Living Memory was an unnecessary genocide that Cid and Nero could have sorted out in a weekend if we'd bothered calling them. Literally could have told Sphene "hold up we know a guy", but the idiot DT writers simply had to try to redo a worse version of Shadowbringers
Legitimately, if a city as small as solution 9 was able to power living memory for 30 years, Cid and Nero could have easily come up with some way of getting that power.
@@shawnscouten5184 The city itself wasn't the problem. Sustaining its growing population that could only go up, was. Said population were nothing more than simulacrums with the memories of dead people attached to them. Every addition to that population exponentially raised Living Memory's power requirements. There was literally nothing the Ironworks could have done about that.
Hell yes! We already know the solutions to some of these problems but you think they even mention those?! Noooo...let this poor boy rot in his bed and kill all the eternals and get me started on Sphene... instead of mention the cure/solution and work towards them... living memory was the most useless area and story I've seen in the whole game. Seriously, I took a break for 3 days in that part of msq and only very reluctantly kept playing bc I wanted to end this misery. Never had this feeling ever before in XIV but now. It hurts so bad
Remember the way Emet Selch brushed off the accusation that he was a mass murder? "They're just pale echoes of their former selves, so they're not really alive if you ask me, so of that does not, in fact, make me a murderer from my perspective." Guess what our justification for wiping the Living Memory nodes was?
The more I hear of Dawntrail, the more I can't help but wonder what they were thinking. "This is the vacation expansion!" >Get dragged into a battle for a throne by a character we don't know or have a reason to trust beyond "cute" >help prevent a people from being destroyed >genocide another people >save the world again from annihilation So what part was the vacation again? oh right tacos or something.... I might completely skip this expansion and just wait for the next one before even considering a subscription again.
I can defintely only recommend that you follow through and skip this one. I very much wish I had, it was not worth the large amount of money and time that it cost me.
@@spacedoutpirate6599 It still brings me more joy than anything else in this entire expansion to think that our boy, Estinien, walked up to the gates, got told they were closed for the rites, backed away from the guard and then vaulted over that shit right in front of him without saying a word. It's probably not what actually happened, but it's cannon for me.
Yea. Honestly the entire expansion should have been about Alexandria merging with tural with things worsening overtime as the story goes. The succession should have been the patches that lead to 8.0
Or the other way around. Rite of succession is a great tool for introducing tural. It just would use more time and breathing space to introduce actual problems and have us solve them in better spread out dungeons and trials. Having the Alexandria plot take all of post patches would be nice, but would require the patches to be longer and bigger. We'd also have grown more fond of tural and would care for it more, so it would feel that more is at stakes.
I know it's not mentioned in this video but it's relevant to the "player choice", i think it may have been mentioned in the 7.1 video. When asked to go to Sphene's funeral, one of the choices you have is "I don't think that's appropriate" which honestly excited me, because active choice, only for Wuk Lamat to basically be like "Yeah but i want you there" and we go anyway. It deflated that moment almost immediately
It's been like that the entire game. We can either give snappy comments or agree to help with whatever but in the end it never mattered what you answered, you have to do the work anyway. Wasted potential ofc, and maybe a part of me wished with DT and all the money Ew and Shb brought, that maaaaaybe the game evolves a bit in the new arc, but nope. Never expect something to grow and get better when one single recipe works for what now, almost 5 years already? Since shb SE didn't give us anything new and exciting anymore. DT was such a disappointment in this regard
@@AOffensiveJokeor just watch our character enjoy a damn taco with the XI characters instead of seeing a black screen. Why does everyone else get animations but we don't? I just want my precious lala baby enjoy her damn taco!
I genuinely hated Dawntrail. The writing we had in Shadowbringers, and for most of Endwalker, was incredible. Setting up finales with enemies that were so well-written. Then this shit. I loathe Wuk Lamat in every facet. Everything about her character was horrible. I've been selling off everything I have, giving me more reason to quit.
One part I liked about Living Memory was the conversation with G'raha Tia in which he drew parallels with the acknowledgement of the ramifications of his time travel on the world he left behind. The acceptance that he was either abandoning an entire timeline or erasing it completely for the chance of a better future. It would of been a great point to drive the necessity of a candid discussion with the Endless regarding their existence. Of course, we fixed a fricking fountain instead.
Thinking about this further, this single conversation for me illustrates one of DT's most frustrating failings. It could of been fine that we were not the protagonist, as long as we could of used the time to show our character's growth. For me, every step of the way our character and the scions should of been showing how much we've all grown and changed from the key points in our journey as we help Wuk Lamat and the other claimants avoid mistakes we made in the past. Moments of introspection on how far our character has come from the brash young newbie freshly arrived in Eorzea, and if we could go back and give ourselves some advice, what would it of been? What do we regret, what did we learn, how did we grow, and what is still the same; allowing the story to focus on our characters without making us the protagonist.
That conversation made me slightly like Graha after hating him since Shadowbringers. Probably like one of the few good things in the expansion the other being Krile with her parents (both of which last 5 minutes.)
@@MyVanir look up sodapoppins reaction to the endwalker trailer. He doesn't understand how fountains work and gets annoyed when he see's the water flowing from the pitcher of the giant statue into the sea.
We missed a chance for more Turali to be Endless. Imagine how horrified they would be at Sphene *harvesting their families* to keep the Endless running. What if Namikka had a daughter, and learned that this daughter died in the attack on Tuliyollal. The anger and heartbreak would be so enormously powerful. What if Otis spoke with Namikka and turned on his queen because this isn't the ruler he loved and vowed to serve.
Exactly! I was waiting the whole time for Otis to have a revelation about Sphene's true nature because such fervent belief could only be a set-up for character development, right? And then he just kicks the bucket. Twice. What was even the point of his character outside of giving cheap sympathy points for the former Sphene? Way to subvert our expectations with worse writing, a true achievement.
Erenville is my favorite side character this expansion. I love how his character development happened far away from Wuk Lamat, either ruminating thoughts in his head or off-screen where he finds out about his mother. He and Krile were done so dirty...
