Dawntrail confirmed all my fears for the future of both narration and character development. Many of these complaints were ones I predicted would happen based on the foundation Endwalker set. Worse is that Yoshida never has the proper takeaway for why something is or isn't successful if you read his interviews, so I don't have confidence these issues will be addressed. I'm also not surprised people don't see the problem with Living Memory because, as you said, this isn't the first time we've condemned an entire civilization to obliteration. It turns out large swathes of people are perfectly fine with genocide as long as the author tells them it's okay. (Then if you try to point out how morally corrupt it is you're hit with the "media literacy" argument.) Endwalker is going to be a challenge to rewrite because it's such a mess that contradicts everything established prior to it. The simplest solution is to have Hydaelyn temper and then the whole thing instantly makes sense including the WoL still refusing to help the Ancients at the end of Pandemonium when they had the chance, which I considered the true nail in the coffin of the WoL being a good person. Excellent video series and I'm glad to see your channel getting much deserved attention. I'm looking forward to your video on Venat, I suspect it's going to address problems with her character I didn't get into because I was mostly focused on the lore inconsistencies.
The odds they'll tend to the horrid writing is one in a million from what I've seen from Square Enix. I'll never understand how we went from ShB and HW to this level of quality. Thanks for the support, the feedback. Your work has been an inspiration for me.
@@durantes They swapped out the staff and writers who don't have the quality that HW to ShB had. Game is oversimplified and the writing(story driven MMO btw) has gone down the gutter. XIV is entering it's Shadowlands phase where the writing did a lot of damage to the IP while simultaneously is also like Warlords of Draenor where the only thing worthwhile to do is endgame raiding. Much like the new zones the expansion in all things is underwhelming and shallow. Battle design is still primarily don't stand in orange and just line up your 2 minute burst and blow all your CDs at the same time as everyone else. Very boring game. CBU3 and Yoshida are out of touch with their playerbase. The story when held under scrutiny comes off as a rather mediocre Disney Film with tons of inconsistencies and plotholes. The writing was on the wall during Endwalker with it's myriad pacing issues and Dawntrail is just the aftermath. Yoshida stated he expected a mixed reception(which in itself is a bad answer to give) which means even he knows this expansion is hot garbage. For now the best content XIV can provide is all the drama between players that White Knight the game to death and those who openly and rightly criticize the road XIV is traveling down. And this extends to not just story but down to gameplay systems that are long outdated. Leveling and gearing in this game at this point in time is just terrible. And I don't think pigeonholing everything into trusts and buying level boosts and story skips on the cash shop is the answer. If anything it's part of the problem. Until big changes are made to the game it effectively ended with Endwalker and it's just in maintenance mode until further notice.
@@MagiusNecros I was only able to get my moneys worth from the expansion, via the XIV forums. Hell I wasn't even able to finish this steaming pile of excrement of a story. I was not enjoying myself, and like you said, nothing has changed for endgame. Its the same thing we have been doing for years. So I'm literally missing out on nothing. And y not finishing the story and unsubscribing, I'm at least showing up in the spreadsheets YoshiP lives by. Because if I wasted my time and finished it, it would just be one more number saying I finished and enjoyed the story in this clowns eyes. This entire expansion for me is now a write off. And for the next expansion, it will be the first I do not buy until I hear good things. Which I have zero hope for btw. I know nothing is going to change, which is so very sad.
@lagtastic7511 Dawntrail is the first time I felt like skipping cutscenes. Like I said until the game is overhauled I see no reason to buy any more expansions or subscribe. No one likes to see a great game turn to crap but that's where we are at and Yoshida doesn't seem to care at all.
Haven't you considered the thought that maybe these "Evil Psychopathic Genocide Deniers" are approaching the issue from personal spiritual beliefs on what the Soul is? The value of the Soul is the same in both Eastern and Western mythologies; Immortal, Eternal and part of the Divine. The you in spiritual form, one that is forever. Even when you remove all it's memories. From that perspective, Living Memory are just corpses paraded around by an AI, using "empty" Souls as fuel. Basically the Memory of Cahciua and others may have consumed their own souls, their true selves robbed of memory, as Aether to sustain the mockery Sphene calls "life". The true genocide isn't the player formating the USB drive the memories are housed in, but the countless of souls being reused as energy to feed it all, making the Alexandrians beyond forgiveness and Sphene into a more successful Meteion, because it directly causes harm to the cycle of Life, Death and Rebirth. So yeah, when the characters Think they'll see these people again in the afterlife, no, they won't, they've already been erased from existence when feeding their own memories or someone using a Regulator. It's honestly far more horrifying than thinking a handful of people are okay with genocide, in a fictional game no less. The other side fares no better, because then the soul is meaningless and unique individuality doesn't exist, memories can be copied over and over again, Endless-Otis and Robo-Otis are proof of this. So going the "Endless are living beings" route, you're creating a lot of uncomfortable and horrible questions, now the soul is worthless and all that matters is your memories, memories that can be copied and put elsewhere. So yay, no one is unique in the slightest and we can be copied over and over again… "Why does all this nitpicking and thinking too hard of it even matter?", because you all started thinking the worst of people without considering their point of view and what philosophy or spritiual beliefs they are judging it by. For me either answer is equally as horrifying, though I will say the "Endless are living" answer makes me think the writers may actually be insanely stupid, this kind of Writing is something a demon would come up with to trick people into thinking their soul means nothing and can be sold off for a soda.
EW was like this for me. I can only imagine how bad DT will be by the end. Not my problem in a sense, though, since I pretty much have unsubbed for good.
@@TeemoTemosson Kind of agree here. They probably should've saved the Void for 7.0. It did not sit well with me that we came up with a solution to enter the void safely, and then managed to find a solution to the problem before EW was done. And because of that you barely get to spend any time with Zero, and no time with Azdaja. The rite of succession could've been an entire section on its own. It would've given them more time to actually explore all the cultures instead of listing their bullets points and leaving.
The biggest pang of emotion I got during DawnTrail was when Vrtra showed up and the Endwalker music piped up. The most emotion I had was when I was reminded of better expansions.
That's odd. The biggest pang of emotion alongside the entrance of Vrtra, is seeing the concept of having to move on from the death of a loved one, and needing to pull the plug within Living Memory. Also having to imagine Otis's thoughts and feelings upon seeing a dead Sphene before him, blocked away considering how traumatising it must be for a loyal knight such as he. But I suppose that's just me.
Our characters throw shade at the foes, but aren't allowed to have one criticism or snarky remark at Wuk Lamat. Never felt so detached from the WoL than that.
The closest thing we got was outright and bluntly saying Wuk wasn't fit to lead. And we never really got the chance to say it to her face. Funny enough, Koana is more fit to lead than she is. He gave up his rite to the throne for her and self sacrifice is a great quality for a leader to have.
@@ZeroOmega-vg8nq Except that isn't the first time this happened, we were already not allowed to even disagree with Hydaelyn. I think it's less about appeasing "that group" ,since this would only apply to the english VA, and more about CBU3 hating player agency. You see it in the story, you see it in the job gameplay, you see it in the boss mechanics. You play the game and think about the story exactly how they want you to, or you can fuck off.
They made Bakool ja ja so over the top evil at the start of the expansion I just knew that the writer needed a "evil" character to show how good his favorite OC character wuk lamat is. The funny part is the entire fucking community decide to ignore in-game bakool ja ja and instead went on to lust for him and he quickly became a beloved character vs wuk lamat not being liked lol.
It's funny you mention this,because in the unofficial JP popularity poll she's ranked lower than Honey B. and Yaana. Characters that show up for FIVE MINUTES are more popular than her.
I was so pissed when I realized that within the 80 years of Tulliyolal being established and with Galool's foreign allies, they could not come to the same conclusion for Mamook that we did. Sharlayan is the pioneer for reading aetherical signatures. We even have the ability to identify people via the color of their aetherical signature. And that information was from all the way back in Heavensward. Even the Garleans have had the technology to read aetherical signatures since at least ARR. And you're telling me that Galuf and Ketenramm just didn't care enough to actually investigate and improve their friend's homeland? The writers managed to assassinate all three of their characters in one fell swoop. It's honestly impressive. And good god, Zoraal Ja. He swapped motivation so many times it made my head spin. First it's an appreciation for peace through war. Then it's surpassing his father. Then it's surpassing his siblings. Plus, Zoraal never struck me as the type to ambush, steal, cheat, or lose his cool easily. But all of those things happen in quick succession after the final rite. He went from a reserved, single-minded individual to a 'the villain wants to be the chosen one' anime trope. I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall when the guy who is motivated to cause nationwide conflict helps us kill Valigarmanda, an entity that would probably achieve that goal in spades. Sphene didn't make any sense at all. Your goal is to harvest souls from outside, and your first action upon merging with Yyasolani wasn't to immediately harvest every person trapped inside? And who programmed her? Were they in their first month of programming school? You decided to allow her to give full permissions over her army to some random person she's never met, but didn't foresee that she might need to revoke said permissions? And then on top of that, the system does not automatically give the permissions back to her upon Zoraal's death, but they instead go to his son? That same son he doesn't even claim as his son? Huh? Why does she refuse to tell you the important thing she needs to tell you repeatedly because a robot is walking by? Is she afraid Zoraal Ja can hear her through the robots? Well I'm sorry to tell you this sweety, but you're *in* one so he can hear you right *now*. And we see that when she body hops it basically kills the robot body. So why didn't she bamf to each and every single robot killing the people in Solution 9? She is a headache to even think about. On what Yoshi said, we *all* expected the reception to be mixed. You're starting a new arc. But we still expect at least passable writing quality. We got slop. It's really bad in the side quests as well. I never thought I would get so angry about a story about gathering ingredients for juice. But they managed to fuck that up too. These types of videos are the kind I would like SE to actually see. Actual, real critiques of the writing, instead of bringing real life political bs into it. Also, sorry for the wall of text lol
There's also a sidequest that appears after the "ghost dad" test that spoils the ceremony result, before it happens. 😂 It's the Koana hints hunt quest in Tuliyollal. If you do sidequests first, you spoil msq.
Except the writing was in service to modern political tropes and ideological narrative necessities, so... it's weird to complain about the political angle when the writing itself was a political affirmation.
@@rclaws3230 I'm fine with politics in fiction. I just hate real life politics being poorly injected into a conversation that has nothing to do with them. Dawntrail had way too many other problems that are a direct result of the modern writing special sauce of debase all other characters to prop up one. The other problem is that they don't even do the politics right. We got so little actual meat to the discrimination from Mamook and Bakool. I'm just reminded of the Garleans being the defacto racists of FFXIV. People who participated in genocide, horrific genetic experiments, conscripted the conquered, and committed several other war crimes seem a lot more of a parallel to events in real life that anything DT presents, and they still managed to make it relevant to the in game narrative.
Sometimes I wonder if the story for DT underwent a lot of rewrites before the final product hit the shelves. It'd certainly explain the lack of voice direction and why it seems to *feel* so different than the rest of the expansions. Even ARR felt like it was more thoughtful and nuanced than this, with all the various histories of strife between the city-states dooming them to infighting while the Garleans marched on unimpeded. Even now they're still working on improving stuff even with the WoL doing everything they could to help make everything better. Meanwhile, everything in Tulliyolal is solved in an afternoon while Smiles blares on in the background.
To speak on Bakool Ja Ja's character: I just feel like the way he is characterized is also counter to his otherwise noble intentions. There's no bits of reflection or hesitation on anything that he does, or how any of his actions would reflect badly on his goals, or even on his running for Dawnservant (and it's still wild that he wasn't outright disqualified and jailed for it - as you mentioned - until his father did so because he didn't have his 7 dragonba-- I mean, keystones). Releasing Valigarmanda is pure insanity even for someone like him, but he doesn't even hesitate. "I'm going to release this living calamity of a being that could potentially kill everyone, including my people's children, for the sake of my people's dead children." There's survivor's guilt, and then there's what Bakool Ja Ja does. If he was desperate, his personality never reflected that until the reveal itself.
the real villain of the story is the ffxiv subreddit, where if you say a single negative thing about the expansion you'll not only be downvoted into oblivion, but people will actively report you for harassment.
Bu... but muh transphobia. Not liking DT apparently means means you must hate all trans people because of one bad and miscast VA who is simply unlikeable as a person.
I thought that reddit was pretty mixed to disliking it overall, there's a thread up now where the only really 'upvoted' comments are those criticizing the story. From my anecdote the only ones adamantly defending it are twitter and they're mostly just ideologues who for some reason feel the need to defend everything about DT because one VA is transgender.
Ironically, the ffxivdiscussion subreddit is pretty much the inverse, where people have openly criticised both the story and gameplay since Endwalker and it seems most people agree with said criticisms.
Random thing that bugged me with the train. There is a side quest before that about a lalafel merchant selling corrupted crystals to the locals as a scam but then learning to be a good honest merchant from the pelal. Meaning he had a stockpile of corrupted crystals still just waiting for someone to need them. And corrupted crystals are what we used to pierce garduda's barrier back in ARR. I was all excited for what was clearly about to be a cool callback and they did nothing with it. No mention of it at all.
Yea, also G'Raha using invisibility spell on the train not before it leaves the cover/roof of the train station, so that the enemies don't know that we're leaving, or when we're actually leaving the tunnel that goes through that massive mountain, so that we'd have ample time to actually get near the dome. No, he had to use it after we've been in plain view of the enemy airships for a while, so that they know for sure that we're about to depart, and just in time for when we're about to enter the god damned tunnel itself. Because apparently, the limited duration spell is best utilised for when we have a fucking mountain over our heads. That whole builiding sequence was a disaster. But I do agree, that corrupted crystal merchant also popped up in my mind when they mentioned they needed corrupted crystals.
@@Silferas also somehow sphenes army left the railway intact but build a frontier outpost without a propprer protection, tanks, artillery, or something
I'm glad I'm not the only one that wondered how Bakool wasn't removed from the contest or aggressively being hunted down to be arrested for essentially *releasing a freaking nuke that never stops nuking.*
Bakool: *Releasing a nuke. kidnapping other contestants, attacking other contestants, attacking one of the judges, blocks off pathways, sabotage other contestants' boats* FFXIV writers: This is fine Zoraal: *attacks a judge* FFXIV writers: And that is how Zoraal gets disqualified...
Remember when midgardsormr suicide bombed the agrius because that’s what it took for even the greatest of wyrms to bring it down? But now Vrtra can solo a whole fleet of warships with only one eye? I know this game isn’t great at consistent power scaling but damn
To be fair to Vrtra, those 'warships' were pathetic compared to the Agrius. The entire 'I'm gonna use high tech to invade" story was goddamn stupid when the tech he brings was that pathetic.
Easy, it's like the Garlean ships are old-school sturdy brick Nokias and the Alexandrian ships are modern but pathetically fragile smart phones. Even old cars used to be way sturdier than what we have today despite technological advancements. Either way, it's still kinda stupid, at NO point was Zoral Ja any considerable threat to Eorzea and all of the allied forces, so it was very hard to take HIM seriously.
Bro, I loved both Shadowbringers and Endwalker, not to mention Heavensward was when my WoL first really got her identity, and I love 3.0 for that fact. I was so hyped and excited for when Dawntrail was coming out, and was ready to explore a new world see the culture rich places of Tural, and face Valigarmanda. Hell, I even pre-ordered the expansion the second I could, I was that hyped. It took me 2 and a half months to finish the expansion. I can't tell you how bored, frustrated, and downright angry I was with this expansion. In 6.55, I didn't mind Wuk that much, though she had some growing to do, but if the writers could pull off a good coming of age story, and see her grow and mold into her role as a leader of her people, Id be satisfied, but no. They fumbled the ball so hard. Now I attribute her to a worse version of 4.0 Lyse, which is not a good thing in my book. And dont get me started on that scene of Zorool Ja and his father (may he rest in peace). I was literally screaming for anyone to stop him and kill the son of a gun, but no, we had to sit there and do nothing. I was so upset and furious, it caused me to put down the game and take a 3 week break. After that point, I had lost all enjoyment of the expansion, minus one point, which was when we got to see the train in action, and not for any story reasons, but because I love locomotives. Once I was finished with the final boss (which even then wasn't free of Wuk, heavens forbid), I was so burnt from that, I went to the inn at Ishgard, basked in the ambiance of better times, logged off, and have never looked back. This expansion was a slap in the face to all that I enjoyed in FFXIV storytelling, and honestly, I might not go back, as sad as that makes me. Thank you for reading, if you cared to read. I hope you have a wonderful day/night, and I hope you found enjoyment in this expansion, even though I could not.
I had my problems with endwalker (maybe venat and the time travel writing), and ishikawa ranting via omega about venat, then geting "promoted" to manager rol scared me, but i assumed we would had a more relaxed (but not much) expansion centered about exploring a new continent with the cyberpunk city being some kind of hook for next stories to come. I did not expect what to me has been the worse expansion in terms of writing and while i like wuk i dislike her writing and how the story bends so much around her for her to be the strong protagonist that only doubted herself, while we just watch, instead of writing us being a propper mentor to her and helping while she needs but then us having our own arc. To me all the sphene thing should have been centered about krile instead of wuk, not just make krile into a usb mcguffin carrier and have her with the clones of her parents just so we can have some lore for the mcguffin of next expansion We have blatant plot holes like how yshtola did not realize that krile was from a reflection thus having a diferent proportion of aether/dynamis when she can see that and kryle was born in a reflection to parents from said reflection. We have bad villians, every mature theme is treated like in a mediocre shonen I still have been login after the end of the msq to play the coliseum , expert roulette and level a bit, when the server lagg issues allow it, as sometimes it freezes for a second and boom, 8 people dead because the game says that we did not move out ouf the areas. The seasonal events have somehow become worse not even compared to previous in 14 and other mmos, they are now even worse than ff11s. While a lot of systems are put to shame by even free to play tittles, like housing. And with the longer patch times and the lack of content in general i think i will leave until next big patch and hope this improves, but its looking bleak, specially how yoship did not understand the criticism and was defensive about that saying things like lyses arc and zenos doing nothing for the whole of shb was important for the catharsis of endwalker (zenos maaaaaaybe, but lyse....)
How did we go from Heavensward and Shadowbringers, to SPHEEEEEEEEEENE! My enjoyment of this game is waning. But at least I have some friends to play with occasionally, that's the only reason I'm playing now.
In the case of Living Memory, I think it should be "shut down". If the only way to truly have the Endless survive is the genocide of other worlds, then it shouldn't be allowed to continue sustaining itself. However, I don't think we should have been the ones to shut it down. The only terminal that needed to be removed was the central one, which seemed to only contain Sphene's memories. Leaving the other terminals online just means the Endless are now put on a natural time limit as the remaining life energy is used up. This accomplishes two things. Gives the WoL an opportunity to find an alternate means of fueling living memory in the patches and also wiping our hands of any claims of committing genocide.
Love comments like this not just being critical but adding a solution that is vastly superior to the original outcome shame SE writers don't have a mindset like yours.
Im not even mad that we shut everything down, my problem is that the scions were too non chalant about it. But i agree that it would have been better to just defeat sphene and let the endless dye once the lifetime of their current souls is due, like every normal living being, as its only a "soul energy" power but the place itself could have run for decades. Even if not, magine how important and hard would have been such decision to you and the scions in previous expansions to endwalker
The writers were invested in writing Sphene, not Zoraal Ja, and that's the crux of every issue in Dawntrail. The antagonist that acts as a throughline for the entire story just peters out because it's obvious that they don't want to write for him, only around him (he's the reason the WoL is even actively supporting Wuk Lamat in the first place! Not because they think she's capable but because they don't want another Garlemald). Imagine if they saved Sphene for the post MSQ and just focused all of that time on making Zoraal Ja a compelling villain. Imagine if his "tag along" moment came during Shaaloani so that the entire thing isn't disconnected from the meat of the story. This would be him witnessing the WoL doing things that he would think of as beneath them, just think of the development he'd have from seeing the person who he views as integral to winning the contest for Wuk Lamat just picking up poop? Imagine if the phrase "if only we reached out to him sooner" could also apply to the WoL so that they aren't a disconnected observer to how Wuk and Koana feel after Zoraal Ja's exposition dump? In addition to the above, Zoraal Ja would have been the perfect vessel to air legitimate grievances that the people of Turaal have with Eorzea. In the Shaaloani section, the introductory cutscene at night, the entire area looks like a polluted hellscape with Ceruleum being the cause, The same Ceruleum that greedy Eorzean merchants were trying to swindle the Whalaqee tribe out of since the very first Blue Mage questline. You can even play with his idea of war, having him believe that Tural is actually in a Cold War with Eorzea over things like resources, and if they don't exploit these resources for their own advancement first, then others will. This makes idea of "war leading to peace" have some semblance of sense as it would be Tural establishing hegemony through military and economic might so that they don't need to despoil their own landscape for materials. Finally, just think of the raw emotional impact we could have with the main characters of Dawntrail that could only be done because they're family. The Zoraal Ja vs Gulool Ja Ja fight right now is just exposition for how Soul regulators work instead of a character piece. Imagine when Zoraal Ja is first struck down and revived; he gets up slowly, blinking in disbelief as he places his hand on his body where his father struck the killing blow. His breathing and heartbeat quicken, we hear them getting faster and faster before he screams "I KNEW IT!" and then just goes apeshit on his dad. All of his thoughts and fears of his father not caring about him have been validated. The great uniter who fostered peace between people in Tural just killed his own son for his nation and now he truly has no more hesitation. What a missed opportunity that won't ever happen again in service to a discount Emet Selch.
Pretty sure Emet sent us to this continent to prove his point and to show us how "stupid" we actually are...I cannot explain it any other way to myself at least....it was just that bad. Thank you for putting the time and effort into making these videos. Very well said and thought out. I appreciate your honesty and objectivity as many are incapable of separating their own personal feelings about the game in order to step back and see the bigger picture. Im looking forward to your future videos. Well done.
The more I reflect on this story, the more opinions I hear, the more inconsistencies I see and it makes less and less sense. The amount of people that flat out don't see/notice the drop in quality or how much this could potentially damage the game in the long run is worrying. Only time will tell I guess, Yoshi Ps response was a bit tone deaf. Sucks, but it is what it is. At least the combat, music and graphics are good so thats something... - sorry for the rant it will happen again x)
I don't remember if you touched on this or not, but I'm going to say it anyways. Robot Otis died in vain: Zoraal Ja demonstrated when we confront him and Sphene in Heritage Found, 'killing' Sphene in front of us, only for her to reposess and impose her likeness to another robot vessel. When you fight Bolt the dog superhero, it winds up just standing there charging up, while Otis goes out of his way to defend Sphene from the super saiyan electricity, and winds up dying in the process - when Sphene could easily reposess another robot. His reason for doing so is sound, don't get me wrong - we can attribute that to his PTSD of failing to save Queen Sphene the first time, and he instinctly moved on his own to protect the current Sphene to redeem himself. But knowing that she could just do that, it's kinda horrible that one of the better characters in this expansion winds up throwing his life away. And Wuk saying 'Thank you for the repast' just makes the scene just that bit more worse for me.
