after is complete filler.
- Remove the Disney train building song entirely. Your Dawnservant just got killed why are you singing?!?
- Make it so Sphene is just an ai putting up a front to manipulate people (the queen's personality is just a front for the cold calculated software behind it). If you want you can still have the queen's personality seemingly clash with the ai (blame it on Dynamis or some such).
- Have Sphene.exe actually try to stop us in the last zone from shutting down her primary directive.
- Make it clear that Sphene.ai's plan had no chance to ever work. We just shut her down cause her attempt would still cause a lot of damage.
- Have Koana join us into the final zones instead of Wuk
All very well said. I think far too often Dawntrail seemed to not want me, the player, to actively play the game. I think more combat encounters and minigames could have gone a long way in fixing the gameplay to cutscene ratio. Why was the train attack on Vanguard not a playable instance or minigame? What about a cooking minigame? Or having us actually fight during the assault on the capital?
I hope CS3 hears the feedback on this. While it wouldn’t have improved the narrative, being able to directly interact with the moments that you mentioned would have made the experience more enjoyable.
We have Air Force One in the Gold Saucer and have had it for a long while. But instead of getting a reskinned version of that we're just plopped down on the train in an uninteractive cutscene. And a lot of other cutscenes are like this. Absolutely baffling decision making
You know, Erenville's "reservations" about Wuk Lamat in 6.55 take on a whole new meaning now that we know the 7.0 story.
Unintentional I'm sure, but it still works out.
"She's a long-standing acquaintance, nothing more." Feeling that.
I'm convinced the reason we're always made to go with Wuk when the group splits or why 6 fucking scions decide to defend a gate from literally nothing is because everyone else in the group is just as tired of Wuk as the player is and knows we literally can't speak up about being forced to go with her all the time lol.
After rolling credits and spending some time in the endgame all I can say is that I really wish they just made Arcadion a giant anime tournament arc and focused on that instead
I couldn’t agree more.
That would have actually been interesting and fun 😂
Ngl the whole arcadion story had me more engaged than the whole msq of downtrail and cared more about the characters in the arcadion plot too lol
Hopefully post-msq will be mostly based on S-9 and sorts
thanks for confirming the only reason people hate dt is because they love slop lol
"We cant have a world ending threat every expansion" Puts a world ending threat at the very end of the expansion.
That was the most disappointing part to me. It's the whole MCU endgame discussion yet again. "You guys don't like it because you just want bigger and bigger stakes!"
NO! We fucking wanted smaller stakes, more personal stories. We wanted to be involved. Instead, we could be replaced by anyone of the Scions and nothing would change for 90% of the story, then it fucking ends with ALL THE REFLECTIONS BEING IN DANGER. Stupid nonsense.
@@babaXIII It wasnt a world level threat, your on denial
@@babaXIII It really feels like they think the community are all shonen weebs who NEEDS this gigantic threat to even feel any semblance of enjoyment, when really, those people would've already tuned out 50 quests ago lmfao
Though i think it's not THAT bad considering the WoL basically just solos her, meaning she's not exactly a big leap in danger compared to Hades and Endsinger, her plan never would've worked and if it would NEVER gotten to the point where she'd destroy all the reflections unimpeded when every reflection still around would probably have heroes like the Scions to try and stop her. But it's still very cheap the way they build it up as such when it wasn't really necessary
@@fredy2041 Sphene literally says she is going to wipe out all life on our earth and the earths of every reflection to keep powering her purgatory.
Yes, it was a world ending threat.
@fredy2041SHE WAS GOING TO BASICALLY EAT OF OUR SOULS AND THE SOULS OF ALL REFLECTIONS. WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING, BOY?
SPHEEEENEEEE LISSSSEEN TO MEEEEEEE
Got it all wrong you gotta make it lowercase 🤣
Wuk Lamat said calmly.
SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN
I am actually haunted by that sound. It comes to me in my dreams. You know when a kid calls their mom over and over and the mom finally says, "WHAT?" and the kid has nothing to say? That's what that scene reminded me of. Even Sphene asks, "Why are you telling me this?" No one cares if you understand them when you're beating them to death with your axe, Wuk.
SPLEEEEEEEEN
The game aside, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate how well you articulate your points. Whether one agrees with your purview or not, the depth and construction of your critiques leave only room for real conversation. That's a skill I wish other content creators for this game took more seriously, but sets you apart. Thanks for the video and look forward to more from you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to make this video. I've been playing XIV since the release of 1.0 so I am a HUGE fan but I couldn't agree with you more about DT. There are just a few things I need to get off my chest:
1. Simply walking away from the Golden City and going sightseeing. Y'shtola would never have left an unopened gate. I blame Wuk Lamat.
2. Galuf Baldesion and his crew were given the key but couldn't figure out what it was so Gulool Ja Ja simply puts it in his vault. Bearing in mind Galuf was the founder of the Students of Baldesion whose purpose is research and discovery of new phenomena. Zoraal Ja's sidekick not only knows where the key is but also what it does.
3. Ketenramm didn't think it was worth mentioning he got attacked and his tablet thingies stolen. Also, why did his face look human if he was a roegadyn but in the flashback he had a roegadyn face?
3. Our character sees Sphene in Tuliyolal and doesn't mention it.
Sloppy and illogical just so the plot can progress. I'm not mad, just disappointed. I blame ChatGPT. And Wuk Lamat.
We could've also delve into the world of hockey 🏒 (dungeon, MSQ, 24man dungeon etc ..) for patch 7. But instead, we got this.
I have to agree with most of the points raised in the video. I liked fantasy Texas though, if only because it gave me a breather from Wuk Lamat. It's probably the worst part of the MSQ because it made me keenly aware of how much more I enjoyed the narrative when she wasn't around. Even if the plot was nonsensical (rubber bullets? REALLY???) I didn't really register it as bad because of how relieved I felt.
The kidnapping when we were with Koana made me want to switch sides. He had more and better development during that short sequence than Poochie Lamat had during the entire runtime. Much better voice performance, too. Senna wasn't ready for this.
The worst part about the rubber bullets is that they emphasized it at least 4 times.... only for it to mean ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING. The duel ended with the gun being shot out of his hand; meaning that it literally would not have mattered if the ammunition was real.
All that was needed was a tiny blood splatter from his hand and no mention of rubber bullets and bam. Giant contrived mess is gone and nothing would have changed. If anything it would have improved that part as it shows the kid is the better man by winning the duel AND sparing the Vulture.
I couldn't stop laughing at that remark. What kind of mentality do you need to have to say, in a cowboy place that is riddle with bandits and later on an invasion, that their guns ARE FREAKING TOYS. It was so dumb I couldn't believe they had actually wrote that.
@@StartouchArts I think its part of the disneyficiation. See how we barely kill anyone in the fates for example? We make them RUN AWAY. But this is just my tinfoil theory, rubber bullets, what a dumb idea.
I like how the prevailing sentiment was exactly that, that we can't have a universe-ending threat for every expansion, and then Hiroi did it anyway.
Your review actually got me thinking again about WoL's duty as a side character and low stake threats, since it did happen quite a few times in DT, it's just that it was in the side quests.
The quest that stuck out most for me was the quest with Shunye and Uvlo, the mining/botany role quest givers. You were presented with a problem to solve, and then that problem led into a more personal problem for the involved characters, and you were also presented with reasons and background lore for why the characters are there in the first place, and ON TOP OF THAT it included nice touches to make it personal to your character if you were also a Viera. It stayed focused and didn't overstay its welcome. It was genuinely wrapped up like a nice little package.
I said this earlier in someone's chat stream, that when the gatherer quests are more engaging than the MSQ, there is something wrong.
DT has introduced two new ways for me to play. One: Skipping cutscenes and story. Two: learning how to switch to Japanese voice acting
The train scene should have been playable as well as the invasion ala the lunar primals
Japanese voice acting helps with Wuk Lmao's cringe inducing delivery it does nothing for her cringe inducing writing.