The cutscene of him realizing his mom is dead is easily the best cutscene in solution 9, the dreas given off by that is incredible and it's a shame it only gets referenced from sphene with Erenville somehow making a shocked face rather a pained one and sphene going "surely you knew". Now that could be an interesting bit of character, Erenville up to this point in the expansion has been level headed and a calm anchor (attempting to anyway) to Wuk Lamat, so to see him outright deny his mother's death would be interesting. Sadly living memory is Not all about him and how even the most level headed of us can fall into delusions and must face reality. No that be a cool narrative thing to explore, instead have ice cream which even your in game characters can't taste because it's literally not designed for you. Fun is illegal.
Unironically, this expansion and its story was what made me make an account on the official FFXIV forums to argue against people who were saying that Poochie (Wuk Lamat) had somehow gone through a point of character growth during the expansion and had learned and grown during the story. I spent numerous posts describing in detail how it was not only wrong that they learned anything at all but also that the character itself refused to learn anything and was left exactly where they started, from start to finish. I didn't even get into the finer details of how weirdly detached living memory was nor how we just kind of bungled through it overall and patted ourselves on the back and said "Good jerb, WoL. Good jerb." To say it's cathartic to hear my own frustrations coming from someone else about the entirety of the expansion would be an understatement and I thank you for your service, Durantes.
@5:30 Erenville's mother VA isn't the issue. The fact that they both were from the "Americas" is. Erenville has an Icelandic accent. I have two friends obsessed with Viera lore and they just love watching SE butcher it. And he changes his name to draw less attention because being the rare reclusive male viera from the East isn't noticable.
It is established that Cahciua is from the Shaaloani area (not Shaaloani itself I don't think, but I can't remember the names). They all have plain American accents and really, REALLY bad voice acting, so her accent isn't a problem. Not commenting on Erenville's Icelandic accent - an accent unique to the Viera race hailing from... whatever area they hail from (I'm hazy on Viera lore) - is a problem. It's almost as if they retconned his character's backstory and couldn't figure out how to make this change fit for localization.
@@TheWickedWizardOfOz1Since they're dark skinned, they should originally be from the Golmore Jungle, which you visit in Orbonne Monastery. However, it's every bit possible that the Turali ones have a different origin entirely, with only distant ancestral commonality (perhaps about as similar as Southeast Asians and Native Americans in real life).
Something I've discussed with my friend before is why doesn't Wuk Lamat know anything about her country besides from Tuliloyal? Like it was mention in the patches leading up to Dawntrail that she goes on hunts. And how it's a bonding experience. Pray tell where are her hunting buddies? I hope they aren't hunting the Alpaca inside the city. She's basically royalty, heir to the throne. How did she ever expect to run a nation without knowing her people? She's made out to be an out going, social person so you would think she's knows a lot about her community. But like half the expansion is her just like "Wow that's so cool, never heard of that before!" Koana at the start is strangely more in tune with the nation's needs from a logistical stand point. He gave Tuliloyal essentials flying cars!
It's vaguely explained during that whole sequence when her real dad gets kidnapped, about how someone threw her down a cenote at a real young age and so the real dad made big lizard dad swear to keep her safe, so she was mainly confined to the palace, only going out when there were people to keep her safe, at least until she was an adult. At least that's what I vaguely recall. Remembering Dawntrail's story is hard.
I HATE Cahciua in Livng memory. She is so selfish denying her son even a goodbye. Telling him so bluntly that she is dead and that he should just get over it. “U r my pupil” she says. No he is your SON. And he is grieving and you are ignoring his feelings!
Living memory isnt Utopia, its hell. I was wondering how many people asked to be turned off, rather than living in amusement park that never changes. I would. We liberated them. Thats how i see it. Sphene was bad for the body.
Living Memory is the perfect representation of what not just Dawntrail, but the game as a whole became: Very hyped up and looks very flashy, but strip away the superficial aspects and you're left with a hollow husk of what could have been amazing.
Living memory felt like they looked at Ultima Thule and went "can we copy your homework?" "sure just change it a little so they dont notice" like instead of the scions sacrificing themselves you have to kill these poeple, with a long bridge to hte final boss, the dungeons being civilizations in the process of collapse, to even when Wuk Lamat broke through reality to help with the final boss, just like Zenos in Ultima Thule. Its as if they saw how much people liked it and tried to do it again without any of the build up or proper character development for any of it to really matter. If anything Living Memory should have been saved for its own expansion.
that notion... can be applied to the entirety of Dawntrail. cheap copys of what FF14 did before without the built-up and understanding why it previously worked.
Doesn’t really help that Ultima Thule wasn’t really that great either. The entire weight of that area is based around fake out deaths you can see coming a mile away, and pretending like half the scions even had a character arc to conclude. Even good music can’t redeem it. Then the Meteon phase has one of the most generic power of friendship moments in it. Thankfully you can skip like half the voicelines in the phase even now. That does give it an edge over the final Dawntrail trial. Some of the societies in Ultima Thule were kind of interesting, to be fair, but some were just dumb, like the EA care way, way too much about the universe ending in 5 billion years. The rest were okay though, I would have liked to explore more of them. Tldr: they copied a concept that they didn’t even do that well the first time.
Felt really heroic doing all those murders, with Cahciua saying "no it's okay they aren't actually people" Lady YOU are one of them and literally passed the Turing test without breaking a digital sweat, pretty sure you're full of it sorry
@@CrispBaker Cahciua also state the only ones who remain after the Terminals are shut down are those with something left undone. Does that not imply that everyone else vanished immediately because there's nothing rooting them in place anymore?
@@shawnscouten5184 Yeah, Ultima Thule wasn't as great as some people say it is. The Walk was great, but after a bit it became very obvious that none of these sacrifices would stick. AT FIRST it worked. If it was just Thancred.... maybe. Losing ONE Scion was conceivable. And if we're ever going to lose another Scion, Thancred is probably the one who's gonna go. Estinien.... veeeery big maybe. But Y'Shtola and Urianger? Nah. If there was any scrap of doubt that we might be losing characters here, it went there. No way were we losing this many Scions all together and we certainly weren't losing Y'Shtola and Urianger. They're way too important to supply solutions to problems.
The thing they pulled off with Wuk stealing our moment in the final battle was truly unforgivable. They took the nice twist from the Endsinger fight and ruined it.
Best of EW too, imagine taking a moment that be read like 30 ways and delving it into a show off for how cool and "close" you are eith the new character. Gross.