Maybe... the first couple patches usually are pretty snoozy pace wise. Supposedly they're going to be digging up some "dark secrets" in 7.1 that's related to Solution Nine but somehow I don't think it's going to have much of an impact.
Bravo! Bravo! An excellent feeding DT to the woodchipper milord! My favorite inconsistency in DT is that Zoraal Ja was shown to have massive support when the rite was announced. Like the dude is the army's general, and apparently he's been helping the populace at every turn and knows his people well, and has the respect of all the warriors of Tulliyollal's army... And then all that support means jack dick, only his scurrilous sorcerer sidekick helps him at all. It literally made no sense that when Wuk Lamat won the rite, the populace all cheered in unanimous unison about how awesome that was, as many of them had been staunch Zoraal Ja supporters. What also made no sense was Zoraal Ja attempting to solo his father's shade, losing, and then considering Wuk Lamat better than himself when he knows damn well that Koana and the WoL/Scions were there doing 7/8ths of the work for her. She never won anything by her own strength, save for her ridiculous Super Saiyan Blue molly whopping of Bakool. Two things should have happened with Zoraal Ja that didn't. He should have taken issue with the WoL, and put in a background check on us, and then wanted to overcome us instead of anyone else. Secondly, when Wuk won the rite, his supporters should have been upset to the point of disbelief and staged a coup. He should have had heavy military men with him every step of the way, just in case. Instead we got a bargain bin evil Arbiter who threw away all past connections and advantages. Like, what army was he originally gonna try world conquest with? Tulliyollal's. That same army largely supported him, so they shouldn't be so devil may care about his loss in the rite. I'm fine with a story that curtails to love and peace being the right way to live, and I'm fine with everyone eventually singing kumbaya, but it has to be earned. It has to come natural. Hearts and minds don't magically change just because a cat bitch with a smile on her face says they should. No one sings a song reminiscent of Disneyfied Hymnals while building a Bomb Train. Dawntrail sees no evil, hears no evil, and speaks no evil. Because it turns a blind eye to itself, its failings, and its characters' failings. It's like little Timmy's first fanfiction, and I'll never understand why it was greenlit. Square Enix must really want them to work for/with nothing, or maybe they just don't like working XIV anymore and are attempting to damage it. When they inevitably screw up/debase FFXI in the up and coming 24 man raid, I'll likely unsubscribe. And I've been subscribed to Final Fantasy XIV since 2013. I've been subscribed to FFXI since 2003. I've always considered myself patient with the lack of care that sometimes goes into Final Fantasy MMOs, but Dawntrail was like a reveille. A bugle blast letting me know that, for sure, all of the creatives that I have loved are no longer in charge, and it's all just slop from here on out. I'm mad.
@@danito20 Because they already have in the past. They've taken tons of FFXI monsters and directly ported them into XIV. That, by itself, isn't crazy bad, however, in Endwalker they began adding The Empty monsters to FFXIV, which is a family of monsters that comes from Chains of Promathia, and has explicit lore tie ins to the concept known as, "The Emptiness." Basically the darkness inside of people that binds them together in their shared ancestry as being portions of The Twilight God. In FFXIV, The Empty were reduced to being Moon Fungus. I wouldn't expect them to be the biggest deal ever in XIV, but moon fungus? Really? Things like that do not inspire faith in the direction they will take the 24 man. The most recent patch art features Prishe and Shadowlord set in front of the other things in the patch unrelated to the 24 man. But Shadowlord and Prishe only ever intersect after the end of two whole storylines in XI, in a single battle, so they don't really have any interplay... but that's the way they're builing it. Call me a debbie downer or a doomsayer, but my expectations are already so low they're in Hell. And I feel like I'm still gonna be let down.
Oh and please longer videos are my bread and butter. Its amazing to listen to these at work. I dont need a jordan fringe video length (10 hrs lol) This is good
Even having Gulool Ja opening the gate was an insult. It should have been Krile who opened the gate to Living Memory with how much she is connected to the place.
Bakool Jaja was such a poorly written Fordola. I despised Fordola in the beginning and by the end she was one of my favorite characters from Stormblood. She didn't get away with her crimes, she was punished and still chose to help those in need. Who wrote DT? Every character in DT is just a much worse version of iconic characters from XIV's past.
We were promised a summer vacation. That's all this expansion needed to be. Succession rites, city built on farming souls, we didn't need any of it. They should've kept it for the next expansion so they would've had to time to actually do a good job.
I knew the MSQ was bad. I had already concluded in agreement with most of the points brought up here. And yet this video still manages to bring up even more reasons on why the MSQ failed that I somehow failed to consider. I blame the ennui the MSQ’s bad writing inspired. That said, SE should make the writing staff watch this video series in the hopes they learn something.
even the ceo admitted that the company as a whole as a toxic positivity feedback, as one of the things he says he wants to improve is internal criticism. Add that to how yoship answers to this expansion criticism has been really tone deaf and it makes me worry.
I agree with you so much and you really put into words the thoughts I have about DT, in a way I haven't been able to, thank you so much for this! I hadn't heard about DT getting a budget cut during development though
Completely agree with the part about Bakool Ja Ja. I was like "wtf, did I miss something?" constantly because nothing he did had _any_ consequences and no one really bat an eye. The characters handled him more like a school bully who did some minor mean stuff that we should just shrug off. Even more problematic than the writing is the toxic positivty from the community when it comes to topics like these. I made a deep dive reddit post about the Bakool Ja Ja issue and explained where the writing failed and why - and I got completely destroyed with snide remarks, personal attacks and many strawman arguments. "If you think that's bad writing then you just didn't pay attention, it's all clearly explained! *refuses to elaborate further*" "So by consequences you basically mean you wanted him to get killed off for the stuff he did, right? Booring" "Valigarmanda didn't do any damage, so it would've been stupid if there were any consequences for Bakool" ??? "But there ARE consequences! Wuk and the others are condemning his actions verbally - what more do you want!?" Really disappointed that it's almost impossible to have a nuanced discussion about the story in this community.
You addressed the same issues I had with Dawntrail in these three videos, and it's nice to see somebody not only have those same frustrations, but elaborate on them and why they make the writing bad. Dawntrail is full of plot holes, contradictions and mischaracterizations, and whatever the reason (lack of budget, lack of time, corporate meddling with the plot), it's written like a super generic shonen anime for 8-year-olds. It insults our intelligence and treats us like we have the attention span of toddlers. I would love a series where you fix the writing flaws of this game. I know a lot of people think about how they might do something better, so you'll probably find a lot of people agreeing with whatever videos you make on the subject. I don't care if the videos are long form or short form, just as long as you continue to put out intelligent critique. You've got my sub.
To be fair to Dawntrail, Gulool Ja Ja did have a solution to the Mamool Ja's homeland problem. And it was a pretty good solution, too: It was to -just leave-. He just told his people 'you can *leave*. You don't have to stay there. Come live here instead, we have food and light and no radioactive boulders. It's real nice." From his perspective I think this was the best solution for everyone, since, you know, he wanted people to live and work together and his old homeland fucking sucked. But he wasn't going to forcibly relocate anyone either.
TL;DR: I liked these vidoes and I'm glad they voice all the issues I've had, so there is that. Good job on it and good luck. This is a lot of text and I won't bother trying to altering how others view the issue of the Endless, Souls and so on. Yes I thought way too hard into this. I guess it depends on how you view the Soul, if you have a religious/spiritual view, making it an immortal, eternal part of you, one gifted by divine will and should never be tampered with or just energy you can swap out like a battery (Satan would love this one, makes his job easier). Everyone has their views and everyone thinks they're correct, I'm mostly just tired, the writing of Dawntrail is too insane to try and piece together. I still wanted my thoughts heard, though ignored, belittled, insulted and accused of evil they may be. I'm so happy I wasn't alone in seeing the issues with Bakool, especially the Varligamanda escape, because it's completely against his interests. even the "it'll put a roadblock in the way of others" doesn't work, because if it kills everyone in the valley, he's still out of two stones he needs for the challenge that he now can't complete. If we didn't need a trial for actual gameplay, Bakools quest would have been over as failing the Contest. Zoraal is weird; he supposed to be a "Resilient Son" and a "Miracle" as a Child of a Two-Headed Mamool, who are supposed to be infertile, so why isn't he worshipped as a miracle Child, as it's apparently claimed, to be just as important as the Two-Headed Mamool? Doesn't make sense and goes against what the Mamool supposedly Believes. Is a soul complete if you extract the memories and leave it empty? If it has all memories stripped from it, is given to another person and takes on their memories, is stripped again, is it still YOUR soul? Who soul is it? Who is the soul now? Living Memory is alive according to some, is an AI alive? Is ChatGPT alive? Is a photograph alive? Does tearing up a photo make you a murderer? I honestly don't know, I think the lack of in depth explanation and thought of everything in Alexandria is to be blamed for the long discussions where one side is being blamed for being psychopaths while the other really wants the "we are all genociders" answer. Though whatever conclusion we come to... God, it's all so very wrong, no matter what we agree on, it's all so very horrifying. The way I understood it, is that when you die, your soul is taken by the Origenic and has the memories extracted from it, leaving an empty soul as energy to be used to feed into someone with a Regulator, while the memories are stored into becoming an Endless. By the way, if you have a way to catch a soul and feed souls into a dead body... why not just catch the soul of the one who just died and feed it right back into them, without removing the memories? You gave them their soul and life back and didn't have to strip memories off it, making everything easier. It sounds a lot like the Soulkiller from Cyberpunk, I guess they thought the Engram of Johnny Silverhand IS the real Silverhand, except it's not; it's just his memories, he even says himself that the "real me" as in, his physical form and soul, is out there somewhere. He even explains that the Soulkiller fries your brain and packs away your soul or your memories, killing the real you to some extent. But that's Cyberpunk 2077 a game with better writing that Dawntrail and Origenics might actually be different from it, one can hope. And with Otis, we get something akin to Soma; Endless Otis and Robot Otis. Who is more real? Who is more alive? Does copying a memory make the same person or a new person? So no, when we go around shutting down Alexandria, we are not killing anyone, we're just deleting a USB drive. These people are worse than dead; they've been deleted from existence and it happened the moment Speen took the souls and stripped the memories of them. I don't Think there'll be an answer to this now (until every Post-MSQ update Before the next expansion is, out the writers have time to fix this issue), some will say "yes, we're doing a horrible thing, murdering thousands" others will say "no it's fine, they're not alive". Does it make you feel better if they are considered alive? Is Johnny Silverhands alive, as a memory taking over Vs body? Is a soul bereft of all memory still the same person? Do you consider AI like ChatGPT alive? I don't Think the Endless are alive, because I can easily see how a machine can use memories of a person to simulate actions. It's funny how we're living in an age where AI is so advanced it can trick most people into beliving they're a real person, so assuming the same of a setting that goes Heavy into the cyberpunk feel isn't too far off. But the soul part... so how many people have been consigned to True Death just to ensure there is a steady supply of empty souls that can sustain both the Endless AND the people of Solution 9? Origenics and Souls is a can of Worms, Endless is basically AI masquerading as people, using their memories. For example, why would Wuk Lamats nanny take on the form of her old self, is it because the old bint never had any real happiness ever in her Life and it was only being with Wuk Lamat she was truly happy? Doesn't beat back Wuk Lamat being a Mary Sue allegations lol. The kicker is I Believe these people aren't just dead, they've been deleted; Kriles parents, Erenvilles mom, Wuk Lamats nanny, all their empty souls are just endlessly being fed into other people, people who then add their own memories to those souls, then those souls get stripped of memory over and over again. When or if those souls ever make it to the Aetherial Sea, they would have gone through this so many times they will only have the memories of the last person who had that soul, not the original person. So yeah… in trying to save people from Death Speen succeeded in the thing Meteion failed at doing; granting True Death with Origenics. But since it's apparently not true and we are just committing genocide, otherwise if it was, it sure would be an inconvinence if anyone in the story thought about, told Sphene and have her commit Seppuku on the spot realizing this. So it's a good thing everyone doing video essays on this all agree that "yes, we're doing a Little genocide", otherwise the plot would be even dumber than it already is lol (no matter the conclusion we all finally agree, it's all very horrible, no answer is the better one, it's all full on evil) So yeah, I don't see "killing" the Endless as murder, because I know these people have LONG SINCE BEEN ERASED FROM EXISTENCE BY SPHENE, to me I am just shutting down this absolute mockery of Life and crime against nature itself. I was getting furious at seeing the Endless, it felt like someone was running around in a skinsuit "look at me! I'm not dead! I'm so happy! Look how happy I am!" Also people still use Regulators post-MSQ, so what happens when they die? Is Origenics still Active? Will it continue to Catch and process souls? What happens to the memories it extracts? They have nowhere to go... so do they just get deleted? So the people of Solution 9 still using Regulators are basically doomed to erasure from existence the moment they can no longer sustain their bodies with souls. And what happens if Origenics are shut down? Then we have cases of someone dying, their soul goes into the Aetherial Sea, they get up on a different soul, which they add their memories to, then they die and that soul goes to the Aetherial Sea... so we have several souls all with the same memory in the Aetherial Sea... It's honestly the most evil thing I've ever seen, Wuk Lamat is the greatest fool in the universe to forgive Speen for this. There's a reason why we say "your immortal soul" and why Selling it to demons is such a big deal; it is YOUR SOUL for eternity, but this Writing makes it all out to just be Another type of energy that you can trade away. If this was written by Satan himself as propaganda as to why you should sell your soul, I'd totally Believe it. But fine, FINE. WOL committed a genocide for the plot. Does that make you happy? My thoughts aren't a happy ones either, but it is infintely worse for the world building of FF14, so maybe pretending these memories are alive, somehow, makes you feel better. Kind of amazing the Ascians didn't step in on this, it literally breaks their plans so hard and is far worse than WOL opposing them, it would literally crush their attemps at "Unsunder" the "Sundered"... because all those souls that could be whole are now broken beyond repair. Speen is irredeemable for doing this and she's worse for having put the player in this position, if we go by the "you're a murderer WOL!" idea. TBH the more I think of it, I don't care if the Endless are alive or just a living photograph; the whole issue with how they're explaining this still makes my belief that they've created True Death by stripping memories from a soul to feed it to another is a sin beyond forgiveness. Whatever answer is given, Sphene is still the worst villain in all of FF14 and Wuk Lamat forgiving her is outright evil. But I'm sure they can retcon this in future updates... they have to... right? In closing; I am sorry if you read all of this, but thanks for doing this. I do hope some of this is incorrect or gets changed in future updates, because if it's never addressed or changed... oh no. P.S: I'm fairly convinced Living Memory is the message of "let the past die, kill it if you have to" and "nostalgia is empty and evil, it drains society is must be destroyed to progress forward". It's why it resembles a theme park, why food is devoid of taste and why we're given no choice in how tackle the issue except pulling the plug. But no matter what answer agreed on, one thing is absolutely true: it is morally justified to blame Sphene.
I actually really dig the fact that Zoraal was quiet in the first half. FFXIV has never had a quiet antagonist. Everyone gets their feelings and motivations discussed at great length. But I won't say there's not an open-ended void that you have to fill in yourself. The time wasted on Sphene could have been spent exploring Zoraal's upbringing to bring more sense to his warmongering. Wuk was too campy and smiles, so Zoraal being a bitter crown prince that was pushed to insane lengths to fulfill his legacy was so welcome for me. He may not be executed the best, but I loved watching Zoraal steadily go to greater and greater lengths. Before Everkeep, my man got on the phone, like, "Hey, Karen, could you push the 'kill everyone' button?" Code Blood, lol. Last bit: I really REALLY wanted Zoraal's son to be an angry teen when we got there so he could be like "You wanna kill my dad? Let me do it." so that Zoraal is ended the same way he ended Gulool.
The reason why still living people can just enter Living Memory is because it's essentially a large server room. Befor Sphene transported it to another reflection, it was quite literally just the top floor of the Everkeep. It's just a roofless building sitting on the ground in another reflection now.
Koana really should have won the rite. Especially with how it ended with Wuk Lamat basically saying “I’ll raise Gulool Ja into a kind king.” I personally think they could have been bolder to have Wuk Lamat lose the rite to Koana, but over her adventure with us, gather a party of different races - like a WoL - and show that Gulool Ja Ja’s legacy comes in various forms through all three of his children. It even leaves her untethered to Tural to raise Gulool Ja and help Solu-9. That child is highkey the only thing that was made me less hate Wuk Lamat and feel more like it was such a missed opportunity to make more interesting choices. The WoL should have been either a more involved guardian or a less involved mentor, they made them sort of both and neither.
The thing is zoraal ja’s story could have been interesting if they had done anything to flesh him out. Imagine you are the first born son of a king. Not just the first born but a miracle birth as your father was not supposed to be able to have children. You grow up thinking you will succeed him. Then be brings home two stray orphans and gives them equal rights to as heir to his throne. Not just in the line of succession but equal rights. He takes away your birth right. A right that has been drilled into you by the people around you. How bitter that could make a person. But we got none of that. It was such a missed opportunity to make him an actually interesting villain. Instead we kinda just get Zenos part 2 electric boogaloo.
Hey. Thanks for the in-depth look at the villains of Dawntrail. I completely agree with you in regards to Living Memory. I never was so appalled to my WoLs actions than in this area. The quote you mentioned from Emet was constantly screaming in my mind. "This is all so wrong. Make it stop. Or let us at least morn. Everything but smile it all casually away." were my thoughts. I was thinking of the tribes in Ultima Thule and the tribe quest and was "These are not alive either. Should we also shut them down?". Wuk was smiling and pushing us on. I did not want it. But even Erenville and his mentor confused the hell out of me. Erenville, a gleaner(!) and his mother (also invested in botanical life), were ok with shutting a terminal down. A terminal which was also the powerhouse for the mechanical trees in LM. The trees as mentioned containing the samples of the previous botanical life of that reflection. What were the writers thinking? I do not understand. And at the end putting "Smile" over our actions. Us having destroyed the remnants of Alexandrias history, taken down their king and queen and installed a 7 year old as their new ruler, who is guided by Wuk (so basically installing a puppet government if you so want to phrase it). I do not get what went on there
Wow, hit basically every single point I hoped for. Can't really say I disagree with any of your points. Letting the failed theater kid that wrote the fucking Sorrow of Werlyt (would love to hear your thoughts on that clusterfuck, by the by.) helm the next expansion was one of the dumbest decisions they could have made.
30 minutes in and you have hit every point flawlessly. Zoraal Ja was about as deep as a puddle. "I'm going to show you why war is bad." Since they told us he was a badass fighter i would have expected more people to support him if his angle was "look at the super powers beyond the salt. I am the strong leader you need to stand up to them to protect us." Fear would have done more for him Living memory was literally "Mods asleep post wuk lamat memes"
Hm. That's a decent angle for Zoraal. Especially with the aftermath of the Final Days. People could be terrified of the outside world and desperate for a symbol of strength to carry them through.
One thing that particularly made me angry, is that Kryle's percieved so SO many reds flags coming from Zoraal Ja each time the team met him, but never, NOT ONCE, though about sharing this information with anyone.
26:00 I still haven't gotten over this. When the negative opinions about Smile came around (exacerbated by Wuk Lamat's VA), so many people brought notice to the uses of it in MSQ, and how it's used just before going to war on enemy territory with a kamikaze train. They probably thought it was lessened by the fact that the soldiers are mechanical, but it's still funny as hell.
There is little awareness to most of this expansion. My favourite has to be how nobody in the writers room ever stopped to think about the scene where "Zoraal Ja, dying, vents to his crying infant son about his entitlement and daddy issues after declaring war on an entire reflection and losing". Zoraal Ja being a walking talking red flag throughout the entire expansion required me to suspend my disbelief immensely to progress the story without giving up, but that one scene killed me.
At this point, I'm happy we had a free choice in making our characters. Wuk Lamat is so pushed into the focus, its a wonder we aren't forced to user our free phantasia to turn into her...
THANK YOU. The amount of people defending the Living Memory genocide would be flabbergasting if I didn't attribute it to mentally blocking out what we did. I loved Endwalker, but can respect your thoughts - it kept my belief suspended, and time travel is an area where logic cannot always be applied (the grandfather paradox and all that), so I can step back and still enjoy it. I could not enjoy Dawntrail, heavens know I tried.
The problem is that applying time travel that way was a choice and they also did not write it in a way that it bound Venat's hands - quite the opposite. You can see this in how Yoshi has answered questions on time travel since, including the 6.0 Q&A. Idk, I could never really enjoy EW and how it tried to make out all that to be 'necessary'. Seeing the new writers incapable of concealing the act of horror of wiping out the endless as well as Ishikawa managed to fluff up the Sundering, and the writing decline so badly and get panned by all and sundry is pretty satisfying to me, not going to lie.
@@alchemi8085 Then write the characterisation to fit it better. Just having an NPC blurting out that they're not alive even when subsequent writing doesn't jive well with this is not good writing.
It took me DAYS to realize something good out of the story mess. It seems the toxic positivity is kind of gone and everyone is open to criticism of the game.
Thank you, I do not understand people that say Bakool was a good villain or a good character. His story was total nonsense straight from a cartoon for children in the single digit age range. And Zoraal was almost not even a character tbh, low key, and the way they framed the scenes around him, like killing their father, were so dumb it made it total nonsense. Instead of having us find him dead after the battle or see what happened while cut off by debris or enemies, they had WoL and the Scions just stand and watch when we easily could have stopped it and we should have attacked him and prevented him from escaping in the first place. DawnTrail hurt my soul, I do not understand what happened to the writing team but whoever they changed and gave power to that let this happen needs to be undone, replaced, it was so bad. Sphene is basically a walking macguffin that doesn't even make sense. And yes, Koana was honestly the one we should have been backing, Wuk should have been the one to remove herself from the running because she doesn't actually have any of the skills needed. Koana actually did everything to help, and without fumbling into stuff like focusing on a festival that everyone conveniently forgot was magic instead of actually making something to dorectly address the food shortage. Even the second half, it makes zero sense for Wuk to come with us instead of Koana who actually has training and knowledge from Sharlayan about advanced technology, hell the train we use was from him too. Wuk's only skillset is wanting to be friends with everyone whoch ironically, actually would have made sense if she was the one that got aid from Vritra but no, Koana did that too. It's so dumb.
It is actually insane how ffxiv devs managed to genocide the msq and reputation of ffxiv within a single patch. That's crazy. Maybe I should go play WoW or Minecraft. Better MSQ.
The MSQ was so bad this time I think I'm just going to take a break from an expansion, the gameplay didn't change *that* much and the MSQ is bad now, so why am I playing this game???
