I'm so tired of the argument that we're taking a "mentor" role in Dawntrail. Being a mentor would imply that Wuk actually listens to us. We have so few conversations with actual substance with her, and she never really asks for advice in the areas that she is most inept in. The whole second part of the MSQ is us just standing by, watching, as Wuk plows through diplomacy like a dumb truck. There isn't a single moment in Dawntrail where you can actually claim we did some real impactful mentoring. Oh, but at least we reminded her that she loves peace!
Anyone who uses the 'Mentor' role argument has never had a Mentor in their life and it shows. It bothers me so much because the emphasis this expansion was that we'd be Retainers/Mentors to the future rule. We literally didn't do that, and it feels like the titles were used as fluff marketing to push sales. Cause the narrative didn't match us fulfilling those roles in the slightest.
this argument is a great example of the loud minority of fans that allowed wow to fall in to what it become in shadowlands, the wales will defend it so hard that the company has no reason to care or try, they can deliver hot garbage and the fans that made the game their identity will defend it to the grave, the games grave that is. if you dont believe me just go criticize the game on the forums or even the reddit and watch as idiots that live on the forum come to the defense of the billion dollar company.
People using that argument cant even understand the game has done the mentor role 1000x better with some hw/stb roles and even some of the side events like the rising tide or w/e we had a few years ago did it better.
It's why whenever someone says "I'm okay with not having the WoL be the main character anymore", I'll always respond with "I'm not." I would have been a little more accepting of it if we actually did train Wuk Lamat and/or give her some actual solid advice or words of warning based on previous mistakes. And I say 'we', because I think the Scions should have contributed too. Alphinaud is standing right there and never thought to bring up his own hubris and naivete with the Crystal Braves? If this is their idea of mentoring, I want nothing to do with it. Of course the WoL isn't always the absolute center of attention.. but we always have our moment to shine, or some kind of motivation to do what we do. As much as people had an issue with Zenos, when he beat us in Stormblood it made it personal. It really helps to have a more personal, human reason to be motivated in a story aside from just lofty altruism. XIV has always stood out for being an MMO where your character feels important. This needs to come back ASAP.
18:08 This isn't true. We asked only 3 people in Living Memory whether they wanted to be erased, which is to say nothing of the thousands of Endless who resided there. Over 99% of the population that we deleted had no say in the matter. The story does not address this to any satisfying degree. All this being followed by a big celebration in Tulliyolal where everyone is partying like nothing happened really disconnected me from the MSQ. My character was even forced by the writers to Smile (get it) as she looks up at the sky like a shounen protagonist while the camera zooms out. I've always made my own little headcanons for my character between patches, but never before have they conflicted this hard with the actual story. My character should be on the brink of a Dark Knight mental breakdown at this point.
I've always levelled DRK as usually my second or third job since I unlocked it early on in my FF career. Never before, however, have I felt compelled to swap mains to it halfway into an expansion. Not even for ShB. Weaponizing my character's PTSD seemed almost mandatory to make it through this MSQ. One thing I will say, however, that Wuk Lamat did do is pretty much cure the community problem of toxic positivity almost overnight.
Ikr... The story lacks actual consequences. Absolutely agree with the disconnection to the story. It feels so unreal to see us going there about to commit mass murder ourselves (just like sphene did) then go there play games and eat ice cream and when everything is done do a party?? I dunno like why is there no conflict about this?? Why is erenville the only person who looks unhappy about this happening?? I love wuk lamat but she even allowed bakool ja ja running around without any kind of punishment for what he did, it all just feels like a joke or a movie for kids i dunno. The ideas are there and good, just rly badly executed sadly (there can't be happiness for everyone...)
I mostly agree, but it's not the first time. The heroic prologue music kicking in as we flew into the sunset at the end of 3.0 was more jarring for me. It was like we were just ignoring that out friend just got body snatched by the vengeful ghost dragon.
Many of the problems with the narrative in Dawntrail is that we were told completely different things than we were shown. For instance. We are TOLD that Gulool Ja Ja spurned and pressured his son. We are SHOWN that he is a level-headed and compassionate man.
One of the weirdest things to me was how Dawntrail just stopped caring about dynamis. We learn about this fundamental force in Endwalker, realize it's such a potent part of the universe, but when we go back to Dawntrail, and it's back to "soul aether, memory aether, and that's it!" We don't even mention it.
Dynamis is just too powerful. It's literally reality warping. Having the WoL depend on Dynamis every single time or to solve simple problems destroys the narrative. People forget WoL is pretty much a God at this point.
There hasn't been a single way to manipulate dynamis at all. It is a potent power that we cannot yet harness, and we still don't know too much about it, other than "it gives you strength to keep on going". The only one who could manipulate dynamis was Meteion.
Considering we were basically at the edge of the universe when Meteion was being fought, which would ultimately lack aether (which naturally negates dynamis quite easily), it makes sense dynamis from others would be much more potent in such an environment.
That isn't weird at all. That is consistent since the entire MSQ always forgets to care about things. Like 9 times out 10 our ass should be calling Cid and Nero when a spaceship is involved or anything technological but they wait until the last possible minute to give him a fucking call. I expected Endwalker to get into the consequences of G'raha Tia's time travel from Shadowbringers and something more concerning Tiamat's trip to Meracydia which Shadowbringers patch content made a big deal out of which you only get any info about if you talk to every NPC around before the quest giver after returning from Elpis. Also the Loporrits are a massive problem going forward as they have technology to answer for just about any problem.... speaking of would have expected them to be the defense against Solution 9 instead of Radz-at-Han. This is personal but they need to sunset the Echo headaches as a way to tell what happened in the past. This has been the single weakest part of every single expansion.... why in the fuck would the big bad villain stand there while you have a flashback in real time about their past instead of just killing you while you have a headache? Maybe the WOL should have a training ARC where they can finally control it and sees the visions in a split second like Shulk from Xenoblade.
The whole "We take the role of her mentor' gets repeated a lot but... why? We don't really do anything. We're not Obi Wan. We're not recounting bits of our life or offering wisdom. We don't train her and help her improve. We just tag along and nod a lot. We're, at heart, a passive observer. Nothing more. Nothing would have changed if we weren't there. And that's the problem of the story.
It's because people are using the 'Mentor' role as a scapegoat excuse but it falls flat on its face. The people who use the Mentor argument don't know what a Mentor actually is cause they've never had one - or seen one. So they're just parroting what others have said to seem intelligent in an attempt to counter complaints.
The people who say it's a mentor arc are pretty much abjecty full of shit and are probably shills or are coping in their own way. We did next to no mentoring. We had like 2 times when we explicitly "tutored" Shit-Lamat. And both of those two times were also basically throwaway lines. Woke-LMAO: "One my bruthur smeert. Other brother stronk. What about me? Wut I have?" Warrior of Light: "Oh, just the same spastic shit you've been shouting non-stop about since the expansion started; Peace, happiness, learn the culture." If you really want to consider throwing her own mantra back at her after she miraculously forgot it for 12 seconds as "mentoring" or tutoring. Like you said, we were pretty much just observers and tag-alongs.
...And then she realises that she didn't even need a mentor and just needed to believe in herself. It's like a poorly written Saturday morning cartoon.
I didn't notice the lack of NPC diversity for most of the story, but in the ascension of Wuk Lamat to the throne, that giant crowd made it too obvious for me to ignore. Even with a perlin noise pattern to offset various models' movement patterns by a bit here and there, the fact that everyone's movements were fundamentally identical was weirdly jarring and got into uncanny valley territory.
GW2 NOT ONLY has a fully voiced Story and TONS of inconsequential characters... but during covid, they couldn't record lines for the MSQ due to it... they added it voiceless and WENT BACK to voice it to keep the story to its standard, rather than lower it during that time. But SE...
They could at least go back and add more voices to some of the scenes in ARR since it has such a bad rep for new players. They hate going back to fix longstanding problems though. SE is too busy funding dead projects.
To be fair, FFXIV has WAY more cutscenes and story/quest dialogue than GW2. And from my memory of playing up to Path of Fire at least, a huge bulk of GW2's story dialogue isn't even an animated cutscene, but rather characters standing around in the game environment saying a couple very brief lines at the end of a battle or something. Granted, GW2 does have voiced lines during dynamic events, battle quips, and a voiced player character with multiple races, so it's hard to measure. I agree that FFXIV should have more voices lines in the MSQ and possibly beyond, but I don't think comparing GW2's "fully voiced story" tells the whole tale here.
If Guild Wars 2 kept expansions as packed as Path of Fire and Living World Season 4 that could be a point to make however I believe that was made at a loss and the game has went down in content after with expansions sometimes taking only 5-8 hours to complete at launch. I am going to be realistic with the voice acting thing : players do not want this because people complain right now about how long a patch cycle is.... XIV is voiced in Japanese, English, French, German, Korean and Chinese the scheduling required for a XIV expansion with full voice but not nerfed down to the length of a GW2 story would require expansions to take 3 years and longer patch cycles. I honestly think people are looking at GW2 from the outside having not played it and looking at the feature list rather than what it is like if you were caught up to the most recent patch having played everything that came before.
20:00 I remember there's a dialogue in one of the society quests in Ultima Thule that says the beings there not having soul aether doesn't matter, and as longs as they have consciousness, they're treated as living beings, both by the NPCs in the story, and the WoL. I don't remember the exact quote, but I remember there was also an actual dialogue choice with our character. Then why is Living Memory different? I think there was some potential in concept for some nice discussions about it that they decided to completely ignore, and we don't see it at all. Instead, in Living Memory we're just told by the story to care about them when talking to 0/3 locals, when it's a tear-jerker moment, and stop caring after we "kill" them.
The difference is the beings left over in Ultima Thule do not need to feed on aether or kill others in anyway to continue to exist. If there were no looming threat from Sphene I think leaving them as is until their stores are depleted would have been a option... Living Memory is basically mechanical sin eaters without the transformation that if left alone could freely travel between reflections.
Might be because not every player do that quest. I certainly haven't and borderline won't do it since I don't like DoL/H play. So they just put a blanket of us having no experience of that quest. Besides, what "consciousness" is I think is not yet established?
@tjongdavid1921 We have many instances in game already where we get additional dialogue if we have completed an optional quest. For example, in Pandaemonium, if we completed Ivalice, we remember Ultima Seraph. In 5.0, before the update, the Exarch reveal scene changed if we didn't have Crystal Tower completed (it wasn't required back then). And even more recently, Gaia appears in a cutscene if you completed Eden! What consciousness is is briefly touched upon during the 5.4 patch, when they were searching for solutions to save the tempered, and the video message they get in Azys Lla talks about it, how it's not the soul that defines one's existence! They could have expanded on that.
@SiriusPharos it's not about their sustainability, it's about their existence. Them being unsustainable doesn't make them more or less alive. If they're not alive and we are killing them like pests, then why even get the time to meet them? If Sphene's threat is such an urgency to solve, then how come we have time to go on gondola rides and theme parks? There was no sense of urgency, and turning them down before facing Sphene changed absolutely nothing.
FFXIV became popular because it not only had a good story for an MMO, but the story was amazing on it's own merits. No MMO could ever come close to having a story as good as XIV. This simply is not the case anymore, and sadly it isn't because other MMO's have gotten better at telling their stories.
@@ASackOfPotatoes Not likely they will just make the next expansion universally praised because of the story since the majority are complaining about story now instead of gameplay and up to this point it was minimal people complaining about gameplay other than those that complained the gameplay was too hard in DT which hopefully no one listens to them.
This is true, and at the same time so sad. It just shows that underneath the safety blanket of the story, the game itself is a pretty bad one. Predictable and boring gameplay loops. And if you did not have a static to raid and were just simply a casual player, which I would say is a large majority of the player base, there is really little to nothing to do. I have over 3k hours invested into this game, and part of me always knew this. I carried on because I love the story and world setting, but quit for the first time about 5 hours into DT. Now its seems like everyone is starting to realize that ffxiv without a story is just a bad game. I hope they are able to somehow rebound out of this.
Being a gacha game would make more sense, not less, to be fully voiced. Those games pull in more money than god. Do you ever think before you post something, or is this a rare occasion? Regardless, FF14 should have 100% full voice acting. I just think the way you expressed that sentiment is beyond stupid.