And with that flat delivery they couldn’t even pull off her show stealing well. She’s diving in anime style with a huge Getsuga Tensho to a giant robot and she has all the energy of someone reading a terms of service.
The disappointing part is that instead of hearing the criticism yoshida just took it as attacks on his staff and isnt gonna listen to the criticism at all. And while i hear the mass murder part, by that point of the story i didnt care about a single character and just wanted to force teset everything there.
To be fair, the "criticism" of English VA was way out of control, but I do hope they take the general criticism of DT and make the next story expansion not focus on a sympathetic good guy turn villain for their greater good ideal. I want an expansion villain to be the expansion villain, but just a steppingstone for a twist villain.
@@FoxiestDuck it really wasn't though wuk got 90% of the voices lines this expansion so the VA being bad stuck out like a sore thumb, especially compared to every other languages VA's choosing a man to voice wuk just shows that producing a quality game was not the English teams priority. The VA's online profile didn't help them either.
@@FubukiShiromiya yoshida did a Japanese media interview and pretty much just blamed attacks on staff, but the "attacks" he listed were mostly just criticism. Weather he actually heard the criticism and was just being a boss defending his staff to the public, or actually thought it was attacks is unknown but it's not a good sign.
na mate, i just unsubbed this time not because i need to focus IRL but because i am just...not hyped my indifference grew stronger when i noticed that Kate isn't Mr. Fox and new writer team doens't know how to do storytelling properly Dawntrail has a decent gameplay but they are messing around with jobs again (specially on pvp) honestly i am just...hopeless. I accepted the fact that i played one of the best story of all time and now i can go and play something else until the next FF MMORPG.
@@Grandmaster-KushIs Wow any better though? I heard their story also ruined itself, and just kinda sucked in general. Maybe I should consider it, but idk if I want to get invested in another story that will ruin itself later.
I have an even bigger problem with Erenville. He was really popular with the fanbase as part of the bunboi craze in EW, being the first male viera NPC introduced in the game. He was clever, witty, had an exotic accent and kinda dunked on the scions during the whole frog questline in labyrinthos. But most importantly, he had that air of mystery and intrigue about him that made him interesting. I can clearly see how such a character can go on many people's husbando list. And I feel they should've kept it like that. To me personally, I never felt that he adds anything of value to the WoL's entourage. We didnt need to know his backstory nor did we need to be on his journey of giving him a closure. Now they have completely removed the intrigue and mystery behind erenville. Imagine if we didnt have erenville with us in Shaaloani, it would've actually felt like a vacation/adventure where we were just exploring the wild west zone all by ourselves and continue the story by talking to new people and learning from them without having an NPC to tag along with us. As a friend of the new dawnservant, that should've given us enough privilege to meet the important people in different settlements in Shaaloani. But now, with showing his story (which wasnt even good or compelling) he is just a tour guide with no combat skills, and the skills or information that he does have to offer could've easily been sourced from the local NPCs all by ourselves.. like we did till now from ARR to EW.
It feels like the VA was hired over other reasons give the atrocious performance that some people said "slaps" without providing any snippets of which. The Japanese VA is a lot better, but that still doesn't retract much from the dialog from a modern cartoon.
@@MaverickhunterXZeroI agree Japanese VAs were better picked, especially Cahciua, but both JP and EN were terrible with Shaaloani residents (especially the foul-mouthed rubber bullet toy gun dueling boy).
Didn’t like Wuk Lamat, felt like they put more effort into Krile’s backstory pre-Dawntrail than they did in the actual expansion (and tbh, I didn’t care about Krile anyway. She’s one of the least interesting Scions to me but whatever), it was just… it was like they took all of the feedback from ARR to Endwalker and decided to do the opposite of what the players enjoyed. As someone who plays FFXIV for the story, I was so shocked when I actually found the trials, raids and dungeons for Dawntrail more enjoyable than the actual content and story itself. And I’m about as filthy casual as they come. This rewrite is much better than what we actually got. I’ve been so disappointed that I don’t even care about the new patch because I’m sure it will be more Wuk Lamat 2.0.
I usually call Living Memory just Golden Ultima Thule because it’s essentially a cheap grab at emotions in the final zone. While I love absolutely adore the ost for this area, it’s adds to the cheapness of what the writing is attempting to do. While I have my take on Ultima Thule (mostly with the Scions not dying), it actually was a culmination of a very long journey since ARR, characters from every expansion talking to us in that final stretch before we confront Meteion was a good sight and it felt genuine because it has proper build up for it to be utilized. Add the score on top of it where the music is quite literally singing about the journey we’ve taken in XIV is what encapsulated the situation perfectly. EW is far from perfect and at times was significantly lacking or didn’t conclude things properly, but they still managed for the most part to make things emotionally impactful when in regards to our journey and Meteion being out ultimate enemy (I’m ignoring Hermes on purpose). Also also to the people who deflect the criticism of the WoL not being a prominent character in DT need to understand a major difference between *The Most Important Character* and *The Main Character*, the two can very well be the same thing in many stories but it most certainly isn’t an absolute. The WoL pretty much HAS to be the main character otherwise what’s the point. If we’re not the most important, this is completely fine, but we don’t even take a backseat, we’re basically in the trunk for like 85% of Dawntrail. Anyways keep up the great videos, I’m loving the critical analysis of a game I so desperately love
The reason they can't have Endless standing around after you turn off a zone because what would they do besides beg for their lives and then people would realize they are acting like psychotic murderhobos. Turning them off changes nothing. Even if you had no choice but to kill Sphene they'd all shut down when that happened. Playing with them first is just twisted and sick. DT was so insultingly bad it was enough to make me willing to give up my house just to stop paying for this turd.
Yeah, the Endless die too fast to have time to react. Where are all the people panicking as they disappear, or people rushing to find their families or loved ones? The Endless are supposed to have the same personality as the people whose memories they have, and most people aren’t happy with just disintegrating with no warning. That guy we help to find his wedding ring right before we erase him was just horrifying. But we can’t deal with consequences, so everyone has to display complete and total apathy to everyone they know and love vanishing in the side quests, despite them behaving the same as any human would before this. They can’t deal with the natural consequences of their own story setup, so they try to bury and gloss over it. It’s disgusting, and horrendously bad writing.
