Was DAWNTRAIL A Missed Opportunity?
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- I spent more time than I care to admit thinking about this expansion's story and an embarrassing amount of time taking notes, just to put together whatever this is. Did I forget key details? Important story beats? Probably... Scream at me about it in the comments! Or better yet, type it straight to my face sometime when I'm livestreaming on Twitch!
/ grimwittv
Zoraal-J being overwhelmed by souls and him losing himself for a moment made me cry so much......... then of course the moment is ruined by Wuk Lamat
As was every moment of the expansion. :D
For a character who I did not care about at all until like halfway thru the expansion, his death actually did hit me in the feels. Wish he'd gotten more of an arc
Nah, he was, just like the others of this expansion, a very boring and bland character. His whole reason to commit mass murder and try conquer the world was because he had an existencial crisis and didn't know his place in the world, that's it. "I'm gonna commit genocide and take over the world because I want." That's the vibe he gave, no real reason. So his death didn't moved me at all. He just took what he sowed. :/
Sphene fucking ninja looted the dimension key after Zoraal Ja before we were done rolling on it, wtf
I'm so glad someone said it
Its Vision not aligning with story.
The Vision of the MMO and I think Yoshida has said something along the lines that the world is living and breathing, with you just existing in the game as a player character that can exert some external force into the story. While the story itself is quite linear and Ishikawa did a remarkable job weaving nearly every loose plot thread from ARR to EW. The biggest issue that the writing team has currently is that without Ishikawa at the helm its a boat without a rudder.
The lead writer for Dawntrail is the same lead writer that did the first half of Stormblood. The second issue was that there was absolutely no clear plan how to mingle the consequences of the Final Days with the living world aspect. If anything the game's lore in Dawn Trail is ignored for plot convivence by the lead writer. In some writing circles you just cannot put the "end of the world as we know it" genie back into the bottle and not expect continuity consequences. That is pretty much what we had in Dawntrail headed by the SB writing lead, a consequence filled start of an expansion from the consumer's point of view. The game became more of Wuk Lamat and I, people are overblowing the WoL's stand as a mentor from two to three lines of throw away dialogue. Again the writer created what is called a black hole sue, where everything in the plot services their chosen character at the expense of all prior character development.
Lets just prattle the missed opportunities that needed to be explored:
The Claimant and their follower's motivations. We get political headline serviced level taking points when it comes to the first and second promise. There's no push back from Wuk or the WoL in debating these talking points....my favorite is the Palupalu where half of them are behind the First Promise because they think war will open up new markets. Yet there could have been a good discussion on how War is inevitably bad for the economy and conquered people are more worried about survival then buying luxury goods. In the Bird area, there could have been a discussion about how elder wisdom still has its place in a ever growing modern society. There's no touch about the Mamook's biding their time to take over the country, at the expense Bakool Ja Ja and his clutch mates. We never get the ability to explore Koana and Zoraal Ja as characters, they serve more as plot points for Wuk herself as the whole MSQ bends to her will (because of the writer). Zoraal Ja being the most criminal one out of them and in a game that made villain's like Emet, Lahabreaha and Elidibus sympathetic. Its down right criminal and I'll get to Sphene soon but this is a bigger sticking point. These were miss issues in just the first half of the game. What could have been a great story from a political standpoint its comical on how bad they botched it. The succession story could have been self contained as the first half of the MSQ. If anything it would have given great focus for the writing team to zero in on that issue, have underlying issues with people not being fully happy with who became Dawnservant. It just devolved to Wuk Lamat and I, where the player was hamstringed with zero agency. Forget being the strongest person on Eythiris, this was strait to TV movie plot.
The second half pretty much was just "oh look do you like FF9, where here's FF9 in your MMO". They overdid the callbacks to the point and on top with Wuk being stapled to you. The story just spaghetti all over the place, made worse by Sphene who tries to act more like a Mirror Universe version of Emet with genderbent angle. They did the whole Time bubble (Alexander) and beach head merging and very little ties into the plot point of "oh right the WoL is very strong, so we have to give him strong enemies". I continually ask how did this even make it past editing let alone get greenlit to be put into production.