Strangely enough the German voice acting is really good as well. The voice actress for Wuk in German is phenomenal.
The MSQ was baffling to me. It felt like they hired writers from a morning cartoon for children aged 3-7. The way things were framed and executed, almost every major plot point falls apart if you just think about for a minute or 2 or think back to other plot points that contradict them and should not be possible if other plot elements and characters exist as the story presents them.
And the audio problems, from the very glaringly bad voice acting from Wuk Lamat even though they know she has like 95% of all the screen time in the story and enjoyment of the MSQ very heavily was on her shoulders to carry as a result, it felt like no care went into the voice acting and direction. And I love Soken, most of the music was great, but for the main theme to be so jarring with terrible vocals and mixing, I just cannot wrap my head around how that could even happen. That woman singing the verses sounded insane, there is no world where that does not sound awful, it was pitchy AF and it's the main song, it closes out the MSQ and it's a disaster.
I'm so mixed on DT because it's like half of it was amazing but arguably the biggest thing they needed to nail, in the MSQ, almost couldn't have been worse. I could forgive it if there were some plot holes that you really had to seek out to realize but so much of it was nonsense. It felt like the writers and whoever decided how to set up the scenes, didn't care or even try to make it make sense.
The way they obviously sidelined all the actual Scions for Living Memory was just atrocious, at least one of them would have said "THIS IS GENOCIDE ARE YOU KIDDING ME" and the writers didn't know how to handle that so they just sidelined the lot of them
@@CrispBaker You'd think we, the WoL, who killed Emet Selch for doing precisely what we end up doing here, would have something to say.
@@TheAsj97 The fact that they had a "but thou must!" railroad prompt for committing an actual genocide is probably the most egregious moment in the entire MSQ, going back to the start of ARR. I'd take the weakest part of Doma over the dog's breakfast they made of that. You can tell Ishikawa was nowhere near that mess.
@@CrispBaker It hurts how badly they screwed Krile over especially. She's the one character that actually had a direct tie to what was happening in the second half but no, everything is Wuk Lamat. All her contributions were sidelined to force Wuk Lamat or baby Gulool, she got a cute, tiny story section and then nothing. Genuinely, she could have been cut completely and it would have changed nothing. And the other Scions literally just felt like they put them there just to make a narrative excuse for duty support NPCs.
@@mismismism The second half should have had about half as much Wuk and 3x as much Krile and Erenville. Problem is that the writers were too fixated on their OC waifu to bother with the characters that somebody else created.
I mostly agree but Shaaloani is my favorite zone. The bad voice acting, the obvious story, it was a spaghetti western exactly like you'd expect from a non-American making a Western, and after the weirdness of the Rite arc it was nice to actually get a beach episode.
The music and visuals in that zone are honestly incredible as well. Really hard to make a desert area look that good, just take Thanalan for example. I was having a blast in that zone finally getting away from Wuk. Estinien with his ridiculous cameos, and traveling with Erenville, a character who actually understood we could absolutely END anyone who stood in our way. It wasn't until we just randomly let the enemy get away and the whole thing with rubber bullets that I started to roll my eyes again.
Thank goodness I missed the "Smile" song. Don't think I could've handled that after the ammount of cringe and spoon feeding I suffered through.
Koana was the rightful Dawnservant, he just needed a course in social interaction. Kinda like how Ascians should have invented Mental Health support and counselling for Fandaniel.
The more I think on it, the more unbelievable it is that Koana wasn’t the main character. He was already in Sharlayan while we were, why didn’t we journey with him instead?
@@embersarcade I never considered that. Good catch
@@fredy2041 I hope this is satire....
@@embersarcade needed to show off female hrothgar
@@embersarcade Plus, he seemed more approriate to bring into the high-tech environment of the last 2 zones. It would have been intresting to see the character that had put his hopes in technology rather than humanity and tradition see how far technology can be used to pervert the human and spiritual existance that alexandrian tech does to memories, the soul, and the cycle of life. Would have been neat to see how he would react and reflect on this. But Axe and friendship go burr I guess...
Never forget... Bakool Ja Ja stepped on your Taco. He must pay for that.
When I heard that Smile song I immediately thought that it was a song that belonged in a movie like The Greatest Showman or something.
100% Corporate DEI slop. I could imagine this song in a Coca Cola commercial being sung during the BLM protests by a fat black woman with an afro holding up the Black Power fist the entire time; maybe a crystal flute too.
This song was WWWWAAAYYYYYYYY TOO MUCH "black church gospel" for no reason at all
had major Disney vibes to it too
Got major Lion King "Circle of Life" vibes from it.
I dunno, for some reason i get the idea of some kind of Telethon where they get a bunch of celebrities together to answer phones for donations and then at the end they all get up together to sing some sappy song for some cause like saving the rain forest or the whales or something like that.
Nah, don't insult the Greatest Showman like that lol
That movie actually had some good music
I completely agree with all you said here, minus one thing. Shaaloni was actually the best part of the expansion because wuk lamat wasn't present.
And the fact that I felt her presence so overbearing, that I actually enjoyed the low point simply because of her absence, you know it's kinda of a shitty character.
Also mate, fantastic video!
lol wise words.
Shaaloani felt like how the level 90-91 quests should've been. Slightly all over the place but should lead you to characters that move the story forward, not only for tbis expansion, but future ones too. Kind of like ARR was at the beginning and the you met the 1 Scion and then the whole group, etc.
They should "get rid" of the Scions and move us to be with a new group with fresh new chars and have a cameo here and there with the old team, maybe a few of them that didn't have much development or weren't Scions, like Krile and Erenville, could be a part of that new team too.
I loved cowboy town because it finally felt like I got to start my actual vacation without needing to babysit.
Same lmao. I have been saying the exact same thing. The fact that Shaaloani was amongst my favourite parts of the game simply because I got to adventure around a bit with Erenville really speaks volumes as to how suffocating Wuk Lamat is.
Also like how you can’t go into Shaaloni or anywhere north in the beginning thinking it’s some crazy stuff up there. Only to find out it’s a bunch of cat guys playing a western (with zero tension) while talking in “murican” voices that are more stereotypical than believable. Koji you should know better man you had to have heard these characters before this shipped.
I actually liked Shaaloani when playing through the expansion, but in hindsight I think that's mostly because it felt like I was finally free of the ball and chain that was Wuk. That part of the main quest was mostly just filler until they could throw the actual plot at the player.
What I believe is that Dawntrail's story was put into the backseat as Final Fantasy XVI was in its storyboarding phases. The main writers for Dawntrail both came from writing beast tribe scenarios, with one of them helming the story of the Sorrow of Werlyt. Meanwhile, XVI got the writer of Heavensward.
...XVI was in production actively during Stormblood and Shadowbringers, so it's storyboard was done way before Dawntrail was even a neuron firing off in anyone's mind. The writers were chosen because Ishikawa wanted to pass the torch (and because she was promoted, and the JP business promotion stuff is a whole other can of worms in regards to "stop doing what you're good at and love doing to manage other people not as good at what you do.")