@@shawnscouten5184 They aren't panicking because they accepted the end when it came. To put forward an analogy, imagine a nursing home in the middle of a desolate land controlled by an AI programmed to keep everyone alive and happy at all cost. Meaning the elderly can't pass on even if they want to. Then you arrive at a point where everyone wants in there wants to pass on, but can't because the AI won't let them. You go to the different rooms, you talk to those interned, pull the plug, and then shut down the AI when you eventually reach it. That is Living Memory in a nutshell. Even the most perfect Paradise becomes stale eventually, and because those in it can't leave; it becomes a very ironic hell given enough time. And more to the point, Cahciua explicitly state the only Endless who remain after the Terminals are shut down are those with one thing left undone. Everyone else disappeared immediately because they've had their fill - most of whom have been "alive" for centuries doing the same thing over and over again - and embraced the end the moment they had the opportunity to.
@@cordar7547 Some of the first people we meet are a couple who have waited hundreds of years to finally get married and now that they are finally together we shut them off cause...reasons... What you're describing did not happen in that zone. It's how you fixed what happened in that zone in your head because what actually happened was nonsensical. The only person begging to die is Cahciua and not because she's ready to die, but because she has a moral objection to the version of afterlife she knowingly signed up for. She's there for no other reason than to strong arm the player into shutting down the terminals even though doing so nets us no benefit. We do it because she finds them disgusting and wants them destroyed, herself included. If the AI was forcing her to be happy she wouldn't be able to run a revolution both inside it and outside of it insuring it's destruction and she spends her last moments lamenting that she doesn't have more time, but then apologizes for being a downer before going back to insisting we off her. When Krile's parents ask if we're deleting them, the whole party looks down in shame, because what they are doing is in fact shameful. They are wiping out a civilian population to possibly demoralize a leader they have conflict with. But Krile's parents are like, "Nooooo, we want to die, it's all good, off us now," so that the player might not consider for one moment how twisted what they are doing actually is. Shame the people Emet-Selch killed in mass were able to beg for their lives. Had the writers just decided they were all for some reason cool with their destruction we would have had a very different story.
@@MissKashira Sphene would not be persuaded because of the protocol Preservation programmed her with, and she started erasing her memories in the middle of their final discourse about the issue right after she's asked to "Find another option!" Intent on committing multiversal genocide to fuel Living Memory. The only tangible way forward for the Scions, much as they disliked it, was to try and erase the impetus of her decision to drain entire worlds; Living Memory's perpetually worsening power requirements. With so little time, the only option was to shut down the Terminals. Ultimately it came down to the Needs of the Many. The choice between the multiverse, and a single city of digital ghosts. And if you want to drag Emet-Selch into the conversation, his famous quote does fit into their decision to converse and "playing" with the denizens of Living Memory. To learn about them so that at least something of them would live on after all is said and done. That's much more than can be said about Alexandria, whose living doesn't remember their dead at all.
@@MissKashira We shut them off because there is no way to keep the thing powered without syphoning our world of life energy and because AI based on dead people is a fucking creepy idea. I hope someone makes an AI based on your grandpa and keep it turned on and around you at all times.
When we finally get to the "Golden City" halfway through. Whatever the Ja Ja Binks name was (leader with two heads, all their names sound the same and end in Ja)- "Congrats, this is the golden city." WoL- "This glowy room with an obvious gate of some kind?" "Yes, the Golden City!" "... A single room. And a gate. Did anyone try to, idk, reopen it after Krile's parents came through?" "No, why would we do that? Instead we sealed it off with special Sharlayan technology and left it as it is all these years." WoL- "Does anyone in Old Sharlayan know that their wet dream of research material is potentially this gate and/ or what is behind it? " "Nope. Just sealed off this glowy room with an ominous gate and perpetuated the rumour that the Golden City exists, though we have never actually seen it with our eyes." Later in the plot development with Solution Nine. "Hey dumbasses... WHY DIDN'T YOU RESEARCH THIS INSTEAD OF SEALING IT OFF?" Anyway, does anyone actually want to find something we can actually call the "City of Gold"? Something that is actually a city? Perhaps made of gold? And not a room with a gate leading to an alternate shard of reality? Cause I do!
Also, dropping the final days from DT felt weird. Like honestly imo it was a decent expansion overall, but surely the final days was not a localized event to our continent. The song of oblivion had to affect the New World in some way but... Nope. Not even a single mention by an NPC. It would have added an interesting twist to the right of succession, with a nation recovering from their population turning into beasties and whatnot.
@@MyVanirI knew it was gonna be a problem because a disaster of that scale would prove to make all the new threats "small" and that's a bad thing to a lot of writers, so often times a story with new threats after the world ending one just pretend it didn't effect the new places. I remember thinking "either Tural is a really happy place or Gaulool ja ja is a really good leader. Which as we know,is not the case.
@@floatingposeidon The excuse is that the effects of the Final Days start at one particular point and then spread out over time. Given how rushed that segment of Endwalker was, it didn't spread very far. Not that it's a good excuse, but it's the canon excuse.
@@Corvus7159 They start from Ultima Thule, from Meteion and her sisters. That's established in Elpis. It affects areas of weak atmospheric aether first, as we learn from the Watcher on the moon. We saw that it affected Doma (and Hien mentions that it is affecting the steppes, though not to a great degree) as well as Eorzea and Garlemald in the class quests, and it is mentioned iirc that it's also affecting the land Kugane is attached to (can never remember it's name) and it first appeared in Thavnair, which happens to be close enough that Vrtra and a bunch of his buddies could get together and fly to Tully's defense in a manner of days, and arrive with enough strength to enter right into combat, and that was after alliance talks began after the initial invasion of Tully. So... who said that was canon, and can we smack them around the head.
I don't believe deleting data from an SSD is murder, but I agree with absolutely everything else. The second part of the game was so bad... That your proposed alternative is now my head canon. Thank you for putting basically all my thoughts about what's wrong with this expansion into words.
living memory is the greatest zone ever created especially if you have friends to farm fates with its literally twilight town from kh and you get to pretend to be a nobody like roxas xion and axel its so genius
I also had an immediate KH vibe from second 1 on. The music, the City design... but everything else was just shell and boring. But maaaaybe that's a hint for an upcoming KH crossover? I wish for it so badly, with the shards and world travel on both sides there's no reason to not have Sora visit us someday!