As a 14 fan is sad to see the comunity defend everything without criticism, wich is fanboy not fan behaviour. While WoW has improved their writing and a lot of things about the game, its in more languages and their transmog system is a lot better with a similar sized studio to 14, ESO is single payment and you get better seasonal events, better oufit and waaaaaay better housing, and even some f2p games are making improvements ff14 comunity is letting the game become worse and worse in terms of writing and content
@@matthewoconnor2742 if you dont care about savage and crafting you have 0 content worth doing this expansion once you complete your arcadium set. And the only long term content that previous expansions offers is a island that its insulting how badly implemented it is compared to similar homestead systems in other games even f2p ones from 10+ years ago, they did not even let us decorate it propperly and have an instanced bedroom there. This while the servers are melting from ddos, in 2024, because somehow a cloud protectedl oad balanced is alien tech.
I just wanted everyone to be consistent. Everyone's motivations and goals flop constantly to the point they get in their own way. I thought Bakool Jaja *was* going to be "Saturday morning cartoon villain" then he released a living nuke. I just wanted characters I could look back fondly on after DT was over.. and the one character i did like was murdered because the universe hit pause on our character!
Loved the video to bits, the whole series, I am also someone that loves this game and replaying with my alt the good parts and finding always many nice details I missed, while DT is the only expansion I started to skip all becasue no matter how many dialogues i miss they will repeat the same reftain over and over again that is impossible to miss something. I also hope this will bring back the game on track but the perception is that they are bored of their own game, the contents are all the same, harder maybe, but none the less the same like alexandria is the end of the world that we saw in Dead ends that was the end of the worlds we saw in Amaurot. The seasonal events have become forgettable, the items in the shop totally uninspired which is strange as they should provide extra money. They failed with the double dyes, where the second dye goes on almost unnoticeable details in the few items where it is implemented. They messed up with the graphical updates, being forced to even reissue the benchmark and the last message on Lodestone is to apologize for failing to update the characters so badly that they will need 2 or 3 patches to sort it out. And worst of all the time among the patches has grown from 2 months, when they were providing always 2 extra expert dungeones to 4,5 months, with one dungeon, leaving nothing to do except for old contents. Not sure if this depends on the company current situation or just they are planning to abandon this game and soon announce a new one, but this is definitely not the best way to retain those players, including some streamers, so hardly regained after the disaster of the 1.0.
I think I'm going to try and do a bit of a dawntrail re-write so this'll probably be a long one: To begin with, we never join the rite of succession. We travel to tural with erenville and krile to discover what's going on with her earring and to have a classic adventure as a break from all the saving the world we've been through. Once in tural, we find out about the rite by accident because we saw a big monster and fought it for fun. Turns out that monster was a tural vidral that had been causing trouble, and so dealing with it was named one of the trials for the rite. Zoraal Ja commends us for our strength in battle but insists that we do not interfere further with the rite. Cue us returning to travelling with krile and co. to discover what we can about the earring and the golden city. We soon receive a summons from galool ja ja and go to meet him. He knows who we are and asks what our business is in tural. He informs us that the rite will end at the entrance to the golden city and makes a request that we delay our adventures so as not to interfere. So as not to leave us with nothing to do, he offers us a challenge to fight him both as an indulgence but also as a way to gauge our true strength. We proceed to wipe the floor with him and he rewards us by allowing us passage to explore shaaloni since there are no ties to the rite there. (This is now the second zone we actually go to) While in shaaloni, we explore and get to learn a bit more about erenville while also learning of the yok huy's dreams and how a sickness eventually drove them back. Then BOOM alexandria's dome appears, and they invade. We are caught on the front lines defending the people of shaaloni. After we triumph over the vanguard of the army, we learn that a separate detatchment was sent to tuliyolal and upon arriving, see the aftermath of the assualt. Through the echo we still get to see the invasion happen, and we see galool ja ja fall defending his people. The candidates for the rite call on us for aid in fighting alexandria, except bakool ja ja, and we venture into the dome. Koana is amazed with the technology, zarool ja is in awe of their strength and wuk lamat is trying (and not doing a good job) to put on a brave face for her people. When we meet sphene, wuk lamat is the one who opens a dialogue between the two sides and tries to find understanding for the sake of peace. We then receive a call from erenvile who is outside of the dome, informing us that bakool ja ja has released valigarmanda in a failed attempt to use the vidraal as a weapon against alexandria. Zoraal ja opts to stay behind with a detatchment of the army to hold a frontline while we go with koana and wuk to aid bakool with valigarmanda. Upon valigarmanda's defeat, the beast actually agrees to aid us by defending the land. Thus we are free to return to the dome. When we return we find that time distortion between the two realities has occurred, and zoraal ja has been in alexandria for around 30 years. In this time he has actually decided to join sphene's side, has had a child and now desires conquest of the rest of tural to unite it under the banner of alexandria. With alexandria an even bigger threat than before and having intimate knowledge of tural thanks to zoraal ja, we seek out Otis to try and learn more of why alexandria seeks conquest. Here is where we learn of the endless and of the souls required to sustain them. We also meet galool ja, zarool's son, and find out he has been distant to the boy as he has been so focused on planning the second invasion of tural. A comment is made from wuk and koana about how this is out of character for him as he only ever sought power as a means to defend his family. Erenvile, being with us, learns his mother had been caught in the dome and has been leading a resistance group. We meet with her and launch a plan to go through origenics to confront zoraal ja and sphene. We fight zoraal ja and find out that his heel turn happened because it was the only way to save his father. Galool ja ja has in fact been made into an endless (his soul having been taken when he fell in the initial invasion) and zoraal ja refused to let him go. He reconciles with his family and passes on his legacy to his son, informs us of sphene's plan and then passes on. With a little bit of krile brain power we work out that the golden city is another gate into alexandria and we can use this (and the cool chalice we found) to activate it and reach where sphene has gone. Racing against the clock to prevent the second invasion we travel to yak'tel and discover the truth behind the blessed siblings. We learn that bakool's motivation was to right the wrongs of galool ja ja who had abandoned his people out of shame for their actions rather than to help them so they wouldn't repeat the mistakes of the past. We find ketenram and learn the golden city is at the heart of the burial ground and bakool secures our passage inside to reach the golden city. Upon reaching the gate, the WoL and krile get a vision of her parents giving her to galuf, and ketenram explains where she cane from. Now with more reason than ever to enter the gate we head in and find ourself in living memory. We are greated by erenvile's mother who explains that she actually died in the assualt and that zoraal ja's actions are what secured her and many of the turali people's place as endless. However, she recognises this for the hollow existence it is and seeks to put an end to it for the sake of those still living. We aid her in shutting down the endless area by area, all while erenvile is denying the reality of losing his mother (echoing much of zoraal ja's sentiment). We have to shut down galool ja ja's endless in one area and Otis' endless in another. Eventually krile finds her parents preserved as endless and learns the truth of her origin and that she was in fact from alexandria at the time of the war that caused calamity. She is accepting of the loss of her true parents and in doing so helps erenvile to understand he must do the same. Then we proceed to shut down the 'server thing' with erenvile's mother and have a touching scene of him saying goodbye while she whispers something to him we don't hear. We proceed to confront sphene and she sends the others away to deal with us alone, no bullshit wuk lamat appearance just us vs the big bad in an epic climax. We return triumphant and koana, wuk and bakool decide to rule as a council each playing to their own strengths. We end of the expansion with erenvile appraoching us geared up as a viper and revealing his mother's last words were encouraging him to continue to travel with us and take up her old gear from when she was the defender of his viera tribe against the vidral. The last shot showing that we still have the key/chalice thing and revealing azem's symbol glowing on top of it. Okay that took a while to write out, and obviously, it's on a youtube comment so it's underdeveloped and probably got loads of issues. But I'd love to know what people think of this as an idea for how to improve the expansion while still hitting a lot of the key events and story beats.
The bloody knife in Elpis part, at least had a justification that had been established as far back as Heavensward where in the Alexander raid series it was shown that a time travel event changing history is impossible to carry out, since time travel mechanics in FFXIV seem to follow the Novikov self-consistency principle which guarantees that going back in time ensures that the future you have come from is going to happen no matter what you do, which is why the only way one could reach a different outcome is if you were to travel to a different timeline, which is exactly what G'Raha Tia had done, having arrived to Norvrandt from a timeline where the Warrior of Light had died to the Black Rose via the use of Crystal Tower, bypassing the issue of being unable to affect the history of his timeline by jumping into a completely different point in time in another one, in which he did not exist as an individual. So even if some way to save the past and save the ancients could have been found, averting The Sundering, or maybe even the Final Days and creation of Zodiark, it would have just created an alternate timeline in which the ancients would not have suffered the Final Days and The Sundering would never have occurred, but it would do nothing for the timeline from which our Warrior of Light had originally come. Unless he was of course willing to petition Garlond Ironworks to commit to centuries of research so that he could ditch his own and come chill with the ancients. After having the indignity that was Dawntrail inflicted upon me, I would have been tempted to do just that, because that story lacks any sort of justification entirely for what had been done and side characters from prior expansions had more development and time invested into them than Dawntrail's main antagonists.
The time travel aspect is a tempting explanation. It's definitely better than any of Venat's own arguments before we leave Elpis. Though the fact she never mentions it as a reason for her actions. That with Elidibus' warning in mind, we travelled back in time knowing we were going to use these people and then abandon them to preserve our time. It's a weighty decision the story refuses to confront at all. It's a topic I plan to address in the near future. Thanks for the input. There are some viewpoints to consider.
@@durantes I had always assumed that being an ancient, Venat had immediately grasped all the implications when she said that she would not have given the Warrior of Light her ward without a good reason, but since she had no recollection of having done so, that could only mean one thing: he had come from the future. The story could have definitely done a better job illustrating that, like having WoL and the scions read some of the Ironworks records found within the Crystal Tower, or have the Exarch tell us more during some downtime.
Zoraal ja suffers from the identical problem as Wuk lamat does. they both have basicly no change in character, zoraal starts as angsty looner guy with daddy issues, and ends as looner guy with daddy issues, with only getting a new shiny armor in between. The annoying part with Zoraal ja is that there is so much potential for tragic character developement. A child suffering from his own expectation, seeing the acts of his father as distrust towards him. there could have been progress to more self reflection and a better self during the trial, only for it to be squandered in the last trial for an unfair reason, by his own kind mind you. there could have been a more settled down loving husband in Alexandria only for him to die with his wife during the birth of his son thanks to the Alexandrian tech, leaving him only the anger and ambition of his former self and a child he has no connection with anymore. (now that i think of it... how comes that we didnt saw Zoraal ja in living memory....) But Dawntrail is written in such an infantile way that any form of nuance or heavy hitting philosophic question or even any reasoning of why characters act the way they are is sweeped under the rug.
I have been looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this since you first mentioned it and have been rewatching your past videos for a few weeks. I enjoy your style and opinions, so I am eager to see how the villains stack up from ARR to SHB (my personal favorites), EW (apt), and now DT. Edit: Wow, it was so much more terrible than your past DT videos led me to believe. It literally got worse the farther down the line of villains you went. Especially the last one. Anyroad, I prefer long videos. I can listen to them to help me sleep, have them playing in the background, or just sit down and watch the whole thing. If the video is "too long", people could always...you know...pause it and resume it later? I know. I have watched, in its entirety, a video almost 60 hours long. Regardless of what you do, I await your next project. I am particularly interested on your thoughts on Venat/Hydaelyn. I have never heard anyone say anything bad about her, so I expect that video will be quite fascinating, especially if you go over the actions of both her forms. ...Also, if you don't mind, as someone that loved Zenos from Day One, I would be elated seeing you do a long video on him and his life from SB to EW. If you ever make a series for discussing FF Villains (even if just for XIV), Zenos would be an excellent first choice...to me, at least.
Yeah, I love long analysis videos, and I also encourage Durantes to go longer if he feels the desire to do so. Good critiques are typically *exhaustive* critiques. Both positive and negative critical essays are best when they go into detail and examine how individual things fit (or fail to fit) together.
Great breakdown. Keep it up! Loved longer videos too. This is good quality. I don’t mind length but quality which I’ve come to see with your breakdowns and possible fixes to story arcs
I still have one idea on a huge missed opportunity regarding Dawntrail... What if one or both of the twins boarded that first train before the barrier went up? Can you imagine how different the narrative would be with one of them being a guide to Alexandria and Solution Nine?
You know the first part of the MSQ is BAD when the producer says to people stop talking shit about it lmao,here's hoping it gets better but that's whisful thinking.
@@NotRealAkira Im not a fan of private servers personally, but it is a route you could go down if you wanted to give it a try. You can buy the entire game off of steam for 10-20 dollars if you want to play the retail version.
@@BiscuitsV2 I said that mostly because while, yes, the servers are still running I'm already paying like 20$ per month on a FF14 sub (Canadian currency sucks), and I'm sure there's not that many players so I'd have to solo most of the content anyways, so... Kinda hard for me to justify paying a 2nd sub
Not only 11 has better writing than what ff14 is having nowadays, the seasonal events are better. Halloween this year in 14 was: go to a npc, talk to them. Repeat twice, get clothing, done. No minigames, no hidden pumpkins, no dresses npcs, and if you miss the event dont worry, you will have to pay real money for the clothing on a subscription + expansion based game.
There are just so many things wrong with, well, most everything about Dawntrail that it's just baffling. From the story to the characters, it's just one head-scratcher after another. From Wuk Evu and the Hanu Elder KNOWING about Ihih'hana's true purpose and just not seemingly bothering to tell newer generations why it's so important to their lives, to us telling Bakool to NOT use his sob story as an excuse for what he did the entire rite but Wuk forgives him immediately anyway so everyone else does too, to Wuk solving Mamook's centuries long eugenics problem AND racism with just the hand of friendship and some crop seeds that weren't bananas which shows Gulool Ja Ja was a moron for never doing this since it was just THAT EASY TO FIX, alllll the way to Krile getting shafted the entire MSQ right until the very end of the expansion, even though she was constantly hyped up during the fanfest keynotes to play a major role, by giving her about 10 minutes with her parents...and then the writers deciding it would be a REAL good idea to have Wuk Lamat COMPLAIN THE ENTIRE TIME we learn about the Milala alongside her because "me not smart, learning hurt head." To add onto that: Cahciua, Erenville's mother, was introduced in zone 5. Cahciua had more dialogue spoken in her appearances in zones 5/6 then Krile had THE ENTIRE EXPANSION. I could go on, and on...and on, but it really is just baffling how many things they did and then ultimately went "This is great, ship it."
Great video I think the best way to sum up DT is that we the player or the WoL is the villain of the story and tbh if I was Zoraal Ja and had Wuk Lamat as a sibling I think I would lose my mind too. The main points I could think of were.. 1st: Wuk Lamat is selfish, entitled, nepo baby with no skills and no knowledge of her people she is also naive and immature without a single qualification to be a decent leader. All her achievements throughout the story were not earned not even once the worst part is a character from Genshin Impact of all games with a character called Kachina was a better done version of Wuk Lamat. Zepla a FF 14 CC and Genshin CC pointed that out and after looking into it I agree and find it embarrassing the game that brought us Emet could stoop so low. 2nd: We as the player/WoL robbed a far more suited character of being the ruler that being Koana as he did actually get achievements was humble and abandoned his chance of victory. 3rd: Erased not just a people but all records of their existence. An entire civilisation without memories would mean they are truly dead. You could argue that you the player engaged in one of the most evil acts in all of FF 14. Not once did you stop to consider or try to negotiate with alternatives it was just they must go. There are other games with similar story lines such Tales of Xiilia 2 and Fate grand order: Lostbelt in the Cosmos. Xillia 2 was worse than this game because the throughout the story the MC ends millions of lives to stop the main timeline from falling apart only to find out that the one who set up the trial lied which was revealed in the true ending so everything you did was for nothing. DT has given me the same level of hatred I had for Xillia 2's stupid plot. At least in FGO you have no choice its literally you or them while cruel there are no alternatives. 4th: Considering how strong the WoL is. There were so many casualties that could have been avoided. 5th: I give this its own point but lying to Sphene after ending her purpose and people was so cruel I couldn't even believe it at the time. Tone deaf, stupid and cruel the kind of writing I would expect from Forspoken not FF 14. Can it even be fixed at this point other than having Wuk Lamat die heroically and have Koana be the true leader I don't know if you could. All I can think of is that Alexandria had a back up plan with a remaining server the new villain is completely furious at Wuk Lamat and WoL vows revenge tries to kill Zoraal Ja's son Wuk Lamat sacrifices herself to save him and WoL finishes off the new villain who acted out of pure desperation. Then acting in character the WoL and the scions try to find a way to at least preserve the memories or bring back the citizens from the back up archive without needing more souls. Also Koana becomes the new leader and opens up trade to enter a new era of prosperity. That's the best general summary I could come up with to try and fix this mess. Also this message is way too long sorry about that.
The last zone is just so... SO poorly written. I can only assume they wanted to make an argument to morality of AI and its consciousness. They are artificial intelligence, since it was stated multiple times throughout the whole latter part of the story. Let's ponder some, if you would: If they are taken as alive: Irredeemable mass murder just as bad as the Hydaelyn boogaloo. Why do we not take more time and try to do literally anything? And no, one talk with a posterboy on a gondola does not count as enough. If they are NOT taken as alive: Literally just hitting the power button, lol. So... why not just speedrun that and skip an entire bossfight? Like seriously, besides being nice to the Mary Sue, there is L i t t e r a l l y no point in doing anything in there whatsoever. Considering that this is literally just a tack-on, let's then ask ourselves a question: How Will We Know When AI is Conscious? [Thanks, Exurb1a]. In an exceptionally short version, we simply cannot know as we cannot define consciousness. We can't even determine if an AI is sentient or sapient, let alone conscious. Tell me this, can these memories/ai make new memories? And are we sure that they are not only just hearing us, but *listening* to us? - We don't know. "Sure," you might say "but these memories react to us and seem to gain new knowledge!" - We don't know if they do and even if, that is not Consciousness, that is [Sentience]. "But they do posses self-expression as can be seen with their art!" Correct, but we also do not know if it's stuck in a loop of doing the same thing and not creating. In both cases, however, this debates [Sapience]. The best argument for this is the "Chinese room experiment" (go watch a video on it if you don't know it), where this specific language/memory/whatever model simply cannot know and express that it in and of itself is [Conscious]. From my memory (because I am not going to re-do the whole story for this lmao), there aren't any interactions that would give enough thought towards this line of thinking whatsoever. I then propose, if you would, that we are talking to exceptionally good parrots - which we can't even know for sure. And, in the end, we arrive at the whole thing being nigh-literally Matrix ripoff (Funnily enough, it was so insiped by it that it also copied the level of very bad decisions when it comes to writing the later movies). [tl;dr] Which is all to say, that even if they ARE alive, we don't know. If they are NOT alive, we also don't know. We, as the character, just go along with Wuk Lamat's musings for the sake of sakeness and pondering to Miss Mary Sue. Stopping to think about any part of this at ANY POINT IN THE WHOLE ZONE be damned. [Personal opinion] They are just AI running on soul batteries and the entire zone didn't matter at any point in time, literally just being padding for runtime.
they shouldve thought of a option to let them run on a different power source. can these same writers say the same if we irl are AI created by some extradimensional god? what if they want to turn us off? the writiers dont have the depth to tackle these questions of conscience and being. dawntrail is a massive dissapointment.
@@eW91dHViZSBpcyBjZW5zb3JzaGlw Fully agree on the entirery of its writing thus far, yeah. Worst part is that they even attempted to tackle topics with more depth, like a lot of Shadowbringers did with the morality of killing the sins, etc. but this? Nah, not the same writers and it SHOWS
It is explained to us that they are alive and are made of an stolen soul, wich is then cleaned of its memories and implanted the ones of an alexandrian. So while they are stored in a computer and given hologram boddies (or robot ones) they are conscious sentient being like any human and even have a human soul inside. And while that would be already evil by itself, said stolen soul is used as a power source, because the plot decided that only human souls work for it, and in the process of being used as a power source (or to heal the boddy of a flesh and bone citicien) the soul gets destroyed completly, instead of joining the reincarnation circle. So we had killed inocent people/souls that were kidnapped and implanted with false memories and given the aspect stored in said memories, with almost no weight given to said decision, in a hurried plan to save the world (seeing how a half eyed dragon soloed their fleet and stinien + a few cowbois stopped their attack, was not that much of a threat tbh) Not only propper weight is not given to the decision of murdering people (and it would have been as easy as say that its better to kill them and free their sould that have the sould completly erased but still show the decision as something hard) but this makes sphene be disgustinly evil, stupid, and a discount emet selch. While emet plan involved killing the current people to resurrect the ancients, it was at least fusing souls into the big original soul (how a single ancient souls can be split and lead to multiple sentient beings is its whole can of worms) Sphene plan is to continue killing people just to take their soul and implant them with false memories, just to keep a museum of what her civilization once was. So it goes from: i can understand that you want to kill us to resurrect your friends, but thats still evil. To: "Sphene, we are friends, i totally understand you and i get your dream, even if its just to keep kidnaping and brainwashing souls destroying them and not actually resurrecting anyone, ill stop you because there is no other way but i will carry your legacy UWU, oh and my friend the wol does not give a fuck he is now a bland npc"
My argument against your genocide point is that my WoL didn't have any idea what she was doing as she was stuck in a time skipping mechanic ala Futurama and was just clicking things she was told to click. I had started skipping all cutscenes by Living Memory so I missed everything there lol. I only play FFXIV for the story so this expansion has me questioning whether or not I should keep playing.
@@ChannelRaznoff That seems to be a lot of people lately. People i’ve known for years are barely playing anymore. They’re aren’t motivated with this nonsense being all they’re getting.
Using souls as a resource was one of the most interesting concepts introduced in FFXIV but was so unexplored it ended up making no sense. Can someone for example explain why it's wrong to use souls to revive someone that died? If souls and memories are different things I don't see an issue putting a new soul in someone to revive them, it'd be kinda like a heart transplant. And I understand the system works somewhat like a ponzi scheme where you need more people paying into it than are paying out. BUT if there are declining birth rates that would mean you would need less souls to keep up the system. 2 people having 1 kid means there's 1 extra soul to work with and if 2 people just don't have kids there's 2 extra souls to work with. And why don't animal souls work for bringing someone back? I know they can be used for a power up but why can't a cow soul for example be used to revive someone? And if the soul of a cow and person are too different does that mean to bring back a Hyur that died you have to use a Hyur soul and not a Hrothgar or Lalafell soul? What could have made it more interesting is if after getting a new soul after dying and coming back there were some side effects, for example changes in personality and mannerisms implying the personality someone has isn't just their memories but their actual soul. And as a side note it feels hypocritical playing reaper in the parts of the story that criticize the soul system. Here I am using a voidsent that feeds off the aether of me, my enemies and possibly their souls (you do have a soul gauge as a reaper) possess my character for a power up. Yet here I am saying how wrong it is to use souls as a resource.
It's considered *morally* wrong to use souls in that way. It's generally accepted in the Source that once a person dies, that's it. The soul returns to lifestream to repeat the cycle of life anew. There are those like Emet Selch and Aulus Asina who could give a damn about all that, but they are the exception and not the rule. Thus, when we see souls being used as a "resource", we see it as messed up as that's just not how we perceive how souls should work.