The worst part is that the core narrative of 16 is the same as for 14. The villain is an ancient life-form who seeks to regain his lost glory by sacrificing the world that his kind created. Now that Yoshi P is the head honcho for both of the games it really leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Dawntrail story checklist
Speak with Wuk Lamat
Ignore Krile
Speak with Wuk Lamat
Turn the player character into an npc
Speak with Wuk Lamat
Ignore Erenville
Speak with Wuk Lamat
Turn Sphene into a giant missed opportunity
Speak with Wuk Lamat
And do not forget the most important thing SPEAK WITH WUK LAMAT
Damn you for making me listen to that gawd-awful midpoint interruption in the last trial, lmao. I agree with you 100%. You nailed pretty much everything that is good, bad, and ugly with this expansion. I never disliked anyone so much as Wukface. And I literally asked my screen at the credits "wtf is this music" lol. I was all ready to explore a new continent with Krile and help her find her grandfather and to visit Erenville's home town, and bump into the locals along the way. Really didn't want to get involved with more political shenanigans and all the rot that came with it. I can only pray that someone from Yoshi's team sees this video. Your criticisms and observations are on point. I know it takes time to build up to the heights we just left, but this is not how you do it. 😑
_Spheeeeeeene. Listen to meeee._
One thing that still blew my mind was after following Cahciua while she's controlling the outrunner, we don't know anything else at all about her except her distinct voice and cheery personality. Later on when you see her in Living Memory for the first time, that cutscene isn't voiced and really dulled the moment. Sure, you've probably figured out that's where she was, but it felt like a completely different character after getting to Living Memory. Any cutscene after meeting her, there's zero personality that she had before and comes off almost monotone and dull. And also, it felt like her audio was just way louder than everyone else overall.
Still not having voice acting for all the scenes while other MMOs way smaller than Ff14 have even side quests voice acted in 2024 is criminal in my opinion.... They always make up excuses for it, but the real reason is just because it's cheaper this way and nothing else... Same thing with Viera hats... In 6 years even if they do 1/day,they would be done, we are at a point where they don't even talk about that.... Square Enix runs this game with the bare minimum budget while the profit is being put in their other projects...
Also she creates a central conflict: she says that the Endless aren't sentient and real, but her own existence and behavior calls that into question. At least Erenville should have said "uh, you seem pretty real, are you sure that you aren't just delusional", but the writers didn't know how to answer that so they kept it out
I'm guessing that the game went through extensive rewrites, and while "animating" those cutscenes is really simple as it's all canned animations, the voicework is a bigger problem. They couldn't get people back into the booth to re-record the audio for all the different localized voices, so they had to just go with what they had.
Still, it's a bad look considering that even Genshin Impact manages to have fully-voiced cutscenes, and you don't have to pay a monthly fee for that, let alone the base game and expansion costs. Just more proof that Square uses FF14 to pay for all its dumb experiments with NFTs and AI, and starves the actual game of resources. (Like, say, competent writers to replace Ishikawa.)
good observation
i was stunned that her reveal scene wasn't voiced lmao
Your review pretty much mirrors my own sentiments about Dawntrail so far as a whole. There were flashes of brilliance peppered in the MSQ and the locales were pretty nice, but story is a literal make or break because it has to bend over for the narrative black hole that was Wuk Lamat. Also, in terms of VAs, this is the reason I stuck to using JP voices since ARR.
The other problem I've had is that the story beats Dawntrail tries to tread were things we already went through.
Our WoL sets foot in a brave new land, giving us a chance to learn of the cultures and people? Shadowbringers.
A new female character introduced that is thrust into a role of responsibility they probably aren't the least bit ready for? Lyse.
A new male character who wants to do what is best for his people in his country? Hien.
There's also the fact that when we later find out about Sphene's "immortality" it feels like a bit of an odd choice to have Otis sacrifice himself. It feels like a cheap ploy for tugging at our heartstings.
I also play with JP VAs, they did a really good job in DT too
@@kleeneonigiri Sadly that can only get them so far, considering the MSQ... It's night and day how much effort was put into the voice acting direction between all the available voice options... except for the EN version of Wuk Lamat's.
Like, she got spat on by a llama and all she showed was mild annoyance. Every other VA? They were screaming in sheer disgust which sold me on the scene more. Even for the last trial, as much as I hated her butting in, every other VA? They nailed the emotion they wanted to convey. EN version? "SPEEEN!" XD
@@SilverNightbane Yeah, watching some videos I saw the big difference XD Feels more like a narrator who's not being involved
@@kleeneonigiri A friend of mine made a meme about it. EN VA is just tweeting while everyone else is unleashing Inner Release.
After finishing the MSQ, I've realized two things: 1) Wuk Lamat needs to be louder, more happy-go-lucky, and have access to a time machine, and 2) Any time Wuk Lamat's not on screen, everybody should be asking "Where's Wuk Lamat?"
A big problem in DT as well I think is it cribbed too hard into XIV's own tropes like 'friendship is power', as well as severe weaknesses in its MSQ gameplay flow such as poor cutscene pacing and lack of interactivity. Probably the BIGGEST issue is it's just... too damn long. It has some not bad parts but as a whole I do not want to play it on my alt, which is crazy.
The silver lining of DT's very 'divisive' response is that so many of these issues which have existed for so long are now so squarely in the spotlight that, hopefully, they will finally be addressed and we can move on in patch content to better stuff. I'm PARTICULARLY glad that there has been such a strong (although 'relative') rejection of how sidelined the WoL was in the story. Hopefully they re-discover their courage to put us out there again in 7.X and 8.0.
its genuinely insane to me how people who have gotten to dawntrail still think shit like friendship is power is ffxivs big trope please exercise some media literacy before preaching about it
@siduxjxhdgzhdjxhxuuxxyhgg1079 I'm using friendship is power here in a very broad sense, obviously there's more angles but in general if the stories message can be boiled down to "we are stronger together" that is something that has been treaded out way too often in ff to carry an MSQ.
Honestly, I kind of enjoyed not being the main focus for part of the expansion. After how heavy the last xpac was narratively I thought of the first half of this as kind of a fun vacation thing, focused more on exploring a new land and it's peoples while helping a possible friend. And with that view in mind, it kind of fit. I get it wasn't for everyone and obviously anyone who dislikes it is free to do so, but I just super enjoyed that take.
"I'm tired of a story that was written to conclusion long before the Warrior of Light set foot on the boat."
I don't mind that the Warrior of Light wasn't the focus. What I do take major issue with is how little our existence mattered for any of the story. The only times we even mattered were the 99 and 100 Trials. If you are going to make us sit through 20+ hours of cutscenes, I damn well expect to be doing something to make my presence here more than a simple formality.
@@kuronanestimarenot even as a formality. Felt like we were the character in a bad movie that was “just there”
You say that Smile plays after a genocide. But the game refused to even entertain the moral complexity and themes of transhumanism it itself sets up, so it doesn't even consider what we did a genocide at all. These memories can hear, feel, think. They can experience new things and even turn against their own creator. BUT THEY'RE NOT ALIVE SILLY, THEY HAVE NO SOULS. It's just a cemetery. It baffles me how people can just go along with this idea so easily, after playing Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Are *we* not the fragmented, incomplete shadow versions of an original? But we still have value? Pale imitations. That's what Emet called us. And he was wrong. DIDN'T WE SPEND THE ENTIRETY OF THE LAST TWO EXPANSION EXPLORING THIS?
To be fair we are FRAGMENTED versions of the original pieces of that same entity. These were just stored memories like basic AI, basically guessing how one might react to people as they WERE.
So in essence they are but of a shell of the person, whereas Emet THINKS were are shells despite just being fragmented versions of the original. Also the fact that they made stopping them so urgent due to what it costs to keep them like that is why they had to go. But who knows, maybe they might explore it more in the patch quests.
@@Akantorz They are simulacra created by the AI based on the memories. The AI does not control them. How do we know this? The AI tries to stop us from shutting down the terminals while the citizen of Living Memory are largely OK with it that.
And simulacra based on memories *are* people, at least if the Omicron Society quests are anything to go by.
@@zerocold1924
Yes, the AI doesn't control them, but that doesn't mean that some AI using memories hasn't crafted them into existence.
The difference between the Omicron and these living memories is that the Omicron seem to be replicas of these beings given life by Dynamis, which could be rebirthing them given that they are not in the Aether lifestream.
The memories can only exist by STEALING life from others to continue and then move on, whereas souls in the lifestream can be reborn, they might not have their old memories, but they can access their same persona. As someone grows in the world, their experiences can shape how they behave, whereas the memories can only behave the way THAT specific person would have done things.