The game should have been a vacation. And a humbling experience for our character that can slay universe ending gods. We enter the new continent and the trial boss is already causing havok not a storm and its attacking the main city. We solo duty fight it, we get it to half health and we go into phase two of its epic fight, we the character get a bit to pumped and just instantly slay it cutting the fight short. Hundreds of people see our power and fear it, we a foreigner just slew to them a world ending threat without seemingly a throught. That would be TERRIFYING to see. Then it would be an expansion of regaining the peoples trust. It would push the first promise into a power hungry craze, along with a major part of the public cause holyshit we are under prepared for an invasion from the east!. Bakool ja ja would be justified in underhanded tactics because they KNOW they have no chance and so on. Also to add onto the final fight. Remove wuk lamat breaking in and have Otis break in instead, youve had to fight him all throughout living memory once he realises what you are going to do and one last stand he joins Sphene to protect her. Then after the fight he is still going strong he is impervious his will to protect the queen is impossible to break and then the kids come in to talk him down, it breaks him, collapsing into a silent mess unable to figure out what and who he swore to protect. The Queen, the AI or the people aka the children he's looked after for too long to keep track of. Then proceed with Sphene the AI seeing Otis break also begin to malfunction as no matter what some fragment of the original soul of all these endless are still there in their stripped memories.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with the scene of Krile and her parents. The writers want to tell me that they didn't have ANYTHING to talk about? Krile had no stories to tell about Galuf? How he raised her with 'so much love' etc etc? And her parents had no stories to tell what they did after leaving her kid behind? Nothing about their hometown? Nothing about how they were pursued from the other scientist because they had ethical objections? This scene needs to be shit on like everything esle in Dawntrails writing. There was no good reason for any awkward silence to occur in the first place.
The awkward silence at the beginning makes sense, since it's hard for both sides to initiate the conversation, but yes, there should have been more of the sort of thing real people would talk about, rather than goofy ice cream scenes.
@@honest_psycho7237 the silence is natural at the start. Imagine being Krile, you spent your entire life knowing you were adopted and focused on following your adoptive fathers work, then you find out your parents are (kinda) alive and then you meet them. There will be an awkwardness of emotions and an inability to know how to initiate the conversation but after the ice is broken they had a lot to talk about.
Bout the 4:00 portion. They do state that there are other, still functioning, terminals. That's why there are still npcs other than the travel ones that are still running around. I'm pretty sure that the npc that says it is the one that unlocks the spooky dungeon. That being said, I don't see any reason why we can't just flip the place back on and use it as a housing district or a super golden saucer. It's pretty yknow. Update: And about the 27:00 portion, I remember the game saying something along the lines of turning off the servers deletes everyone and turning it back on won't recover their data.
I mean we could still turn it back on, and use the Endless’s abandoned houses as a housing district. I wouldn’t really put it past them to be honest, I mean they did add the freaking sundering as an emote. Still waiting on a black rose emote to this day.
There was no reason for the Living memory to be a physical space. I refuse to believe it's the fabled Golden City. As a whole, it feels like there was zero oversight when this story was developed. Zepla recently made a very succinct video about why Dawntrail fell flat. I agreed with her on so many points that it felt like I'd written it myself. Things like the unforgivable amount of Wuk Lumat's presence, the scions not being portrayed as themselves, ideas that are presented poorly and then waved away just to push you to the next area, etc. Honestly, the story feels like a rough draft outline--This happens and then this happens and then this happens. No room for "because," "therefore," or "despite."
i pkay with jp voices and hated the moment when wuk inserts herself into the last fight but MAN the english voice acting make it even worse... like she was forced to act in a shitty kindergarden level play...
I think they're going to go with the "there were always two Sphenes" direction. That's why right before the trial we see a montage of her voice lines with them alternating between being direct and confident or gentle and either afraid or begging. One being the mind of the original or something while the other was the machine itself or some other entity running the place. I felt like living memory was pointless with the exception of one or two moments and us wanting to "get to know" these holodeck programs before we turned them off was a waste of time. That is a good point about people in other areas vanishing when we turn off their terminal. We should have arrived in the amusement park to a pack of screaming panicked people because a bunch of them dissipated mid conversation.
Yeah, I mentioned it before, but the Endless displaying complete apathy to all their friends disappearing, when they had previously behaved exactly the same as humans was exceedingly dumb, and blatantly only happens so that we don’t have to see the consequences of our actions.
@@shawnscouten5184 I actually liked it, since it emphasized their AI nature and added to the uncanny valley effect of the whole zone. I still skipped 99% of the zone's cutscenes, because I was growing nauseous from the writing by that point.
As a 2.0 player, I try very hard to be optimistic of DT... But holy shit, I never took this long to clear MSQ within the first week... It took me 2 months cause how boring as shit this story was. You hit the nails of area that should of improved. Wuk was a story killer and u have to be a 7 year old or less to kiss up this dumbed down story. If I didn't know any better, DEI had their dirty claws on it. And nobody can change my mind. This was a weakest story in the entirely of FFXIV, even ARR was better UPDATE - please be mindful, I'm only talking about is Story. Everything else like music, post raids, etc is amazing.
Likely. Square was featured on their website and given how Wuk Lamat is written to side-step everyone other character to be the "Bestest Evar!" I wouldn't be surprised why this game's story was such a missive let down.
@@MyVanir I hate to break it to you, but this steady track record is broken. Wokesh** has infiltrated the East, and yes it is totally and utterly incompatible with it. That said, when China (a literal communist country) and Korea have become better and more free at producing anime-esque games and related media than the homeland of anime itself, this highlights a significant issue. Japan is no longer making products for a domestic audience.
I generally hate the direction they’re going with FFXIV, so much so in fact that I’m considering cancelling my subscription after 10 years. Plus the new content is too hard for me. Literally. My eyes and hands can’t react fast enough. And it’s not fun. I know some people like it. Good for you.