@@Sutekiiii it feels like the writers wanted us to be upset based on some of our own irl perceptions of what a soul is, but the way it's presented in the game the soul seems little different than an organ. And even using the views of someone from the source when they were talking about that soul processing plant they acknowledge that the people of solution 9 recreated the aetherial sea it's just more industrial. So it feels kinda illogical to be upset about being actually efficient about using souls for what they actually are a resource In the end though I see allot of this being a problem of over explaining a settings mysticism. Same thing with that shadowlands expac wow had that ruined the lore for the afterlife
@@hunterharris5929 I kind of lost all reason to care about how they were using the souls after we saw Sphene being totally ok with those souls being used for recreational purposes. I cannot believe that the writers didn't have an epiphany when Sphene was having a conversation with an arena fighter who was freaking out because they didn't have anymore souls left to spend. If maintaining the count was so important for so long to the point where she would travel to other reflections to yoink other people's souls, why on earth was recreational use ever allowed in the first place? Why are we allowing people to live outside of the city where they can die in numerous ways? Why do we not have robots for handling combat in the Thunder Yards? We get the explanation that it's because the robots can't take a lightning strike, but that doesn't make sense because we *know* they're made of electrope. The entire zone's lackadaisical approach to explaining how the souls are used then trying to tell you 'using souls bad' clashes so hard, it's painful.
@@BiscuitsV2 I'd also add how it's weird using a soul can't cure diseases or old age but can somehow cure a shot to the face or being gored by a monster
@@hunterharris5929 Lol yeah. Like that chronic lightning aether disease thing. I feel like we could've used the same method we used to cure the enthralled. And if they wanted to add some twist where using souls would help them do it, fine by me.
Not...thrilled with your assessment of Emet-Selch. You need to realize his motivation wasnt just about a teaching moment. The whole time, from the moment he laid eyes on us, and our soul, he was convinced we were Azem. The whole dialogue about waiting for that one, it was us, or at least his belief in who he believed we were. It's that fact that allowed him to indulge in letting us contain the light. But...I'm getting off track, and going into speculation, as I'm of the belief that he was seeking to cause a personal rejoining in the hopes that genocide wasn't the only way to restore those he lost.
If Bakool JaJa was in Transformers Animated, Shockwave could have said that he was decepticon and everyone aside of Megatron would agree. Megatron wouldn't really object, he would just kill the idiot there and then, because Animated Megatron is the only Megatron with balls and also not an idiot. Zoraal Ja is full nothing burger... I have my thoughts about EW issue but I think there it's more justified, considering that trying to break timeline COULD potentially make things even worse, as Time Travel is another can of worms of "It could've; it could'vent" I just don't feel that it was that bad and Elidibus implied that changing past would mean that we won't return to our timeline but to new one that would be completely different and us from this timeline will disappear and everyone will succumb to horrible depression-death. Or maybe he meant that we won't be able to change timeline even if we tried and I wasn't ready for him going full Kain-on-Raziel-timeline-ramble on me, to be honest. Let's just agree that changing history is impossible (as devs implied) and move on. Regarding Living memory I just kinda assumed (sorry, I didn't read half of text, I was in a hospital, playing game on my laptop with shitty GPU and Wuk Lamat had added extra assault to my vision as something in her material reflectivety broke and random parts of her body were randomly sparking at me like miniature super-novas making cutscenes physically painful to percieve - don't play Dawntrail on Macbook Air with M1 CPU - that's morale) - that we don't kill them, just shut termials off and that will kinda cache them back on disk and they will just go into permanent hybernation, so in theory if we find good enough power source we could restart that thing and let these VR backups loose - at least that's what I thought would have happen. I cannot comprehend how hard final fight falls on its own face tho. It's just... SPHENE LISTEN TO ME As such, I really hope that writing team scales shit back, removes Wuk Lamat from future story and focuses on Erenville or Krile, or both. One positive point that I have personally - I never bought game for just MSQ and stuff like areas, world bosses, mounts and raids are important to me as well and it feels like this expansion almost all attention went to the gameplay, considering that fights are interesting and genuenly well done, story is simple and engaging, there is no Wuk Lamat, or Koana, or whatever - it's just us, other fighters and the commentator dude. I must admit, I do legit like Yaana as a character, GIANT Undertaker vibes of Wicked Thunder just killed me, I was enjoying the whole ride. I have my own thoughts about how it could have been done (for example, would be interesting to see Bakool JaJa being literally a goofball who maybe tries intentionally to do everything wrong and we would see in Echo that he released Valigharmanda unintentionally by screwing up his attempt at doing the ritual), maybe make Koana so set on innovations that he wouldn't notice when innovations would make life worse - like for example - machines would pollute waters or something, or maybe it will just destroy people's way of life, taking some traditional jobs away by making them redundant, so it will be convenience vs. traditions, or that Wuk Lamat would be trying to listen to people and find peaceful solution to a conflict when being dragged into honest to god clash of interests where you can only choose one side and forever will not be liked by others. Make Zoraal Ja competent at something other than herding golden Alpaca. Make Zoraal Ja actually nuanced and compelling villain where player would see him as a ruthless all-or-nothing type of person, make an Echo scene with Gulool JaJa where we look at their conversation as Gulool JaJa tries his best to stop possibly ongoing war between separate Mamool Ja and Hrothgar tribes that he couldn't stop even with his attempts at peace and while we are trying our diplomatic way to stop it, Zoraal Ja just crushes both warmongering groups with iron fist by literally killing their leaders and Wuk Lamat will face results of that and we will have to figure out ways of trying both tribes to not go with war on Tuliyollal and why do I already have better idea for Dawntrail story than what we have, huh? I feel like devs really put more thought into Kapybara mount animations than in actual story...
The lack of closure in Living Memory is something that bugged me a *lot* considering that the Endless are now deader then dead due to them being scrubbed from the memories of the Alexandrian citizens, unable to persist even in that capacity...after they stressed how people never truly die as long as they are remembered with the Yok Huy business. Somehow it would not surprise me if they end up walking it back in the post-patches and restoring the place in some capacity.
I honestly just hated how hard they tried to make us accept how we were genociding an entire peoples and that means 'we were no different that Emet-Selch' when *they are already dead and these are just computer simulations running off their memories.* I felt nothing shutting down those towers. No, that's not entirely true. I felt contempt because once again WL figures out how to do something that she claimed she couldn't before. She uses aether to shut down a tower when she told us much earlier she doesn't know how to manipulate aether and we are never shown ANYONE showing her how.
Found your vids, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them because I agree with pretty much everything, but I hate them because every time I watch them, I just end up angry and frustrated.
I would like to thank you for the video first of all. It is very refreshing to see more criticism being made of FFXIV when it has been seeming to go down a road of utter incompetence on several fronts. Secondly I largely agree with everything said, then again I had felt the writing was going south in 6.0 and DT certainly has proven me right in someways that I personally don't think the writing can be really turned around at this point without major intervention. Once you start to look past the "emotional" hooks you start to realize how awful the actual writing is, or at least that was the case for me personally back in EW and DT certainly continues that trend. Thankfully DT seems to at least be causing more people to see how mediocre things are due to the bad quest pacing, boring writing, and far too much focus on Wuk Lamat over the rest of the cast; arguably to the point she became a black hole sue having character change entirely to boost her up such as Alisaie instantly loving her or Alphinaud agree with her stupid ideas. Finally, thank you very much for the video. I generally believe most things need criticism to become better after all and you hit every point I could think of.
When the OST Name and the Monster Design of a villian gives you a better understanding of the stick of said villian in your Story driven game, when all the previous Story, you know Things are Bad...
I want to correct you about Wuk's last words to Zoral Ja. When she said papa left him the one thing they couldn't have, she wasn't speaking the answer, she expressed he left it for him and Glool Ja. Meaning their biological Link, something Wuk and Koana can't obviously gain of share with their father. It was admittedly confusing the way the lines were delivered. I blame that on bad direction.
DT is the worst MSQ story... so far. 😅 8.0 looking bleak seeing YP nonsensical responses. People questioning if he even played it or just read the cliff notes, looking like he didnt play.
Trust me, we had similar questions based on some of the EW interviews, i.e. did he even play SHB or parts of EW like the Elpis sidequests? :p Like you, I see no room for improvement if this is the headspace CS3 is in.
XIV has always had some world-building issues varying in severity, e.g. SHB introducing the First and having it be so similar to the Source's civilisations in spite of thousands of years of evolutionary divergence (evolutionary mechanisms are how Yoshi explained the emergence of the main races of the setting, so they are very much in play), which sure may make strained amount of sense on the setting's internal logic but aren't really that plausible. Both SHB and EW worsened this gradually as they tried to adapt older writing to fit new ideas. However, with DT it looks like they just went hold my beer to all the prior expansions when it came to plausibility, shoved it in a particle collider and speed ran its disintegration. Yoshi also reinforced, regarding Emet, that Emet's belief that the WOL could find another way was genuine, and so was his disappointment when they fell short of his wishes. The issue I had with Living Memory is the story cannot make its mind up on whether they should be seen as people or not (nor is it entirely clear on why they would differ from an Amaurotine phantom like Hyth's, tbh), and when it's trying to go for emotional gut punches, it will pretend that they are but then in the same breath will try convince you they're just memories. They also didn't consider how well this fit with the Omicrons' lore. Just sloppy, messy writing all around. The writing around the Endless doesn't surprise me - they pulled off a similar feat with EW by trying to make you swallow Venat's ill-concocted rationale for ushering in the extinction of the ancients as necessary/a 'good' thing, because she thought they were 'doomed' because they 'couldn't' change (EE3 and the Elpis sidequests shit on this), and deployed ample propagandistic style writing (e.g. Venat's martyr vision) to make you not question what was truly happening, with EE3 sealing the fate of how absurd her reasoning was. Plus you had the WoL playing coy around Themis in Panda as to the fate of his people when the WoL could've provided critical info there (and the timeline erasure excuse holds no water because, as G'raha surmised, and as the 8UC has confirmed, this results in AUs, not erasure. Yoshi dug his heels in on this further by describing the setting as a multiverse, where many events can spawn AUs.) So seeing this yet again? It shows the new writers are as tone deaf as the old, if not worse. One thing I'd note regarding how they wrote character reactions - in the non-EN versions, Elidibus came across as justifiably angered still by Venat, but he was acting out of a sense of duty to preserve the star. So they understood the importance of these sentiments there. With Sphene, the writing reminds me of one of the dragons letting bygones be bygones and making peace with the omicron facsimiles over... cake. Like you, I appreciate moral ambiguity and even scope to make decisions that are in line with that, but I detest bad writing and narrative railroading, so EW and DT both sucked afaic. Nothing I have heard from Yoshi P has inspired any confidence that they know what the issue is or have any wherewithal to rectify it. Good luck with the rewriting, but I'd just note EW saw similar critiques and rewrites with the writers absorbing none of it. Perhaps DT's reception may alter that but I am not even sure the feedback is reaching Yoshi's ears as it gets filtered through by the very localisation lead (Kate) who helped concoct this mess. Maybe the Japanese mirroring western concerns on sites like 2ch will help.
@@alchemi8085Yes, you have Cahciua asserting as much, since as I said the story is in the same breath trying to convince you they're just memories. Good that the story went to pains to preliminarily dehumanise them so you don't have to think too hard on any subsequent interactions.
I enjoy watching these video essays. They are so validating. I can't think any less of this expansion's shit story than I do. They can only go up from here with the patch content... surely.
Estinien instantly wiping out a whole army by himself was basically proof of what you said in the last video. Things happened in this expansion because we stood around and did nothing despite being walking WMDs at this point.
Also, why is it that all of the Turali NPCs look like they're wielding bone or stone weapons but in the scene where Bakool holds his sword to Wuk's neck has a metallic glint come off of it? Glint doesn't mean "sharp".
And i thought i was the only one who hated Dawntrail like dude. They showed us the Scions in the trailer only for us not to actually do anything Only time we Played as Wuk Lamate and she was borning as hell. Like i wont lie when o went to the wild wild west i enjoyed it until we came back to wuk Lamate. Man the scits werent even funny. Just felt like i was in a disney movie. Hell there was a scene when rhe scions talk and Wuk Lamate wants you to explain to her the reflections, i msde Alphanaud tell her and he got mad at me. Like most the dialogue we are giving is not much other then give is the whole murder himbo dialogue. Mentor my ass I wanted a beach episode not a imma teach you but you get a power boost to come at my level. The moment the king asked to look after his daughter damn well knew he was gonna die and basically it wa gonna go rock bottom.
1:50 The sad thing is, Bakool Jar Jar isn't exactly wrong. Look at the veritable entourage Wuk Lamat gets herself compared to the others. WoL, Alphinaud, Alisae, Krile, Erenville. Yes, none of them amount to fuck all over the course of the story, I'm aware, but that's still five helpers, when the runner up for party size, Koana, has two allies, Zoraal Ja has a hanger-on, and Bakool sort of has his groupies but even then iirc only one of them even does anything besides stand around looking like a chucklefuck.
@@Kurainuz Look, terminal cutscene incompetence is a condition the WoL has struggled with since they were called the warrior of the crystal back in vana'diel, ain't no chirurgeon in the multiverse can cure it yet
The whole train segment was stupid, first of all, why the hell were the robots riding motorcicles and ALSO holding a gun at the same time? Why not just send drones with guns attached isntead? Why not just shoot the damn rails instead of flying all over where the train was and try to shoot the people riding it? Could go on, but that is just a small footnote on why the writing for the villains sucks in DT.
Going back with New Game+, I still feel the same emotions in SHB as I did the first time. I cannot say the same for EW, and I will have to see with DT (Though I do like Wuk so it may be ok for me). I feel like if the game devs would focus on narrative rather than scale it would have been better. If DT had only been Act 1 but expanded on, leaving Zooral Ja as a recurring villain and Act 2 as a second expansion, it would have played out differently. Basically, revisit the narrative of the SHB and reapply it more carefully in this scenario. That is why I say that if the devs would give a chance of starting late and not having to go through ARR, it should start in SHB.
I think the Endless existing on soul energy is the fact that most miss that makes people think it's ok to just "turn off" virtual avatars. But as they need soul energy it would imply that they are very much alive. That's a great point. Unfortunately the game also makes very poor explanation on how the mechanics work exactly. Taking an example from real life you can make a mimicry of a real person with AI and LLMs that can feel real, but is just actually running pieces of their history through an algorithm to manufacture a simulacra. I think this is what some people think what happens in the story, as there are issues in the translation and people completely miss the soul energy part.
@@4mb127 A lot of DT was piss poorly explained. The writing was that big of a mess. I can see where Square was coming from with this plotline. There’s some fascinating concepts at work. Just no effort to make em worthwhile.
@19:42 It's stated big daddy lizard was the first blessed sibling, and before him it was assumed that the two lizard types that give rise to him couldn't mate with each other. Much like blue emo lizard was the first viable offspring produced by a blessed sibling, before he popped out it was assumed blessed siblings were sterile.
The Sphene fight is why I’ll never do trial roulette again. Worse than the Lich King kill imo. At least Torion had established lore and was rather unceremoniously killed in the beginning of Legion. Shouldn’t have stolen the MC’s kill
I agree with pretty much everything except the endless being alive. If someone points a hand at your literal off switch and you just poof into technomancy dust, you aren't alive.
Had a feeling that the writers watched western animation from the 80's and 90's and thought they'd take pieces of it to make this expansion. Bakool = Starscream, Zoraal = Shredder, Wuk Lamat = Simba, Speeeeeeen = Disney Princess with a dark secret. While I still enjoyed my playthrough, there were moments where I just chuckled odd moments off like MST3k commentary. The big war in the main city and the "rescue" that comes was pretty cool I thought. My copium for playing this, despite some of it's flaws is like I'm watching a long episode of the Venture Bros where you're just along for the ride until the final 1/4th of the game where you finally get to go ham. My favorite line to Sphene was "If it's alright with you, I'm going to obliterate your whole army" (or something along those lines). Because like Brock Samson, I needed to blow off some steam after dealing with everything up to that point. The fourth, fifth, and final area though I felt dragged on for a while. The closure arcs were rushed in the final zone which I felt should have been far more fleshed out but it is what it is.
it all went downhill the moment our new wokealization lead started. remember: she gave us the rastaphants - in thavnair. which made about as much sense as eating soup with a fork. and now her influence clearly shows throughout dawntrail...
This has colonialism vibes. Tribes have century old problems, but then Wuk lamat + Koana come with their more educated brains and boom those problems are solved. What would those primitives do without them.
If I remember correctly... the story was written mainly by the dude who wrote the Bard Job Questline. My girlfriend told me that I and I was curious about what he's written so far in the game. Due to that I played through the quests and yikes. I knew right away it wasn't going to live up to the hype.
1:15:09 Actually, one Caveat to this point. Sphene was not in fact running away. I understand she doesn't have her army anymore. However it states plainly in the game that she's going to 'Absorb the Source' into her realm. Effectively causing a World Wide Wipe. This would sustain the endless and her people far more effectively than just sending an army out, and she'd get the full 'lifestream' of the source within her power for this cause. She'd effectively kill everyone in the world, and not have to invade a single continent to do so.
Yeah, I rechecked a few scenes after someone pointed that out. It's barely ever mentioned, so it missed my attention. But that creates problems of its own. Mainly, what is she waiting for? Why not use the key and get it over with? This memory wipe shouldn't have anything to do with that process. If it's that she doesn't understand, which is implied, then said key can't even be used like that, or they already would have. I doubt her multi-armed death robot form was going to change that. I admit to overlooking that point. But it's just replacing one set of problems with another.
@@durantes She didn't have the key before. It was in our dimension, then zoraal Ja took it. Then he held onto it to not give her power, apparently. Notice how she only takes it when he's dead.
@@durantes Ah, i understand. Yeah, even I was annoyed with how much time we spent in Living Memory, despite the place looking nice initially. I thought at first "Surely this place will look nice *again* later, after we can fly right?" But no, it looks like nothing but dead stone afterward. Back to the topic though, as soon as we arrive, it says 'Preparing for realm merger' And what's the first thing Wuk Lamat wants to do? Oh, right. 'Let's *get to know* these people.' Bitch, we are on a time table here, and if that realm merger happens, our reality is fucking DONEZO. We have to pick up the pace and get it done QUICKLY. And then when we finally get to the last SSD to shut it down and put an end to the Endless, the CPU says it's nearly time for realm merger, and she's like 'ALREADY!?' I was like 'YES, BECAUSE YOU HAD US DICKING AROUND WITH PEOPLE INSTEAD OF GOING STRAIGHT FOR THE OBJECTIVES! WHAT SPECTRUM ARE YOU ON!?' Ugh, it annoyed the hell out of me SO much.
@@rednova2212 Preaching to the choir, dude. The writing was so wasteful, it's easy to lose track of the actual story. Still. I'll address this in the next vid. Cover my bases.
A rewrite sounds interesting. And for a change, maybe dive into some future potential? I know the expansion has been controversial, but there were some interesting lore bits about Azem, the Key, the Volcano and these sort of things.
You mean the Dr. Evil volcano, ancestral home of the Milala? xD Not throwing shade, I just laughed when I saw that - as a lalafell myself, that made me smile.
@@TheWickedWizardOfOz1 Yeah! Do you remember when in Endwalker Hythlodaeus referenced one of these stories from the lodestone where Azem saved an entire island with a volcano? I think the milala home is a reference to that!
In EW I had the impression that the writers at some point realized that they had to end the story somehow and just crammed one emotional gut punch after the other into the last few hours of msq, after the previous glacial pace and unrelenting filler crap. I had skimmed most of it, so didn't notice the glaring issues, which - for me - made the expansion ok-ish. DT was just an insult to my intelligence and my moral compass.
I just realized, Sweet Baby Inc must have struck again. A month or so again,it was exposed during an Investor call, one of Square's Investors questioned them about their ties to Sweet Baby. Because of how parasitic that consultancy group has been on the video game industry. With their talentless enployees overpriced. That's most likely why the msq was so bad and hard focusing on Wuk Lamat.
If it was a duel, then we have no vengance to do. And if it wasn't a duel, then we stood around and did nothing. So she either murder his brother (in the case of a duel) or she allowed her dad to be murdered and not only did nothing but prevented anyone else from doing anything.
oof... how did I not see this throughout the game? Was I so focused on leveling up all my other classes that I completely forgot about different parts in the story?
Dawntrail is what happens when something gets to big for its own good. Now FFXIV has to pander to basically children because there's too many mentally immature people who play this game who get triggered by anything remotely serious. For real, Dawntrail feels like it was made for kids going through puberty instead of the actual adults playing the game that want more mature themes. This game has turned into a shonen jump anime...
Dawntrail confirmed all my fears for the future of both narration and character development. Many of these complaints were ones I predicted would happen based on the foundation Endwalker set. Worse is that Yoshida never has the proper takeaway for why something is or isn't successful if you read his interviews, so I don't have confidence these issues will be addressed.
I'm also not surprised people don't see the problem with Living Memory because, as you said, this isn't the first time we've condemned an entire civilization to obliteration. It turns out large swathes of people are perfectly fine with genocide as long as the author tells them it's okay. (Then if you try to point out how morally corrupt it is you're hit with the "media literacy" argument.)
Endwalker is going to be a challenge to rewrite because it's such a mess that contradicts everything established prior to it. The simplest solution is to have Hydaelyn temper and then the whole thing instantly makes sense including the WoL still refusing to help the Ancients at the end of Pandemonium when they had the chance, which I considered the true nail in the coffin of the WoL being a good person.
Excellent video series and I'm glad to see your channel getting much deserved attention. I'm looking forward to your video on Venat, I suspect it's going to address problems with her character I didn't get into because I was mostly focused on the lore inconsistencies.
The odds they'll tend to the horrid writing is one in a million from what I've seen from Square Enix.
I'll never understand how we went from ShB and HW to this level of quality.
Thanks for the support, the feedback. Your work has been an inspiration for me.
@@durantes They swapped out the staff and writers who don't have the quality that HW to ShB had. Game is oversimplified and the writing(story driven MMO btw) has gone down the gutter. XIV is entering it's Shadowlands phase where the writing did a lot of damage to the IP while simultaneously is also like Warlords of Draenor where the only thing worthwhile to do is endgame raiding.
Much like the new zones the expansion in all things is underwhelming and shallow. Battle design is still primarily don't stand in orange and just line up your 2 minute burst and blow all your CDs at the same time as everyone else. Very boring game.
CBU3 and Yoshida are out of touch with their playerbase. The story when held under scrutiny comes off as a rather mediocre Disney Film with tons of inconsistencies and plotholes.
The writing was on the wall during Endwalker with it's myriad pacing issues and Dawntrail is just the aftermath.
Yoshida stated he expected a mixed reception(which in itself is a bad answer to give) which means even he knows this expansion is hot garbage. For now the best content XIV can provide is all the drama between players that White Knight the game to death and those who openly and rightly criticize the road XIV is traveling down. And this extends to not just story but down to gameplay systems that are long outdated. Leveling and gearing in this game at this point in time is just terrible. And I don't think pigeonholing everything into trusts and buying level boosts and story skips on the cash shop is the answer. If anything it's part of the problem.