I'm super torn about Gulool Ja Ja. In his idk, 80 years of ruling, he did nothing for the Mamook, and then we get there and solve a generational issue in about 5 minutes. What did he even do after he ascended the throne? I'm so puzzled by it all, and the longer I think about Dawntrail, the more confused I get...
If we were a "Mentor" to Wuk.....What did we try to teach her???? Unless it was friendship and Smiles=Good, there isnt anything about her character that we seem to have influenced
We could have taken a more passive role and let her make mistakes, then pick her up and dust her off before offering advice or words of wisdom, but we don't... we're just kinda... there.
Hey Zapla, Thanks so much for taking the time to watch my video. It's wonderful to hear your thoughts, and I do agree that War Within has a much richer and more coherent story than Dawntrail. It is, at least for me, a much better gaming experience over all. I think I was too forgiving in my review, and your critiques are well founded. I have hope that going forward the 14 team will learn from their missteps. They have created some of the most compelling stories I've experienced in gaming, /fingers crossed It was a lovely surprise to find this video, as I admire your work, respect your opinions, and found your insights illuminating. Many hugs Fornax o/
Gulool Ja Ja didn't even do that. The lore says he loved and cared for every one of his children, and all of them had to train hard. Only Koana was not into sparring because he was too busy studying, hence why he is a Machinist. There is nothing to indicate that GJJ treated Zoraal Ja harshly. The way he talks makes it seem like GJJ was Fire Lord Ozai, which doesn't make any sense. His motivations are purely speculative. People loved him and praised him, he was strong since ever and never had a true challenge when commanding the Landsguard. There was nothing for him to prove to anyone.
@MrDoot-hj2ir I know, I meant him from his perspective. Now thinking about that part would have been something cool. During the event of End Walker he had to kill friends, this troop and citizens. GJJ told him to do it to spare them and to save others. That PTS could have turn him into what is now and fuel his revenge got Garland like they stated in the end of End Walker
it makes perfect sense... his brain partially exploded because daddy never told him where babies come from... he then got someone pregnant because he fell for the thirst trap and left for a pack of cigs but found Solution 9s version of LSD which made him super aggressive.
You can easily explain away pure evil types as dark personality types. No matter how people are raised there are going to be bad apples. This isn't to say the way they portrayed Zoraal Ja was good.
@@MrDoot-hj2ir Firelord Ozai had Azula and Zuko train hard and learn about the other nations to become competent rulers, he was a monster in every other way... but even he did a better job preparing the next ruler than GJJ did, how has Wuk learned nothing of her people in her entire time growing up in the nation's capital?!?
And FFXIV did a great job avoiding that until Endwalker. There were female villains, but they were like Livia, Yotsuyu and Fordola. Meteion was a big diversion from the norm in FFXIV, and now Sphene makes it seem like it will just be a game of "spot the cutesy teenage girl to figure out who the expansion's final boss is."
On the subject of Living Memory where "I think it would be cool if one them fights you": It would be cool if one of them fought you to prevent you from essentially deleting and killing all the souls in Living Memory but it would be even cooler if they tried to fight you and the systems in Living Memory took those rebellious souls out in front of you thereby preventing dissidents from manifesting within the AIs systems itself. It would add a deep and fascinating turn on our understanding of what's happening where the AI is rewriting the soul's behaviours in order to comply with the programmed utopia the AI is tasked with creating. Kind of like the Matrix with a new spin on it. Would've been cool... instead we got Dawntrail.
For me the entire question that the Living Memory tried to ask fell flat on its face because I didn't care whether or not the computer-generated people were truly sentient or not (Though in my opinion they were essentially just Chat-GPT models with a person's memory as prompt). To me, the whole region felt like a depression marathon to make you feel bad for turning off the orphan crushing machine. I couldn't care less about the people inside the supercomputer simulation because the computer BURNS THE SOULS OF LIVING PEOPLE TO RUN. It takes people's souls out of the loop of reincarnation that FFXIV confirmed to exist.
Another crime on top of the others. The houses in the open world are rarely open, it destroys immersion and is a straight up MMO / RPG sin. Dawntrails story is juvenile.
Ya I kind if miss that from ARR, all the houses were open and there was always minj taverns outside of the cities that weren't towns. It felt like you were traveling and those were pit stops before reaching a town. It unfortunate but FFXIV alot of uts adventures fantasy charm with magic and beasts creatures and now its about technology and modernization. Gaius was right, Eorzea was barbaric lmao compared to every other place in hydelyn
14's world is honestly pretty lame, there isn't much of a reason for enemies to exist on the overworld either and there's no reason to interact with them, they just exist
@@elpanchou ehhh i don't think ARR was, as i mentioned you'd run into small tavern and find quests there with people with their own issues as well as yellow quests that gave you minions, but really after HW FFXIV became a whole different game.
Living memory should have been a long debate on the ethics only for one of the characters namely Wuk without any warning to shut it down to everyone's surprise.
I will say this, you said you felt nothing shutting off the servers. Im not going to ask you to feel anything, but the moment this was proposed, and we were going along with it, all I can think of is Emech Selch telling us "You're not alive to me, thus it isn't murder if I kill you." And we turn off the servers, killing billions of people we don't consider alive to stop Sphene, and she doesn't even pump the breaks, no anger, never addressed. But we did the exact same thing we killed Emech for, and we did it without a second thought.
@@zombie_dinosaur96it's not. Their existence would only be able to continue by killing everything else, so it's not doing what Emet Selch did, it's "the good of the many".
Also, iirc, the Endless are people who already lived out full lives until the emergency in the storyline, so it's probably a little more fine to kill sentient beings who've had their full day than everyone else who hasn't.
@ Your arguing on a whole different thing. I never said what was being done to sustain the endless wasn't reprehensible, wasn't amoral. I am saying, the way we know the soul, memories, we aren't considering them, alive. Within the story we go through some of the lowest stakes push, flip the switch and shut off billions of lives without a second thought, and it doesn't stop Sphene, sphene doesn't care, no one brings this up. We do it, for nothing ontop of that. I mean we killed Emmet Schelc because he didn't consider us people, he was willing to genocide worlds to bring everything together to cling to the past, to revive the dead. So are our fractured slivers of souls just as valid as digital memory's that can still feel, act and speak as if they are alive? No one sat down to talk with the endless, no one asked what they want, if they wanted to live or die, or fight for themselves until the power ran out, no attempt to find a back door or repurpose a maintenance drone, no attempt to build a bridge after mad maxing a train, just, shut it down, turn off billions, face zero repercussions for that.
EW really wanted to be the expansion that said you should strive to live even if things suck. DT could have been the expansion what does it mean to be alive.
9:15 Is an excellent point I've stressed time and again. The writing is extremely uninterested in fleshing out Tural as anything existing before we get there. What upbringing did Gulool Ja Ja give his kids? Why didn't he prepare them to succeed him from the start? It's just like the festival ceremony with the crops. There are massive, fundamental gaps in the storytelling. It's as if not only Wuk Lamat, but all of Tural never existed before we got there, and the writers had no interest in giving a fleshed out history that made any sense. Gulool Ja Ja's rise even sounds like some kind of revisionist history of a tyrant rather than something that actually happened.
You know whats crazy when kona was in the field of reeds and said he learned that technique from an archon and both the WOL and Alph mean mugged him but didn't ask any questions or that what he said was never brought up again
I never understood the Gulool Ja Ja is a "good parent" take. Sure, it seems like he loved his children, but that doesn't mean he raised them well... Zoraal Ja is a literal psychopath, who hates his family so much, that it almost gave Krile a panic attack. Twice. He also makes zero sense the few times he opens his mouth. Khona (the best of the three) learned how to be a sentient, self sufficient being because he went to Sharlayan. He makes no mention of his father teaching him anything. And, well... Wuk is Wuk. I don't need to beat a fossilized horse with that one. She literally acts like she's never left the capital in her life. I get the whole "The contest is meant to temper them" bit, but it didn't go down that way. We either did all the work for Wuk, or she just tripped and fell into the correct answers, as we solve deep, generations old problems in an afternoon. We didn't "mentor" her. Unless you count that time we literally possess her to beat the shit out of Bakool Ja Ja (someone who she was no match for just days before). I really hate remembering details about this MSQ. It just pisses me off again. 😒
A much better angle for the competition would have been that Lizard Dad wants each of his children to learn from each other, to learn the best qualities of their siblings through observation of them being practiced by being direct competitors to them, because they each have a strength the others lack... but they don't even do that...
She mentions the actual body sizes for the different races because in GW2 every race has body types from slender to thick while many other popular mmo's like wow and 14 just have 1 body size for all the races.
Dat moment when you realize Wut Lamat is the only feature complete hrothgar in the entire game and yet somehow even she is incomplete. I so want off this ride.
You think that the clothes were the same in Tulliolal? Take a screenshot of ANY crowd cutscene, ANY of them. There's going to be 10 identical Hrothgars, Miqo'tes, Hyurs. Just clones, clones and more clones. Same clothing only makes it more jarring.
1 think I don't agree wtih is when people say "but they're just the memories" without anything else. yet we have Graha, sure the current Graha is alive and well, but we act like he's still the same person from the 1st, he isn't, he has his memories but we somehow act like the crystal exarch is our graha, he really isn't. But in relation to "erasing" the endless, at this point in the story I was more in "let's just get this over with" kind of mood, I was tired of the constant "LeT's LeArN aBoUt ThEiR cUlTuRe" theme we had the entire expansion, on top of obviously Wuk being there as well. I didn't skip anything until we got to the 4th area there and we go "flower picking" and i'm like "WHY ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS?!" Erenville's "sad" moment with his mom was also just bad and didn't make me feel anything, I was more annoyed than anything that we had this gloomy bunny boy with us and the camera made damn sure to make sure that Erenville is brooding, while nobody can do anything for him and he's just pouting in the corner over there like a little kid, till he finally snaps at the end, but it's too late for me to remotely care. But her "honest" review doesn't seem honest. she mentions she had fun in DT, yet then also mentions that DT's surroundings and story is immersion breaking. (this review was the story thing as she said she didn't even mention the gameplay) I hope that they course correct in the patch MSQ, but 7.1 doesn't have me being hopeful, they NEED to remove Wuk entirely, we're sick and tired of her, what's the 1st scene we see? fucking Wuk. sure she shuts up more often now, thank fuck for that, but the fact that she's there just makes me go "when is she gonna open her yapping mouth again and ruin everything?" (also, the whole "Wuk can't fail" angle doesn't stop in 7.1 either, even if she "fails" to convince the kid about the issues on mortality (something she has no struggle with, but these people for the 1st time in their lives feel grief, they for the 1st time know that if they die, they won't come back, that safety net has been taken away) Wuk just goes back to her cheery self near instantly)
I don't know if anyone has mentioned it but the giants' (trolls) models are from FFXI. I don't remember much about the Pelu from FFX, but I wouldn't be surprised if they reused their models from FFX too or at least the HD version. I know they reuse a lot of the monsters from XII and the XIII trilogy so I wouldn't be surprised if they did the same for these two groups of people.
I guess at least some of the cringey Japanese tropes were at home with Yotsuyu and Gosetsu. When the team said they were working to show more varied cultures, I wasn't expecting to see the narrative grind to a halt so many times to reenact Japanese tropes like the guy frantically apologizing and then going "ok I won't mention it again" followed by a "wow so fast!" joke. A lot of that usually gets localized out, but it feels unacceptable in any language at this point of the game's "we tell vast stories about 3 dimensional characters" lifespan to resort to cardboard cutout scenes like this.. Also Koana being a good opposite of Wuk Lamat feels less like he's smart and more like he's the cold anime boy with a heart of gold for his younger sister trope. And then his intellect is weirdly developed as he makes... questionable choices to sacrifice himself.