@22:25 This brings up another point that runs along side this. They need to tone down the references and allusions to other FF games. I let it pass with ff4 and the post patch content of endwalker but FF9 was just massacred. The play didn't sit right with me and that was at the beginning of ix
Ah, Living Memory. The zone where Krile finally gets to "eat." Where the food tastes like nothing. Much like all of Dawntrail, where we get to have a new expansion where the story reads like nothing. It's just a vehicle to watch Wuk Lamat debase the entire game.
Even back before 7.0 they tried making her out to be stronger than our WoL. Remember that duty where everyone was caught in a monsters grip and it was charging the attack? She was the only one to break out of it and then jump aside only to pull everyone else out of the way with her chains ability. That alone showed her apparent greater strength than our WoL, which should NOT have been the case.
@@rednova2212and how many of such exact moments did we had throughout FF14? But sure , let's pretend that it all started with Wuk Lamat and DT. Way to tell you have no recollection of the story thus far and just want to sound smart among dumb crowd
@@rednova2212 It really didn't, at all, as there are quite a few fights where someone else breaks out of mechanics first. I mean, seriously. If she was stronger than the WoL, bog standard roadside bandits would not have been able to kidnap her.
@@yuriel9699 Those moments had happened way earlier in the story tho. like before we traveled to the EDGE of existence. The WoL regardless of how YOU feel is basically a walking deity and to get surpassed by Wuk who isnt even travelled enough to know her own culture is baffling. Wheres her experience and power coming from other than a writer?
@@yuriel9699Honestly, we haven’t had that many moments of someone else rescuing us since Endwalker. Fitting, because Endwalker is basically when we reached god levels of strength. Zero seals some voidsent that would just keep regenerating otherwise, so I guess that counts, but that’s more saving us time than anything. But yeah, I’ll chalk up Wuk Lamat escaping the chains first as just good luck. Still, you can’t exactly argue that Wuk Lamat isn’t OP when she is spamming dynamis LBs repeatedly on the source (despite dynamis supposedly having little influence there) and dealing 15% of damage to Sphene way faster than us, after somehow just breaking through a rift in reality. Wuk Lamat is just unnaturally strong for some reason.
I did find it very convenient that every person you run into in Living Memory is like, ready to die. Like they're just straight up tired of being alive. That's immediately when I knew that Living Memory was whack.
Hearing your version of the story just through words alone made me feel more emotion than the entirety of Dawntrail did.... visuals, audio, writing team and all. Honestly, Dawntrail is so bad it genuinely makes me feel uncomfortable on an instinctual level. Its crazy how it has managed to utterly sour me on the game as a whole, and leave me feeling like I should be avoiding this product like the plague in the future. Reminds me of a lot of the similar types of IP-assassination we've seen across the gaming industry. Surely that's just a coincidence right? Haha.... ha...
Dead on for 90% of this. But i did like the direction 7.1 msq took with how the Alexandrian people are now being forced to confront grief for the first time. It will be interesting to see how this will play out
Tbh I liked how they did the sphene extreme and I am pretty sure the transitions between the wind stage, earth, and ice are sphene moving us in between reflections and making us fight in them. Maybe sphene could’ve travelled to those reflections and taken souls from there before turning her eyes to the source solidifying her as some reflection hopping villain. Perhaps us the WoL could’ve fight sphene to the end and instead of having wuk join in she convinces sphene to let the endless go after the fight citing the aetherial sea allows the endless to technically live on after death and that generations will remember their ancestors after death so they aren’t technically dead. and she lets all of the souls go releasing a bunch of souls back into the aetherial sea and perhaps at some point in another expansion it causes a problem maybe villains from those reflections break out of the aetherial sea and invade the source or something perhaps they have a mastery of aether that allows them to break out.
I really do wish Dawntrail was just a vacation to find a mythical treasure, it didn't need world-end catastrophe and the fable that was hinted so long ago was a disappointment. The fact the the the WoL, you the player turn the "golden city" into a dead husk feels like a slap in the face. It really does emphasize modern gaming as something that is so hyped up, but turn into a miserable experience. I understand the endless likely wouldn't have wanted to be kept alive if it meant the slaughtering of nations to entire world, but more thought into that would have helped instead of just blinking them out of existence. The idea of Living memory should have a means of people to see their loved once off, to get a proper good-bye, but because of Sphene, it was twisted into a non-existence. No one knew they were there because she "spared" them the grief of loss by removing the memories of them. If anything, she should go down as the most hated queen for robbing people of their loved ones and keeping them as pets in a gilded cage. Living (now what I call Dead) Memory, is just the most bitter icing on this cake that was just there to celebrate their new star, Their New Lightning/Rey Palpatine to be shoved in everywhere. If Dissidia was still on-going, I imagine she would not only be a character, but take up a good portion of the story as the lead in that. I'm convinced they not only rushed the script, but kept making rewrites only to make her more awesome and the Story feels like it was written by a modern western writer, the biggest insult I can give.
I miss when XIV's moralizing was more subtle, but it feels like it's been beating people over the head with the themes/messaging since EW...which is made worse when there are some gaping holes in the logic used by the writers that can end up making those elements fail to resonate with the viewer as was the case with both the Ancients and Endless who had an obvious "intended" interpretation but could also be easily perceived in a light that totally undermines what the writers were aiming for. I also suddenly realized that Stormblood was the last expansion where we actually had solo duties in the final zone to spice things up (Two, in fact).
Yeah, there are issues with the story’s intended message not lining up with what the story actually shows. Like, the plenty was clearly intended to be what the ancients would have ended up like. But if you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense. The people in the plenty valued pleasure to the detriment of everything else, and seemed incredibly hedonistic. In comparison, the Ancients are much more selfless, dedicated to improving the star, and making the world a better place. Not to mention the plenty refused to acknowledge death as a concept, and kinda went crazy when they couldn’t find a way to make the world better and made a murder beast. The Ancients have a better relationship with death, they allow it if you want it, but it is by no means forced. They would have no reason to create Ra La, no matter how long they existed for as a result. Those that wish to die would die, and those that didn’t would continue to do so. The Ancients and the Plenty share basically nothing in common outside of fashion choices, so it is just objectively a poor comparison. Sure, they “could” eventually become like plenty, but to do so would require altering the ancient’s fundamental values as a culture, so it is extremely unlikely to say the least. Much less likely than the source dying to war or disease, something that is nearly impossible to happen to the ancients.