Until big changes are made to the game it effectively ended with Endwalker and it's just in maintenance mode until further notice.
@@MagiusNecros I was only able to get my moneys worth from the expansion, via the XIV forums. Hell I wasn't even able to finish this steaming pile of excrement of a story. I was not enjoying myself, and like you said, nothing has changed for endgame. Its the same thing we have been doing for years. So I'm literally missing out on nothing. And y not finishing the story and unsubscribing, I'm at least showing up in the spreadsheets YoshiP lives by. Because if I wasted my time and finished it, it would just be one more number saying I finished and enjoyed the story in this clowns eyes.
This entire expansion for me is now a write off. And for the next expansion, it will be the first I do not buy until I hear good things. Which I have zero hope for btw. I know nothing is going to change, which is so very sad.
@lagtastic7511 Dawntrail is the first time I felt like skipping cutscenes. Like I said until the game is overhauled I see no reason to buy any more expansions or subscribe.
No one likes to see a great game turn to crap but that's where we are at and Yoshida doesn't seem to care at all.
Haven't you considered the thought that maybe these "Evil Psychopathic Genocide Deniers" are approaching the issue from personal spiritual beliefs on what the Soul is? The value of the Soul is the same in both Eastern and Western mythologies; Immortal, Eternal and part of the Divine. The you in spiritual form, one that is forever. Even when you remove all it's memories.
From that perspective, Living Memory are just corpses paraded around by an AI, using "empty" Souls as fuel. Basically the Memory of Cahciua and others may have consumed their own souls, their true selves robbed of memory, as Aether to sustain the mockery Sphene calls "life".
The true genocide isn't the player formating the USB drive the memories are housed in, but the countless of souls being reused as energy to feed it all, making the Alexandrians beyond forgiveness and Sphene into a more successful Meteion, because it directly causes harm to the cycle of Life, Death and Rebirth. So yeah, when the characters Think they'll see these people again in the afterlife, no, they won't, they've already been erased from existence when feeding their own memories or someone using a Regulator. It's honestly far more horrifying than thinking a handful of people are okay with genocide, in a fictional game no less.
The other side fares no better, because then the soul is meaningless and unique individuality doesn't exist, memories can be copied over and over again, Endless-Otis and Robo-Otis are proof of this. So going the "Endless are living beings" route, you're creating a lot of uncomfortable and horrible questions, now the soul is worthless and all that matters is your memories, memories that can be copied and put elsewhere.
So yay, no one is unique in the slightest and we can be copied over and over again…
"Why does all this nitpicking and thinking too hard of it even matter?", because you all started thinking the worst of people without considering their point of view and what philosophy or spritiual beliefs they are judging it by. For me either answer is equally as horrifying, though I will say the "Endless are living" answer makes me think the writers may actually be insanely stupid, this kind of Writing is something a demon would come up with to trick people into thinking their soul means nothing and can be sold off for a soda.
The more I think about the Dawntrail MSQ, the worse it gets :(
You n me both, dude. It's really that terrible
I've unsubbed. The game isn't fun
EW was like this for me. I can only imagine how bad DT will be by the end. Not my problem in a sense, though, since I pretty much have unsubbed for good.
@@lolcat5303 EW was disappointing. It should have been split up into two expansions. Garlemald and Zodiark got cucked.
@@TeemoTemosson Kind of agree here. They probably should've saved the Void for 7.0. It did not sit well with me that we came up with a solution to enter the void safely, and then managed to find a solution to the problem before EW was done. And because of that you barely get to spend any time with Zero, and no time with Azdaja. The rite of succession could've been an entire section on its own. It would've given them more time to actually explore all the cultures instead of listing their bullets points and leaving.
The biggest pang of emotion I got during DawnTrail was when Vrtra showed up and the Endwalker music piped up.
The most emotion I had was when I was reminded of better expansions.
It's hilarious that this was the greatest scene in DT, imo. An Endwalker cutback.
That's odd. The biggest pang of emotion alongside the entrance of Vrtra, is seeing the concept of having to move on from the death of a loved one, and needing to pull the plug within Living Memory.
Also having to imagine Otis's thoughts and feelings upon seeing a dead Sphene before him, blocked away considering how traumatising it must be for a loyal knight such as he.
But I suppose that's just me.
Same. That was ironically the most memorable scene for me.
@@mcihay246 There was no emotion with Living Memory because I don't know or care about any of these people. It came off forced.
@@cheesemuffin8129 Seems I'm just more empathetic.
It only appears forced because, as you stated yourself, you don't care.
Our characters throw shade at the foes, but aren't allowed to have one criticism or snarky remark at Wuk Lamat.
Never felt so detached from the WoL than that.
cant have opposing opinions bout characters conveniently voiced by THAT group
The closest thing we got was outright and bluntly saying Wuk wasn't fit to lead. And we never really got the chance to say it to her face. Funny enough, Koana is more fit to lead than she is. He gave up his rite to the throne for her and self sacrifice is a great quality for a leader to have.
I felt like I was reading a visual novel half the time, almost forgot my character was even there at all....
@@ZeroOmega-vg8nq Without shame and crybaby attacks at least.
@@ZeroOmega-vg8nq Except that isn't the first time this happened, we were already not allowed to even disagree with Hydaelyn.
I think it's less about appeasing "that group" ,since this would only apply to the english VA, and more about CBU3 hating player agency.
You see it in the story, you see it in the job gameplay, you see it in the boss mechanics.
You play the game and think about the story exactly how they want you to, or you can fuck off.
They made Bakool ja ja so over the top evil at the start of the expansion I just knew that the writer needed a "evil" character to show how good his favorite OC character wuk lamat is. The funny part is the entire fucking community decide to ignore in-game bakool ja ja and instead went on to lust for him and he quickly became a beloved character vs wuk lamat not being liked lol.
It's funny you mention this,because in the unofficial JP popularity poll she's ranked lower than Honey B. and Yaana.
Characters that show up for FIVE MINUTES are more popular than her.
Unlike wuk, bakool had real character development and history to him in contrast to the wuk lamat can do no wrong
@@amelveambitzya3592 wuk lamat can do no ... thing. thats it. Shes useless.
I was so pissed when I realized that within the 80 years of Tulliyolal being established and with Galool's foreign allies, they could not come to the same conclusion for Mamook that we did. Sharlayan is the pioneer for reading aetherical signatures. We even have the ability to identify people via the color of their aetherical signature. And that information was from all the way back in Heavensward. Even the Garleans have had the technology to read aetherical signatures since at least ARR. And you're telling me that Galuf and Ketenramm just didn't care enough to actually investigate and improve their friend's homeland? The writers managed to assassinate all three of their characters in one fell swoop. It's honestly impressive.
And good god, Zoraal Ja. He swapped motivation so many times it made my head spin. First it's an appreciation for peace through war. Then it's surpassing his father. Then it's surpassing his siblings. Plus, Zoraal never struck me as the type to ambush, steal, cheat, or lose his cool easily. But all of those things happen in quick succession after the final rite. He went from a reserved, single-minded individual to a 'the villain wants to be the chosen one' anime trope. I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall when the guy who is motivated to cause nationwide conflict helps us kill Valigarmanda, an entity that would probably achieve that goal in spades.
Sphene didn't make any sense at all. Your goal is to harvest souls from outside, and your first action upon merging with Yyasolani wasn't to immediately harvest every person trapped inside? And who programmed her? Were they in their first month of programming school? You decided to allow her to give full permissions over her army to some random person she's never met, but didn't foresee that she might need to revoke said permissions? And then on top of that, the system does not automatically give the permissions back to her upon Zoraal's death, but they instead go to his son? That same son he doesn't even claim as his son? Huh? Why does she refuse to tell you the important thing she needs to tell you repeatedly because a robot is walking by? Is she afraid Zoraal Ja can hear her through the robots? Well I'm sorry to tell you this sweety, but you're *in* one so he can hear you right *now*. And we see that when she body hops it basically kills the robot body. So why didn't she bamf to each and every single robot killing the people in Solution 9? She is a headache to even think about.
On what Yoshi said, we *all* expected the reception to be mixed. You're starting a new arc. But we still expect at least passable writing quality. We got slop. It's really bad in the side quests as well. I never thought I would get so angry about a story about gathering ingredients for juice. But they managed to fuck that up too. These types of videos are the kind I would like SE to actually see. Actual, real critiques of the writing, instead of bringing real life political bs into it. Also, sorry for the wall of text lol
There's also a sidequest that appears after the "ghost dad" test that spoils the ceremony result, before it happens. 😂
It's the Koana hints hunt quest in Tuliyollal. If you do sidequests first, you spoil msq.
@@Tiniestvoice I wheezed at this. I wasn't interested enough to do the side quests, but that is hilarious.
Except the writing was in service to modern political tropes and ideological narrative necessities, so... it's weird to complain about the political angle when the writing itself was a political affirmation.
@@rclaws3230 I'm fine with politics in fiction. I just hate real life politics being poorly injected into a conversation that has nothing to do with them. Dawntrail had way too many other problems that are a direct result of the modern writing special sauce of debase all other characters to prop up one.
The other problem is that they don't even do the politics right. We got so little actual meat to the discrimination from Mamook and Bakool. I'm just reminded of the Garleans being the defacto racists of FFXIV. People who participated in genocide, horrific genetic experiments, conscripted the conquered, and committed several other war crimes seem a lot more of a parallel to events in real life that anything DT presents, and they still managed to make it relevant to the in game narrative.
Sometimes I wonder if the story for DT underwent a lot of rewrites before the final product hit the shelves. It'd certainly explain the lack of voice direction and why it seems to *feel* so different than the rest of the expansions. Even ARR felt like it was more thoughtful and nuanced than this, with all the various histories of strife between the city-states dooming them to infighting while the Garleans marched on unimpeded. Even now they're still working on improving stuff even with the WoL doing everything they could to help make everything better.
Meanwhile, everything in Tulliyolal is solved in an afternoon while Smiles blares on in the background.
To speak on Bakool Ja Ja's character: I just feel like the way he is characterized is also counter to his otherwise noble intentions. There's no bits of reflection or hesitation on anything that he does, or how any of his actions would reflect badly on his goals, or even on his running for Dawnservant (and it's still wild that he wasn't outright disqualified and jailed for it - as you mentioned - until his father did so because he didn't have his 7 dragonba-- I mean, keystones).
Releasing Valigarmanda is pure insanity even for someone like him, but he doesn't even hesitate.
"I'm going to release this living calamity of a being that could potentially kill everyone, including my people's children, for the sake of my people's dead children."
There's survivor's guilt, and then there's what Bakool Ja Ja does. If he was desperate, his personality never reflected that until the reveal itself.
the real villain of the story is the ffxiv subreddit, where if you say a single negative thing about the expansion you'll not only be downvoted into oblivion, but people will actively report you for harassment.
Bu... but muh transphobia.
Not liking DT apparently means means you must hate all trans people because of one bad and miscast VA who is simply unlikeable as a person.
The ff community is admittedly full of snowflakes
So regular reddit behavior?
I thought that reddit was pretty mixed to disliking it overall, there's a thread up now where the only really 'upvoted' comments are those criticizing the story. From my anecdote the only ones adamantly defending it are twitter and they're mostly just ideologues who for some reason feel the need to defend everything about DT because one VA is transgender.
Ironically, the ffxivdiscussion subreddit is pretty much the inverse, where people have openly criticised both the story and gameplay since Endwalker and it seems most people agree with said criticisms.
Random thing that bugged me with the train. There is a side quest before that about a lalafel merchant selling corrupted crystals to the locals as a scam but then learning to be a good honest merchant from the pelal. Meaning he had a stockpile of corrupted crystals still just waiting for someone to need them. And corrupted crystals are what we used to pierce garduda's barrier back in ARR. I was all excited for what was clearly about to be a cool callback and they did nothing with it. No mention of it at all.
Yea, also G'Raha using invisibility spell on the train not before it leaves the cover/roof of the train station, so that the enemies don't know that we're leaving, or when we're actually leaving the tunnel that goes through that massive mountain, so that we'd have ample time to actually get near the dome. No, he had to use it after we've been in plain view of the enemy airships for a while, so that they know for sure that we're about to depart, and just in time for when we're about to enter the god damned tunnel itself. Because apparently, the limited duration spell is best utilised for when we have a fucking mountain over our heads.
That whole builiding sequence was a disaster. But I do agree, that corrupted crystal merchant also popped up in my mind when they mentioned they needed corrupted crystals.
That quest is probably setting up the pelupelu tribe quests
@@Silferas also somehow sphenes army left the railway intact but build a frontier outpost without a propprer protection, tanks, artillery, or something
I'm glad I'm not the only one that wondered how Bakool wasn't removed from the contest or aggressively being hunted down to be arrested for essentially *releasing a freaking nuke that never stops nuking.*
Bakool: *Releasing a nuke. kidnapping other contestants, attacking other contestants, attacking one of the judges, blocks off pathways, sabotage other contestants' boats*
FFXIV writers: This is fine
Zoraal: *attacks a judge*
FFXIV writers: And that is how Zoraal gets disqualified...
@@Shatterstar Zoraal: probably attacked the Summoning Pot.
The Judge: and i took that personally
Remember when midgardsormr suicide bombed the agrius because that’s what it took for even the greatest of wyrms to bring it down? But now Vrtra can solo a whole fleet of warships with only one eye? I know this game isn’t great at consistent power scaling but damn
It's embarrassing. You can tell they're not even trying.
To be fair to Vrtra, those 'warships' were pathetic compared to the Agrius. The entire 'I'm gonna use high tech to invade" story was goddamn stupid when the tech he brings was that pathetic.
suuuush dont question product just consume and move to next product
@@eastbow6053
That adage explains too much these days...
Easy, it's like the Garlean ships are old-school sturdy brick Nokias and the Alexandrian ships are modern but pathetically fragile smart phones. Even old cars used to be way sturdier than what we have today despite technological advancements. Either way, it's still kinda stupid, at NO point was Zoral Ja any considerable threat to Eorzea and all of the allied forces, so it was very hard to take HIM seriously.
Bro, I loved both Shadowbringers and Endwalker, not to mention Heavensward was when my WoL first really got her identity, and I love 3.0 for that fact. I was so hyped and excited for when Dawntrail was coming out, and was ready to explore a new world see the culture rich places of Tural, and face Valigarmanda. Hell, I even pre-ordered the expansion the second I could, I was that hyped.
It took me 2 and a half months to finish the expansion.
I can't tell you how bored, frustrated, and downright angry I was with this expansion. In 6.55, I didn't mind Wuk that much, though she had some growing to do, but if the writers could pull off a good coming of age story, and see her grow and mold into her role as a leader of her people, Id be satisfied, but no. They fumbled the ball so hard. Now I attribute her to a worse version of 4.0 Lyse, which is not a good thing in my book.
And dont get me started on that scene of Zorool Ja and his father (may he rest in peace). I was literally screaming for anyone to stop him and kill the son of a gun, but no, we had to sit there and do nothing. I was so upset and furious, it caused me to put down the game and take a 3 week break.
After that point, I had lost all enjoyment of the expansion, minus one point, which was when we got to see the train in action, and not for any story reasons, but because I love locomotives.
Once I was finished with the final boss (which even then wasn't free of Wuk, heavens forbid), I was so burnt from that, I went to the inn at Ishgard, basked in the ambiance of better times, logged off, and have never looked back.
This expansion was a slap in the face to all that I enjoyed in FFXIV storytelling, and honestly, I might not go back, as sad as that makes me.
Thank you for reading, if you cared to read. I hope you have a wonderful day/night, and I hope you found enjoyment in this expansion, even though I could not.
I had my problems with endwalker (maybe venat and the time travel writing), and ishikawa ranting via omega about venat, then geting "promoted" to manager rol scared me, but i assumed we would had a more relaxed (but not much) expansion centered about exploring a new continent with the cyberpunk city being some kind of hook for next stories to come. I did not expect what to me has been the worse expansion in terms of writing and while i like wuk i dislike her writing and how the story bends so much around her for her to be the strong protagonist that only doubted herself, while we just watch, instead of writing us being a propper mentor to her and helping while she needs but then us having our own arc.
To me all the sphene thing should have been centered about krile instead of wuk, not just make krile into a usb mcguffin carrier and have her with the clones of her parents just so we can have some lore for the mcguffin of next expansion
We have blatant plot holes like how yshtola did not realize that krile was from a reflection thus having a diferent proportion of aether/dynamis when she can see that and kryle was born in a reflection to parents from said reflection.
We have bad villians, every mature theme is treated like in a mediocre shonen
I still have been login after the end of the msq to play the coliseum , expert roulette and level a bit, when the server lagg issues allow it, as sometimes it freezes for a second and boom, 8 people dead because the game says that we did not move out ouf the areas.
The seasonal events have somehow become worse not even compared to previous in 14 and other mmos, they are now even worse than ff11s. While a lot of systems are put to shame by even free to play tittles, like housing.
And with the longer patch times and the lack of content in general i think i will leave until next big patch and hope this improves, but its looking bleak, specially how yoship did not understand the criticism and was defensive about that saying things like lyses arc and zenos doing nothing for the whole of shb was important for the catharsis of endwalker (zenos maaaaaaybe, but lyse....)
How did we go from Heavensward and Shadowbringers, to SPHEEEEEEEEEENE!
My enjoyment of this game is waning. But at least I have some friends to play with occasionally, that's the only reason I'm playing now.
In the case of Living Memory, I think it should be "shut down". If the only way to truly have the Endless survive is the genocide of other worlds, then it shouldn't be allowed to continue sustaining itself. However, I don't think we should have been the ones to shut it down. The only terminal that needed to be removed was the central one, which seemed to only contain Sphene's memories. Leaving the other terminals online just means the Endless are now put on a natural time limit as the remaining life energy is used up. This accomplishes two things. Gives the WoL an opportunity to find an alternate means of fueling living memory in the patches and also wiping our hands of any claims of committing genocide.
Not a bad idea. Solves a few of our problems. And gives us a conflict to confront in future story patches.
Love comments like this not just being critical but adding a solution that is vastly superior to the original outcome shame SE writers don't have a mindset like yours.
It’s possible that Hildibrand could help fix this…
Im not even mad that we shut everything down, my problem is that the scions were too non chalant about it. But i agree that it would have been better to just defeat sphene and let the endless dye once the lifetime of their current souls is due, like every normal living being, as its only a "soul energy" power but the place itself could have run for decades.
Even if not, magine how important and hard would have been such decision to you and the scions in previous expansions to endwalker
The writers were invested in writing Sphene, not Zoraal Ja, and that's the crux of every issue in Dawntrail. The antagonist that acts as a throughline for the entire story just peters out because it's obvious that they don't want to write for him, only around him (he's the reason the WoL is even actively supporting Wuk Lamat in the first place! Not because they think she's capable but because they don't want another Garlemald).
Imagine if they saved Sphene for the post MSQ and just focused all of that time on making Zoraal Ja a compelling villain. Imagine if his "tag along" moment came during Shaaloani so that the entire thing isn't disconnected from the meat of the story. This would be him witnessing the WoL doing things that he would think of as beneath them, just think of the development he'd have from seeing the person who he views as integral to winning the contest for Wuk Lamat just picking up poop? Imagine if the phrase "if only we reached out to him sooner" could also apply to the WoL so that they aren't a disconnected observer to how Wuk and Koana feel after Zoraal Ja's exposition dump?
In addition to the above, Zoraal Ja would have been the perfect vessel to air legitimate grievances that the people of Turaal have with Eorzea. In the Shaaloani section, the introductory cutscene at night, the entire area looks like a polluted hellscape with Ceruleum being the cause, The same Ceruleum that greedy Eorzean merchants were trying to swindle the Whalaqee tribe out of since the very first Blue Mage questline. You can even play with his idea of war, having him believe that Tural is actually in a Cold War with Eorzea over things like resources, and if they don't exploit these resources for their own advancement first, then others will. This makes idea of "war leading to peace" have some semblance of sense as it would be Tural establishing hegemony through military and economic might so that they don't need to despoil their own landscape for materials.
Finally, just think of the raw emotional impact we could have with the main characters of Dawntrail that could only be done because they're family. The Zoraal Ja vs Gulool Ja Ja fight right now is just exposition for how Soul regulators work instead of a character piece. Imagine when Zoraal Ja is first struck down and revived; he gets up slowly, blinking in disbelief as he places his hand on his body where his father struck the killing blow. His breathing and heartbeat quicken, we hear them getting faster and faster before he screams "I KNEW IT!" and then just goes apeshit on his dad. All of his thoughts and fears of his father not caring about him have been validated. The great uniter who fostered peace between people in Tural just killed his own son for his nation and now he truly has no more hesitation. What a missed opportunity that won't ever happen again in service to a discount Emet Selch.
All of that is far, far better than what we got. Sigh. The missed opportunities never fail to amaze.
@@durantes In the sea of opportunities, ff14 writers seem to have preferred to hit the rocks.
Pretty sure Emet sent us to this continent to prove his point and to show us how "stupid" we actually are...I cannot explain it any other way to myself at least....it was just that bad.
Thank you for putting the time and effort into making these videos. Very well said and thought out. I appreciate your honesty and objectivity as many are incapable of separating their own personal feelings about the game in order to step back and see the bigger picture.
Im looking forward to your future videos.
Well done.
The more I reflect on this story, the more opinions I hear, the more inconsistencies I see and it makes less and less sense. The amount of people that flat out don't see/notice the drop in quality or how much this could potentially damage the game in the long run is worrying. Only time will tell I guess, Yoshi Ps response was a bit tone deaf. Sucks, but it is what it is. At least the combat, music and graphics are good so thats something...
- sorry for the rant it will happen again x)
I don't remember if you touched on this or not, but I'm going to say it anyways.
Robot Otis died in vain:
Zoraal Ja demonstrated when we confront him and Sphene in Heritage Found, 'killing' Sphene in front of us, only for her to reposess and impose her likeness to another robot vessel.
When you fight Bolt the dog superhero, it winds up just standing there charging up, while Otis goes out of his way to defend Sphene from the super saiyan electricity, and winds up dying in the process - when Sphene could easily reposess another robot.
His reason for doing so is sound, don't get me wrong - we can attribute that to his PTSD of failing to save Queen Sphene the first time, and he instinctly moved on his own to protect the current Sphene to redeem himself.
But knowing that she could just do that, it's kinda horrible that one of the better characters in this expansion winds up throwing his life away.
And Wuk saying 'Thank you for the repast' just makes the scene just that bit more worse for me.
7.X patches would have to be unbelievably amazing to fix this mess of a story.
Expect at least 2 patches of speaking with Wuk Lamat.
Maybe... the first couple patches usually are pretty snoozy pace wise. Supposedly they're going to be digging up some "dark secrets" in 7.1 that's related to Solution Nine but somehow I don't think it's going to have much of an impact.
More effort was put into Zoraal Jas gold hat lighting than his character in the story
Bravo! Bravo!
An excellent feeding DT to the woodchipper milord!