@@jessica_swan This made me say "oh no" upon reading, but admittedly my only memories of the anime are from my childhood, and anything spammed online to convince me to watch it. I think I understand what you mean though. :')
0:40 when the music start playing at this time, it game me so much nostalgia, but at the same time so much sadness with the current situation in the game. FFXIV will always have a special place in my heart. I hope they are able to bring it back to it's glory days. Make the story interesting again, and give us better gameplay.
the soul thing I was under the impression that the "backup" souls are normally taken from the beasts in the wilderness while only being taken from people every so often and that is why people were getting their memories erased when someone's soul was used.
Think she has some kind of underlying health issue, so that is why she is so quiet. I still think it's nuts that anyone could actually enjoy this xpack. I thought maybe it could be one of those culture war issues, that one side will embrace something, because they think it's 'owning the chuds.' Dawntrail made me appreciate Stormblood and Lyse, if that was people thought was the worst the game could get, I would like some more.
as soon as she said "its complicated" instead of "no... no its not." i checked out. Why call it an honest review if youre not going to be honest? Lots of cope saying that the story had any real high points and that Wuk was in anyway a good character.... she wasnt.
On one hand I agree that the Tulliyolal music does not really fit and that this choice was a missed chance. On the other hand, I personally did not like the Old Sharlayan music as it always made me very tired and want to turn off the PC immediately and go to bed. It was so boring. Now the Solution 9 music triggers tiredness and demotivation. 😅
I dont love the reviewers take of " the msq is still better than other MMOs though" because I feel like that is the attitude the dev team is expecting us to have as they slip into complacency.
They should honestly just put ff14 on life support, start funding a new mmo where classes aren’t all the same. Start a new story with a new game, not repurpose the same shit for the next 10 years. Ps: saying The War Within’s story is better is massive cope. It’s not even better than the worst ff14 story, which would be Dawntrail.
I don't mind the voiced/unvoiced cutscenes that much. But Dawntrail especially it felt like they didn't choose all the correct cutscenes to voice. And as the story gets further from the beginning I do think it's getting more ridiculous that we're not getting more voiced cutscenes.
DT MSQ was maddening. Literally felt like we weren't really doing anything, other than chaperoning Wuk on her press tour cuz we really were NOT mentoring her at all; nor was mentoring her our job either. Everything in the first half of the MSQ felt very much: we need these things to happen to hit a quota or a plot point and nothing felt organic. Even the first trial, Valigarmanda, didnt feel like a natural progression point, it just fell at that point where a Trial was needed. Everything was so superficial and contrived. We get to the second half of the MSQ, after the intermission with Erenville, and again, we are treated not like the protagonist, but like Wuk's weapon. We are following her, nodding and smiling and doing the battling for her while we don't have nay actual stakes ourselves in anything that happens. DT felt more like a boring transition into something better (cuz we have all been intrigued by the other reflections sinces ShB) rather than an amazing new beginning.
Watching other people's thoughts on the 7.0 MSQ has been a real trip for me. It has shown me that I consume content in a very different way from most people. I don't feel beholden to the exact way that conversations and events play out in the cutscenes. I write my own head canon in real time, in my head canon my WoL actually talks and was asking all of these questions. DT gave me the framework I needed to tell myself a good story. My WoL saw children, she put on a play for them, they were laughing. They were happy. And then she was forced to unceremoniously erase their existence forever. No amount of sweet sciency magic jargon could convince her that they were simply an illusion and that she wasn't committing a war crime by killing them. Living memory was the most traumatic moment in the entire MSQ for me.
The issue the real main issue(other than Wuk Lamat never shutting up) is the fact the trials to become dawnservant drags on way too long. The story of Sphene and all the other stuff should have been the main focus and they should have devoted more time to getting us to actually care about the "mass murder" of the last zone.
4:00 A fundamental issue with this is how she fails to understand when it is about you and when it isn't. It's not about you in Stormblood, ARR's post game until your blessing is undone, and during the Endwalker's post game. Especially Stormblood. We have no stake in the war at all. We're only in it because we want to help Lyse. Lyse, who gets sidelined by the ONE TRUE LORD for the rest of the expansion. At least it gave us Zenos. A tangible villain who totally isn't going to die the first and often only time he fights us. Actual staying power. Dawntrail is such a nothing ride. We have no moment because there is no moment. It's never that it wasn't about us. It's that the devs gave us a Monopoly board and allowed only reading how we help Princess Sheltered walk her dumbass from point A to B just to talk to her for more learning the 'lore'.
Living Memory... my hesitation on turning off the servers and committing AI genocide was based more on wanting to hang out in this beautifully designed map rather than the moral/ethical questions of "what constitutes life?"
It’s a 10+ year old game, the story was the only real new thing. That ended and so did the forgiving of the various other issues the game has had for years. Maybe the next FF MMO will be better. Maybe.
I think with all three siblings it was an attempt to show that while it’s stated with equal affection with their father there were obvious parental gaps(this is normal with children). Wuk, it’s that she knows nothing about her society. For Koana… its probably something that’s inbetween the two, he gained appreciation for the culture but he sees how they’re “behind” the outside world and never learned anything beyond the surface level. But then you have Zoraal who is supposed to be special since his birth is an impossibility and he seemingly does know and understand the culture. He probably felt someway in having adopted siblings as if he’s being told he’s not enough and then tack on the contest for something he probably felt was his birthright. I think under normal thought processes, no clue why he would want to invade the outside world, but if you look at it as corrupted values of his father in gathering the tribes, it makes sense. The comment on the endless… i think it’s too early to comment given the patch cycle appears to have more focus on solution9 and Alexandria. It’s very much like completing HW msq and being like “we didn’t resolve the nidhogg subplot” before the patch cycle concludes. I mean… what? At least wait until it finishes before we assume it’s never being explored.
yah Fornax has always been on the quiet side but she's cool. I think GW2's base story, much like FF14 ARR, is its weakest point. Season 4 however.. Holy hannah, it was easily my favorite MMO story until the absolutely amazing Shadowbringers showed up and End of Dragons was fantastic (especially for us Cantha fans) the issue with GW2's story is without the seasons it's inconsistent... and Heart of Thorns is something of a mistake fix, shall we say, on decisions made story-wise in the core game / season 1. As much as I love GW2, S1 is a thing admittedly it's a little dry but it sets up the stage for S2 and on... it wasn't even re-playable until recently so if you missed it back in the day toooooo bad. They've since added *most* of it back, a mission or two are missing but they're sorta side-story ish. However Heart of Thorns introduces the end of the "talking heads" era of story delivery and gives us in-world story delivery which is MUCH better. additionally GW2's MSQ is *entirely* voiced from start to finish. Seriously if Anet can do it and they're MUCH smaller than Square, SE has no excuse on this one.
Yeah, GW2 definitely suffers from inconsistent quality with releases. But they always deliver on spectacle and voice acting and I'm happy that they're willing to go back to address stuff like S1 (even if it did take a long time). Despite the flaws of SOTO I am enjoying their new expac model, it keeps things rolling and ANet manages to do a lot with what they have.
I’m going to say this, and it’s my personal feelings on ffxiv since playing since 1.0. Outside of 1.0, dawntrail to me is easily the worst expansion/narrative in all of ffxiv
I disagree with the regulator portion of this. I don't think regulators contradict the functionality of FFXIV aetherology on the concepts of souls and what we know. We know from previous expansions that souls are consist of memory, conciousness, and emotion. The three components of information make up the soul. The color of one's soul is also the unique signiture for a soul. listing the information on souls that has been provided by each expansion thus far. Stormblood-offered the concept that souls do reincarnate and that one can recognize one's soul from a previous life. Shadowbringers-the souls of the now are fragments of their former selves and that souls are comprise of memory and conciousness. Endwalker-introduce that souls cannot be created and that souls can be modified through the pandemonium raids. It also introduce the concept of emotions being a component and that souls return to the aetherial sea to be cleanse. It also introduce that souls can be consumed and devoured (This is through the voidsent). Dawntrail-It introduce the similar uses of the soul that the pandemonium raids have introduced and the voidsent. However, it built upon the idea that souls can be consumed to cheat death at the cost of the soul being burnt up and its aether dispersing. Now in the concept of the cleansing portion. Yes, souls are wipe clean of their memory as they enter the aetherial sea before returning to the worlds as something entirely new. This however does not contradict what the Alexandrians had done. The regulators the alexandrians and its systems follows the specific process. -Souls are collected by the regulators and sent to the Aetherial cleansing system -Souls are harvested through their tools as well in order to also be transfered to the aetherial cleansing system -The regulators have the ability to manipulate the memory of those who wears them. -The memory is extracted and the souls themselves are packed and contain within their aether cells. -The cleansed/process soul is package and redistributed for whatever necessary uses. A. The energy of souls are used to sustain living memory in order to preserve the memory stored there. Since the only aether compatiable for that task is the aether that make up the soul. B.The souls are distrubted to the masses for uses to cheat death. Now in the context of what happens to the souls that are expunged for Everkeep's system through both societial and Systematic uses. The souls are consumed like any other form of aether. In fact nothing about FFXIV lore on this topic contradicts this. Souls are a battery pack for the alexandrian's way of life. Once used these souls burned up don't return to the aetherial sea. They explained this directly in the MSQ. That's why its so horrifying to both the WoL and their companions. The action of using souls in this manner goes agaisnt the very laws of nature that the ancients held to high regard. It is essentially a self-extinguishment event that's occuring that makes the action of the Alexandrians methods terrible. It's suppose to be unerving because you the player have the knowledge and knowings of how souls work and their importance, but the culture of alexandria directly preverts this to the point that its hard to digest. The Alexandrian's regulation system is a extremely vague dark corner of the FFXIV's concepts of souls. Once a process soul is used for whatever purpose it was for by the alexandrian's system, It's gone. It is no longer a soul. Nothing in FFXIV's lore contradicts that idea since no laws and lore about souls ever stated a soul could not be destroyed or consumed as a source of energy. The only instance of soul consumption is with the voidsent. The voidsent however consume souls differently to Alexandrians. Souls consumed by voidsent are more of amalgamation of souls. A cluster of souls that disperse upon the death of the voidsent to reform elsewhere. Alexandria's methods are different, since they're process of consumption are essentially burning these souls as fuel. Its both consumption, but in entirely different ways that doesn't contradict the laws of FFXIV aetherology. What Alexandria's contribution to the lore imposes that several facts are true. Implied vaguely by the MSQ that the souls consumed in this manner likely return to ambiant aether after consumption. It also implies that souls are comprised of a entirely different nature of aether but if used in the way the Regulator system does it, the souls themselves no longer are of that type of aether thus they don't return the aetherial sea. They dissolve into the ambiant aether instead. This is not the same as when dynamis erosion destroyed the souls in Endwalker of those affected by despair. What the Alexandrians do is the equivalance of burning fossil fuels. The fossil fuels in this case are souls. Finite in number since they are circulated, but still a source of energy since they still comprise of aether. That's the paper clip theory that is explained in the video. The idea that an AI are using a finite and unrefundable resource to sustain a system. The souls are the paper clips. Sphene is the AI. The alexandrians are the compliers. I will say that dawntrail doesn't do a good job at explaining this concept and contribution to FFXIV lore thoroughly. So its easy for the playerbase to miss these things or get confused. But the statement that the regulators ruins the previously establish lore of FFXIV on the concept of souls is not true. It falls very well in line with what we already know and expands upon it by showing that its possible to manipulate memory to an extent. However, this isn't explained well in the MSQ unless you were hyperactively reading every line and paying attention to the hints and inferences given through the MSQ and the dunguons.
@@HamsterPants522 No problem, it just annoys me that people don't understand the regulators system and how it ties to the already existing lore of FFXIV. In fact the system is the same concept done in FF9 but way darker. I agree with a lot of other points in this video, but the one's that portain to Alexandria aren't it. It misses some key aspects about dystopian writing that is difficult to fathom because of the disperity. I akin this to george orwell or fahrenheit 451 or the giver. Where we the players are the outsiders to a civilization that clearly is so far gone that the lifestyle they live is just natural to them. To them its nature, to us its so unnatural in the context of FFXIV lore it feels like a plot hole, but still fits into the dystopian mold. They just a bunch of people so far gone that its actually no suprise that no one among them questions it. We do, but expecting anyone outside the Wuk lamat band and the resistence to question it just doesn't fit right. It just sounds like they struggled to fully understand the themes going on in that half of the MSQ. There are faults in its writing that I agree more with Krytan on that the fact the MSQ doesn't try to elevate these points to the players.