@@shawnscouten5184 The thing was that the Ancients were stagnating, and it's implied that the Nibirun(Plenty) would have been the end result for when they ran out of ways to improve the world. And the Ancients were showing signs of that extremity where the Nibirun bettered the world to the point they even removed sorrow by their willingness to embrace a paradise where pain and sorrow did not exist.
I absolutly disagree with your take on Otis and how to change his involvement in Living Memory.. simply because of the fact that Otis being there already goes against everything the game has thought us before. It was made clear when we first meet him that he is a prototype from a time before alexandria learned to to detach memory-aether from soul-aether.. meaning his soul is still intact in that bucket and that he can't become an endless. that was done in an effort to raise the stakes and impact of his sacrifice. In Living Memory at no point it is even hinted at, that "the system" can reconstitute entitys from the memories of other's. and even if it could, that entity should not have the PTSD Otis had in Living Memorys because.. you know.. its reconstituted from other ppls memories. Not that it matters, considering that, as far as i remember, Sphene didnt even die due to him failing to protect her but due to lightning-sickness, meaning that PTSD is already a long shot to begin with. for every reason i can come up with for otis being there, something else in the games call that reasoning into question. that lead's me only to one conclusion. the whole Otis-bit doesnt make sense and was a cheap play at emotion. and almost everyone fell for it due to him being fun character. ( which leads to quite some interesting implications in itself).
Also, Otis sacrificing himself the first time was also pointless, as Sphene (or any of us) could have just mentioned that Sphene can body swap drones at will, so there is 0 need to guard her. Instead we all just stand there and let her die.
@@shawnscouten5184 : true the initial sacrifice was also pointless in the way it was depicted and a cheap play for emotions. but there are only slight adjustments needed to make that one work. endless-Ortis on the other hand would need major rewrite to even justify his existence.
@@renemuller7383Fair enough, I don’t disagree with that. Maybe robot Otis could just live and go with us and have the ptsd moment trying to comfort the worried children briefly with a play. That way you get both of the good moments in the story without the cringe ones.
@@shawnscouten5184 I mean, robot otis's sacrifice could easily have been to deflect the paralysis beam from all of us, taking it like a lightning rod to enable us to keep fighting. Doesn't even need a change in the scene, just add a line in the aftermath about him initially moving on blind instinct and then realizing the utility of leaving the WoL and gang free.
Dawntrail is the Warlords of Darenor of WoW. The game is going to go down hill from here, and never get back to what it was. Watched it happened before.
Personally speaking,I was bored because I wanted the expansion over and after the gang for the second time let the villan do whatever they wanted for the scene (Wuk's dad did not have to die like that,we have literally 6 plus people in the room), Sphere should not have gotten the key like that and being allpwed to walk free. Most of the people there have fought a primal,I'm sure 1 of them can take a chalice from a corpse.
I will never stop being mad for how they pushed aside Krille in DT. I was so happy they said she will shine more this expansion only to get bombarded with infinite WL and barely any Krille. Heck, even with my pretty low bar for fun story, I feel annoyed at how hard they are trying to push WL in scenes. Emotional scene with Krille? Speak to WL. Emotional scene with Erenville? Speak to WL. Give it a fucking rest already.
Fine... The obvious stuff first Starting from the cooking Contest We of course pair wuk and zoral ja together So that both there Ideologies clash, allowing a glimps behinds phrases and platitudes. With both winning the contest, the Situation is now alot more tense, compared to the original rotes, With zoral ja having now 6 keystones. In the aftermath there could be a seed of doubt shown in the path he is walking or in the negativity He is trapped in. During the final Trial, we actually See him fight Daddy Phantom, were he defeats it by destroying the summon Pot. Which mamool chieftain uses as Personal attack to disqualify him wrongfuly from the rite. Which destroys the glimps of betterment he had and gives far more credit to his claim to the throne and somewhat explains his piece through war as he fell victim to the stagnant believes, traditions and pettyness of the tribes, especially the mamool ja (aka, people have become to confy) After that, He doesnt attack ketteram, He murders the chieftain Out of spite and also he had still the final stone that he needs (and maybe even frames the Hrothgar), deposes Sareel ja, and cutting lose everything that bound him to tural by going through the golden Gate. Now i would keep him as the angry tyrant as we see him after he returns. However, we use the Echo to See what happened to him in these 30, and what we see clashes completely with what we experienced during the Invasion. We see a more calmer, more adult zoral ja, a more rational ruler, someone who uses the Military for protection, not for Invasion. Someone who i might even Care about the people (in a more stoic manner) Glimpses of a wife, a Family, of fulfilment and regret, a zoral that just walked out of his fathers Shadow. 30 years or more, are a long time that Changes people. And than we get the truth of what happened. His wife died shortly after golul jas birth and the regulator did his thing, making him forget the love of his life and all the good things he had, leaving nothing back outside of the bitternes, anger, and negativity of his young self and a child he had no connection towards anymore. Something that shows the true potential repurcusions of regulators Also in living memory we meet the wife instead of namika, which can clarify Potential Open questions
My biggest gripe with Living Memory is that they had the perfect chance to call back to Emet Selch's "I will not be guilty of murder line" (my thoughts are that these aren't even the dead- just simulations based on the memories ripped away from souls before being put into vending machines like a Twinkies, but that's neither here nor there). Followed closely by giving us this beautiful zone and then... taking it away. Actually, my biggest gripe is that a random COLOSSEUM BATTLE that you even barely get to see is where they decide to use Protecting My Devotion from FF9. Not during the solo duty where Steiner-in-all-but-Name is fighting alongside you and ultimately loses his life. But to build off of Living Memory changing to a spiral, the Meso Terminal should've changed to resemble Alexandria, being a perfect segway into the last dungeon. Still mad they didn't reference Memoria, but maybe they're saving that for 7.3.
This really seems like another 'maybe we should've explored this area before things got serious' moment. Why did we not visit Living Memory before Sphene bamf'd? She could've revealed what she was earlier on to try and gain more of your trust, and just let you wander around talking to everyone. It would've at the very least given you more of a chance to get to know these people, and maybe see them as living beings as Sphene does. But they fumbled it, and I feel like I felt the first time doing the Titan questline. I'm pissed. And the worst part about this is that Dawntrail didn't give me a sassy catgirl to agree with me that the quests were bullshit.