My favorite inconsistency in DT is that Zoraal Ja was shown to have massive support when the rite was announced. Like the dude is the army's general, and apparently he's been helping the populace at every turn and knows his people well, and has the respect of all the warriors of Tulliyollal's army...
And then all that support means jack dick, only his scurrilous sorcerer sidekick helps him at all. It literally made no sense that when Wuk Lamat won the rite, the populace all cheered in unanimous unison about how awesome that was, as many of them had been staunch Zoraal Ja supporters.
What also made no sense was Zoraal Ja attempting to solo his father's shade, losing, and then considering Wuk Lamat better than himself when he knows damn well that Koana and the WoL/Scions were there doing 7/8ths of the work for her. She never won anything by her own strength, save for her ridiculous Super Saiyan Blue molly whopping of Bakool.
Two things should have happened with Zoraal Ja that didn't. He should have taken issue with the WoL, and put in a background check on us, and then wanted to overcome us instead of anyone else. Secondly, when Wuk won the rite, his supporters should have been upset to the point of disbelief and staged a coup. He should have had heavy military men with him every step of the way, just in case.
Instead we got a bargain bin evil Arbiter who threw away all past connections and advantages. Like, what army was he originally gonna try world conquest with? Tulliyollal's. That same army largely supported him, so they shouldn't be so devil may care about his loss in the rite.
I'm fine with a story that curtails to love and peace being the right way to live, and I'm fine with everyone eventually singing kumbaya, but it has to be earned. It has to come natural. Hearts and minds don't magically change just because a cat bitch with a smile on her face says they should. No one sings a song reminiscent of Disneyfied Hymnals while building a Bomb Train.
Dawntrail sees no evil, hears no evil, and speaks no evil. Because it turns a blind eye to itself, its failings, and its characters' failings. It's like little Timmy's first fanfiction, and I'll never understand why it was greenlit. Square Enix must really want them to work for/with nothing, or maybe they just don't like working XIV anymore and are attempting to damage it.
When they inevitably screw up/debase FFXI in the up and coming 24 man raid, I'll likely unsubscribe. And I've been subscribed to Final Fantasy XIV since 2013. I've been subscribed to FFXI since 2003. I've always considered myself patient with the lack of care that sometimes goes into Final Fantasy MMOs, but Dawntrail was like a reveille. A bugle blast letting me know that, for sure, all of the creatives that I have loved are no longer in charge, and it's all just slop from here on out. I'm mad.
Ok why do u think they will debase ff11?
@@danito20 Because they already have in the past. They've taken tons of FFXI monsters and directly ported them into XIV. That, by itself, isn't crazy bad, however, in Endwalker they began adding The Empty monsters to FFXIV, which is a family of monsters that comes from Chains of Promathia, and has explicit lore tie ins to the concept known as, "The Emptiness." Basically the darkness inside of people that binds them together in their shared ancestry as being portions of The Twilight God.
In FFXIV, The Empty were reduced to being Moon Fungus. I wouldn't expect them to be the biggest deal ever in XIV, but moon fungus? Really?
Things like that do not inspire faith in the direction they will take the 24 man. The most recent patch art features Prishe and Shadowlord set in front of the other things in the patch unrelated to the 24 man. But Shadowlord and Prishe only ever intersect after the end of two whole storylines in XI, in a single battle, so they don't really have any interplay... but that's the way they're builing it. Call me a debbie downer or a doomsayer, but my expectations are already so low they're in Hell.
And I feel like I'm still gonna be let down.
@@SirVyre inb4 we find out Super Hell exists, just waiting to be found once the 24 man makes it's main entrance. Totally not a doomsayer btw lol.
Oh and please longer videos are my bread and butter. Its amazing to listen to these at work.
I dont need a jordan fringe video length (10 hrs lol)
This is good
10 hours? Couldn't imagine it... I appreciate the input!
Even having Gulool Ja opening the gate was an insult. It should have been Krile who opened the gate to Living Memory with how much she is connected to the place.
I miss shadowbringers
I the writing before ishikawa was "promoted" to manager just after writing omega venting about venat writing problems :(
Bakool Jaja was such a poorly written Fordola. I despised Fordola in the beginning and by the end she was one of my favorite characters from Stormblood. She didn't get away with her crimes, she was punished and still chose to help those in need. Who wrote DT? Every character in DT is just a much worse version of iconic characters from XIV's past.
We were promised a summer vacation. That's all this expansion needed to be. Succession rites, city built on farming souls, we didn't need any of it. They should've kept it for the next expansion so they would've had to time to actually do a good job.
I knew the MSQ was bad. I had already concluded in agreement with most of the points brought up here. And yet this video still manages to bring up even more reasons on why the MSQ failed that I somehow failed to consider. I blame the ennui the MSQ’s bad writing inspired. That said, SE should make the writing staff watch this video series in the hopes they learn something.
even the ceo admitted that the company as a whole as a toxic positivity feedback, as one of the things he says he wants to improve is internal criticism.
Add that to how yoship answers to this expansion criticism has been really tone deaf and it makes me worry.
I agree with you so much and you really put into words the thoughts I have about DT, in a way I haven't been able to, thank you so much for this! I hadn't heard about DT getting a budget cut during development though
Completely agree with the part about Bakool Ja Ja. I was like "wtf, did I miss something?" constantly because nothing he did had _any_ consequences and no one really bat an eye. The characters handled him more like a school bully who did some minor mean stuff that we should just shrug off.
Even more problematic than the writing is the toxic positivty from the community when it comes to topics like these. I made a deep dive reddit post about the Bakool Ja Ja issue and explained where the writing failed and why - and I got completely destroyed with snide remarks, personal attacks and many strawman arguments.
"If you think that's bad writing then you just didn't pay attention, it's all clearly explained! *refuses to elaborate further*"
"So by consequences you basically mean you wanted him to get killed off for the stuff he did, right? Booring"
"Valigarmanda didn't do any damage, so it would've been stupid if there were any consequences for Bakool" ???
"But there ARE consequences! Wuk and the others are condemning his actions verbally - what more do you want!?"
Really disappointed that it's almost impossible to have a nuanced discussion about the story in this community.
You addressed the same issues I had with Dawntrail in these three videos, and it's nice to see somebody not only have those same frustrations, but elaborate on them and why they make the writing bad. Dawntrail is full of plot holes, contradictions and mischaracterizations, and whatever the reason (lack of budget, lack of time, corporate meddling with the plot), it's written like a super generic shonen anime for 8-year-olds. It insults our intelligence and treats us like we have the attention span of toddlers.
I would love a series where you fix the writing flaws of this game. I know a lot of people think about how they might do something better, so you'll probably find a lot of people agreeing with whatever videos you make on the subject. I don't care if the videos are long form or short form, just as long as you continue to put out intelligent critique. You've got my sub.
To be fair to Dawntrail, Gulool Ja Ja did have a solution to the Mamool Ja's homeland problem. And it was a pretty good solution, too: It was to -just leave-. He just told his people 'you can *leave*. You don't have to stay there. Come live here instead, we have food and light and no radioactive boulders. It's real nice." From his perspective I think this was the best solution for everyone, since, you know, he wanted people to live and work together and his old homeland fucking sucked. But he wasn't going to forcibly relocate anyone either.
TL;DR: I liked these vidoes and I'm glad they voice all the issues I've had, so there is that. Good job on it and good luck.
This is a lot of text and I won't bother trying to altering how others view the issue of the Endless, Souls and so on. Yes I thought way too hard into this.
I guess it depends on how you view the Soul, if you have a religious/spiritual view, making it an immortal, eternal part of you, one gifted by divine will and should never be tampered with or just energy you can swap out like a battery (Satan would love this one, makes his job easier).
Everyone has their views and everyone thinks they're correct, I'm mostly just tired, the writing of Dawntrail is too insane to try and piece together. I still wanted my thoughts heard, though ignored, belittled, insulted and accused of evil they may be.
I'm so happy I wasn't alone in seeing the issues with Bakool, especially the Varligamanda escape, because it's completely against his interests. even the "it'll put a roadblock in the way of others" doesn't work, because if it kills everyone in the valley, he's still out of two stones he needs for the challenge that he now can't complete. If we didn't need a trial for actual gameplay, Bakools quest would have been over as failing the Contest.
Zoraal is weird; he supposed to be a "Resilient Son" and a "Miracle" as a Child of a Two-Headed Mamool, who are supposed to be infertile, so why isn't he worshipped as a miracle Child, as it's apparently claimed, to be just as important as the Two-Headed Mamool? Doesn't make sense and goes against what the Mamool supposedly Believes.
Is a soul complete if you extract the memories and leave it empty? If it has all memories stripped from it, is given to another person and takes on their memories, is stripped again, is it still YOUR soul? Who soul is it? Who is the soul now?
Living Memory is alive according to some, is an AI alive? Is ChatGPT alive? Is a photograph alive? Does tearing up a photo make you a murderer?
I honestly don't know, I think the lack of in depth explanation and thought of everything in Alexandria is to be blamed for the long discussions where one side is being blamed for being psychopaths while the other really wants the "we are all genociders" answer.
Though whatever conclusion we come to... God, it's all so very wrong, no matter what we agree on, it's all so very horrifying.
The way I understood it, is that when you die, your soul is taken by the Origenic and has the memories extracted from it, leaving an empty soul as energy to be used to feed into someone with a Regulator, while the memories are stored into becoming an Endless.
By the way, if you have a way to catch a soul and feed souls into a dead body... why not just catch the soul of the one who just died and feed it right back into them, without removing the memories? You gave them their soul and life back and didn't have to strip memories off it, making everything easier.
It sounds a lot like the Soulkiller from Cyberpunk, I guess they thought the Engram of Johnny Silverhand IS the real Silverhand, except it's not; it's just his memories, he even says himself that the "real me" as in, his physical form and soul, is out there somewhere. He even explains that the Soulkiller fries your brain and packs away your soul or your memories, killing the real you to some extent. But that's Cyberpunk 2077 a game with better writing that Dawntrail and Origenics might actually be different from it, one can hope.
And with Otis, we get something akin to Soma; Endless Otis and Robot Otis. Who is more real? Who is more alive? Does copying a memory make the same person or a new person?
So no, when we go around shutting down Alexandria, we are not killing anyone, we're just deleting a USB drive. These people are worse than dead; they've been deleted from existence and it happened the moment Speen took the souls and stripped the memories of them.
I don't Think there'll be an answer to this now (until every Post-MSQ update Before the next expansion is, out the writers have time to fix this issue), some will say "yes, we're doing a horrible thing, murdering thousands" others will say "no it's fine, they're not alive".
Does it make you feel better if they are considered alive? Is Johnny Silverhands alive, as a memory taking over Vs body? Is a soul bereft of all memory still the same person? Do you consider AI like ChatGPT alive?
I don't Think the Endless are alive, because I can easily see how a machine can use memories of a person to simulate actions. It's funny how we're living in an age where AI is so advanced it can trick most people into beliving they're a real person, so assuming the same of a setting that goes Heavy into the cyberpunk feel isn't too far off.
But the soul part... so how many people have been consigned to True Death just to ensure there is a steady supply of empty souls that can sustain both the Endless AND the people of Solution 9?
Origenics and Souls is a can of Worms, Endless is basically AI masquerading as people, using their memories. For example, why would Wuk Lamats nanny take on the form of her old self, is it because the old bint never had any real happiness ever in her Life and it was only being with Wuk Lamat she was truly happy? Doesn't beat back Wuk Lamat being a Mary Sue allegations lol.
The kicker is I Believe these people aren't just dead, they've been deleted; Kriles parents, Erenvilles mom, Wuk Lamats nanny, all their empty souls are just endlessly being fed into other people, people who then add their own memories to those souls, then those souls get stripped of memory over and over again.
When or if those souls ever make it to the Aetherial Sea, they would have gone through this so many times they will only have the memories of the last person who had that soul, not the original person.
So yeah… in trying to save people from Death Speen succeeded in the thing Meteion failed at doing; granting True Death with Origenics.
But since it's apparently not true and we are just committing genocide, otherwise if it was, it sure would be an inconvinence if anyone in the story thought about, told Sphene and have her commit Seppuku on the spot realizing this. So it's a good thing everyone doing video essays on this all agree that "yes, we're doing a Little genocide", otherwise the plot would be even dumber than it already is lol (no matter the conclusion we all finally agree, it's all very horrible, no answer is the better one, it's all full on evil)
So yeah, I don't see "killing" the Endless as murder, because I know these people have LONG SINCE BEEN ERASED FROM EXISTENCE BY SPHENE, to me I am just shutting down this absolute mockery of Life and crime against nature itself.
I was getting furious at seeing the Endless, it felt like someone was running around in a skinsuit "look at me! I'm not dead! I'm so happy! Look how happy I am!"
Also people still use Regulators post-MSQ, so what happens when they die? Is Origenics still Active? Will it continue to Catch and process souls? What happens to the memories it extracts? They have nowhere to go... so do they just get deleted? So the people of Solution 9 still using Regulators are basically doomed to erasure from existence the moment they can no longer sustain their bodies with souls. And what happens if Origenics are shut down? Then we have cases of someone dying, their soul goes into the Aetherial Sea, they get up on a different soul, which they add their memories to, then they die and that soul goes to the Aetherial Sea... so we have several souls all with the same memory in the Aetherial Sea...
It's honestly the most evil thing I've ever seen, Wuk Lamat is the greatest fool in the universe to forgive Speen for this.
There's a reason why we say "your immortal soul" and why Selling it to demons is such a big deal; it is YOUR SOUL for eternity, but this Writing makes it all out to just be Another type of energy that you can trade away. If this was written by Satan himself as propaganda as to why you should sell your soul, I'd totally Believe it.
But fine, FINE. WOL committed a genocide for the plot. Does that make you happy? My thoughts aren't a happy ones either, but it is infintely worse for the world building of FF14, so maybe pretending these memories are alive, somehow, makes you feel better.
Kind of amazing the Ascians didn't step in on this, it literally breaks their plans so hard and is far worse than WOL opposing them, it would literally crush their attemps at "Unsunder" the "Sundered"... because all those souls that could be whole are now broken beyond repair. Speen is irredeemable for doing this and she's worse for having put the player in this position, if we go by the "you're a murderer WOL!" idea.
TBH the more I think of it, I don't care if the Endless are alive or just a living photograph; the whole issue with how they're explaining this still makes my belief that they've created True Death by stripping memories from a soul to feed it to another is a sin beyond forgiveness. Whatever answer is given, Sphene is still the worst villain in all of FF14 and Wuk Lamat forgiving her is outright evil.
But I'm sure they can retcon this in future updates... they have to... right?
In closing; I am sorry if you read all of this, but thanks for doing this. I do hope some of this is incorrect or gets changed in future updates, because if it's never addressed or changed... oh no.
P.S: I'm fairly convinced Living Memory is the message of "let the past die, kill it if you have to" and "nostalgia is empty and evil, it drains society is must be destroyed to progress forward". It's why it resembles a theme park, why food is devoid of taste and why we're given no choice in how tackle the issue except pulling the plug.
But no matter what answer agreed on, one thing is absolutely true: it is morally justified to blame Sphene.
I actually really dig the fact that Zoraal was quiet in the first half. FFXIV has never had a quiet antagonist. Everyone gets their feelings and motivations discussed at great length.
But I won't say there's not an open-ended void that you have to fill in yourself. The time wasted on Sphene could have been spent exploring Zoraal's upbringing to bring more sense to his warmongering.
Wuk was too campy and smiles, so Zoraal being a bitter crown prince that was pushed to insane lengths to fulfill his legacy was so welcome for me. He may not be executed the best, but I loved watching Zoraal steadily go to greater and greater lengths. Before Everkeep, my man got on the phone, like, "Hey, Karen, could you push the 'kill everyone' button?" Code Blood, lol.
Last bit: I really REALLY wanted Zoraal's son to be an angry teen when we got there so he could be like "You wanna kill my dad? Let me do it." so that Zoraal is ended the same way he ended Gulool.
The reason why still living people can just enter Living Memory is because it's essentially a large server room. Befor Sphene transported it to another reflection, it was quite literally just the top floor of the Everkeep.
It's just a roofless building sitting on the ground in another reflection now.
Koana really should have won the rite. Especially with how it ended with Wuk Lamat basically saying “I’ll raise Gulool Ja into a kind king.”
I personally think they could have been bolder to have Wuk Lamat lose the rite to Koana, but over her adventure with us, gather a party of different races - like a WoL - and show that Gulool Ja Ja’s legacy comes in various forms through all three of his children.
It even leaves her untethered to Tural to raise Gulool Ja and help Solu-9. That child is highkey the only thing that was made me less hate Wuk Lamat and feel more like it was such a missed opportunity to make more interesting choices.
The WoL should have been either a more involved guardian or a less involved mentor, they made them sort of both and neither.
The thing is zoraal ja’s story could have been interesting if they had done anything to flesh him out. Imagine you are the first born son of a king. Not just the first born but a miracle birth as your father was not supposed to be able to have children. You grow up thinking you will succeed him. Then be brings home two stray orphans and gives them equal rights to as heir to his throne. Not just in the line of succession but equal rights. He takes away your birth right. A right that has been drilled into you by the people around you. How bitter that could make a person. But we got none of that. It was such a missed opportunity to make him an actually interesting villain. Instead we kinda just get Zenos part 2 electric boogaloo.
Hey. Thanks for the in-depth look at the villains of Dawntrail.
I completely agree with you in regards to Living Memory. I never was so appalled to my WoLs actions than in this area. The quote you mentioned from Emet was constantly screaming in my mind. "This is all so wrong. Make it stop. Or let us at least morn. Everything but smile it all casually away." were my thoughts. I was thinking of the tribes in Ultima Thule and the tribe quest and was "These are not alive either. Should we also shut them down?".
Wuk was smiling and pushing us on. I did not want it. But even Erenville and his mentor confused the hell out of me. Erenville, a gleaner(!) and his mother (also invested in botanical life), were ok with shutting a terminal down. A terminal which was also the powerhouse for the mechanical trees in LM. The trees as mentioned containing the samples of the previous botanical life of that reflection.
What were the writers thinking? I do not understand. And at the end putting "Smile" over our actions. Us having destroyed the remnants of Alexandrias history, taken down their king and queen and installed a 7 year old as their new ruler, who is guided by Wuk (so basically installing a puppet government if you so want to phrase it). I do not get what went on there
Wow, hit basically every single point I hoped for. Can't really say I disagree with any of your points. Letting the failed theater kid that wrote the fucking Sorrow of Werlyt (would love to hear your thoughts on that clusterfuck, by the by.) helm the next expansion was one of the dumbest decisions they could have made.
30 minutes in and you have hit every point flawlessly.
Zoraal Ja was about as deep as a puddle.
"I'm going to show you why war is bad."
Since they told us he was a badass fighter i would have expected more people to support him if his angle was "look at the super powers beyond the salt. I am the strong leader you need to stand up to them to protect us." Fear would have done more for him
Living memory was literally "Mods asleep post wuk lamat memes"
Hm. That's a decent angle for Zoraal. Especially with the aftermath of the Final Days. People could be terrified of the outside world and desperate for a symbol of strength to carry them through.
One thing that particularly made me angry, is that Kryle's percieved so SO many reds flags coming from Zoraal Ja each time the team met him, but never, NOT ONCE, though about sharing this information with anyone.
26:00 I still haven't gotten over this. When the negative opinions about Smile came around (exacerbated by Wuk Lamat's VA), so many people brought notice to the uses of it in MSQ, and how it's used just before going to war on enemy territory with a kamikaze train.
They probably thought it was lessened by the fact that the soldiers are mechanical, but it's still funny as hell.
Not all the soldiers are mechanical. Like we saw in Vanguard. It was just a stupid choice. These developers have no awareness, I swear it.
There is little awareness to most of this expansion.
My favourite has to be how nobody in the writers room ever stopped to think about the scene where "Zoraal Ja, dying, vents to his crying infant son about his entitlement and daddy issues after declaring war on an entire reflection and losing". Zoraal Ja being a walking talking red flag throughout the entire expansion required me to suspend my disbelief immensely to progress the story without giving up, but that one scene killed me.
At this point, I'm happy we had a free choice in making our characters. Wuk Lamat is so pushed into the focus, its a wonder we aren't forced to user our free phantasia to turn into her...
THANK YOU. The amount of people defending the Living Memory genocide would be flabbergasting if I didn't attribute it to mentally blocking out what we did. I loved Endwalker, but can respect your thoughts - it kept my belief suspended, and time travel is an area where logic cannot always be applied (the grandfather paradox and all that), so I can step back and still enjoy it. I could not enjoy Dawntrail, heavens know I tried.
Agreed. DT was just impossible. It really was a case of you love it or you don't. There's not much of an in between
The problem is that applying time travel that way was a choice and they also did not write it in a way that it bound Venat's hands - quite the opposite. You can see this in how Yoshi has answered questions on time travel since, including the 6.0 Q&A. Idk, I could never really enjoy EW and how it tried to make out all that to be 'necessary'. Seeing the new writers incapable of concealing the act of horror of wiping out the endless as well as Ishikawa managed to fluff up the Sundering, and the writing decline so badly and get panned by all and sundry is pretty satisfying to me, not going to lie.
@@alchemi8085 Then write the characterisation to fit it better. Just having an NPC blurting out that they're not alive even when subsequent writing doesn't jive well with this is not good writing.
It took me DAYS to realize something good out of the story mess. It seems the toxic positivity is kind of gone and everyone is open to criticism of the game.
Thank you, I do not understand people that say Bakool was a good villain or a good character. His story was total nonsense straight from a cartoon for children in the single digit age range. And Zoraal was almost not even a character tbh, low key, and the way they framed the scenes around him, like killing their father, were so dumb it made it total nonsense. Instead of having us find him dead after the battle or see what happened while cut off by debris or enemies, they had WoL and the Scions just stand and watch when we easily could have stopped it and we should have attacked him and prevented him from escaping in the first place. DawnTrail hurt my soul, I do not understand what happened to the writing team but whoever they changed and gave power to that let this happen needs to be undone, replaced, it was so bad. Sphene is basically a walking macguffin that doesn't even make sense.
And yes, Koana was honestly the one we should have been backing, Wuk should have been the one to remove herself from the running because she doesn't actually have any of the skills needed. Koana actually did everything to help, and without fumbling into stuff like focusing on a festival that everyone conveniently forgot was magic instead of actually making something to dorectly address the food shortage. Even the second half, it makes zero sense for Wuk to come with us instead of Koana who actually has training and knowledge from Sharlayan about advanced technology, hell the train we use was from him too. Wuk's only skillset is wanting to be friends with everyone whoch ironically, actually would have made sense if she was the one that got aid from Vritra but no, Koana did that too. It's so dumb.
It is actually insane how ffxiv devs managed to genocide the msq and reputation of ffxiv within a single patch. That's crazy. Maybe I should go play WoW or Minecraft. Better MSQ.
The MSQ was so bad this time I think I'm just going to take a break from an expansion, the gameplay didn't change *that* much and the MSQ is bad now, so why am I playing this game???