Hell, it's not even a good FF9 reference. Compare the 4 lords, Doma, Ivilace, or any other previous reference.
But with Dawntrail? 'It's named Alexandria, isn't that enough?'
So I think the problem is that we're bar none without a doubt the mightiest person in the world. "Normal" people are not a threat to us at all. So how do you make anything less than a multiversal threat interesting? You could "depower" the WoL, but no one likes that and is severely lame (looking at YOU Metroid series. "Oh, I got smacked hard and lost all my powerups!"). They instead decided that the WoL would play an advisory role, only stepping in if it was necessary. Which makes sense in a way. If our job is to help Wuk Lamat become Dawnservent, sure, we could just simply go nuclear on anyone or anything that challenges her...but how would that prove she's a good leader? It's a decent idea, but it's clear that the idea just was beyond the writer's ability to tell well.
I'm also of the mind that once the second half kicks off, they should've shifted the focus to Erenville and Krile. Wuk Lamat could still come, seeing that she still has an interest in what's happening, what with her brother flipping out and attacking her country and all, but she definitely should've been in the back seat at that point because, as Alphinaud pointed out, at that point it's a Scion problem to solve.
I will say though, the idea that the WoL is just going around just training up and installing good world leaders just so they can deal with threats themselves so the WoL can go adventuring for, like, two frikkin minutes without someone whining for help does amuse me a bit.
I like your points. It's not an easy task to hit the reset button and start a brand new story.
I think you're definitely onto something here 👍
I had the same idea, what if the WoL was ordered by the Eorzean Alliance to make sure a non-war hungry leader was installed so they could focus on reconstruction after all that happen during the final days. It would have played a deeper role plus...the final look when its found out we were told to make sure she won by any means could have served as a break the hero plot point.
@@grygaming5519Yes bit thats just not something we or Azem would do. We dont put people in as rulers of countries. I dont care what the Alliance says.
Also, we never would support an idiot like Wuk Lamat. 😂
Honestly, you could depower the WoL. One line of dialog.
"You didn't escape your conflict with Zenos unscathed. Coming that close to death, you've lost quite a bit of your martial skill. You may never be as powerful as you once were....'
Done.
Not only does that give a reasonable excuse for us being depowered (We WERE on our deathbed.), but it allows them the ability to REpower us.
SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN in first cutscene shown. LESSGO!
Btw food for thoughts:
King was free for 80 years, right? And he knows about Mamook shady stuff? And he does what exactly?
80 years sitting on his ass, doing nothing?
Or he wasn't a living character until DT plot was conceived by writers and just appeared as NPC with backstory being pre-written?
The amount of times I screamed 'Why am I letting this happen!?' at the screen was too damn high.
How did Zoraal Ja walk out of that room? Why didn't I get involved when Bakool's army jumped in? Why did I let Speen take the key?
Facts!!!!! Literally so frustrating.
They pretty much said we "disbanded" as the Scions, so I thought that we'd be with only a few. Even having the twins was something I didn't expect, I thought it would be me, best buddy raha, and the ever wandering Estinien. Honestly I'd have loved like a vacation/"you were super injured from your fight with Zenos" arc, but instead felt like.... kind of how I'd feel the WoL would have felt. A person who has saved the entire world, or even all of existence, and we're just sitting back and watching someone else's story and... I just wanted a little bit more. I just wanted to either try to become back to most of our strength or something. But with the lower stakes for 80% of the MSQ just felt.... boring. Like we weren't travelling for our characters entertainment, but neither did we really feel like we were helping, despite being the strongest on the planet at this point.
"atleast, that is what the story will be"
FFXIV is supposed to be an MMO RPG with a central focus on the story. If the players are saying they were bored out of their minds while playing MSQ, there is a big problem...