So as explained before, they are just copies, unable to formulate something new, only make choices based on what knowledge their old memories had. That's why all the quests involved completing tasks based on what they knew that they always wanted to do and then they were fine with dissipating.
They’re more like the memory crystal phantoms that you encounter in the final Pandemonium raid series or the shades in the DRK Stormblood quests. But yes, it would have been nice to have a discussion about it with everyone, perhaps with the player’s WoL chiming in with those examples depending on your side quest progress.
There's a whole arc in Endwalker's post-game about how the Dynamis-generated beings in Ultima Thule are actually sentient and worth helping and protecting. The Endless have a much better claim to existence than they do, enough that we really do have to question if the game forces the players to commit a genocide. But the writers weren't competent enough to handle that question, so they just ignored it and sidelined all the characters who'd logically bring it up.
Succinct and accurate.
Like most, I was confused, if not stunned by the narrative choices made here. Who's our antagonist now? I think this is the first time in the game's history where we have almost nothing to go off of for what the patches are going to hold. We have one MacGuffin. That's it. We barely learned about the three antagonists we were presented with, one per trial (gotta stick to a formula), and now we have nothing left of intrigue. It's impressive that they were able to write such a solid story for the raid series, but miss by such a margin on the MSQ. Why is it that they felt the need to hastily tell and wrap up two complete stories, when one left on a small cliffhanger would have been more than sufficient?
A lot of "What ifs" to follow, but I've been struggling with understanding how they went about things, in light of some alternatives.
Wuk Lamat, bless her soul, was the wrong protagonist here. This was Krile and Erenville's story, through and through. I welcome the WoL taking a back seat, but to whom? I didn't even like the premise in 6.55 -- since when was the WoL interested in politics? They gave us the decision to say we didn't wanna go, and we got G'raha to drop us a "hear, feel, think" reference? It all feels so forced, in a bad way.
Why couldn't we spend the expansion working with Krile to uncover the mysteries of her grandfather? Maybe seed some info of her parents along the way -- maybe Galuf actually had some sort of prolonged contact or something and left us notes. Why wasn't this Galuf's guiding Krile to uncover her history? Give Erenville more limelight as we uncover a history he has on Tural, visiting old friends and struggling with his estrangement. Have us meet his mom at least once before everything goes down, so we actually feel some sort of way about her too. She's just as intrigued about the world, why couldn't we run into her on occasion as we ran about following Galuf's footsteps with Krile with Erenville as our guide?
Use the Societies system to innovate on the MSQ a little. Have Wuk Lamat be the B-story, and if you do 2-3 questlines per area, you build enough rep to get Wuk Lamat support from the societal delegation. If you don't get enough, Koana wins Dawnservant for the time being, some repercussions are felt during some cutscenes, but nothing so drastic that CB3 can't manage it. Not looking for a Visual Novel level of branching, just, small stuff to shake things up a bit. Wuk Lamat could eventually rise to be the Dawnservant along side Koana like they established, just, shake up the path to get there a little.
The decision for us to not be involved in the attack on Tuliyollal? Why? We could easily have had that as a dungeon or MSQ story-mode (could you imagine role-playing as Bakool Ja Ja?), with a trial to fight off Zoraal Ja. Break the formula, make it a pyrrhic victory, still let major characters meet the long sleep, but then we'd feel something, any sort of attachment to these antagonists. Give Sphene 3 patches of content to simmer, let us grow to like her a bit, there was no need to end it here.
They had threads of gold to weave this story with, and they binned it all for the sake of rushing through two stories, front to back, with new everything. It's just so strange.
I wonder if we'll ever touch on the lightning-sick kids again.
I'm just, baffled.
...
...
...
But the combat? The combat. So good. See you workers out there when we strike down Queen Honey B. Lovely. /bgm 100000000
Dawntrail felt like it wanted to have its cake and eat it too. It tried so hard to crib off the emotional impact, crescendos, and narrative highs of Shadowbringers, without any of the necessary development that ShB got prior to release, and in the span of only 1/3 of the MSQ's runtime at that. I remember how Heavensward ended the base expac's MSQ with Thordan slain, but Nidhogg was still out there body-napping Estinien. There were hooks and places left to go that they couldn't just cram into the base release, so they allowed it to stretch into the patch content, and it was marvelous. I hope and pray that these dullard writers get sacked and Yoshida steps in to right this ship before we move on to the next expac.
call me weird but i pretty much stopped caring when i got to the quest to pick up bird shit. i dont know why but after that i just gave up on DT altogether, like there was a button that just switched on or something
I don't recall collecting birdshit in DT, I do however recollect collecting dung in Stormblood while we were waiting for the Naadam to start. Least there it was interesting seeing how they cope with lack of wood.
That wasn't such a bad quest, it followed with throwing them on fire at the bandits camp and causing a huge mess :p
@@Zriatt funny how the xaela tribes in stormblood were more entertaining/lore enriched than almost all of dawntrail. I’ve never wanted to skip a cutscene so much in 11 years of playing this game until DT. Makes me wonder what was going through the writers minds when they wrote this atrocious mess.
It was that moment you realized they were starting to cater more to the WoW transplants than the players that grew the game and kept it alive. DT is spit in the eye for everyone who kept XIV alive from original release to ARR, especially players that stayed during the end of HW and Stormblood when this game should have died.
@@GuruGodPlays But is it right to say "should have died" when it actually grew into MMORPG that is still presently arguably better than the all other alternatives. Even despite some story mishaps of DT.
We need Ishikawa back. This is a wake up call for Square Enix.
Might have to comeback to do some damage control to the MSQ.
That's how I felt when playing it: I, the player, the character, I was just a camera. A camera that focus on Wuk Lamat, she is the central character, she is the mighty, she is the coolest. Me, the player, I'm just a follower of her, a side character like all the other scions. I did not teach her anything, don't give her any help, she is totally capable of everything herself. Square Enix should remove that character with a sword on its shoulder in the expansion logo and place Wuk Lamat there instead, because the game is all about her. I, player, I'm completely appalled on how unimportant and trivial my presence in this expansion is. I'm sure I'm not going to buy another expansion for this game. The thing that would bring me back to this game is if Wuk Lamat dies, preferable in my hands and no other. Nothing else will bring peace to me.
Wol stands for: Wuk of Lamat
Wuk lamat would destroy you
@@user-dw8bt8qj5g Could you please not use me for you self gratification fetish? Its just gross and I'm not interested in your furry fantasy.
I was putting up with it right up to the major scene which leads to you heading to the Night City location. That one scene where no one does anything for no reason literally killed all ability to take this expansion seriously. There was no explanation given to letting HIM walk away after that event. Not even the flimsiest of excuses. Not one.
Dawntrail's story = wuk lamat brainless nonsense followed by a redo of Emet selch and Shadowbringers.
cheap emet selch except this time the wol commits the genocide
@@innocentperson2232 Sphene is trying to genocide living people to power the fake computer memories.
I just beat Dawntrail like 30 minutes ago, and this video sums up pretty much all my thoughts. Although, I will say a huge thing is the writer, Hiroi, is completely incapable of putting himself in the characters' shoes when writing their dialogue, making everybody sound samey and devoid of personality. Everybody speaks in a unique way thanks to their past experiences and personalities and who they are as people; but no one in Dawntrail is like this, everyone's interchangeable and nothing in the story would be altered for it.
"I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you".
Emet-Selch lied. I felt like a genocidal during the Living Memory bit.
We became what we sought to destroy.
Not for me. It's just Memories being played by tech. An AI with the memories of a dead loved one would not be the dead Person. Same thing here.
those were esentially really convincing AI avatars. So no, you're not actually guilty of murder for killing them. You were esentially turning off a video game console when you did the whole living memory thing.
@@cabl7787 Exactly
God damn. People are siding with chatgpt/AIs with input memories. Meanwhile everyone is ignoring all those souls still trapped in the regulators and soul cells. Sheesh.