As a 14 fan is sad to see the comunity defend everything without criticism, wich is fanboy not fan behaviour. While WoW has improved their writing and a lot of things about the game, its in more languages and their transmog system is a lot better with a similar sized studio to 14, ESO is single payment and you get better seasonal events, better oufit and waaaaaay better housing, and even some f2p games are making improvements ff14 comunity is letting the game become worse and worse in terms of writing and content
@@matthewoconnor2742 if you dont care about savage and crafting you have 0 content worth doing this expansion once you complete your arcadium set. And the only long term content that previous expansions offers is a island that its insulting how badly implemented it is compared to similar homestead systems in other games even f2p ones from 10+ years ago, they did not even let us decorate it propperly and have an instanced bedroom there.
This while the servers are melting from ddos, in 2024, because somehow a cloud protectedl oad balanced is alien tech.
Start subbing guys, this guy always cooks for us! Durantes keep doing great. FF14 next expansion will be better, Inshallah.
One and half hours is not nearly enough to enumerate all the nonsense in the writing, but you do a great job in the time allotted.
@@4mb127 heh heh
Well, I’ve a few others out. But yeah. Still not enough. DT was comically bad.
I just wanted everyone to be consistent. Everyone's motivations and goals flop constantly to the point they get in their own way. I thought Bakool Jaja *was* going to be "Saturday morning cartoon villain" then he released a living nuke. I just wanted characters I could look back fondly on after DT was over.. and the one character i did like was murdered because the universe hit pause on our character!
Loved the video to bits, the whole series, I am also someone that loves this game and replaying with my alt the good parts and finding always many nice details I missed, while DT is the only expansion I started to skip all becasue no matter how many dialogues i miss they will repeat the same reftain over and over again that is impossible to miss something.
I also hope this will bring back the game on track but the perception is that they are bored of their own game, the contents are all the same, harder maybe, but none the less the same like alexandria is the end of the world that we saw in Dead ends that was the end of the worlds we saw in Amaurot.
The seasonal events have become forgettable, the items in the shop totally uninspired which is strange as they should provide extra money.
They failed with the double dyes, where the second dye goes on almost unnoticeable details in the few items where it is implemented. They messed up with the graphical updates, being forced to even reissue the benchmark and the last message on Lodestone is to apologize for failing to update the characters so badly that they will need 2 or 3 patches to sort it out.
And worst of all the time among the patches has grown from 2 months, when they were providing always 2 extra expert dungeones to 4,5 months, with one dungeon, leaving nothing to do except for old contents.
Not sure if this depends on the company current situation or just they are planning to abandon this game and soon announce a new one, but this is definitely not the best way to retain those players, including some streamers, so hardly regained after the disaster of the 1.0.
I think I'm going to try and do a bit of a dawntrail re-write so this'll probably be a long one:
To begin with, we never join the rite of succession. We travel to tural with erenville and krile to discover what's going on with her earring and to have a classic adventure as a break from all the saving the world we've been through.
Once in tural, we find out about the rite by accident because we saw a big monster and fought it for fun. Turns out that monster was a tural vidral that had been causing trouble, and so dealing with it was named one of the trials for the rite. Zoraal Ja commends us for our strength in battle but insists that we do not interfere further with the rite.
Cue us returning to travelling with krile and co. to discover what we can about the earring and the golden city. We soon receive a summons from galool ja ja and go to meet him. He knows who we are and asks what our business is in tural. He informs us that the rite will end at the entrance to the golden city and makes a request that we delay our adventures so as not to interfere.
So as not to leave us with nothing to do, he offers us a challenge to fight him both as an indulgence but also as a way to gauge our true strength. We proceed to wipe the floor with him and he rewards us by allowing us passage to explore shaaloni since there are no ties to the rite there.
(This is now the second zone we actually go to)
While in shaaloni, we explore and get to learn a bit more about erenville while also learning of the yok huy's dreams and how a sickness eventually drove them back.
Then BOOM alexandria's dome appears, and they invade. We are caught on the front lines defending the people of shaaloni. After we triumph over the vanguard of the army, we learn that a separate detatchment was sent to tuliyolal and upon arriving, see the aftermath of the assualt. Through the echo we still get to see the invasion happen, and we see galool ja ja fall defending his people. The candidates for the rite call on us for aid in fighting alexandria, except bakool ja ja, and we venture into the dome.
Koana is amazed with the technology, zarool ja is in awe of their strength and wuk lamat is trying (and not doing a good job) to put on a brave face for her people. When we meet sphene, wuk lamat is the one who opens a dialogue between the two sides and tries to find understanding for the sake of peace.
We then receive a call from erenvile who is outside of the dome, informing us that bakool ja ja has released valigarmanda in a failed attempt to use the vidraal as a weapon against alexandria.
Zoraal ja opts to stay behind with a detatchment of the army to hold a frontline while we go with koana and wuk to aid bakool with valigarmanda.
Upon valigarmanda's defeat, the beast actually agrees to aid us by defending the land. Thus we are free to return to the dome.
When we return we find that time distortion between the two realities has occurred, and zoraal ja has been in alexandria for around 30 years. In this time he has actually decided to join sphene's side, has had a child and now desires conquest of the rest of tural to unite it under the banner of alexandria.
With alexandria an even bigger threat than before and having intimate knowledge of tural thanks to zoraal ja, we seek out Otis to try and learn more of why alexandria seeks conquest. Here is where we learn of the endless and of the souls required to sustain them. We also meet galool ja, zarool's son, and find out he has been distant to the boy as he has been so focused on planning the second invasion of tural. A comment is made from wuk and koana about how this is out of character for him as he only ever sought power as a means to defend his family.
Erenvile, being with us, learns his mother had been caught in the dome and has been leading a resistance group. We meet with her and launch a plan to go through origenics to confront zoraal ja and sphene.
We fight zoraal ja and find out that his heel turn happened because it was the only way to save his father. Galool ja ja has in fact been made into an endless (his soul having been taken when he fell in the initial invasion) and zoraal ja refused to let him go. He reconciles with his family and passes on his legacy to his son, informs us of sphene's plan and then passes on.
With a little bit of krile brain power we work out that the golden city is another gate into alexandria and we can use this (and the cool chalice we found) to activate it and reach where sphene has gone.
Racing against the clock to prevent the second invasion we travel to yak'tel and discover the truth behind the blessed siblings. We learn that bakool's motivation was to right the wrongs of galool ja ja who had abandoned his people out of shame for their actions rather than to help them so they wouldn't repeat the mistakes of the past.
We find ketenram and learn the golden city is at the heart of the burial ground and bakool secures our passage inside to reach the golden city.
Upon reaching the gate, the WoL and krile get a vision of her parents giving her to galuf, and ketenram explains where she cane from. Now with more reason than ever to enter the gate we head in and find ourself in living memory.
We are greated by erenvile's mother who explains that she actually died in the assualt and that zoraal ja's actions are what secured her and many of the turali people's place as endless. However, she recognises this for the hollow existence it is and seeks to put an end to it for the sake of those still living. We aid her in shutting down the endless area by area, all while erenvile is denying the reality of losing his mother (echoing much of zoraal ja's sentiment). We have to shut down galool ja ja's endless in one area and Otis' endless in another. Eventually krile finds her parents preserved as endless and learns the truth of her origin and that she was in fact from alexandria at the time of the war that caused calamity. She is accepting of the loss of her true parents and in doing so helps erenvile to understand he must do the same. Then we proceed to shut down the 'server thing' with erenvile's mother and have a touching scene of him saying goodbye while she whispers something to him we don't hear.
We proceed to confront sphene and she sends the others away to deal with us alone, no bullshit wuk lamat appearance just us vs the big bad in an epic climax.
We return triumphant and koana, wuk and bakool decide to rule as a council each playing to their own strengths.
We end of the expansion with erenvile appraoching us geared up as a viper and revealing his mother's last words were encouraging him to continue to travel with us and take up her old gear from when she was the defender of his viera tribe against the vidral. The last shot showing that we still have the key/chalice thing and revealing azem's symbol glowing on top of it.
Okay that took a while to write out, and obviously, it's on a youtube comment so it's underdeveloped and probably got loads of issues. But I'd love to know what people think of this as an idea for how to improve the expansion while still hitting a lot of the key events and story beats.
The bloody knife in Elpis part, at least had a justification that had been established as far back as Heavensward where in the Alexander raid series it was shown that a time travel event changing history is impossible to carry out, since time travel mechanics in FFXIV seem to follow the Novikov self-consistency principle which guarantees that going back in time ensures that the future you have come from is going to happen no matter what you do, which is why the only way one could reach a different outcome is if you were to travel to a different timeline, which is exactly what G'Raha Tia had done, having arrived to Norvrandt from a timeline where the Warrior of Light had died to the Black Rose via the use of Crystal Tower, bypassing the issue of being unable to affect the history of his timeline by jumping into a completely different point in time in another one, in which he did not exist as an individual. So even if some way to save the past and save the ancients could have been found, averting The Sundering, or maybe even the Final Days and creation of Zodiark, it would have just created an alternate timeline in which the ancients would not have suffered the Final Days and The Sundering would never have occurred, but it would do nothing for the timeline from which our Warrior of Light had originally come. Unless he was of course willing to petition Garlond Ironworks to commit to centuries of research so that he could ditch his own and come chill with the ancients. After having the indignity that was Dawntrail inflicted upon me, I would have been tempted to do just that, because that story lacks any sort of justification entirely for what had been done and side characters from prior expansions had more development and time invested into them than Dawntrail's main antagonists.
The time travel aspect is a tempting explanation. It's definitely better than any of Venat's own arguments before we leave Elpis. Though the fact she never mentions it as a reason for her actions. That with Elidibus' warning in mind, we travelled back in time knowing we were going to use these people and then abandon them to preserve our time. It's a weighty decision the story refuses to confront at all. It's a topic I plan to address in the near future.
Thanks for the input. There are some viewpoints to consider.
@@durantes I had always assumed that being an ancient, Venat had immediately grasped all the implications when she said that she would not have given the Warrior of Light her ward without a good reason, but since she had no recollection of having done so, that could only mean one thing: he had come from the future. The story could have definitely done a better job illustrating that, like having WoL and the scions read some of the Ironworks records found within the Crystal Tower, or have the Exarch tell us more during some downtime.
@@Enochlesis_t
Heh. They could have done a much better job. With a lot of different elements.
Zoraal ja suffers from the identical problem as Wuk lamat does. they both have basicly no change in character, zoraal starts as angsty looner guy with daddy issues, and ends as looner guy with daddy issues, with only getting a new shiny armor in between.
The annoying part with Zoraal ja is that there is so much potential for tragic character developement.
A child suffering from his own expectation, seeing the acts of his father as distrust towards him.
there could have been progress to more self reflection and a better self during the trial, only for it to be squandered in the last trial for an unfair reason, by his own kind mind you.
there could have been a more settled down loving husband in Alexandria only for him to die with his wife during the birth of his son thanks to the Alexandrian tech, leaving him only the anger and ambition of his former self and a child he has no connection with anymore.
(now that i think of it... how comes that we didnt saw Zoraal ja in living memory....)
But Dawntrail is written in such an infantile way that any form of nuance or heavy hitting philosophic question or even any reasoning of why characters act the way they are is sweeped under the rug.
I have been looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this since you first mentioned it and have been rewatching your past videos for a few weeks.
I enjoy your style and opinions, so I am eager to see how the villains stack up from ARR to SHB (my personal favorites), EW (apt), and now DT.
Edit: Wow, it was so much more terrible than your past DT videos led me to believe. It literally got worse the farther down the line of villains you went. Especially the last one. Anyroad, I prefer long videos. I can listen to them to help me sleep, have them playing in the background, or just sit down and watch the whole thing. If the video is "too long", people could always...you know...pause it and resume it later? I know. I have watched, in its entirety, a video almost 60 hours long. Regardless of what you do, I await your next project. I am particularly interested on your thoughts on Venat/Hydaelyn. I have never heard anyone say anything bad about her, so I expect that video will be quite fascinating, especially if you go over the actions of both her forms.
...Also, if you don't mind, as someone that loved Zenos from Day One, I would be elated seeing you do a long video on him and his life from SB to EW. If you ever make a series for discussing FF Villains (even if just for XIV), Zenos would be an excellent first choice...to me, at least.
Yeah, I love long analysis videos, and I also encourage Durantes to go longer if he feels the desire to do so. Good critiques are typically *exhaustive* critiques. Both positive and negative critical essays are best when they go into detail and examine how individual things fit (or fail to fit) together.
Great breakdown. Keep it up! Loved longer videos too. This is good quality. I don’t mind length but quality which I’ve come to see with your breakdowns and possible fixes to story arcs
I still have one idea on a huge missed opportunity regarding Dawntrail...
What if one or both of the twins boarded that first train before the barrier went up? Can you imagine how different the narrative would be with one of them being a guide to Alexandria and Solution Nine?
You know the first part of the MSQ is BAD when the producer says to people stop talking shit about it lmao,here's hoping it gets better but that's whisful thinking.
Hey, all im gonna say is FF11 has way better writing, and doesn't do the feel good foo foo sunshine & rainbow bullshit that 14s been doing lately
How do you get into FF11? Should I just play a private server?
@@NotRealAkira Im not a fan of private servers personally, but it is a route you could go down if you wanted to give it a try. You can buy the entire game off of steam for 10-20 dollars if you want to play the retail version.
@@NotRealAkira The official servers are still up and running, but yes there are private servers as well.
@@BiscuitsV2 I said that mostly because while, yes, the servers are still running I'm already paying like 20$ per month on a FF14 sub (Canadian currency sucks), and I'm sure there's not that many players so I'd have to solo most of the content anyways, so... Kinda hard for me to justify paying a 2nd sub
Not only 11 has better writing than what ff14 is having nowadays, the seasonal events are better.
Halloween this year in 14 was: go to a npc, talk to them. Repeat twice, get clothing, done. No minigames, no hidden pumpkins, no dresses npcs, and if you miss the event dont worry, you will have to pay real money for the clothing on a subscription + expansion based game.
1:08:14 There is no one alive. We are told they are just memories. It's not genocide.
There are just so many things wrong with, well, most everything about Dawntrail that it's just baffling. From the story to the characters, it's just one head-scratcher after another.
From Wuk Evu and the Hanu Elder KNOWING about Ihih'hana's true purpose and just not seemingly bothering to tell newer generations why it's so important to their lives, to us telling Bakool to NOT use his sob story as an excuse for what he did the entire rite but Wuk forgives him immediately anyway so everyone else does too, to Wuk solving Mamook's centuries long eugenics problem AND racism with just the hand of friendship and some crop seeds that weren't bananas which shows Gulool Ja Ja was a moron for never doing this since it was just THAT EASY TO FIX, alllll the way to Krile getting shafted the entire MSQ right until the very end of the expansion, even though she was constantly hyped up during the fanfest keynotes to play a major role, by giving her about 10 minutes with her parents...and then the writers deciding it would be a REAL good idea to have Wuk Lamat COMPLAIN THE ENTIRE TIME we learn about the Milala alongside her because "me not smart, learning hurt head." To add onto that: Cahciua, Erenville's mother, was introduced in zone 5. Cahciua had more dialogue spoken in her appearances in zones 5/6 then Krile had THE ENTIRE EXPANSION.
I could go on, and on...and on, but it really is just baffling how many things they did and then ultimately went "This is great, ship it."
Great video I think the best way to sum up DT is that we the player or the WoL is the villain of the story and tbh if I was Zoraal Ja and had Wuk Lamat as a sibling I think I would lose my mind too. The main points I could think of were..
1st: Wuk Lamat is selfish, entitled, nepo baby with no skills and no knowledge of her people she is also naive and immature without a single qualification to be a decent leader. All her achievements throughout the story were not earned not even once the worst part is a character from Genshin Impact of all games with a character called Kachina was a better done version of Wuk Lamat. Zepla a FF 14 CC and Genshin CC pointed that out and after looking into it I agree and find it embarrassing the game that brought us Emet could stoop so low.
2nd: We as the player/WoL robbed a far more suited character of being the ruler that being Koana as he did actually get achievements was humble and abandoned his chance of victory.
3rd: Erased not just a people but all records of their existence. An entire civilisation without memories would mean they are truly dead. You could argue that you the player engaged in one of the most evil acts in all of FF 14. Not once did you stop to consider or try to negotiate with alternatives it was just they must go.
There are other games with similar story lines such Tales of Xiilia 2 and Fate grand order: Lostbelt in the Cosmos. Xillia 2 was worse than this game because the throughout the story the MC ends millions of lives to stop the main timeline from falling apart only to find out that the one who set up the trial lied which was revealed in the true ending so everything you did was for nothing. DT has given me the same level of hatred I had for Xillia 2's stupid plot. At least in FGO you have no choice its literally you or them while cruel there are no alternatives.
4th: Considering how strong the WoL is. There were so many casualties that could have been avoided.
5th: I give this its own point but lying to Sphene after ending her purpose and people was so cruel I couldn't even believe it at the time. Tone deaf, stupid and cruel the kind of writing I would expect from Forspoken not FF 14.
Can it even be fixed at this point other than having Wuk Lamat die heroically and have Koana be the true leader I don't know if you could.
All I can think of is that Alexandria had a back up plan with a remaining server the new villain is completely furious at Wuk Lamat and WoL vows revenge tries to kill Zoraal Ja's son Wuk Lamat sacrifices herself to save him and WoL finishes off the new villain who acted out of pure desperation. Then acting in character the WoL and the scions try to find a way to at least preserve the memories or bring back the citizens from the back up archive without needing more souls. Also Koana becomes the new leader and opens up trade to enter a new era of prosperity.
That's the best general summary I could come up with to try and fix this mess. Also this message is way too long sorry about that.
The last zone is just so... SO poorly written. I can only assume they wanted to make an argument to morality of AI and its consciousness. They are artificial intelligence, since it was stated multiple times throughout the whole latter part of the story. Let's ponder some, if you would:
If they are taken as alive: Irredeemable mass murder just as bad as the Hydaelyn boogaloo. Why do we not take more time and try to do literally anything? And no, one talk with a posterboy on a gondola does not count as enough.
If they are NOT taken as alive: Literally just hitting the power button, lol. So... why not just speedrun that and skip an entire bossfight? Like seriously, besides being nice to the Mary Sue, there is L i t t e r a l l y no point in doing anything in there whatsoever.
Considering that this is literally just a tack-on, let's then ask ourselves a question: How Will We Know When AI is Conscious? [Thanks, Exurb1a]. In an exceptionally short version, we simply cannot know as we cannot define consciousness. We can't even determine if an AI is sentient or sapient, let alone conscious.
Tell me this, can these memories/ai make new memories? And are we sure that they are not only just hearing us, but *listening* to us? - We don't know.
"Sure," you might say "but these memories react to us and seem to gain new knowledge!" - We don't know if they do and even if, that is not Consciousness, that is [Sentience].
"But they do posses self-expression as can be seen with their art!" Correct, but we also do not know if it's stuck in a loop of doing the same thing and not creating. In both cases, however, this debates [Sapience].
The best argument for this is the "Chinese room experiment" (go watch a video on it if you don't know it), where this specific language/memory/whatever model simply cannot know and express that it in and of itself is [Conscious]. From my memory (because I am not going to re-do the whole story for this lmao), there aren't any interactions that would give enough thought towards this line of thinking whatsoever. I then propose, if you would, that we are talking to exceptionally good parrots - which we can't even know for sure.
And, in the end, we arrive at the whole thing being nigh-literally Matrix ripoff (Funnily enough, it was so insiped by it that it also copied the level of very bad decisions when it comes to writing the later movies).
[tl;dr] Which is all to say, that even if they ARE alive, we don't know. If they are NOT alive, we also don't know. We, as the character, just go along with Wuk Lamat's musings for the sake of sakeness and pondering to Miss Mary Sue. Stopping to think about any part of this at ANY POINT IN THE WHOLE ZONE be damned.
[Personal opinion] They are just AI running on soul batteries and the entire zone didn't matter at any point in time, literally just being padding for runtime.
they shouldve thought of a option to let them run on a different power source. can these same writers say the same if we irl are AI created by some extradimensional god?
what if they want to turn us off?
the writiers dont have the depth to tackle these questions of conscience and being.
dawntrail is a massive dissapointment.
@@eW91dHViZSBpcyBjZW5zb3JzaGlw Fully agree on the entirery of its writing thus far, yeah. Worst part is that they even attempted to tackle topics with more depth, like a lot of Shadowbringers did with the morality of killing the sins, etc. but this? Nah, not the same writers and it SHOWS
It is explained to us that they are alive and are made of an stolen soul, wich is then cleaned of its memories and implanted the ones of an alexandrian.
So while they are stored in a computer and given hologram boddies (or robot ones) they are conscious sentient being like any human and even have a human soul inside.
And while that would be already evil by itself, said stolen soul is used as a power source, because the plot decided that only human souls work for it, and in the process of being used as a power source (or to heal the boddy of a flesh and bone citicien) the soul gets destroyed completly, instead of joining the reincarnation circle.
So we had killed inocent people/souls that were kidnapped and implanted with false memories and given the aspect stored in said memories, with almost no weight given to said decision, in a hurried plan to save the world (seeing how a half eyed dragon soloed their fleet and stinien + a few cowbois stopped their attack, was not that much of a threat tbh)
Not only propper weight is not given to the decision of murdering people (and it would have been as easy as say that its better to kill them and free their sould that have the sould completly erased but still show the decision as something hard) but this makes sphene be disgustinly evil, stupid, and a discount emet selch.
While emet plan involved killing the current people to resurrect the ancients, it was at least fusing souls into the big original soul (how a single ancient souls can be split and lead to multiple sentient beings is its whole can of worms) Sphene plan is to continue killing people just to take their soul and implant them with false memories, just to keep a museum of what her civilization once was.
So it goes from: i can understand that you want to kill us to resurrect your friends, but thats still evil.
To: "Sphene, we are friends, i totally understand you and i get your dream, even if its just to keep kidnaping and brainwashing souls destroying them and not actually resurrecting anyone, ill stop you because there is no other way but i will carry your legacy UWU, oh and my friend the wol does not give a fuck he is now a bland npc"
My argument against your genocide point is that my WoL didn't have any idea what she was doing as she was stuck in a time skipping mechanic ala Futurama and was just clicking things she was told to click. I had started skipping all cutscenes by Living Memory so I missed everything there lol. I only play FFXIV for the story so this expansion has me questioning whether or not I should keep playing.
@@ChannelRaznoff
That seems to be a lot of people lately. People i’ve known for years are barely playing anymore. They’re aren’t motivated with this nonsense being all they’re getting.
Using souls as a resource was one of the most interesting concepts introduced in FFXIV but was so unexplored it ended up making no sense. Can someone for example explain why it's wrong to use souls to revive someone that died? If souls and memories are different things I don't see an issue putting a new soul in someone to revive them, it'd be kinda like a heart transplant. And I understand the system works somewhat like a ponzi scheme where you need more people paying into it than are paying out. BUT if there are declining birth rates that would mean you would need less souls to keep up the system. 2 people having 1 kid means there's 1 extra soul to work with and if 2 people just don't have kids there's 2 extra souls to work with. And why don't animal souls work for bringing someone back? I know they can be used for a power up but why can't a cow soul for example be used to revive someone? And if the soul of a cow and person are too different does that mean to bring back a Hyur that died you have to use a Hyur soul and not a Hrothgar or Lalafell soul?