One thing that concerns me about the writing is what they've said about how they rotate in new talent and give them a turn at the wheel: I might have misunderstood, or perhaps they didn't give enough detail to mislead my thinking, but from what they've said, it sounds like they bring in new writers to give them experience in writing the main content, while the experienced writers (like Ishikawa) take a more supervisory role... but what happened to letting new talent learn the ropes on side content first before giving them the wheel of the main story? Like how Ishikawa started by writing job quests like Rogue and Dark Knight, before moving up and writing the MSQ for Shadowbringers? Seems an odd choice if they're not doing that anymore and just putting unproven writers on the meat and potatoes of their flagship game franchise.
28:00 Shadowlands was definitely worse in all aspects, but one of the worst moments was in the final raid. All I'll say is 3D Printer. Those who know, know. EDIT: Oh and the fact that the entire death realm runs on literal soul eating, that torture equals redemption, that all the wild gods are now soul eaters given how ardenweald works, etc etc.
GW2 story was OK up until your story got ursurped by a funny tree man who even got a magical sword meant for chosen heroes. But even then, it wasn't the most terrible thing to happen. GW1 was phenomenal and it's a shame the Utopia expansion was cancelled. I liked the concept.
I've been playing a relatively new open world gacha called Wuthering Waves recently, and I would say it clears Dawntrail in almost every aspect. The first several chapters are pretty bad, but from the Mt. Firmament arc onwards it just keeps getting better. 2.0 was probably the most impressive thing I've seen in gacha. It's sad to see games based on predatory practices putting more effort into their games, but I suppose you could argue charging a monthly sub fee for almost no content is pretty predatory, too, lol.
We were never a mentor to her though. As someone who has been a mentor to people for 30 years, I'm insulted by anyone who tries to use that excuse. They very clearly do not understand what a mentor actually is.
4:55 Um..... No? First why is Stormblood suspiciously missing from this addled summary? And second. No. It got political more than once, and the WoL was a victim of politics.
It’s very clear to me on the cultural context side that the intention of the authors was to tell the triforce story. Each of the claimants represent one piece with the two head guy representing Ganon. The problem is that it’s super hamfisted and badly executed.
The real question is if Dawntrail is worse than ARR _purely_ story-wise. And honestly deciding that for me is as difficult as saying if SHB or EW were better LOL
I liked the villains in Stormblood- they were the only interesting part, and one of them had a massive lesbian crush on the WoL. So of course I got attached. And then, it looked like Zenos was turning into a selfish anti-hero. But then we dumped him like trash in space, so, no anti-hero.
I didn't even think about the regulator issue. Nice point. I do think Dawntrail has better story than most MMOs. TWW story is barely there. It has one solid moment and very sparse writing. Most is still regular WoW whimsical random bullshit worldbuilding that's just rehashing the same stale stereotypes and narrative elements that were better told in vanilla. Shadowlands had much better lore and more interesting zones than TWW. Ardenwald and the vampire land were very interesting. What's there in TWW? Bearded dwarf ladies that even comes to mind. Both Dawntrail and TWW fail in similar ways. Stale, uninspired, arrested development. Also you might want to revisit Stormblood. Many of the character decisions didn't make much sense and were highly questionable.
i think people especially streamers will tell you how bad it is and then say it was still good because saying the truth means loosing access to square events, without integrity you can keep making content about a game no one will support or watch, or you can tel the truth risk upsetting the company and affirm your audience that will have your back the entire way.
Nah the problem with it was bad but actully good is the fact that alot of the character are likable. Everyone is a good character but they where just writen so poorly and placed in a bad story. And thats just the writting. The fights are all fantastic. The only issue with dawntrail was the writting.
@@zombie_dinosaur96 the writing was a train wreak, with a good writer wuk could be an amazing character, but it wont change the fact that the first 6 hours of the MSQ are walk and talk with no combat, there is no challenge, there is nothing to care about except a very raicist vision of what south America is "ooooo tacos Meho jajajaja" sure the content is ok if its not just a reskin of the same dungon for the last 15 years, but why do i care to try to get to it when i have to suffer 80+ hours of pure lecturous shit to see said content... my point is that content creator act like yoshi p is their disabled son they have to shield from these criticisms, all in fear of loosing out on that sweet axcess and the perks that come with.
Dawntrail felt like 2 seperate stories smooshed together. Zoraal Ja and Sphene being dual antagonists made no sense to me. Felt forced, contrived. 3/4 of DT was running errands for rainbow kitty, and 1/4 was Alexandria and AI. The latter half had by far the greater potential, but it fell so flat so fast. It shoulda been reversed, 1/4 playing errand buddy and then you can spend the rest of the xpac really exploring the meaning of life with AI etc. After my first playthrough, i thought maybe they were just teasing the alexandria story now and setting up future xpacs. Now, though, I'm concerned they just missed the boat. Turning off Living Memory should have had me feeling existential for days. Instead, i felt meh. (Actually i was kinda glad to turn off Erenville's mom's voice actor. Don't hate me.)
Sadly the problem won't be fixed because society is too immature to suggest people involved with the writing should be fired. People assume management is to blame or that there was a miscommunication or that a worker wasn't motivated. Sometimes a writer is just not an interesting person and shouldn't have a career in writing. Many of the plot points make it very clear that at least one writer is a very immature person that doesn't think in an insightful way. Writing is incredibly difficult and a small # of people are capable of doing it. They need to set way higher standards. Only exceptional and incredibly mature/insightful people should have a career in writing. Getting a degree doesn't make you any good.
Was bad, I don't see the point of dragging this, the negatives outshine the positives, everyone tries to sweet talk ff 14, end was crap, and so we move on, Endwalkers is pure ass, I'm not going to lower my standards or expectations just because these god danm content creators are afraid to PROPERLY criticize the game.
Ffxiv has the pokemon issue where they need it to be squares most profitable game so their budget is significantly reduced so they make as much money as possible and the game is suffering so much because of it
There isn't a single good thing about Shadowlands. The War Within is a close second in quality to Shadowlands. Dawntrail wasn't good, but not an affront to God like those WoW expansions are.
This video is 6 months old and was only a little after the launch of the expansion. And I totally agree with time this expansion becomes worse not just thinking back of the MSQ but even the dungeons so cool in the beginning now with allthe classes I need to level up they become all the same all plain and linear something to power through to get to the end and then there is nothing to do at the end for months.
I silenced the voice lines after a while, because I just couldn't listen to wuk anymore. There was more wrong with them like Tancred and Y'shtola atrocious implementation, but wuk was just so... pointless... a lot.... idk
You know what baffles me? Monster Hunter Wilds have full voice acting for the main character with both male and females and with all voice types. The M.C doesn't talk too much but they ARE voiced. I wonder why Square can't do the same for our WoL? So tired to see the mute nameless hero just nodding their head.
My random theory told me that the dawntrail is an experiment before SE input AI system inside the new expension that can make the story be more interesting? Thats why dawntrail feel kinda low. What do you guys think?
That makes no sense. Generative ai only produces the most generic things possible by design. That would the the opposite of a tool for interesting content.
Whether Shadowlands was worse really isn't the question. The question is "Is Dawntrail XIV's Shadowlands?" And the answer to that, sadly, is yes. Both were the breaking point for their communities, and both caused a massive exodus of players who were just done.
Good god no its not Shadowlands, DT actually has fun content although the usual X.0/.1 lacking relic/casual content.People just hate Wuk Lamat and Simp for Emet
@@xierotron What fun content? I certainly don't see any. We're barely getting any content, and the content we do get is the same snorefest we've been getting since ShB, with the same snoozefest jobs we've had since ShB. @xviii5780 I was there in Shadowlands. I did Choregast. I leveled far too many alts because they wouldn't let us change Covenants. It was absolutely a catastrophe. But the comparison doesn't actually matter. DT has already proven to be XIV's Shadowlands. Look at the exodus of players that continues to leave due to failed patch after failed patch. It could very well end up being worse than Shadowlands if this keeps up.
Honestly there is a laundry list of things i would change about Dawntrail but I'm sick of the community trying to gaslight people into thinking that this expansion was anything but mid and if you dislike Wuk Lamat as a character then your a transphobe. With a community that mostly pays AAA game prices and a sub we should be getting a fully voiced MSQ experience.
Ugh, I'm sorry, I wanted to watch this video, but I have zero tolerance for ASMR-esque voices at all. I find it hard to endure the narration, so I have to escape.
It Seems that Zep is trying to explain her way out of playing FF14 instead of just admitting she went back to WoW. Despite the failure of Dawntrail, I will not give Blizzard any more money for trash content to support their whales
it's just a different mmo dude it's not that deep, you can in fact play multiple games, i don't know why people have this tribal mentality about it, you're not picking teams
@ The issue I have, is that during Endwalker her "Dis" was on the other foot. FF14 has one bad expansion and already its back to WoW which has subjectively been in downward trend since Wrath. Taking a break from FF14 is one thing but the videos should be reflecting what joy you are getting out of WoW currently, not Trashing FF14 for one sub expansion that they are trying to turn around.
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![HOW MANY LINES?! | Zepla checks out the 2.0-7.1 MSQ Dialogue Analysis [Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail]](/img/n.gif)
I'm so tired of the argument that we're taking a "mentor" role in Dawntrail. Being a mentor would imply that Wuk actually listens to us. We have so few conversations with actual substance with her, and she never really asks for advice in the areas that she is most inept in. The whole second part of the MSQ is us just standing by, watching, as Wuk plows through diplomacy like a dumb truck. There isn't a single moment in Dawntrail where you can actually claim we did some real impactful mentoring. Oh, but at least we reminded her that she loves peace!
Anyone who uses the 'Mentor' role argument has never had a Mentor in their life and it shows.
It bothers me so much because the emphasis this expansion was that we'd be Retainers/Mentors to the future rule. We literally didn't do that, and it feels like the titles were used as fluff marketing to push sales. Cause the narrative didn't match us fulfilling those roles in the slightest.
this argument is a great example of the loud minority of fans that allowed wow to fall in to what it become in shadowlands, the wales will defend it so hard that the company has no reason to care or try, they can deliver hot garbage and the fans that made the game their identity will defend it to the grave, the games grave that is.
if you dont believe me just go criticize the game on the forums or even the reddit and watch as idiots that live on the forum come to the defense of the billion dollar company.
A dumb truck makes me think of that truck from cars.
People using that argument cant even understand the game has done the mentor role 1000x better with some hw/stb roles and even some of the side events like the rising tide or w/e we had a few years ago did it better.
It's why whenever someone says "I'm okay with not having the WoL be the main character anymore", I'll always respond with "I'm not."
I would have been a little more accepting of it if we actually did train Wuk Lamat and/or give her some actual solid advice or words of warning based on previous mistakes. And I say 'we', because I think the Scions should have contributed too. Alphinaud is standing right there and never thought to bring up his own hubris and naivete with the Crystal Braves?
If this is their idea of mentoring, I want nothing to do with it. Of course the WoL isn't always the absolute center of attention.. but we always have our moment to shine, or some kind of motivation to do what we do. As much as people had an issue with Zenos, when he beat us in Stormblood it made it personal. It really helps to have a more personal, human reason to be motivated in a story aside from just lofty altruism.
XIV has always stood out for being an MMO where your character feels important. This needs to come back ASAP.
18:08 This isn't true. We asked only 3 people in Living Memory whether they wanted to be erased, which is to say nothing of the thousands of Endless who resided there. Over 99% of the population that we deleted had no say in the matter. The story does not address this to any satisfying degree.
All this being followed by a big celebration in Tulliyolal where everyone is partying like nothing happened really disconnected me from the MSQ. My character was even forced by the writers to Smile (get it) as she looks up at the sky like a shounen protagonist while the camera zooms out. I've always made my own little headcanons for my character between patches, but never before have they conflicted this hard with the actual story. My character should be on the brink of a Dark Knight mental breakdown at this point.
I've always levelled DRK as usually my second or third job since I unlocked it early on in my FF career. Never before, however, have I felt compelled to swap mains to it halfway into an expansion. Not even for ShB. Weaponizing my character's PTSD seemed almost mandatory to make it through this MSQ.