Wuk Lamat, is Dawntrail's Mary Sue character.
She does everything right, everyone loves her, and she always gets her way.
No, she isnt a Mary sue kid, she isnt even as abd as Lyse
@@fredy2041 was Lyse in dawntrail?
@@fredy2041not nearly as bad as Lyse because Lyse made space for other characters. Stormblood wasn’t about Lyse, she was just a part of it. Dawntrail is about Wuk Lmao and only about her pretty much.
@@fredy2041Lyse actually had moments of weakness though, like when Rhalgr's Reach was attacked by the Garleans and she was helpless to do anything
@@chelsthegameruiner8669 She didnt
It’s a shame when the MSQ gets “good”, Final “Fantasy” XIV proceeded to spit in the face of FFIX fans. No real bosses from the old game, the references often weren’t directly from the game to begin with, making Lindblum some mustache twirling super power, playing IX tracks while sitting in “We have Night City at Home”.
And to top all that off? They went out back behind Heritage Found and old yeller’d my childhood with those ruined Alexandrian remains, and literally turned the rest of the callbacks into a netrunner theme park. The one thing I can appreciate them doing from IX that I didn’t even catch right away, was the frog out in the “marshes” in Kozama’uka, the rest of it just… ugh. Even Alexandria the dungeon, reskin of the last dungeon in 6.0 that it was, could’ve been awesome. Instead we fight an antivirus. No Antlion, no Beatrix, no Cleyrans, no Meltigemini, nooottthhhiiiinnnnggggg from IX to call back to. Such a shame. Oh and Wuk Lamat really irritated the crap out of me 😂
They should have called it Dawntrope. Whoever wrote the MSQ must think Nartuo is the peak of storytelling.
There were 2 main writers for Dawntrail. One of them specialized in Beast Tribe Quests and the other one was the one who wrote The Sorrow of Werlyt. You can pretty much guess which half was written by who...
the dude that voiced Wuk Lamat was horrendous!
I loved Nartuo!
@@gzuskreist1021 yet more proof that a man shouldn't be voice acting a female. for some reason females can do male characters fine, but men can't do female characters.
Wuk just sounded like a 13 year old boy the entire time and it actively made me hate her until i switched to JP and then hated her ideology and worldview
@@gzuskreist1021 Ok transphobe
The city is under attack!
Every MMO: Time for a battle
14: Never take out your weapon, run away.
There's corrupt sheriffs in Texas!
Every MMO: Raid the bandit hideout
14: Put bird feces in a bag.
The main villain has been revealed!
Every MMO: Time to fight!
14: Let's learn about their culinary history!
I argue that Wuk Lamat actually starts out in danger of not winning the rite. I feel that feeling is negated a fair bit just because we're the ones who are accompanying her, so we know exactly what the result will be later.
I agree there should have been more emphasis on threats to her success, and yeah the xibruq pibil section could have been an interesting opportunity. I don't think a lot of people minded just because Koana is such a likeable character, so the opportunity for more time with him was liked.
Second half really needed so much less Wuk Lamat, especially in the final trial because my reaction was surprise, but unlike when Zenos came to our rescue in Endwalker, it quickly changed to "why is it just Wuk Lamat?" like where are the other scions? I get she's the main character basically but there's way too much of her second half.
Damn bro this was such a thorough review. Good that you came at it from so many angles positively and critically - musically, tone of the story, characters, raid/dungeon content, etc.
I hear a lot of my friends absolutely coping about "This expansion was never gonna measure up to Endwalker" As if thats an acceptable excuse for why the msq is absolute garbage. As if its some kind of obvious rule that a new saga has to be painfully boring, horribly paced and childish before it can be interesting and exciting. Frankly I was embarrassed at quite a lot of the cutscenes, especially when smile played. Also Wuk Lamat sounds like my Prison girlfriend
Yeah.. maybe you should look at who voices wuk lamat
@@DTCTVP okay but that's voice direction problem her voice acting is fine and I would argue her direction is also fine there is nothing wrong. yes you can personal not like the voice but that is a you problem.
@@qxsiz1502 Transphobe
@@DTCTVP he didn't sound like a woman "foreign" or not. sounded straight up like a 17 year old boy trying to do a female voice.
real women should feel insulted
@@DTCTVP The diverse accents of Tural being played by a white woman doing a put-on brazilian accent, that's funny.
I agree with most of what you have to say here (I don't think the voice acting was 'that' horrible, but then the story was so bad I probably didn't notice.) But I think what sums my feelings up for Dawntrail is that I have played all of the MSQ up to this point multiple times, with no story skips, and I enjoyed it. Even Stormblood and ARR have their moments and while points can be frustrating, that's still engagement.
I have absolutely no desire to play through Dawntrail again and watch my Warrior of Light make vapid smiles at Wuk Lamat through the entire narrative. They should have left her back at the castle in part two and let us explore the final zones with Erenville and Krile alone.
JP voices are always great.
I will say, as a personal gripe, I can't stand how FF9 was treated.
FF12 has it's entire lore, plot, and characters just copy pasted into Eorzea.
FF6 has several bosses, a kingdom, and the child of a major character.
FF8 had an entire raid series around it, thematically speaking.
FF4 had the entirety of the patch content.
And all of them felt done with love and adoration for the source content.
FF9? You get a broken down, destroyed model of one city, lip service to another one, and that's it. Why was Otis not named Adelbert? Why did we never get any mention a knight who single handedly defeated 100 foes? Why was the play not named 'I want to be your Canary'? So many endless possible ways to show love to the source, and we get nothing. It's really heart breaking to me, who watched all of these other games get so much love and respect, and when it comes time to our turn, we get a middle finger.
Yeah the credit song sounded like a crappy Disney song. Once we got to Texas and quit babysitting Wuk Lamat, I started to enjoy the story.
Fantastic review and felt it summarised my feelings.
Thank you!
The anime tropes were egregiously bad this expansion even down to the "let's go fight somewhere empty" while I felt like I was playing as Krillin just standing there watching everything, probably got half of Solution Nine killed because we let Wuk Lamat "solo" her brother even let him chat it up while he slaughtered people in front of us. After that they even tried to moralize him because his dad was a boomer who didn't leave him any inheritance so clearly he could be excused. Awful mess of a saturday morning kids anime. I just want an expansion where it's just the WoL going around doing quests, so tired of the scions, Wuk's et al at this point.
The scions honestly need a break I agree totally. I honestly thought like you that this was going to be a questing exploring adventure expansion, but no. It just solidified Wuk Lamat. In my opinion they are trying create the larger than faction leader like in WoW but failed miserably because this is not what ff14 built itself on then they dared to say this expansion is for us.
I had heard the voice acting was lackluster, but I was not expecting it be -that- bad, holy shit.
Rarely felt the need to skip scutscenes of an expansion. Last time was in Stormblood and I didn't, fearing to skip major scene. Here I was upset by Lamat, the endless cycle of "let's go to that village, for talk and learn how these people make her food, monuments, for like.... 3 hours without a fight, dungeon or trial.
I was committed to reading every word of this game’s story. Dawntrail broke that streak.
Completely agree. I was big on story, and I first started this game all the way back in ARR, I very rarely skipped any cutscenes in all my years of playing this game, if ever. When I heard ppl say that the beginning of the story was boring, I thought it was maybe exaggerated. But then I played it myself and I finally got it.
I found myself not give a single crap about the endless Wuk Lamat fetch quests and tedious dialogue. I also, honestly didn't give a rats ass about the succession battle. I only just finished the first dungeon, and honestly I feel (emphasis on feel) like dropping the game altogether since its so boring.
It also doesn't help that I'm a summoner main, and they didn't change anything in 7.0.
100% agreed. I actually started to hate her because of it. When we reach Solution 9 and Krile mentions finding out about her earring I thought we'd go with her. But no, we're stuck with Lamat again in the most boring shit ever. They dangle good story threads infront of you and use her to block you off to go do something else.