Yeah, XIV is kind of a victim of its own success this expansion. Shadowbringers and Endwalker were just very engaging stories
It really is Stormblood 2.0 all over again, shaky story but fun gameplay.
The story sounds good on paper but I think between this and Post-EW storyline you can tell without their golden goose Ishikawa piloting the helm anymore they're really struggling on the execution part again like they did in ARR and Stormblood.
Galool Ja Ja states he is cultivating a Dawnservant, and he's happy to deny all of them the position if they do not pass his own judgment. So the age of the successor is irrelevant.
He obviously planned to stick around and help the new Dawnservant with their duty, but he was cut down.
Second comment to feed the algo: Someone pointed out something that made the rite of succession so much worse:
We literally already did this exact plotline. It was told much better, well condensed, with a living, breathing culture with it's own language and customs beyond food.
And we did it in like, 2 levels.
It was called the Azim Steppe.
That is so true, I know Stormblood is the other expansion people are kinda down on, honestly though at this point I remember it much more fondly than Dawntrail right now
In the moment?
I was fuming and mad, in the moment, and not from immersion but lack thereof.
It wasn't until AFTER that I thought about it more and I changed my opinion and started to like what they did, or tried to do, with Dawntrails story.
For example how the Trial 2 just are lovely dripped with the father-son dynamic and relationship, like the Raid AoE is named Patricide and how he would almost commit filicide as well, so they know what they are trying to do here.
But for real, in the moment during 11:05 I couldn't stop thinking about WHEN our character would intervene, but we are the Warrior of Nodding still it seems, so nothing that makes sense in that moment happened, completely shutting out any believability of the scene as the question _"Are we just letting him go for NO reason?"_ still lingers IN THE MOMENT.
So yeah, execution was trash but they got good themes and worth experiencing.
Well made video talking about this, it's so great to see others' view on it and seeing that maybe I am focusing too much on the details.
Interesting, I haven't heard many people say that the story grew on them after they finished. Appreciate your thoughts! 👍
Wuk Lamat legit ruined the entire expansion for me. Without her it would have been a 6.5-7/10. But with how much they pushed her, DT is now a 3/10. The dungeons and trials are the only reason it's not a 0/10
Someone needs to count up how many times in cutscenes we got a shot of her clenching her fist, I lost track... 😂
@@GrimwitTVWe talked to her 139 times. No joke. So go from there on figuring out the number of hand clenching 😂
Dungeons and trials are so good that this expansion is an easy 8/10 for me, story issues be damned
Honestly I feel like the MSQ in DT both panders to and insults the player. It sort of expects us to do the heavy emotional lifting during moments that they desperately want to be impactful. Instead of providing characters or plot beats that naturally invest us in the narrative, it seems like they want us to force ourselves into having a reaction (or rely upon real world experiences to lend weight to what are, imo, mostly empty platitudes). Some of that is due to bad choices in the writing, but i think it really boils down to not giving the narrative the space to breathe. I would have loved a genuinely scaled down sense of danger, but they just couldn’t quite commit to it, or couldn’t find a way to entertain us without resorting to another apocalyptic, world ending threat.
"We need a council of leaders and must journey the continent to find suitable candidates and run local elections but I'm too old for this shit. These are my three kids. They're stupid and one might be evil. Bodyguard them while they do the job. Also there's a two headed guy running around who's interested in the job but I'd advise against it. Off you go then."
Zoraal ja storms off because he believes he should rule by birthright, keeps showing up to thwart your attempts at forming a government.
Done!
Can you imagine bakool jaja’s arc going from aggressively insisting he should be on the council to comedically begging to join the club at the end? 😂
Best take on dawntrail thus far and I’ve watch a ton of reviews .
Thanks! I really appreciate that
Not to cheapen the story of living memory with my take, but, the message I took from the zone was: "Abandon technology. Get off the cell phone, and go touch grass."