One thing I will say, however, that Wuk Lamat did do is pretty much cure the community problem of toxic positivity almost overnight.
Ikr... The story lacks actual consequences. Absolutely agree with the disconnection to the story. It feels so unreal to see us going there about to commit mass murder ourselves (just like sphene did) then go there play games and eat ice cream and when everything is done do a party?? I dunno like why is there no conflict about this?? Why is erenville the only person who looks unhappy about this happening?? I love wuk lamat but she even allowed bakool ja ja running around without any kind of punishment for what he did, it all just feels like a joke or a movie for kids i dunno. The ideas are there and good, just rly badly executed sadly (there can't be happiness for everyone...)
I find it really hypocritical how badly we judge Emet, then go and nuke the endless and expansion later.
I mostly agree, but it's not the first time. The heroic prologue music kicking in as we flew into the sunset at the end of 3.0 was more jarring for me. It was like we were just ignoring that out friend just got body snatched by the vengeful ghost dragon.
Many of the problems with the narrative in Dawntrail is that we were told completely different things than we were shown. For instance. We are TOLD that Gulool Ja Ja spurned and pressured his son. We are SHOWN that he is a level-headed and compassionate man.
One of the weirdest things to me was how Dawntrail just stopped caring about dynamis. We learn about this fundamental force in Endwalker, realize it's such a potent part of the universe, but when we go back to Dawntrail, and it's back to "soul aether, memory aether, and that's it!" We don't even mention it.
I literally wondered why Dynamis wasn't brought up as a solution to Living Memory and Solution 9's energy woes.
Dynamis is just too powerful. It's literally reality warping. Having the WoL depend on Dynamis every single time or to solve simple problems destroys the narrative. People forget WoL is pretty much a God at this point.
There hasn't been a single way to manipulate dynamis at all. It is a potent power that we cannot yet harness, and we still don't know too much about it, other than "it gives you strength to keep on going". The only one who could manipulate dynamis was Meteion.
Considering we were basically at the edge of the universe when Meteion was being fought, which would ultimately lack aether (which naturally negates dynamis quite easily), it makes sense dynamis from others would be much more potent in such an environment.
That isn't weird at all. That is consistent since the entire MSQ always forgets to care about things. Like 9 times out 10 our ass should be calling Cid and Nero when a spaceship is involved or anything technological but they wait until the last possible minute to give him a fucking call. I expected Endwalker to get into the consequences of G'raha Tia's time travel from Shadowbringers and something more concerning Tiamat's trip to Meracydia which Shadowbringers patch content made a big deal out of which you only get any info about if you talk to every NPC around before the quest giver after returning from Elpis. Also the Loporrits are a massive problem going forward as they have technology to answer for just about any problem.... speaking of would have expected them to be the defense against Solution 9 instead of Radz-at-Han.
This is personal but they need to sunset the Echo headaches as a way to tell what happened in the past. This has been the single weakest part of every single expansion.... why in the fuck would the big bad villain stand there while you have a flashback in real time about their past instead of just killing you while you have a headache? Maybe the WOL should have a training ARC where they can finally control it and sees the visions in a split second like Shulk from Xenoblade.
The whole "We take the role of her mentor' gets repeated a lot but... why? We don't really do anything. We're not Obi Wan. We're not recounting bits of our life or offering wisdom. We don't train her and help her improve. We just tag along and nod a lot. We're, at heart, a passive observer. Nothing more. Nothing would have changed if we weren't there. And that's the problem of the story.
It's because people are using the 'Mentor' role as a scapegoat excuse but it falls flat on its face. The people who use the Mentor argument don't know what a Mentor actually is cause they've never had one - or seen one. So they're just parroting what others have said to seem intelligent in an attempt to counter complaints.
The people who say it's a mentor arc are pretty much abjecty full of shit and are probably shills or are coping in their own way. We did next to no mentoring. We had like 2 times when we explicitly "tutored" Shit-Lamat. And both of those two times were also basically throwaway lines.
Woke-LMAO: "One my bruthur smeert. Other brother stronk. What about me? Wut I have?"
Warrior of Light: "Oh, just the same spastic shit you've been shouting non-stop about since the expansion started; Peace, happiness, learn the culture."
If you really want to consider throwing her own mantra back at her after she miraculously forgot it for 12 seconds as "mentoring" or tutoring.
Like you said, we were pretty much just observers and tag-alongs.
...And then she realises that she didn't even need a mentor and just needed to believe in herself. It's like a poorly written Saturday morning cartoon.
I didn't notice the lack of NPC diversity for most of the story, but in the ascension of Wuk Lamat to the throne, that giant crowd made it too obvious for me to ignore. Even with a perlin noise pattern to offset various models' movement patterns by a bit here and there, the fact that everyone's movements were fundamentally identical was weirdly jarring and got into uncanny valley territory.
GW2 NOT ONLY has a fully voiced Story and TONS of inconsequential characters... but during covid, they couldn't record lines for the MSQ due to it... they added it voiceless and WENT BACK to voice it to keep the story to its standard, rather than lower it during that time.
But SE...
They could at least go back and add more voices to some of the scenes in ARR since it has such a bad rep for new players. They hate going back to fix longstanding problems though. SE is too busy funding dead projects.
To be fair, FFXIV has WAY more cutscenes and story/quest dialogue than GW2. And from my memory of playing up to Path of Fire at least, a huge bulk of GW2's story dialogue isn't even an animated cutscene, but rather characters standing around in the game environment saying a couple very brief lines at the end of a battle or something. Granted, GW2 does have voiced lines during dynamic events, battle quips, and a voiced player character with multiple races, so it's hard to measure. I agree that FFXIV should have more voices lines in the MSQ and possibly beyond, but I don't think comparing GW2's "fully voiced story" tells the whole tale here.
If Guild Wars 2 kept expansions as packed as Path of Fire and Living World Season 4 that could be a point to make however I believe that was made at a loss and the game has went down in content after with expansions sometimes taking only 5-8 hours to complete at launch. I am going to be realistic with the voice acting thing : players do not want this because people complain right now about how long a patch cycle is.... XIV is voiced in Japanese, English, French, German, Korean and Chinese the scheduling required for a XIV expansion with full voice but not nerfed down to the length of a GW2 story would require expansions to take 3 years and longer patch cycles.
I honestly think people are looking at GW2 from the outside having not played it and looking at the feature list rather than what it is like if you were caught up to the most recent patch having played everything that came before.
You expect too much from Squeenix, they're just a small indie company, after all!
@@0Fyrebrand0 I would prefer 100x a shorter voiced MSQ than what we have today.
20:00 I remember there's a dialogue in one of the society quests in Ultima Thule that says the beings there not having soul aether doesn't matter, and as longs as they have consciousness, they're treated as living beings, both by the NPCs in the story, and the WoL. I don't remember the exact quote, but I remember there was also an actual dialogue choice with our character. Then why is Living Memory different?
I think there was some potential in concept for some nice discussions about it that they decided to completely ignore, and we don't see it at all. Instead, in Living Memory we're just told by the story to care about them when talking to 0/3 locals, when it's a tear-jerker moment, and stop caring after we "kill" them.
The difference is the beings left over in Ultima Thule do not need to feed on aether or kill others in anyway to continue to exist. If there were no looming threat from Sphene I think leaving them as is until their stores are depleted would have been a option... Living Memory is basically mechanical sin eaters without the transformation that if left alone could freely travel between reflections.
Might be because not every player do that quest. I certainly haven't and borderline won't do it since I don't like DoL/H play. So they just put a blanket of us having no experience of that quest. Besides, what "consciousness" is I think is not yet established?
@tjongdavid1921 We have many instances in game already where we get additional dialogue if we have completed an optional quest. For example, in Pandaemonium, if we completed Ivalice, we remember Ultima Seraph. In 5.0, before the update, the Exarch reveal scene changed if we didn't have Crystal Tower completed (it wasn't required back then). And even more recently, Gaia appears in a cutscene if you completed Eden!
What consciousness is is briefly touched upon during the 5.4 patch, when they were searching for solutions to save the tempered, and the video message they get in Azys Lla talks about it, how it's not the soul that defines one's existence! They could have expanded on that.
@SiriusPharos it's not about their sustainability, it's about their existence. Them being unsustainable doesn't make them more or less alive. If they're not alive and we are killing them like pests, then why even get the time to meet them?
If Sphene's threat is such an urgency to solve, then how come we have time to go on gondola rides and theme parks? There was no sense of urgency, and turning them down before facing Sphene changed absolutely nothing.
@@SiriusPharos
That's part of why I think we'll eventually find a new power source to go back and turn Living Memory back "on".
FFXIV became popular because it not only had a good story for an MMO, but the story was amazing on it's own merits. No MMO could ever come close to having a story as good as XIV. This simply is not the case anymore, and sadly it isn't because other MMO's have gotten better at telling their stories.
It just sounds like the story carried the bad gameplay from EW to DT or as other says from ShB to DT.
@@SemekiIzuio Yup, exactly. In a way im glad DT was awful because maybe now they'll actually innovate on their dated af delivery of content in FFXIV
@@ASackOfPotatoes Not likely they will just make the next expansion universally praised because of the story since the majority are complaining about story now instead of gameplay and up to this point it was minimal people complaining about gameplay other than those that complained the gameplay was too hard in DT which hopefully no one listens to them.
This is true, and at the same time so sad. It just shows that underneath the safety blanket of the story, the game itself is a pretty bad one. Predictable and boring gameplay loops. And if you did not have a static to raid and were just simply a casual player, which I would say is a large majority of the player base, there is really little to nothing to do. I have over 3k hours invested into this game, and part of me always knew this. I carried on because I love the story and world setting, but quit for the first time about 5 hours into DT. Now its seems like everyone is starting to realize that ffxiv without a story is just a bad game. I hope they are able to somehow rebound out of this.
Have you played the Sith Warrior or Imperial Agent questlines in SWTOR? They're pretty good, if you haven't...
Even NIKKE has full voice acting for its MSQ and major events, and it's a gacha game!
wuthering waves, path to nowhere etc..100% top notch quality voiced cutscenes.
Being a gacha game would make more sense, not less, to be fully voiced.
Those games pull in more money than god.
Do you ever think before you post something, or is this a rare occasion?
Regardless, FF14 should have 100% full voice acting. I just think the way you expressed that sentiment is beyond stupid.
@@NeatNightOwl It is not stupid when you consider how big of a corporation SE is
@@NeatNightOwlit really wasn’t stupid and no reason to be an ass especially if in the end your just going to agree
@@NeatNightOwl you sound like an avid reddit user
I'm super torn about Gulool Ja Ja. In his idk, 80 years of ruling, he did nothing for the Mamook, and then we get there and solve a generational issue in about 5 minutes. What did he even do after he ascended the throne? I'm so puzzled by it all, and the longer I think about Dawntrail, the more confused I get...
If we were a "Mentor" to Wuk.....What did we try to teach her????
Unless it was friendship and Smiles=Good, there isnt anything about her character that we seem to have influenced
We could have taken a more passive role and let her make mistakes, then pick her up and dust her off before offering advice or words of wisdom, but we don't... we're just kinda... there.
23:03 this is the same feeling as the latest Pokemon games, there is no reason we shouldn't have voice acting in those games.
Hey Zapla,
Thanks so much for taking the time to watch my video. It's wonderful to hear your thoughts, and I do agree that War Within has a much richer and more coherent story than Dawntrail. It is, at least for me, a much better gaming experience over all. I think I was too forgiving in my review, and your critiques are well founded. I have hope that going forward the 14 team will learn from their missteps. They have created some of the most compelling stories I've experienced in gaming, /fingers crossed
It was a lovely surprise to find this video, as I admire your work, respect your opinions, and found your insights illuminating.
Many hugs
Fornax o/
Zoraal Ja being evil makes 0 sense. Daddy was "tough" on me
Gulool Ja Ja didn't even do that. The lore says he loved and cared for every one of his children, and all of them had to train hard. Only Koana was not into sparring because he was too busy studying, hence why he is a Machinist. There is nothing to indicate that GJJ treated Zoraal Ja harshly. The way he talks makes it seem like GJJ was Fire Lord Ozai, which doesn't make any sense. His motivations are purely speculative. People loved him and praised him, he was strong since ever and never had a true challenge when commanding the Landsguard. There was nothing for him to prove to anyone.