Lol wtf is this have you seen the filler in other storys.
How the fuck did u make it trough ARR?
my headphones died right befor the credits now I am thinking that was a blessing
The 12 were watching over you fr
Wuk made me a racist
Shadowbringers Endwalker best expansions ever for ff14
Take me back.
@@embersarcade You should be on jail transphobe
I was enjoying the last fight until Wuk Lamat showed up.
I hear Sweet baby inc was involved with Squex, so DT's problems could be caused by them.
I love Shalooani as a western type land to visit.
But indeed the story in it is..useless to be polite
And oh god..
the english voice of Wuk Lamat... damn i'm glad to have switched in japanese from the get go, i swear the Japanse voice are top notch.
Agreed. I love Shalooani as an area as well. The story there is just to remind us of Namikka which is relevant in the next area. But at that point, I didn't care because it's just another boring filler.
@@einschwartz Unfortunatly i didn't care about Namikka either..Non that she's uninterested, but she's someone Wuk Lamat care about.
And unfortunatly i don't care about Wuk Lamat. I don't know why but i didn't like her. Koana was much much much more interesting.
@@Geekezf It's because Wuk does not have any real character or growth yet is omnipresent in the MSQ
This is by far the worst MSQ in 14. Wuk Lamat was obnoxious and unfit to rule (peace and happiness is not a basic domestic or foreign policy) and NO we were NOT her mentor but her yes man. I think Koana should have been focused on more who had more flaws and grew over time and showed leadership skills (signing a trade agreement with Vitra and defending Tuliyolal) and Zoral Ja's views and motivations were stupid. So overall the Rite of Succession was cringe and shallow.
2nd part should have heavily focused on Krile and Erenville but surprise surprise the low IQ clown lioness shows up and sucks the life out of the story again. Sphene was weak sauce, her plan was dumb cause if she absorbed the source then that would shatter other reflections and then what? no energy source. I am a huge FF9 fan (my fav FF ever) and they way they used 9 was kinda cheap, I felt nothing when I finished the MSQ. The final fight was ruined by Wuk Lamat and her disgusting voice (that voice actor definitely got the job through nepotism, no doubt).
I never want to see Wuk Lamat ever again, send her away like Poochie the Dog. The writers need to be demoted, get some forward thinking, convicted writers that understand basic things like 'Show don't tell'. The music overall was great except for the opening song and Smile (that song makes me cringe into a pretzel), the dungeons/ trials and raids are fun. The locations are coo, I love Shaloani the most cause of the music and just love the western setting. Overall if the devs/writers don't course correct, this game will collapse, never seen the community so pissed off.
Ouch. And you hate to say that about a character cuz you want them to always be good and well written and when they aren't it's a letdown.
Also how did she get the job via nepotism? Like how would you know that?
@@Titanxzero1 It's nepotism or a DEI hire. Most likely the latter.
The VA of Krile was robbed. She has barely had a chance to shine for years now. They could have devoted the whole second half of the expansion to her and Sphene, especially due to what her parents did. Instead she gets 1/4 of disney land.
I hate this expansion so much. Worst expansion by far.
The only thing that saved my sanity (a bit...) with how much WUK LAMAT we got through this expansion was theorizing that she was a brain parasite hallucination and we were all helpless in indulging in its fantasies. Hence the excessive nodding to things most WoL's probably wouldn't care about or cheerleading... It would also explain why the Scions acted all off.
I would've never thought about it that way. But it makes a lot of since to me now.
Good thing I switched to Japanese, this was unbearable to listen to.
One thing I really dislike about the story is that basically learning about different cultures is summed up to "let's try their food"... and that's it. As if culture is only food.
Speak to every politically-milquetoast-consumption-slave around you and they’ll say the same thing.
@@embersarcade Your nothing but a discusting transphobe
And they didn't even get good food variety either, you get Tacos, mezcal, and a version of yerba mate that is so thoroughly inaccurate you might as well call a peanut butter and jelly sandwich a taco "because it's filling inside a thing made out of flour".
great video.
I will say, I liked the Texas part of the story just because it was goofy and actually felt like an adventure again. It was nice to get away from Wuk for a bit.
I was really upset with how they handled the endless. The question of what makes someone alive, is one that has been debated for hundreds if not thousands of years. There’s no way any human can truly prove themselves sentient and not just biological computers, and that ultimately leads to the question of what the difference between a biological computer and a classical computer is.
Moreover they simply hand waved away the issue of powering these things. They say they “need life aether” and it’s never really questioned. Don’t forget we also “couldn’t cure the tempered” for almost 10 years until they suddenly could so for them to not even try honestly made me pretty mad in the moment lol.
And sure we had the blessings of a few people we met to turn them off, but what of the potentially thousands that we didn’t? And we turned them off so sphene wouldn’t have a need to fight anymore and we just fought her anyway. Honestly it was just really lazily handled and made no sense.
Honestly, the talk-to-them-and-learn-their-culture part of Living Memory started to _rankle_ me. You have a massive computerized archive of the lives of everyone who has died in Alexandria, comprehensive enough to actually reconstruct them into living(ish), emotive people with inner lives...
...and you think you can understand what they're about by talking to them for half an hour and storing that information in your fallible rotting meat brain? And that makes it okay to shut them down and destroy the archive? _Arrogance._ Sheer, absolute _arrogance._
Not that different from the sheer arrogance of deciding you can understand and resolve a generational conflict by talking to people for half an hour and getting an Amazon package from Sharlayan, actually, but I don't think the sheer unbridled arrogance of people who profess a love for multiculturalism without actually putting in any work to enculturate is an _intended_ theme of Dawntrail.
@@Geesaroni yeah the whole thing really struck me as “moral masturbation”. Like the writers were beating us over the head with how immoral and unnatural it was for these things to continue to exist. So much so that we had the god given right to decide that they don’t deserve to be around anymore. Maybe they believed it was a mirror to the ascians holding onto the past, but to me it was more like we were the ones who had become the ascians and passing judgement on all of our lessers.
After being thoroughly disappointed by almost every minute of the MSQ, I've watched many reviews to see how others feel about the state of the game so far. I can safely say that this review pretty much sums up all of my feelings towards Dawntrail. From the childish story, boring to nonexistent gameplay throughout said story, bland or even cringeworthy voiceacting, all the way to the actual dungeon and raid style gameplay being the best it's ever been (fingers crossed for savage!). This review sums up my thoughts pretty much perfectly.
Also, crazy how you're the first I hear pointing out the thematic mismatch between Tuliyollal's visuals and music! I felt exactly the same way. Having played Battle for Azeroth (Yeah... I know xD) at least I can say that that game did the soundtrack for an ancient Mesoamerican city, that being Zandalar, 10000x better. I have no clue why the theming between visuals and soundtrack are such a complete mismatch here.
Zandalar was a gorgeous zone, Blizzard’s environment team has always been top-notch.
@@embersarcade agreed. Zandalar is actually one of my favourite zones in WoW. Tuli cannot even remotely compare. I find everything about Tuli annoying. It’s as if Wuk Lamat was a city…
The feeling i got from tulliyolal's sound track(both tracks) was that i was visiting a modern central/south american tourist resort. While not unpleasant per se, it is a little jarring to be thrust out of my fantasy escapism every time the music starts.
25:00 hu? Who would disagree with your take on EW themes? It's OBVIOUSLY about putting something forward against Nihilism. Not only that it's also heavy in themes of "taken on the burdon of life and moving forward".
Like EW is basically Jordon Peterson's 12 Rules for Life the videogame. You'd have to pretty inept to not see the strong themes presented. It just doesn't draw as much from biblical corpus but it's the same message.