I don’t think that cheapens it at all. Endwalker felt to me like the “even when the world is scary and hope seems lost, don’t give up” which felt very appropriate for coming out during a global pandemic
DT also seems relevant to the current discourse on AI. Even though it never really explicitly says AI, it definitely has a message of “don’t make the mistake of thinking technology can serve as a substitute for the human experience”
If that's true, it's an awfully weird message for a video game that literally relies on keeping people indoors, hunched over a TV/Monitor for hours.
@@GrimwitTV I've been referring to the entire Living Memory conflict as 'Sphene wants to use souls to power her ChatGPT'
It's very clearly a shot at AI.
My disappointment with Shalaaoni is based on how wasted the zone feels. You start the zone by gettingbto this really cool town torn right out of an old western. You spend *one cutscene* there and then poof, off to the next town. Then you spend a few small cutscenes at the next town, establish the story of the zone which is just "Get bracelet back. Stop bandits." And then you find another cool town thats cut out of a cliffside. Nothing happens there. Then you stop the bandits. Talk to the train people, then go to the final area of the zone which is this cool Miqote Native American-esque settlement, chat with them for 2 seconds, ignore their concerns and say "We'll make sure Koana doesnt let things get outta hand. Trust us!" and then the area is over...
The right of succession storyline Is just the first part of the storyline of final fantasy 10. But I liked The right of succession storyline It's hard to go from an end of a era like endWalker You're going from six gear Back down to first, Also I didn't watch any of the Hype of Dawntrall.But I am One of those that didn't like the ending of Endwalker And thought Post patch Of endWalker was a lot better. endWalker's boss was dumb And the explanation of the world Shattering is stupid. A whole world ending with very powerful people Over a emo girl Thats sad And has daddy issues was just wow
I would have liked to see the end of the tourney Bakool ja ja won, could have had a few more characters or something instead of Wuk Getting kidnapped cause the writers wrote everyone braindead
Not even just the end, having the tourney be part of the MSQ could've been sick! I guess they decided to save the fighting tournament arc for the raid series but still... 😒
its there any kind of endgame on dawntrail, like bozja and eureka?
There will be an exploration zone in a couple patches, right now endgame is extreme trials, raiding, hunt trains, etc.
i didnt mind the 1st halve of the game so much sure it has its issues like most of the Scions that where there didnt even need to be in there. but it felt likt they where to keep familiar characters in the trust system.
Yeah I think I forgot to mention this in the video but there's that one part before the level 99 trial where all the scions we left back in Tuliyolal catch up with us and I was like "Why are y'all here? Oh... because we need to have trust NPCs"
I respectfully disagree Re: the Rite of Succession. I’m actually glad a country maintained something of a monarchy. It’s a bit tiresome that every single time we overthrow a country, we institute a representative republic/democracy. It’s kind of unrealistic to expect people that have only known one way of life - monarchy - to just be able to handle such an extreme change of leadership style with no issues.
Good point! Thinking about this more idk if the continuation of a monarchy bothers me *that* much, but I think it would've been nice to at least explore the issue
Totally Dawnfail, worst expansion.
Yep, and it isnt even close. The story also dumbed down everyone in it. Great for 5 year olds, but not adults.
@@JustinStrife agreed 👍🏻
The last Zone was the worst one, it was pointless beside Erenville and Krile, everything else was pointless, painful boring and dull, after 7 years of ff14 i have see myself skipping cutscene because i just wanted to be done with this god awful Side quest Expansions
23 minutes is long? That's like an appetizer.
Good to know! I've kind of been RUclips-pilled to believe that keeping content shorter makes it more appealing to the algorithm, but that's not always true, different audiences have different appetites and all that
Take my opinion with a grain of salt. I like to watch 10 hour long video essays.