@MrDoot-hj2ir I know, I meant him from his perspective. Now thinking about that part would have been something cool. During the event of End Walker he had to kill friends, this troop and citizens. GJJ told him to do it to spare them and to save others. That PTS could have turn him into what is now and fuel his revenge got Garland like they stated in the end of End Walker
it makes perfect sense... his brain partially exploded because daddy never told him where babies come from... he then got someone pregnant because he fell for the thirst trap and left for a pack of cigs but found Solution 9s version of LSD which made him super aggressive.
You can easily explain away pure evil types as dark personality types. No matter how people are raised there are going to be bad apples. This isn't to say the way they portrayed Zoraal Ja was good.
@@MrDoot-hj2ir Firelord Ozai had Azula and Zuko train hard and learn about the other nations to become competent rulers, he was a monster in every other way... but even he did a better job preparing the next ruler than GJJ did, how has Wuk learned nothing of her people in her entire time growing up in the nation's capital?!?
It's funny watching Zepla come to the realization that the MSQ is now just repeating the "cute girls committing genocide" trope
And FFXIV did a great job avoiding that until Endwalker. There were female villains, but they were like Livia, Yotsuyu and Fordola. Meteion was a big diversion from the norm in FFXIV, and now Sphene makes it seem like it will just be a game of "spot the cutesy teenage girl to figure out who the expansion's final boss is."
Pioneered, of course, by Emet-Selch. He was the original "cute girl committing genocide" in FFXIV
On the subject of Living Memory where "I think it would be cool if one them fights you":
It would be cool if one of them fought you to prevent you from essentially deleting and killing all the souls in Living Memory but it would be even cooler if they tried to fight you and the systems in Living Memory took those rebellious souls out in front of you thereby preventing dissidents from manifesting within the AIs systems itself. It would add a deep and fascinating turn on our understanding of what's happening where the AI is rewriting the soul's behaviours in order to comply with the programmed utopia the AI is tasked with creating. Kind of like the Matrix with a new spin on it. Would've been cool... instead we got Dawntrail.
This was so fun to read it ruined my night because we'll never get this.
@@cordrac lol. Dawntrail has foundations for great stories, they just didn't do anything with it. Maybe someday copium
For me the entire question that the Living Memory tried to ask fell flat on its face because I didn't care whether or not the computer-generated people were truly sentient or not (Though in my opinion they were essentially just Chat-GPT models with a person's memory as prompt). To me, the whole region felt like a depression marathon to make you feel bad for turning off the orphan crushing machine. I couldn't care less about the people inside the supercomputer simulation because the computer BURNS THE SOULS OF LIVING PEOPLE TO RUN. It takes people's souls out of the loop of reincarnation that FFXIV confirmed to exist.
Another crime on top of the others. The houses in the open world are rarely open, it destroys immersion and is a straight up MMO / RPG sin. Dawntrails story is juvenile.
Ya I kind if miss that from ARR, all the houses were open and there was always minj taverns outside of the cities that weren't towns. It felt like you were traveling and those were pit stops before reaching a town. It unfortunate but FFXIV alot of uts adventures fantasy charm with magic and beasts creatures and now its about technology and modernization. Gaius was right, Eorzea was barbaric lmao compared to every other place in hydelyn
14's world is honestly pretty lame, there isn't much of a reason for enemies to exist on the overworld either and there's no reason to interact with them, they just exist
@@elpanchou ehhh i don't think ARR was, as i mentioned you'd run into small tavern and find quests there with people with their own issues as well as yellow quests that gave you minions, but really after HW FFXIV became a whole different game.
Living memory should have been a long debate on the ethics only for one of the characters namely Wuk without any warning to shut it down to everyone's surprise.
I will say this, you said you felt nothing shutting off the servers. Im not going to ask you to feel anything, but the moment this was proposed, and we were going along with it, all I can think of is Emech Selch telling us "You're not alive to me, thus it isn't murder if I kill you." And we turn off the servers, killing billions of people we don't consider alive to stop Sphene, and she doesn't even pump the breaks, no anger, never addressed. But we did the exact same thing we killed Emech for, and we did it without a second thought.
Thats a good argument.
@@zombie_dinosaur96it's not. Their existence would only be able to continue by killing everything else, so it's not doing what Emet Selch did, it's "the good of the many".
Also, iirc, the Endless are people who already lived out full lives until the emergency in the storyline, so it's probably a little more fine to kill sentient beings who've had their full day than everyone else who hasn't.
@ Your arguing on a whole different thing. I never said what was being done to sustain the endless wasn't reprehensible, wasn't amoral. I am saying, the way we know the soul, memories, we aren't considering them, alive. Within the story we go through some of the lowest stakes push, flip the switch and shut off billions of lives without a second thought, and it doesn't stop Sphene, sphene doesn't care, no one brings this up. We do it, for nothing ontop of that. I mean we killed Emmet Schelc because he didn't consider us people, he was willing to genocide worlds to bring everything together to cling to the past, to revive the dead. So are our fractured slivers of souls just as valid as digital memory's that can still feel, act and speak as if they are alive?
No one sat down to talk with the endless, no one asked what they want, if they wanted to live or die, or fight for themselves until the power ran out, no attempt to find a back door or repurpose a maintenance drone, no attempt to build a bridge after mad maxing a train, just, shut it down, turn off billions, face zero repercussions for that.
@@FrostiKing i wonder if they will bring this up in a future patch.
EW really wanted to be the expansion that said you should strive to live even if things suck.
DT could have been the expansion what does it mean to be alive.
Apparently being alive is living through suffering and slop, with 'friends' that have no time for you anymore like they used to
9:15 Is an excellent point I've stressed time and again. The writing is extremely uninterested in fleshing out Tural as anything existing before we get there. What upbringing did Gulool Ja Ja give his kids? Why didn't he prepare them to succeed him from the start? It's just like the festival ceremony with the crops. There are massive, fundamental gaps in the storytelling. It's as if not only Wuk Lamat, but all of Tural never existed before we got there, and the writers had no interest in giving a fleshed out history that made any sense. Gulool Ja Ja's rise even sounds like some kind of revisionist history of a tyrant rather than something that actually happened.
Some flashbacks would have been beneficial for a lot of these issuess.
You know whats crazy when kona was in the field of reeds and said he learned that technique from an archon and both the WOL and Alph mean mugged him but didn't ask any questions or that what he said was never brought up again
I never understood the Gulool Ja Ja is a "good parent" take. Sure, it seems like he loved his children, but that doesn't mean he raised them well...
Zoraal Ja is a literal psychopath, who hates his family so much, that it almost gave Krile a panic attack. Twice. He also makes zero sense the few times he opens his mouth. Khona (the best of the three) learned how to be a sentient, self sufficient being because he went to Sharlayan. He makes no mention of his father teaching him anything. And, well... Wuk is Wuk. I don't need to beat a fossilized horse with that one. She literally acts like she's never left the capital in her life.
I get the whole "The contest is meant to temper them" bit, but it didn't go down that way. We either did all the work for Wuk, or she just tripped and fell into the correct answers, as we solve deep, generations old problems in an afternoon. We didn't "mentor" her. Unless you count that time we literally possess her to beat the shit out of Bakool Ja Ja (someone who she was no match for just days before).
I really hate remembering details about this MSQ. It just pisses me off again.
😒
A much better angle for the competition would have been that Lizard Dad wants each of his children to learn from each other, to learn the best qualities of their siblings through observation of them being practiced by being direct competitors to them, because they each have a strength the others lack... but they don't even do that...
She mentions the actual body sizes for the different races because in GW2 every race has body types from slender to thick while many other popular mmo's like wow and 14 just have 1 body size for all the races.
That moment in Tuliyollal's BGM where the pianist slams his head into the keys.
Dat moment when you realize Wut Lamat is the only feature complete hrothgar in the entire game and yet somehow even she is incomplete. I so want off this ride.
You think that the clothes were the same in Tulliolal? Take a screenshot of ANY crowd cutscene, ANY of them. There's going to be 10 identical Hrothgars, Miqo'tes, Hyurs. Just clones, clones and more clones. Same clothing only makes it more jarring.
hated the jazz music, it was not a fun beginning as you spent so long in the city.
Look up the chips ahoy commercials from the 90s. That is what I think of when I hear that music.
1 think I don't agree wtih is when people say "but they're just the memories" without anything else.
yet we have Graha, sure the current Graha is alive and well, but we act like he's still the same person from the 1st, he isn't, he has his memories but we somehow act like the crystal exarch is our graha, he really isn't.
But in relation to "erasing" the endless, at this point in the story I was more in "let's just get this over with" kind of mood, I was tired of the constant "LeT's LeArN aBoUt ThEiR cUlTuRe" theme we had the entire expansion, on top of obviously Wuk being there as well.
I didn't skip anything until we got to the 4th area there and we go "flower picking" and i'm like "WHY ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS?!"
Erenville's "sad" moment with his mom was also just bad and didn't make me feel anything, I was more annoyed than anything that we had this gloomy bunny boy with us and the camera made damn sure to make sure that Erenville is brooding, while nobody can do anything for him and he's just pouting in the corner over there like a little kid, till he finally snaps at the end, but it's too late for me to remotely care.
But her "honest" review doesn't seem honest.
she mentions she had fun in DT, yet then also mentions that DT's surroundings and story is immersion breaking. (this review was the story thing as she said she didn't even mention the gameplay)
I hope that they course correct in the patch MSQ, but 7.1 doesn't have me being hopeful, they NEED to remove Wuk entirely, we're sick and tired of her, what's the 1st scene we see? fucking Wuk.
sure she shuts up more often now, thank fuck for that, but the fact that she's there just makes me go "when is she gonna open her yapping mouth again and ruin everything?" (also, the whole "Wuk can't fail" angle doesn't stop in 7.1 either, even if she "fails" to convince the kid about the issues on mortality (something she has no struggle with, but these people for the 1st time in their lives feel grief, they for the 1st time know that if they die, they won't come back, that safety net has been taken away) Wuk just goes back to her cheery self near instantly)
Honestly, if Dawntrail is a sign of how things will be going forward - they should just stop developing FFXIV.
I don't know if anyone has mentioned it but the giants' (trolls) models are from FFXI. I don't remember much about the Pelu from FFX, but I wouldn't be surprised if they reused their models from FFX too or at least the HD version. I know they reuse a lot of the monsters from XII and the XIII trilogy so I wouldn't be surprised if they did the same for these two groups of people.
I guess at least some of the cringey Japanese tropes were at home with Yotsuyu and Gosetsu. When the team said they were working to show more varied cultures, I wasn't expecting to see the narrative grind to a halt so many times to reenact Japanese tropes like the guy frantically apologizing and then going "ok I won't mention it again" followed by a "wow so fast!" joke. A lot of that usually gets localized out, but it feels unacceptable in any language at this point of the game's "we tell vast stories about 3 dimensional characters" lifespan to resort to cardboard cutout scenes like this..
Also Koana being a good opposite of Wuk Lamat feels less like he's smart and more like he's the cold anime boy with a heart of gold for his younger sister trope. And then his intellect is weirdly developed as he makes... questionable choices to sacrifice himself.
This whole expansion reminded me of watching episodes of One Piece, and not in a good way.
@@jessica_swan This made me say "oh no" upon reading, but admittedly my only memories of the anime are from my childhood, and anything spammed online to convince me to watch it. I think I understand what you mean though. :')
Zepla lived long enough to become the villian in her ff14 journey. Asmon would be proud
0:40 when the music start playing at this time, it game me so much nostalgia, but at the same time so much sadness with the current situation in the game. FFXIV will always have a special place in my heart. I hope they are able to bring it back to it's glory days. Make the story interesting again, and give us better gameplay.
the soul thing I was under the impression that the "backup" souls are normally taken from the beasts in the wilderness while only being taken from people every so often and that is why people were getting their memories erased when someone's soul was used.