Venat literally goes "I will force humans to experience strife to temper them against Nihilism/ whatever warped Meteon into the Endsinger)
I really wish they didn't back track on what Guool Ja Ja said about how it was to see the contestants grow. Cause Koana made the biggest stride in developing as a character and honestly made for a better dawnservant. If Wuk Lamat wasn't written poorly, the second half would have been a great way to see her fully grow and realize that her views were shallow along with why her brother was chosen.
A lot of missed story opportunities, along with how the story was deaf to it's own message. Wuk Lamat claiming to want to understand others but refused to learn why Zuool Ja did what he did or even why he wanted war that badly. On top of that, apparently the writers forgot about his help the moment he got axed.
Holy great review, expressed pretty much every pain point i had with the expansion.
Nah it was not, the dude is being transphobe
@fredy2041 which part?
If you as an american don't want to hear an american accent in XIV every again, as a south american, I don't want to ever hear anyone attempting what CBU3 thinks it's a "latin american" accent. You praised Koana's va, but I can assure you, despite his tone being good, south americans don't sound as if we're making a bad impression of Antonio Banderas.
Great review! I was honestly shocked at how little I was enjoying the story but the encounter design almost makes up for it. I know I had to set my expectations low after EW concluded that saga but damn :/
It's kinda hard to top that 10 years worth of story building tbh. Starting from end of ARR going through Heavensward all the way to the last expansion was absolutely amazing! One of the best gaming exp I had ever
very well made video, honestly underrated channel!
100% agree
Music: Oh cool, I'm not the only one who thinks Tuliyollal's night theme doesn't fit the setting. Also not really a fan of of the main theme itself, but the way Soken pulls motifs out of it for all the other themes is still masterful. I also think the vocalized musical numbers inspire a sense of unity, something that felt fitting for the train scene (maybe too Southern Church and not enough South America, but that's preference), but falls very flat by the end when all attempts at unity and understanding fail to bridge the gap between two supposedly incompatible needs.
Story (part 1): Every time you discover someone's motivation, their actions make less sense in retrospect. Bakool Ja Ja's sob story is not consistent with the glee in which he attempts mass murder. Zarool Ja's attempt to "prove the miracle" is not consistent with relying on someone else's power to harvest his own people. I could believe the Hanuhanu didn't know about the aetheric effect of their ritual... until that cutscene showed those effects were excessively blatant. However, I can see why they'd consider fighting Valigarmanda way too risky and while the Mamool Ja could have found crops to better suit their soil in other lands, I think they were appropriately presented as too spiteful to coordinate that effort.
And yeah, Wuk Lamat is way too Mary Sue. They pretend to give her weaknesses, but none of them ever matter as she proceeds to make every correct decision and win every fight. Imagine if she lost the fight to Bakool Ja Ja who, throughout the fight, gradually goes from a mocking "haha I won't lose" to "I can't afford to lose" until he pulls off an LB3 to win which by itself hints there's more going on than meets the eye. We would then go through a section of story where there's finally some question as to whether Wuk will win. Heck, maybe she doesn't win. Maybe Koana wins, but he has grown enough to realize he needs Wuk to cover his own weaknesses. Same result, more meaningful conflict.
Story (part 1.5): The Western section was the absolute worst. I have no idea who thought they were being smart by trying to squeeze as many cliches as possible in that one zone. That might've been okay if it made sense. Instead, we spend the first half of the zone collecting evidence to set up a duel that apparently renders that same evidence unnecessary. Then in the second half, our help makes it possible to... gather wood that has already been prepared? Oh, I guess it's been prepared by Indians because we really needed to continue that Cowboy cliche.
Story (part 2): My biggest issue here is that I spent 4/5 of the MSQ having "understanding begets unity" yelled at me (though I do like and agree with the message), only for it to have less than zero impact on this otherwise neat section of story. I thought we were gonna cure the Levin sickness with porxies. I thought the solution to the Endless was to only have as many activated as could be sustained. Nah. The characters all decided genocide was the answer. So long as you're sad about it. The overall lore of part 2 was absolutely fantastic though.
Overall, I still enjoyed as I played through it (except part 1.5). Still had all of the neat surface-level moments. It just lacked the "ohmygosh THAT'S why that previous thing happened that way" moments, many of which players would miss the first time, but a theorycrafter puts 7 and 7 together and everyone else agrees that result makes way too much sense to be coincidence. Maybe this is what happens when you finally put an average story next to the greatness of the other expansions. There was also just... a weird focus on parents/caretakers? Bakool Ja Ja, Zarool Ja, Krile, Gulool Ja, Erenville, and especially Wuk Lamat all have massive parent issues.
I can't imagine anyone reading all that, but I typed it up as I watched the video, so I figured I may as well send it haha
I read it.
@@embersarcade Discusting transphobe
I have to disagree with your Sequel to Dawntrail part. I really loved Shaaloani. As a native Texan, the zone really hit close to home and I would say it was the better part of Dawntrail's story.
Yea i was really happy with Shaaloani I dont get the hate of it. Plus we got away from Wuk Lamat which was a nice change of pace.
Speak with Wuk Lamat again.
The American accents sounded like I was playing Fallout 3 again. Most of the voice problems I had were with the horrible or nonexistent voice direction. I do agree that Caciua's voice didn't fit. Why is she the only voiced Viera that isn't Icelandic?
Over all, I sense something severely rotten deep inside CBU3.
If we never interact with Wuk Lamat again, then it’d still be too soon.
I think a lot of the rot is on the new localization, when it's about the weird accents and non-existent direction. Honestly I think DT is pretty abominable because they praise the inclusivity on Twitter and then gave the role of Wuk Lamat to one of the localization head's inexperienced, American voice actress friend and have her force a fake accent and then talk about how great tacos are, it feels like racial parody. Of course, this has little impact on the writing itself, that has it's own problems of putting the wrong people in charge of it.
@@bobbobberson4295 The VA is apparently Puerto Rican so it's not a terrible parody. At least not in this regard but definitely in others. The actual writers were the ones responsible for the repeated look into the camera and tell us that they are better now that they understand their people and their culture over and over and over. They're responsible for the hilarity of Bakool Ja Ja's instantaneous sympathetic turn into a good guy making him the only character in the MSQ that has any development.
They're the ones that are responsible for the BS of Wuk Lamat knowing a hologram projected by an AI for a day and a half before "I feel your pain as if it were my own! I feel like I know them all! I finally understand what Sphene was trying to protect!"
They are also responsible for the final trial being marred until the end of time in roulettes always and forever having a Wuk Lamat intermission so she can "Say what she needed to say" to the murder robot AI.
It's because Cachiua comes from fantasy American Southwest. The oddness stems from why Erenville would sound Nordic if he was born there too. His story doesn't match up
I'm so glad you ripped into that Disney-sounding POS song from the end credits.
Credit where credit is due, the german voice actress for Wuk Lamat is absolutely incredible. She makes the whole character likeable.
I didn’t even know this game was dubbed in German until a few days ago.
@@embersarcade Transphobe
@@embersarcade To all comments here, attencion. This guy is a phobe, he has being harassing the voice actor of Wuk Lamat all over social media, saying awfull things of her. He has also being harassing anyone with agreedy of optimism of DT, and other known content creators. This is just not acceptable. If you dont believe, look on his social media, see the comments he does.
"This is wuk lamat she is my original OC DO NOT STEAL" -the writers probably
I'd be embarrassed if I was the one who created Wuk Lamat
@@Zriattwhy
@@mohrgames9056 Wdym why? As someone else said, she is the Jar Jar Binks of FFXIV.
@@Zriatt elaborate?
@@mohrgames9056 no
Good god why do FF knuckle draggers not understand that an expansion is more than the mediocre level up story you do for the first few days lmao. This is the game for the next 2 years and the content has been great.