Wuk Lamat embodies such virtues as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She's a very brave and stunning character. Her voice actor simply brought it (just like the Australian break dancer in the Olympics brought it) Blackrock cash well-earned Square, fantastic expansion. 10/10
So I came in late and was playing through previous expansion MSQ then right into DT. Honestly, most of the complaints are unfounded. I think there are 3 main camps of people who did not like it:
1. Those who have not done any quests for a while, and
2. Those who get caught up in the whole trans voice actor thing.
3. Those who were hoping that a new arc means a revamp of the questing design and flow to be more exciting and less grindy with meaningless fetch/talking tasks.
Coming from previous expansions right into DT, the questing is extremely similar.
The only actual issues I've had with DT is that the decisions on which cut scenes should be voice acted - in previous expansions if you only watch voiced cutscenes and skip all others, you will still get all the key moments of the story. In DT, a lot of important information are in unvoiced cut scenes, so if you didn't read then the voiced scenes are a bit confusing (this was me). The other thing is the forced focus on Wut Lamat at the end of the MSQ. where she has run her course but was forced into narratives which put her out of place. One example is the last fight, out of everyone who were 'sent away', was she really the likely person to come back?
I feel like the 2nd half of the MSQ should have switched the main character from Wut Lamat over to Krile, that would have made so much more sense.
Wrong.
The pacing is atrocious. The plot itself is so banal. The characters have potential but were mishandled horribly.
It has not been a while since I did MSQ content: It generally does drag, that's just how it is, but Dawntrail really is that much worse.
If you enjoy it, that's fine, but by as many objective measures that storytelling can be critiqued under, Dawntrail just falls short of so many that other expansion stories did far better.
@@NeatNightOwl hmmm, I can't really argue with that.
I actually did not enjoy most of the MSQs from any expansion, so probably it was hard for me to tell them apart.
But I will say, previous expansions I was able to get the main story arc through voiced cut scenes. This one, I skipped a lot of voices cut scenes and instead watched a lore video instead. So I guess you are right that this one is worse. Lol
Dang... The realization just hit me. :(
This is such heavy cope and people like you that refuse to acknowledge flaws with the game are why it won't evolve
@@Rayngoodpeople are allowed to have opinions though? Yall make us terrified to share any input even in the slightest of light that it was good. The hate train is massive and thats fine, but lets not deminish others peoples opinions to say "you are the problem". I expected so much more from this community.
@@samwisegamgee3596 The man literally said 'if you don't like it, it's because you're wrong, or you hate trans.'
Yes, he is the problem.
As someone who doesn't care about the story in the slightest, I think DT is.. okay.
I play to level jobs to max level, then do extremes, so I'm basing my opinion entirely on these experiences only. The dungeons are cool at first (Except the 1st dungeon, it sucks in every way I'm not sorry) but after you run them a few times you realize just how poorly designed the pulls are. Vanguard and the 99 dungeon especially (F YOU TURTLE), the music is just not as epic as ShB dungeon or EW dungeon themes but they're not bad. 6/10 overall dungeon experience
Leveling.. It was a slog to get all 100 just simply because almost EVERY job had nothing new. "Oh look at this flashy animation that over rides an old ability" and maybe an OGCD? But you basically don't do ANYTHING new. If I wanted to do the exact same rotation every time I play a different job I'd just main a crafter. Some are fine, but not most. 4/10
I haven't touched the Ex's yet (I just got all 100's today, so maybe soon) but the trials were fine, a little hectic at first but once you do it twice it's not so bad. 7/10
Yeah that fucking turtle was awful. So far finding the dungeons and raids fun. The notable dungeon I loathe is the carnival one.
I am just a few cutsceens past the first dungeon and I'm fucking STRUGGLING... It's SO boring. Text text text text because you all suk yoshi p 6 ways from Sunday for literally anything they give us.. I like the graphics update but that does NOT excuse the trash I'm dealing with just to get to the next dungeon. It's bad.
Bad excuse. Yoshida moved over to focus on battle design, which, guess what, is the best it's ever been.
They hired a new writing team, and according to the japanese DCs, it feels like they hired from california to translate it into Japanese. There's a lot of problems with the Japanese text that doesn't make sense for a native speaker.