Think she has some kind of underlying health issue, so that is why she is so quiet. I still think it's nuts that anyone could actually enjoy this xpack. I thought maybe it could be one of those culture war issues, that one side will embrace something, because they think it's 'owning the chuds.' Dawntrail made me appreciate Stormblood and Lyse, if that was people thought was the worst the game could get, I would like some more.
Yeah... i didn't like Lyse, but that's because I disagreed with her values, not because she was just an incoherent character.
The other expansions made me rethink how I took on life and how I treat people around me... This one did the opposite
I enjoyed the War Within for a WoW-story, but I still prefer the way XIV tells stories.
I think that's what Krytan meant
with badly animated cutscenes and walls of textboxes?
as soon as she said "its complicated" instead of "no... no its not." i checked out. Why call it an honest review if youre not going to be honest? Lots of cope saying that the story had any real high points and that Wuk was in anyway a good character.... she wasnt.
Typo in the title my friend, it's Krytan, not Kyrtan
Fixed, thank you!
the tuliyollal music is so weird. like why am I hearing jazz in an ancient mayan/south american city? we fell so far down from old sharlayan lmfao
On one hand I agree that the Tulliyolal music does not really fit and that this choice was a missed chance. On the other hand, I personally did not like the Old Sharlayan music as it always made me very tired and want to turn off the PC immediately and go to bed. It was so boring.
Now the Solution 9 music triggers tiredness and demotivation. 😅
The last main city music I liked was from the Crystarium. Actually, both its day and night themes.
I dont love the reviewers take of " the msq is still better than other MMOs though" because I feel like that is the attitude the dev team is expecting us to have as they slip into complacency.
They should honestly just put ff14 on life support, start funding a new mmo where classes aren’t all the same. Start a new story with a new game, not repurpose the same shit for the next 10 years.
Ps: saying The War Within’s story is better is massive cope. It’s not even better than the worst ff14 story, which would be Dawntrail.
I don't mind the voiced/unvoiced cutscenes that much. But Dawntrail especially it felt like they didn't choose all the correct cutscenes to voice. And as the story gets further from the beginning I do think it's getting more ridiculous that we're not getting more voiced cutscenes.
DT MSQ was maddening. Literally felt like we weren't really doing anything, other than chaperoning Wuk on her press tour cuz we really were NOT mentoring her at all; nor was mentoring her our job either. Everything in the first half of the MSQ felt very much: we need these things to happen to hit a quota or a plot point and nothing felt organic. Even the first trial, Valigarmanda, didnt feel like a natural progression point, it just fell at that point where a Trial was needed. Everything was so superficial and contrived.
We get to the second half of the MSQ, after the intermission with Erenville, and again, we are treated not like the protagonist, but like Wuk's weapon. We are following her, nodding and smiling and doing the battling for her while we don't have nay actual stakes ourselves in anything that happens.
DT felt more like a boring transition into something better (cuz we have all been intrigued by the other reflections sinces ShB) rather than an amazing new beginning.
Watching other people's thoughts on the 7.0 MSQ has been a real trip for me. It has shown me that I consume content in a very different way from most people. I don't feel beholden to the exact way that conversations and events play out in the cutscenes. I write my own head canon in real time, in my head canon my WoL actually talks and was asking all of these questions. DT gave me the framework I needed to tell myself a good story.
My WoL saw children, she put on a play for them, they were laughing. They were happy. And then she was forced to unceremoniously erase their existence forever. No amount of sweet sciency magic jargon could convince her that they were simply an illusion and that she wasn't committing a war crime by killing them. Living memory was the most traumatic moment in the entire MSQ for me.
As far as the souls lore in ffxiv, its still true, just this 1 reflection found a way to pervert and corrupt it.
The issue the real main issue(other than Wuk Lamat never shutting up) is the fact the trials to become dawnservant drags on way too long. The story of Sphene and all the other stuff should have been the main focus and they should have devoted more time to getting us to actually care about the "mass murder" of the last zone.
so true about the npc, like all the Goblins are the same unless its in the alexander raid then you got a couple diff Goblins
4:00 A fundamental issue with this is how she fails to understand when it is about you and when it isn't. It's not about you in Stormblood, ARR's post game until your blessing is undone, and during the Endwalker's post game. Especially Stormblood. We have no stake in the war at all. We're only in it because we want to help Lyse. Lyse, who gets sidelined by the ONE TRUE LORD for the rest of the expansion. At least it gave us Zenos. A tangible villain who totally isn't going to die the first and often only time he fights us. Actual staying power. Dawntrail is such a nothing ride. We have no moment because there is no moment. It's never that it wasn't about us. It's that the devs gave us a Monopoly board and allowed only reading how we help Princess Sheltered walk her dumbass from point A to B just to talk to her for more learning the 'lore'.
Living Memory... my hesitation on turning off the servers and committing AI genocide was based more on wanting to hang out in this beautifully designed map rather than the moral/ethical questions of "what constitutes life?"
It’s a 10+ year old game, the story was the only real new thing. That ended and so did the forgiving of the various other issues the game has had for years. Maybe the next FF MMO will be better. Maybe.
The moble 14 already looks way better
I think with all three siblings it was an attempt to show that while it’s stated with equal affection with their father there were obvious parental gaps(this is normal with children). Wuk, it’s that she knows nothing about her society. For Koana… its probably something that’s inbetween the two, he gained appreciation for the culture but he sees how they’re “behind” the outside world and never learned anything beyond the surface level. But then you have Zoraal who is supposed to be special since his birth is an impossibility and he seemingly does know and understand the culture. He probably felt someway in having adopted siblings as if he’s being told he’s not enough and then tack on the contest for something he probably felt was his birthright. I think under normal thought processes, no clue why he would want to invade the outside world, but if you look at it as corrupted values of his father in gathering the tribes, it makes sense.
The comment on the endless… i think it’s too early to comment given the patch cycle appears to have more focus on solution9 and Alexandria. It’s very much like completing HW msq and being like “we didn’t resolve the nidhogg subplot” before the patch cycle concludes. I mean… what? At least wait until it finishes before we assume it’s never being explored.
The only thing I disagree with, Zepla, is that an insane person being in charge of the military is farfetched. XD
yah Fornax has always been on the quiet side but she's cool.
I think GW2's base story, much like FF14 ARR, is its weakest point. Season 4 however.. Holy hannah, it was easily my favorite MMO story until the absolutely amazing Shadowbringers showed up and End of Dragons was fantastic (especially for us Cantha fans)
the issue with GW2's story is without the seasons it's inconsistent... and Heart of Thorns is something of a mistake fix, shall we say, on decisions made story-wise in the core game / season 1. As much as I love GW2, S1 is a thing admittedly it's a little dry but it sets up the stage for S2 and on... it wasn't even re-playable until recently so if you missed it back in the day toooooo bad. They've since added *most* of it back, a mission or two are missing but they're sorta side-story ish. However Heart of Thorns introduces the end of the "talking heads" era of story delivery and gives us in-world story delivery which is MUCH better.
additionally GW2's MSQ is *entirely* voiced from start to finish. Seriously if Anet can do it and they're MUCH smaller than Square, SE has no excuse on this one.
Never forget iceshit saga.
Yeah, GW2 definitely suffers from inconsistent quality with releases. But they always deliver on spectacle and voice acting and I'm happy that they're willing to go back to address stuff like S1 (even if it did take a long time). Despite the flaws of SOTO I am enjoying their new expac model, it keeps things rolling and ANet manages to do a lot with what they have.
I’m going to say this, and it’s my personal feelings on ffxiv since playing since 1.0. Outside of 1.0, dawntrail to me is easily the worst expansion/narrative in all of ffxiv
my new favorite "ffxiv is going bad" content creator striking again
I disagree with the regulator portion of this. I don't think regulators contradict the functionality of FFXIV aetherology on the concepts of souls and what we know. We know from previous expansions that souls are consist of memory, conciousness, and emotion. The three components of information make up the soul. The color of one's soul is also the unique signiture for a soul. listing the information on souls that has been provided by each expansion thus far.
Stormblood-offered the concept that souls do reincarnate and that one can recognize one's soul from a previous life.
Shadowbringers-the souls of the now are fragments of their former selves and that souls are comprise of memory and conciousness.
Endwalker-introduce that souls cannot be created and that souls can be modified through the pandemonium raids. It also introduce the concept of emotions being a component and that souls return to the aetherial sea to be cleanse. It also introduce that souls can be consumed and devoured (This is through the voidsent).
Dawntrail-It introduce the similar uses of the soul that the pandemonium raids have introduced and the voidsent. However, it built upon the idea that souls can be consumed to cheat death at the cost of the soul being burnt up and its aether dispersing.
Now in the concept of the cleansing portion. Yes, souls are wipe clean of their memory as they enter the aetherial sea before returning to the worlds as something entirely new. This however does not contradict what the Alexandrians had done. The regulators the alexandrians and its systems follows the specific process.
-Souls are collected by the regulators and sent to the Aetherial cleansing system
-Souls are harvested through their tools as well in order to also be transfered to the aetherial cleansing system
-The regulators have the ability to manipulate the memory of those who wears them.
-The memory is extracted and the souls themselves are packed and contain within their aether cells.
-The cleansed/process soul is package and redistributed for whatever necessary uses.
A. The energy of souls are used to sustain living memory in order to preserve the memory stored there. Since the only aether compatiable for that task is the aether that make up the soul.
B.The souls are distrubted to the masses for uses to cheat death.
Now in the context of what happens to the souls that are expunged for Everkeep's system through both societial and Systematic uses. The souls are consumed like any other form of aether. In fact nothing about FFXIV lore on this topic contradicts this. Souls are a battery pack for the alexandrian's way of life. Once used these souls burned up don't return to the aetherial sea. They explained this directly in the MSQ. That's why its so horrifying to both the WoL and their companions. The action of using souls in this manner goes agaisnt the very laws of nature that the ancients held to high regard. It is essentially a self-extinguishment event that's occuring that makes the action of the Alexandrians methods terrible. It's suppose to be unerving because you the player have the knowledge and knowings of how souls work and their importance, but the culture of alexandria directly preverts this to the point that its hard to digest.
The Alexandrian's regulation system is a extremely vague dark corner of the FFXIV's concepts of souls. Once a process soul is used for whatever purpose it was for by the alexandrian's system, It's gone. It is no longer a soul. Nothing in FFXIV's lore contradicts that idea since no laws and lore about souls ever stated a soul could not be destroyed or consumed as a source of energy. The only instance of soul consumption is with the voidsent. The voidsent however consume souls differently to Alexandrians. Souls consumed by voidsent are more of amalgamation of souls. A cluster of souls that disperse upon the death of the voidsent to reform elsewhere. Alexandria's methods are different, since they're process of consumption are essentially burning these souls as fuel. Its both consumption, but in entirely different ways that doesn't contradict the laws of FFXIV aetherology.
What Alexandria's contribution to the lore imposes that several facts are true. Implied vaguely by the MSQ that the souls consumed in this manner likely return to ambiant aether after consumption. It also implies that souls are comprised of a entirely different nature of aether but if used in the way the Regulator system does it, the souls themselves no longer are of that type of aether thus they don't return the aetherial sea. They dissolve into the ambiant aether instead. This is not the same as when dynamis erosion destroyed the souls in Endwalker of those affected by despair. What the Alexandrians do is the equivalance of burning fossil fuels. The fossil fuels in this case are souls. Finite in number since they are circulated, but still a source of energy since they still comprise of aether. That's the paper clip theory that is explained in the video. The idea that an AI are using a finite and unrefundable resource to sustain a system. The souls are the paper clips. Sphene is the AI. The alexandrians are the compliers.
I will say that dawntrail doesn't do a good job at explaining this concept and contribution to FFXIV lore thoroughly. So its easy for the playerbase to miss these things or get confused. But the statement that the regulators ruins the previously establish lore of FFXIV on the concept of souls is not true. It falls very well in line with what we already know and expands upon it by showing that its possible to manipulate memory to an extent. However, this isn't explained well in the MSQ unless you were hyperactively reading every line and paying attention to the hints and inferences given through the MSQ and the dunguons.