15:05 His story arc is summarized by Yoshi-P in ex2 trial opening quest which implies that to get whats the deal with him you must read between the lines, but when story is too much into your face you can't possibly understand or see small nuances when elephants with cat years running into your room :D Like it was with Yotsuyu, Zoraal Ja is a victim of society he lived in but from another angle: where attention to his role as 'miracle' was too much and he became overburdened with expectations, right to the point when he started to hate everything that connects him with his father be it his desire for peace or how people view Zoraal Ja as extention of his father, you also can see similarities with problem raised in DRK questline, where Fray emerges as manifestation of protest and anger that We experienced being everyone's 'Weapon of Light', a savior and a slave who is obliged to live up to status of a hero and from whom something is always demanded no matter what.
In other words, Zoraal Ja is Warrior of Light who lost fight to his inner darkness and that's what should've been explored more in MsQ or handed over to Ishikawa for resolving.
Dude that is some excellent insight. I quite get the Yotsuyu comparison but it's been a while since SB. However the DRK quest is still one of my favorite job quests and I did get that vibe that he lost the battle to expectations. And that would've been a much better story than go to x village and learn about y people and do z thing.
@@jg2096 I love DRK questline myself and absolutely convinced it should be part of msq because writers, mainly Ishikawa, likes addressing to its themes from time to time, and thats why I was kinda disappointed that they never let Wol to bring some insite on what's happening with Zoraal Ja because back in Stormblood we actually had a moment with Fordola about burdens and etc. To me it's looked like current writer just doesn't really know much about important details and role that Wol playes and experience that we possess and absolutely should demonstrate, but instead we just " :) " all the time in DT msq, ugh
Even more reason I'm 100% convinced the Dawnservant should have brought us as a neutral party who interacted with the claimants and only later chose one.
Zoraal Ja finds a kindred spirit and actually tries to open up to us a little, making this more of a tragedy.
Like, the basic structure of this story was very promising, the pieces were just placed in an unsatisfying way. Gives Three Houses vibes.
@@antarath517Honestly if the rite of succession is something like FE 3 house, how freaking epic that will be for a new adventure lol
Honestly I didn't even see that. For me Zoraal Ja was a character I couldn't figure out at all. Yeah he couldn't live up to all the fame but apart from that that guy is a ghost. No character, no way to understand why he wants war for the whole world only to show them the importance of peace ( I mean that makes no sense?!)... honestly he's the worst written enemy ever so far. Yeah he might've been a victim... but that's just a minor side fact.
I suspect that a lot of the bad decisions of both _Endwalker_ and _Dawntrail_ stem from the overwork that came with Yoshi-P and his key people handling both 14 and 16 at the same time. The understudies were not properly supervised, leading to plenty of things that should have been caught (and would have been) slipping through.
This is easily the best review I’ve seen of Dawntrail
I appreciate that, it was a lot of work to put together.
@@embersarcade No, its really not. Your an incel, a transphobe. You need some serious help.
No weirdo, its not.
Wuk Lamat's bizzare adventures: The Game
Wut Lamats voice lines sound like they were read with no idea of what was happening in the story or on the screen.
Also, is it me or does it sound like she has something in her mouth? I almost wonder if she put something in there to emulate having fangs...
@@adognamedsallybro has never heard of an accent
@@adognamedsally what do you expect from a dude pretending to be a female?
@@Arabassassin13 yes, that's the reason why so many people criticize it, it's because I'm narrow minded. Oh wise one, tell me more about why DT is actually really good.
@@adognamedsally there’s a clear bias here because everyone was cheering zero for playing main character for post EW getting the story stolen from Uk and the shadow keeper but when it a trans lady with an accent everyone’s up in arms
I'm so glad I played dawntrail in my native language. Wuk lamats german VA does so much better of a performance than the english one.
I agree with everything in your review except for anything related to Shaaloani. Both the zone and the voice acting felt like the old west. I found the setting a blast so much so I want a normal horse in game now to just ride through the zone.
I jumped on one of my horses just to do that!
I really like the OST there as well
If I cared about anything 'old west' related, I'd be unbelievably offended by you saying it felt exactly like that.
Having a normal horse mount for this area would be awesome
Dawntrail really does have amazing dungeons and trials, it’s a shame the MSQ and quest design sour that experience. Thankfully I don’t have to play through the MSQ again. Going forward raids and roulettes will be fun. Arcadian has been awesome so far and it feels like the post game is going to be a winner.
My main question for the expansion is mainly who actually made this? Cause I dont believe it was the team we've had for the last 10 years. The only part that felt like it was actually made by the 14 team was Living Memory and the Solution 9 stuff
Feels like staff were distracted with another game - like FF16, which only released a year ago, and they were still building content for. 14 feels like it was entrusted entirely new staff at the helm without much checking.
@@Ouren I mean we already know SE takes 14s profits to make other shit. Wouldn't be surprised if staff were being taken too
@@Ouren What's weird is that 16 felt like they weren't allowed to do their own thing.
Great video, thanks
Couldn't agree more with all of this. You nailed the review, GG's.
Insane that they forced Wuk Lamat to be part of the story after the rite of succession. How could they not see how trash Wuk Lamat was as a character?
Her VA could have been Scarlet Johansson or Dame Judy Dench and it would have been terrible.
This is why I stuck to JP voices ever since ARR. Their voices are not only consistent, they have far better voice direction.
As much as I hate Wuk Lamat butting into the final battle, at least there she screams and shouts at Sphene. The English VA just sounds like she's mildly emoting while having dentures stuck in her mouth with how muffled her tone is.
I randomly stumbles on this channel on a different video but i gotta say i completely agree with all the points you made ! Great analysys and great videos!
What I wish we got with the Endless is a definition of what it is to be alive in Etheris repeated. We have been given explanations on what a living thing is in FFXIV in the past, specifically how the soul works. This is all the way back in ARR and obvious not many people will remember this scene. And why Alexandria's new society is a bad thing for the world as a whole.
The way the lifestream works is everything living has a soul that returns to the planet once they pass away. Once the soul is cleansed in the lifestream, it is then recycled to form new life. It's why Black Rose is such a devastating chemical weapon for the world as a whole. As it halts the aether in the body and in theory stops the soul from returning to the lifestream. The way the Alexandrians use souls is very similar to the lifestream but is a perversion of the process. We're also not told how use of the soul even works. Is it released once it's used? Or is it gone and will never be reincarnated? Also showing us the results of Zoraal Ja's actions would have gone a long way of making Living Memory a murkier grey situation. It runs on souls, Zoraal Ja nearly completely drained their reserves in his fight against us. Show us the results of that. Have us try to talk to an Endless only for that Endless to be turned off mid conversation. Have it happen to multiple NPCs in the background. Show us why Sphene needs to act on her genocidal plan now and why we can't get outside help to find an alternate solution rather than tell us we don't have another choice.
People praise Living Memory when in all honesty, it's probably one of the weaker parts of the expansion as a whole story telling wise.
"I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you."
From my perspective, I commited genocide.
@@theztav You and many others. If that's what the goal of the story was supposed to be then I suppose they succeeded. But I don't get the impression that's what was supposed to be taken away. It's poorly written and what even is the Endless in relation to life? It's very poorly defined.
The main problem is that they never really say what part of the game's "souls" is the seat of consciousness. Is it the soul, or is it the "memories"? If it's the former, then Erenville's mom (and all the rest) are totally annihilated and Erenville will never see her again. No afterlife, no aetherial sea, nothing. Grim.
On the other hand, if the consciousness is actually part of the "memories", then the whole process is pretty much uploading. The Endless are already arguably conscious AIs, despite what the mom kept insisting, and she herself certainly ACTS like a conscious being albeit a suicidal one. If they're uploaded consciousnesses, though, then we really did do a genocide of the Alexandrians, and did it without sufficient cause as we never bothered to check and see if regular Aether would work. (Which there is an abundance of in the Source and its reflections. The First alone could sustain the Endless indefinitely.)
It’s sucks how they brush the moral dilemma to the side
i highly appreciate the passionate and knowledgable takes on the aesthetic choices, especially the music