What could have made it more interesting is if after getting a new soul after dying and coming back there were some side effects, for example changes in personality and mannerisms implying the personality someone has isn't just their memories but their actual soul.
And as a side note it feels hypocritical playing reaper in the parts of the story that criticize the soul system. Here I am using a voidsent that feeds off the aether of me, my enemies and possibly their souls (you do have a soul gauge as a reaper) possess my character for a power up. Yet here I am saying how wrong it is to use souls as a resource.
It's considered *morally* wrong to use souls in that way. It's generally accepted in the Source that once a person dies, that's it. The soul returns to lifestream to repeat the cycle of life anew. There are those like Emet Selch and Aulus Asina who could give a damn about all that, but they are the exception and not the rule. Thus, when we see souls being used as a "resource", we see it as messed up as that's just not how we perceive how souls should work.
@@Sutekiiii it feels like the writers wanted us to be upset based on some of our own irl perceptions of what a soul is, but the way it's presented in the game the soul seems little different than an organ. And even using the views of someone from the source when they were talking about that soul processing plant they acknowledge that the people of solution 9 recreated the aetherial sea it's just more industrial. So it feels kinda illogical to be upset about being actually efficient about using souls for what they actually are a resource
In the end though I see allot of this being a problem of over explaining a settings mysticism. Same thing with that shadowlands expac wow had that ruined the lore for the afterlife
@@hunterharris5929 I kind of lost all reason to care about how they were using the souls after we saw Sphene being totally ok with those souls being used for recreational purposes. I cannot believe that the writers didn't have an epiphany when Sphene was having a conversation with an arena fighter who was freaking out because they didn't have anymore souls left to spend. If maintaining the count was so important for so long to the point where she would travel to other reflections to yoink other people's souls, why on earth was recreational use ever allowed in the first place? Why are we allowing people to live outside of the city where they can die in numerous ways? Why do we not have robots for handling combat in the Thunder Yards? We get the explanation that it's because the robots can't take a lightning strike, but that doesn't make sense because we *know* they're made of electrope. The entire zone's lackadaisical approach to explaining how the souls are used then trying to tell you 'using souls bad' clashes so hard, it's painful.
@@BiscuitsV2 I'd also add how it's weird using a soul can't cure diseases or old age but can somehow cure a shot to the face or being gored by a monster
@@hunterharris5929 Lol yeah. Like that chronic lightning aether disease thing. I feel like we could've used the same method we used to cure the enthralled. And if they wanted to add some twist where using souls would help them do it, fine by me.
Not...thrilled with your assessment of Emet-Selch. You need to realize his motivation wasnt just about a teaching moment. The whole time, from the moment he laid eyes on us, and our soul, he was convinced we were Azem. The whole dialogue about waiting for that one, it was us, or at least his belief in who he believed we were. It's that fact that allowed him to indulge in letting us contain the light. But...I'm getting off track, and going into speculation, as I'm of the belief that he was seeking to cause a personal rejoining in the hopes that genocide wasn't the only way to restore those he lost.
Then the writers made him into a venat simp in endwalker which makes no sense so who cares anyway
First time in years where I stopped continuing my sub. And I have no intention to resub. SE really blew it with DT.
If Bakool JaJa was in Transformers Animated, Shockwave could have said that he was decepticon and everyone aside of Megatron would agree. Megatron wouldn't really object, he would just kill the idiot there and then, because Animated Megatron is the only Megatron with balls and also not an idiot.
Zoraal Ja is full nothing burger...
I have my thoughts about EW issue but I think there it's more justified, considering that trying to break timeline COULD potentially make things even worse, as Time Travel is another can of worms of "It could've; it could'vent" I just don't feel that it was that bad and Elidibus implied that changing past would mean that we won't return to our timeline but to new one that would be completely different and us from this timeline will disappear and everyone will succumb to horrible depression-death. Or maybe he meant that we won't be able to change timeline even if we tried and I wasn't ready for him going full Kain-on-Raziel-timeline-ramble on me, to be honest. Let's just agree that changing history is impossible (as devs implied) and move on.
Regarding Living memory I just kinda assumed (sorry, I didn't read half of text, I was in a hospital, playing game on my laptop with shitty GPU and Wuk Lamat had added extra assault to my vision as something in her material reflectivety broke and random parts of her body were randomly sparking at me like miniature super-novas making cutscenes physically painful to percieve - don't play Dawntrail on Macbook Air with M1 CPU - that's morale) - that we don't kill them, just shut termials off and that will kinda cache them back on disk and they will just go into permanent hybernation, so in theory if we find good enough power source we could restart that thing and let these VR backups loose - at least that's what I thought would have happen.
I cannot comprehend how hard final fight falls on its own face tho. It's just...
SPHENE
LISTEN TO ME
As such, I really hope that writing team scales shit back, removes Wuk Lamat from future story and focuses on Erenville or Krile, or both.
One positive point that I have personally - I never bought game for just MSQ and stuff like areas, world bosses, mounts and raids are important to me as well and it feels like this expansion almost all attention went to the gameplay, considering that fights are interesting and genuenly well done, story is simple and engaging, there is no Wuk Lamat, or Koana, or whatever - it's just us, other fighters and the commentator dude. I must admit, I do legit like Yaana as a character, GIANT Undertaker vibes of Wicked Thunder just killed me, I was enjoying the whole ride.
I have my own thoughts about how it could have been done (for example, would be interesting to see Bakool JaJa being literally a goofball who maybe tries intentionally to do everything wrong and we would see in Echo that he released Valigharmanda unintentionally by screwing up his attempt at doing the ritual), maybe make Koana so set on innovations that he wouldn't notice when innovations would make life worse - like for example - machines would pollute waters or something, or maybe it will just destroy people's way of life, taking some traditional jobs away by making them redundant, so it will be convenience vs. traditions, or that Wuk Lamat would be trying to listen to people and find peaceful solution to a conflict when being dragged into honest to god clash of interests where you can only choose one side and forever will not be liked by others. Make Zoraal Ja competent at something other than herding golden Alpaca. Make Zoraal Ja actually nuanced and compelling villain where player would see him as a ruthless all-or-nothing type of person, make an Echo scene with Gulool JaJa where we look at their conversation as Gulool JaJa tries his best to stop possibly ongoing war between separate Mamool Ja and Hrothgar tribes that he couldn't stop even with his attempts at peace and while we are trying our diplomatic way to stop it, Zoraal Ja just crushes both warmongering groups with iron fist by literally killing their leaders and Wuk Lamat will face results of that and we will have to figure out ways of trying both tribes to not go with war on Tuliyollal and why do I already have better idea for Dawntrail story than what we have, huh?
I feel like devs really put more thought into Kapybara mount animations than in actual story...
The lack of closure in Living Memory is something that bugged me a *lot* considering that the Endless are now deader then dead due to them being scrubbed from the memories of the Alexandrian citizens, unable to persist even in that capacity...after they stressed how people never truly die as long as they are remembered with the Yok Huy business.
Somehow it would not surprise me if they end up walking it back in the post-patches and restoring the place in some capacity.
I honestly just hated how hard they tried to make us accept how we were genociding an entire peoples and that means 'we were no different that Emet-Selch' when *they are already dead and these are just computer simulations running off their memories.*
I felt nothing shutting down those towers.
No, that's not entirely true. I felt contempt because once again WL figures out how to do something that she claimed she couldn't before. She uses aether to shut down a tower when she told us much earlier she doesn't know how to manipulate aether and we are never shown ANYONE showing her how.
I can see them doing something like that. It would only further invalidate our entire time in Living Memory, which was already 95% padding.
Found your vids, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them because I agree with pretty much everything, but I hate them because every time I watch them, I just end up angry and frustrated.
I am going to rewatch all of Emet Selches Cutscenes of Emet Selchs in Stormblood and ShB to get away from this mess.
I would like to thank you for the video first of all. It is very refreshing to see more criticism being made of FFXIV when it has been seeming to go down a road of utter incompetence on several fronts.
Secondly I largely agree with everything said, then again I had felt the writing was going south in 6.0 and DT certainly has proven me right in someways that I personally don't think the writing can be really turned around at this point without major intervention. Once you start to look past the "emotional" hooks you start to realize how awful the actual writing is, or at least that was the case for me personally back in EW and DT certainly continues that trend. Thankfully DT seems to at least be causing more people to see how mediocre things are due to the bad quest pacing, boring writing, and far too much focus on Wuk Lamat over the rest of the cast; arguably to the point she became a black hole sue having character change entirely to boost her up such as Alisaie instantly loving her or Alphinaud agree with her stupid ideas.
Finally, thank you very much for the video. I generally believe most things need criticism to become better after all and you hit every point I could think of.
When the OST Name and the Monster Design of a villian gives you a better understanding of the stick of said villian in your Story driven game, when all the previous Story, you know Things are Bad...
I want to correct you about Wuk's last words to Zoral Ja. When she said papa left him the one thing they couldn't have, she wasn't speaking the answer, she expressed he left it for him and Glool Ja. Meaning their biological Link, something Wuk and Koana can't obviously gain of share with their father. It was admittedly confusing the way the lines were delivered. I blame that on bad direction.
DT is the worst MSQ story... so far. 😅
8.0 looking bleak seeing YP nonsensical responses.
People questioning if he even played it or just read the cliff notes, looking like he didnt play.
Trust me, we had similar questions based on some of the EW interviews, i.e. did he even play SHB or parts of EW like the Elpis sidequests? :p Like you, I see no room for improvement if this is the headspace CS3 is in.
XIV has always had some world-building issues varying in severity, e.g. SHB introducing the First and having it be so similar to the Source's civilisations in spite of thousands of years of evolutionary divergence (evolutionary mechanisms are how Yoshi explained the emergence of the main races of the setting, so they are very much in play), which sure may make strained amount of sense on the setting's internal logic but aren't really that plausible. Both SHB and EW worsened this gradually as they tried to adapt older writing to fit new ideas. However, with DT it looks like they just went hold my beer to all the prior expansions when it came to plausibility, shoved it in a particle collider and speed ran its disintegration.
Yoshi also reinforced, regarding Emet, that Emet's belief that the WOL could find another way was genuine, and so was his disappointment when they fell short of his wishes.
The issue I had with Living Memory is the story cannot make its mind up on whether they should be seen as people or not (nor is it entirely clear on why they would differ from an Amaurotine phantom like Hyth's, tbh), and when it's trying to go for emotional gut punches, it will pretend that they are but then in the same breath will try convince you they're just memories. They also didn't consider how well this fit with the Omicrons' lore. Just sloppy, messy writing all around.
The writing around the Endless doesn't surprise me - they pulled off a similar feat with EW by trying to make you swallow Venat's ill-concocted rationale for ushering in the extinction of the ancients as necessary/a 'good' thing, because she thought they were 'doomed' because they 'couldn't' change (EE3 and the Elpis sidequests shit on this), and deployed ample propagandistic style writing (e.g. Venat's martyr vision) to make you not question what was truly happening, with EE3 sealing the fate of how absurd her reasoning was. Plus you had the WoL playing coy around Themis in Panda as to the fate of his people when the WoL could've provided critical info there (and the timeline erasure excuse holds no water because, as G'raha surmised, and as the 8UC has confirmed, this results in AUs, not erasure. Yoshi dug his heels in on this further by describing the setting as a multiverse, where many events can spawn AUs.)
So seeing this yet again? It shows the new writers are as tone deaf as the old, if not worse. One thing I'd note regarding how they wrote character reactions - in the non-EN versions, Elidibus came across as justifiably angered still by Venat, but he was acting out of a sense of duty to preserve the star. So they understood the importance of these sentiments there. With Sphene, the writing reminds me of one of the dragons letting bygones be bygones and making peace with the omicron facsimiles over... cake.
Like you, I appreciate moral ambiguity and even scope to make decisions that are in line with that, but I detest bad writing and narrative railroading, so EW and DT both sucked afaic.
Nothing I have heard from Yoshi P has inspired any confidence that they know what the issue is or have any wherewithal to rectify it. Good luck with the rewriting, but I'd just note EW saw similar critiques and rewrites with the writers absorbing none of it. Perhaps DT's reception may alter that but I am not even sure the feedback is reaching Yoshi's ears as it gets filtered through by the very localisation lead (Kate) who helped concoct this mess. Maybe the Japanese mirroring western concerns on sites like 2ch will help.
@@alchemi8085Yes, you have Cahciua asserting as much, since as I said the story is in the same breath trying to convince you they're just memories. Good that the story went to pains to preliminarily dehumanise them so you don't have to think too hard on any subsequent interactions.
Dude, thank you for having the balls to say all of this.
I enjoy watching these video essays. They are so validating. I can't think any less of this expansion's shit story than I do. They can only go up from here with the patch content... surely.
As far as I am concern. Sphene was winning that fight. But decided to suicide rather than talking to Wuk Lamat once again. Can't say I blame her.
Estinien instantly wiping out a whole army by himself was basically proof of what you said in the last video. Things happened in this expansion because we stood around and did nothing despite being walking WMDs at this point.
Also, why is it that all of the Turali NPCs look like they're wielding bone or stone weapons but in the scene where Bakool holds his sword to Wuk's neck has a metallic glint come off of it? Glint doesn't mean "sharp".
And i thought i was the only one who hated Dawntrail like dude. They showed us the Scions in the trailer only for us not to actually do anything Only time we Played as Wuk Lamate and she was borning as hell. Like i wont lie when o went to the wild wild west i enjoyed it until we came back to wuk Lamate. Man the scits werent even funny. Just felt like i was in a disney movie. Hell there was a scene when rhe scions talk and Wuk Lamate wants you to explain to her the reflections, i msde Alphanaud tell her and he got mad at me. Like most the dialogue we are giving is not much other then give is the whole murder himbo dialogue. Mentor my ass I wanted a beach episode not a imma teach you but you get a power boost to come at my level.
The moment the king asked to look after his daughter damn well knew he was gonna die and basically it wa gonna go rock bottom.
1:50 The sad thing is, Bakool Jar Jar isn't exactly wrong. Look at the veritable entourage Wuk Lamat gets herself compared to the others. WoL, Alphinaud, Alisae, Krile, Erenville. Yes, none of them amount to fuck all over the course of the story, I'm aware, but that's still five helpers, when the runner up for party size, Koana, has two allies, Zoraal Ja has a hanger-on, and Bakool sort of has his groupies but even then iirc only one of them even does anything besides stand around looking like a chucklefuck.
5 of the most powerfull and/or inteligent helpers in the world and we let their king be murdered
@@Kurainuz Look, terminal cutscene incompetence is a condition the WoL has struggled with since they were called the warrior of the crystal back in vana'diel, ain't no chirurgeon in the multiverse can cure it yet
The whole train segment was stupid, first of all, why the hell were the robots riding motorcicles and ALSO holding a gun at the same time? Why not just send drones with guns attached isntead? Why not just shoot the damn rails instead of flying all over where the train was and try to shoot the people riding it? Could go on, but that is just a small footnote on why the writing for the villains sucks in DT.
Going back with New Game+, I still feel the same emotions in SHB as I did the first time. I cannot say the same for EW, and I will have to see with DT (Though I do like Wuk so it may be ok for me).
I feel like if the game devs would focus on narrative rather than scale it would have been better.
If DT had only been Act 1 but expanded on, leaving Zooral Ja as a recurring villain and Act 2 as a second expansion, it would have played out differently. Basically, revisit the narrative of the SHB and reapply it more carefully in this scenario. That is why I say that if the devs would give a chance of starting late and not having to go through ARR, it should start in SHB.
"I can't say the Wild West area's name either..."
Texas. It's just Texas.
I think the Endless existing on soul energy is the fact that most miss that makes people think it's ok to just "turn off" virtual avatars. But as they need soul energy it would imply that they are very much alive. That's a great point. Unfortunately the game also makes very poor explanation on how the mechanics work exactly.
Taking an example from real life you can make a mimicry of a real person with AI and LLMs that can feel real, but is just actually running pieces of their history through an algorithm to manufacture a simulacra. I think this is what some people think what happens in the story, as there are issues in the translation and people completely miss the soul energy part.
@@4mb127
A lot of DT was piss poorly explained. The writing was that big of a mess. I can see where Square was coming from with this plotline. There’s some fascinating concepts at work. Just no effort to make em worthwhile.
@19:42 It's stated big daddy lizard was the first blessed sibling, and before him it was assumed that the two lizard types that give rise to him couldn't mate with each other. Much like blue emo lizard was the first viable offspring produced by a blessed sibling, before he popped out it was assumed blessed siblings were sterile.
The Sphene fight is why I’ll never do trial roulette again. Worse than the Lich King kill imo. At least Torion had established lore and was rather unceremoniously killed in the beginning of Legion. Shouldn’t have stolen the MC’s kill
I agree with pretty much everything except the endless being alive. If someone points a hand at your literal off switch and you just poof into technomancy dust, you aren't alive.
Had a feeling that the writers watched western animation from the 80's and 90's and thought they'd take pieces of it to make this expansion. Bakool = Starscream, Zoraal = Shredder, Wuk Lamat = Simba, Speeeeeeen = Disney Princess with a dark secret. While I still enjoyed my playthrough, there were moments where I just chuckled odd moments off like MST3k commentary. The big war in the main city and the "rescue" that comes was pretty cool I thought.
My copium for playing this, despite some of it's flaws is like I'm watching a long episode of the Venture Bros where you're just along for the ride until the final 1/4th of the game where you finally get to go ham. My favorite line to Sphene was "If it's alright with you, I'm going to obliterate your whole army" (or something along those lines). Because like Brock Samson, I needed to blow off some steam after dealing with everything up to that point.
The fourth, fifth, and final area though I felt dragged on for a while. The closure arcs were rushed in the final zone which I felt should have been far more fleshed out but it is what it is.
it all went downhill the moment our new wokealization lead started. remember: she gave us the rastaphants - in thavnair.
which made about as much sense as eating soup with a fork. and now her influence clearly shows throughout dawntrail...
SPHEEENEEE LISTEN TO ME..😂😂😂...IN THE MOST TONE DEAF VOICE I HAVE EVER HEARD.
This has colonialism vibes. Tribes have century old problems, but then Wuk lamat + Koana come with their more educated brains and boom those problems are solved. What would those primitives do without them.
If I remember correctly... the story was written mainly by the dude who wrote the Bard Job Questline. My girlfriend told me that I and I was curious about what he's written so far in the game. Due to that I played through the quests and yikes. I knew right away it wasn't going to live up to the hype.
Another based video.
1:15:09
Actually, one Caveat to this point. Sphene was not in fact running away. I understand she doesn't have her army anymore. However it states plainly in the game that she's going to 'Absorb the Source' into her realm. Effectively causing a World Wide Wipe. This would sustain the endless and her people far more effectively than just sending an army out, and she'd get the full 'lifestream' of the source within her power for this cause. She'd effectively kill everyone in the world, and not have to invade a single continent to do so.
Yeah, I rechecked a few scenes after someone pointed that out. It's barely ever mentioned, so it missed my attention.
But that creates problems of its own. Mainly, what is she waiting for? Why not use the key and get it over with? This memory wipe shouldn't have anything to do with that process. If it's that she doesn't understand, which is implied, then said key can't even be used like that, or they already would have. I doubt her multi-armed death robot form was going to change that. I admit to overlooking that point. But it's just replacing one set of problems with another.
@@durantes She didn't have the key before. It was in our dimension, then zoraal Ja took it. Then he held onto it to not give her power, apparently. Notice how she only takes it when he's dead.
@@rednova2212
I meant after she takes it and flees to Living Memory.
@@durantes Ah, i understand. Yeah, even I was annoyed with how much time we spent in Living Memory, despite the place looking nice initially.
I thought at first "Surely this place will look nice *again* later, after we can fly right?" But no, it looks like nothing but dead stone afterward.
Back to the topic though, as soon as we arrive, it says 'Preparing for realm merger' And what's the first thing Wuk Lamat wants to do? Oh, right. 'Let's *get to know* these people.'
Bitch, we are on a time table here, and if that realm merger happens, our reality is fucking DONEZO. We have to pick up the pace and get it done QUICKLY.
And then when we finally get to the last SSD to shut it down and put an end to the Endless, the CPU says it's nearly time for realm merger, and she's like 'ALREADY!?'
I was like 'YES, BECAUSE YOU HAD US DICKING AROUND WITH PEOPLE INSTEAD OF GOING STRAIGHT FOR THE OBJECTIVES! WHAT SPECTRUM ARE YOU ON!?'
Ugh, it annoyed the hell out of me SO much.
@@rednova2212 Preaching to the choir, dude. The writing was so wasteful, it's easy to lose track of the actual story. Still. I'll address this in the next vid. Cover my bases.
A rewrite sounds interesting. And for a change, maybe dive into some future potential? I know the expansion has been controversial, but there were some interesting lore bits about Azem, the Key, the Volcano and these sort of things.
You mean the Dr. Evil volcano, ancestral home of the Milala? xD Not throwing shade, I just laughed when I saw that - as a lalafell myself, that made me smile.
@@TheWickedWizardOfOz1 Yeah! Do you remember when in Endwalker Hythlodaeus referenced one of these stories from the lodestone where Azem saved an entire island with a volcano? I think the milala home is a reference to that!
@@FuyuYuki92 I haven't done it yet, but one of the variant dungeons also touches on this, I'm told
In EW I had the impression that the writers at some point realized that they had to end the story somehow and just crammed one emotional gut punch after the other into the last few hours of msq, after the previous glacial pace and unrelenting filler crap. I had skimmed most of it, so didn't notice the glaring issues, which - for me - made the expansion ok-ish.
DT was just an insult to my intelligence and my moral compass.
I have many problems with Wok Lamat.
But, I really hate Sphene more.
I just realized, Sweet Baby Inc must have struck again.
A month or so again,it was exposed during an Investor call, one of Square's Investors questioned them about their ties to Sweet Baby.
Because of how parasitic that consultancy group has been on the video game industry. With their talentless enployees overpriced.
That's most likely why the msq was so bad and hard focusing on Wuk Lamat.
If it was a duel, then we have no vengance to do. And if it wasn't a duel, then we stood around and did nothing.
So she either murder his brother (in the case of a duel) or she allowed her dad to be murdered and not only did nothing but prevented anyone else from doing anything.
oof... how did I not see this throughout the game? Was I so focused on leveling up all my other classes that I completely forgot about different parts in the story?
Dawntrail is what happens when something gets to big for its own good. Now FFXIV has to pander to basically children because there's too many mentally immature people who play this game who get triggered by anything remotely serious. For real, Dawntrail feels like it was made for kids going through puberty instead of the actual adults playing the game that want more mature themes. This game has turned into a shonen jump anime...