Thanks for writing this.
@@HamsterPants522 No problem, it just annoys me that people don't understand the regulators system and how it ties to the already existing lore of FFXIV. In fact the system is the same concept done in FF9 but way darker. I agree with a lot of other points in this video, but the one's that portain to Alexandria aren't it. It misses some key aspects about dystopian writing that is difficult to fathom because of the disperity. I akin this to george orwell or fahrenheit 451 or the giver. Where we the players are the outsiders to a civilization that clearly is so far gone that the lifestyle they live is just natural to them.
To them its nature, to us its so unnatural in the context of FFXIV lore it feels like a plot hole, but still fits into the dystopian mold. They just a bunch of people so far gone that its actually no suprise that no one among them questions it. We do, but expecting anyone outside the Wuk lamat band and the resistence to question it just doesn't fit right. It just sounds like they struggled to fully understand the themes going on in that half of the MSQ. There are faults in its writing that I agree more with Krytan on that the fact the MSQ doesn't try to elevate these points to the players.
Same, I don't think regulators are a problem. I understand what they did, and I can see how it fits in all the knowledge we have about souls.
One thing that concerns me about the writing is what they've said about how they rotate in new talent and give them a turn at the wheel: I might have misunderstood, or perhaps they didn't give enough detail to mislead my thinking, but from what they've said, it sounds like they bring in new writers to give them experience in writing the main content, while the experienced writers (like Ishikawa) take a more supervisory role... but what happened to letting new talent learn the ropes on side content first before giving them the wheel of the main story? Like how Ishikawa started by writing job quests like Rogue and Dark Knight, before moving up and writing the MSQ for Shadowbringers? Seems an odd choice if they're not doing that anymore and just putting unproven writers on the meat and potatoes of their flagship game franchise.
28:00 Shadowlands was definitely worse in all aspects, but one of the worst moments was in the final raid. All I'll say is 3D Printer. Those who know, know.
EDIT: Oh and the fact that the entire death realm runs on literal soul eating, that torture equals redemption, that all the wild gods are now soul eaters given how ardenweald works, etc etc.
GW2 story was OK up until your story got ursurped by a funny tree man who even got a magical sword meant for chosen heroes. But even then, it wasn't the most terrible thing to happen.
GW1 was phenomenal and it's a shame the Utopia expansion was cancelled. I liked the concept.
The tubers voice is too light and powdery, I can't 😂 We need Zepla's to the point, blunt voice 😅
I've been playing a relatively new open world gacha called Wuthering Waves recently, and I would say it clears Dawntrail in almost every aspect. The first several chapters are pretty bad, but from the Mt. Firmament arc onwards it just keeps getting better. 2.0 was probably the most impressive thing I've seen in gacha. It's sad to see games based on predatory practices putting more effort into their games, but I suppose you could argue charging a monthly sub fee for almost no content is pretty predatory, too, lol.
We were never a mentor to her though. As someone who has been a mentor to people for 30 years, I'm insulted by anyone who tries to use that excuse. They very clearly do not understand what a mentor actually is.
4:55 Um..... No? First why is Stormblood suspiciously missing from this addled summary? And second. No. It got political more than once, and the WoL was a victim of politics.
It’s very clear to me on the cultural context side that the intention of the authors was to tell the triforce story. Each of the claimants represent one piece with the two head guy representing Ganon. The problem is that it’s super hamfisted and badly executed.
The real question is if Dawntrail is worse than ARR _purely_ story-wise. And honestly deciding that for me is as difficult as saying if SHB or EW were better LOL
Why do her chapter title cards say "Dawmtrail?"
Its almost like the m and n key are right next to each other on a keyboard. 😮
@@zombie_dinosaur96 It's almost as though I found that typo amusing in such a well edited video.😮
@@shigeminotoge4514 its almost as if text doesnt convey sarcasum. O.O
knowing them its probably a Technical Limitation on why they cant voice the entire msq
I suspected that they spent their budget on the graphical update and decided to cut costs elsewhere.
Let WoL explore steps of Azem, time skip, make us made new character that isn't WoL, and see how world progressed.
Daytime tuliyollal music is too much played on repeat, always end up muting it.
Nighttime is much more reasonable.
I liked the villains in Stormblood- they were the only interesting part, and one of them had a massive lesbian crush on the WoL. So of course I got attached.
And then, it looked like Zenos was turning into a selfish anti-hero. But then we dumped him like trash in space, so, no anti-hero.
Who?
I didn't even think about the regulator issue. Nice point. I do think Dawntrail has better story than most MMOs. TWW story is barely there. It has one solid moment and very sparse writing. Most is still regular WoW whimsical random bullshit worldbuilding that's just rehashing the same stale stereotypes and narrative elements that were better told in vanilla. Shadowlands had much better lore and more interesting zones than TWW. Ardenwald and the vampire land were very interesting. What's there in TWW? Bearded dwarf ladies that even comes to mind.
Both Dawntrail and TWW fail in similar ways. Stale, uninspired, arrested development.
Also you might want to revisit Stormblood. Many of the character decisions didn't make much sense and were highly questionable.
i think people especially streamers will tell you how bad it is and then say it was still good because saying the truth means loosing access to square events, without integrity you can keep making content about a game no one will support or watch, or you can tel the truth risk upsetting the company and affirm your audience that will have your back the entire way.
Nah the problem with it was bad but actully good is the fact that alot of the character are likable.
Everyone is a good character but they where just writen so poorly and placed in a bad story.
And thats just the writting.
The fights are all fantastic.
The only issue with dawntrail was the writting.
@@zombie_dinosaur96 the writing was a train wreak, with a good writer wuk could be an amazing character, but it wont change the fact that the first 6 hours of the MSQ are walk and talk with no combat, there is no challenge, there is nothing to care about except a very raicist vision of what south America is "ooooo tacos Meho jajajaja" sure the content is ok if its not just a reskin of the same dungon for the last 15 years, but why do i care to try to get to it when i have to suffer 80+ hours of pure lecturous shit to see said content... my point is that content creator act like yoshi p is their disabled son they have to shield from these criticisms, all in fear of loosing out on that sweet axcess and the perks that come with.
The living memory being an "ethic question" really surprises me becouse im 100% on the side of these are just ones and zeros they dont exist.
Dawntrail felt like 2 seperate stories smooshed together. Zoraal Ja and Sphene being dual antagonists made no sense to me. Felt forced, contrived.
3/4 of DT was running errands for rainbow kitty, and 1/4 was Alexandria and AI. The latter half had by far the greater potential, but it fell so flat so fast. It shoulda been reversed, 1/4 playing errand buddy and then you can spend the rest of the xpac really exploring the meaning of life with AI etc.
After my first playthrough, i thought maybe they were just teasing the alexandria story now and setting up future xpacs. Now, though, I'm concerned they just missed the boat. Turning off Living Memory should have had me feeling existential for days. Instead, i felt meh. (Actually i was kinda glad to turn off Erenville's mom's voice actor. Don't hate me.)
Sadly the problem won't be fixed because society is too immature to suggest people involved with the writing should be fired.
People assume management is to blame or that there was a miscommunication or that a worker wasn't motivated.
Sometimes a writer is just not an interesting person and shouldn't have a career in writing. Many of the plot points make it very clear that at least one writer is a very immature person that doesn't think in an insightful way. Writing is incredibly difficult and a small # of people are capable of doing it. They need to set way higher standards. Only exceptional and incredibly mature/insightful people should have a career in writing. Getting a degree doesn't make you any good.
Another person who dislikes/doesn't think Tulyolal ost fits. That confirmation bias feels good.
Was bad, I don't see the point of dragging this, the negatives outshine the positives, everyone tries to sweet talk ff 14, end was crap, and so we move on, Endwalkers is pure ass, I'm not going to lower my standards or expectations just because these god danm content creators are afraid to PROPERLY criticize the game.
"Was the jailer a better villain then Zoraal Ja?"
My answer... I'm off back to Runescape.
Ffxiv has the pokemon issue where they need it to be squares most profitable game so their budget is significantly reduced so they make as much money as possible and the game is suffering so much because of it
25:50 you got the dud
There isn't a single good thing about Shadowlands.
The War Within is a close second in quality to Shadowlands.
Dawntrail wasn't good, but not an affront to God like those WoW expansions are.
This video is 6 months old and was only a little after the launch of the expansion.
And I totally agree with time this expansion becomes worse not just thinking back of the MSQ but even the dungeons so cool in the beginning now with allthe classes I need to level up they become all the same all plain and linear something to power through to get to the end and then there is nothing to do at the end for months.
I silenced the voice lines after a while, because I just couldn't listen to wuk anymore. There was more wrong with them like Tancred and Y'shtola atrocious implementation, but wuk was just so... pointless... a lot.... idk
I could not focus on this woman's voice I'm sorry, it's very hard to listen to
You know what baffles me? Monster Hunter Wilds have full voice acting for the main character with both male and females and with all voice types. The M.C doesn't talk too much but they ARE voiced. I wonder why Square can't do the same for our WoL? So tired to see the mute nameless hero just nodding their head.
My random theory told me that the dawntrail is an experiment before SE input AI system inside the new expension that can make the story be more interesting? Thats why dawntrail feel kinda low. What do you guys think?
That makes no sense. Generative ai only produces the most generic things possible by design. That would the the opposite of a tool for interesting content.
@@HamsterPants522 You mean like all the dialogue in Dawntrail?
@@TheAsj97 your pfp made me laugh
DT is the beginning of the end. I'm..bailing out
I really hated the music in Dawntrail.
Cap, the music was good, and so was the overall presentation. Those are not part of DT problems.
Whether Shadowlands was worse really isn't the question. The question is "Is Dawntrail XIV's Shadowlands?" And the answer to that, sadly, is yes. Both were the breaking point for their communities, and both caused a massive exodus of players who were just done.
Good god no its not Shadowlands, DT actually has fun content although the usual X.0/.1 lacking relic/casual content.People just hate Wuk Lamat and Simp for Emet
You weren't around during Shadowlands, were you xdd
It was a catastrophe on a completely different scale
@@xierotron What fun content? I certainly don't see any. We're barely getting any content, and the content we do get is the same snorefest we've been getting since ShB, with the same snoozefest jobs we've had since ShB.
@xviii5780 I was there in Shadowlands. I did Choregast. I leveled far too many alts because they wouldn't let us change Covenants. It was absolutely a catastrophe. But the comparison doesn't actually matter. DT has already proven to be XIV's Shadowlands. Look at the exodus of players that continues to leave due to failed patch after failed patch. It could very well end up being worse than Shadowlands if this keeps up.
Is she telling a story or is she doing a review?
sorry but there is no reality where the gay within is better than dawntrail lmao
Yawntrail
Honestly there is a laundry list of things i would change about Dawntrail but I'm sick of the community trying to gaslight people into thinking that this expansion was anything but mid and if you dislike Wuk Lamat as a character then your a transphobe. With a community that mostly pays AAA game prices and a sub we should be getting a fully voiced MSQ experience.
Lamatyii had a decent potential, to be a character in growth, BUT THEY FORGOT TO DO IT
Ugh, I'm sorry, I wanted to watch this video, but I have zero tolerance for ASMR-esque voices at all. I find it hard to endure the narration, so I have to escape.
Same I hardly paid attention to anything of the video besides Zeplas takes and reactions. Sounds like whispering not talking or speaking
It Seems that Zep is trying to explain her way out of playing FF14 instead of just admitting she went back to WoW. Despite the failure of Dawntrail, I will not give Blizzard any more money for trash content to support their whales
what a weird statement. WoW aint no crack cocaine bud. Nothing wrong with playing different games.
it's just a different mmo dude it's not that deep, you can in fact play multiple games, i don't know why people have this tribal mentality about it, you're not picking teams
@ The issue I have, is that during Endwalker her "Dis" was on the other foot. FF14 has one bad expansion and already its back to WoW which has subjectively been in downward trend since Wrath. Taking a break from FF14 is one thing but the videos should be reflecting what joy you are getting out of WoW currently, not Trashing FF14 for one sub expansion that they are trying to turn around.
Yeah i mean i'll never give activision a single cent of my money because i am praying on their downfall as a company.