Yeah, learning about the Endless much earlier would be great for the story. Just have her give us a tour of it, just like she did for solution 9. Have us learn about them before we learn what is keeping them alive.
I think traveling through Midgar in the playstation version of ff7 had more security then solution 9, I think it'd be more interesting if we had to rescue Erenville from being deleted. Like he was tied into it still and didn't want to go yet he wanted to experience more of the world.
An easy fix to the whole Krile situation would be to redo her parents storyline, they could have easy been the founders of oblivion seen how they state they were worried their dimensional travel knowledge was dangerous and wanted to make sure it didnt fall into the hands of preservation. The robot mom storyline could remain unaffected as their guide in the whole operation while Krile's parents stayed the driving force behind Oblivion,meaning they get introduced and developed ealier in the story, just hold off the reveal of them crossing the gate to leave their child (maybe Gulol Ja Ja is killed before revealing this), delay de USB earing a bit so they can have a moment near the end before shutting down the terminal. I swear the moment Krile's parent said they wanted a way to get rid of their knowledge I just didnt buy it, they were pretty confortable just sitting around whatching gladiatorial duels and stuffing their face for milenia.
I don't outright hate Wuk Lamat, she's a product of the writing. The character would have be fine if she wasn't such a massive focus of the story and content. Literally we have Krile here that we've never even went on an adventure with being once again relegated to the background in what was supposed to be her story as well. Dawntrail's story reeks of "being changed halfway through development-itis".
I hope this video gets more views since it has super harsh criticism for DT but also some damn good alternative ideas of how the story should have been made and as much as i liked the story i wish it would have been more EDGY and not so tame, so yeah we need more critics like Mr. Durantes to really show the devs that we want more action and violence like the old world of warcraft had or even the early FF14 ARR with its NPC´s using harsh language towards us or making sexual advances towards us depending on what gender our warrior of light is, but those kind of interactions are nowhere to be seen in EW or DT (Also Durantes your Warrior of light would have fitted perfectly to the way you wanted DT story to go, since he looks like a action hero :D)
The 7.1 story seems like it’s laying the foundation for why this “genocide” had to happen. However, doing illogical shit so that something further down the story can make sense is terrible writing.
Man, fuck Living Memory so much. I was really checked out by this part of the story, but LM almost broke me, even though I knew how close I was to the end of the story. Such a boring disappointment.
I thought that they were going with the manipulative choice, and at first it seemed like that is what they will do. But i guess halfway the gave up, or were not convincing enough and were asked to change it, or they just did not care
I don't think the memories in living memories are alive, they are more akin to gen-AI trained on memory. Simulacrum of life. I think they should've done a better job of showing or telling that something is not quite right, but instead went for emotional scenes to give something to the zone. So I don't think shutting down the terminals is evil, no more than burning a book. What I would have wished to be in place is some sort of redundancy in the system, when we get to the final area sphene reboots living memory, and living memory itself becomes the dungeon. Repurposing endless as minions for the dungeon. (like otis, krieles parents, erenvilles mom or wuks handmaiden). And the giant statue becomes the boss. Also, give some hints to the ancients while you're at it, that the illusion of the golden city was modeled after legends of a golden city of the ancients (and the giants got the vision of the ancient city rather than living memory).
to answer the title, we got tired of babysitting an ignorant cat woman and her constant ranting about "getting to you know you" speech and in WoL fashion causing mass murder, also cause apparently DEI doesn't make good storytelling, who knew...
The golden city did not cause any deep feels for me minus Krile's family reunion. The whole place is just copied memories condensed into projections of a 'version' of themselves. Memories erased/rewritten and not to mention they weren't actual people. Without the shortcomings of the living brain all a computer can do is with the set of memories have the individuals act like they might would. Not to mention depending on your views on cloning I just couldn't care less. These holograms were part of an empire that wanted to murder my world so they can get some Mario 1 Ups. Sometimes the people/robots of an evil nation get destroyed as well. Hell, with the technology of an invading advanced force I wouldn't have been surprised if another nation tried to take solution 9. It was a tech powerhouse that had no leader. Though I haven't played .1 yet so I could be off base on that part.
Brains aren’t magic. Consciousness isn’t magic, it is a trait that a creature displays. The endless proved they were more than capable of developing new memories and even skills (as shown by cachiua hacking out of living memory, something that she was unfamiliar with in life.) to be able to react, adapt and learn to that degree requires an undeniable degree of sapience. They are robot copies of the original person, yes, but they are capable of acting indistinguishably from a human being, and thus are alive by definition. Also, the Endless were mostly unaware so many people were being killed to keep them alive, and even if they were, they could do little to stop it, so you can’t really hold them guilty for that. And I believe killing innocent civilians unnecessarily is a war crime. We didn’t murder random civilians in Garlemald when we invaded it
Living Memory is the exact opposite of Ultima Thule and I hate it At the start Ultima Thule looks like a place of despair and emptiness but as the story goes on (and with the Omicron quests) the place becomes more alive and filled with hope. Living Memory becomes from a wonderful place to... a bleak empty grey area. With a music in the background that makes me cut my veins. I don't want to go here to gather, do stories and whatnot. Worst MSQ final zone so far
Wasn't the whole reason for shutting the terminals down specifically to make it so Sphene would have less reasons to put up a bigger fight? Could have sworn that was literal dialogue said in that portion of the msq
@@renemuller7383 Sadly, even that’s a thin explanation. With the Scions right outside the gateway, we’ve all the support needed to assault Sphene at once. Tola or Urianger could find us an in easily. Given the stakes, that’d be the logical route. Just not the one the writers wanted.
@@durantesI absolutly despise the "oh, the scions are outside WE CAN JUST FRONTALLY ASSAULT HER" thats NOT how this works, just because we have the scions with us dosnt mean that FRONTALLY ASSAULTING THE ENEMY AT THEIR MOST STRONGLY DEFENDED PLACE would be sucess. the scions arent all powerfull, they are experts in their fields, and non of their fields would be really aplicable, or FASTER then shutting down the terminals
I checked out right before the zoraal ja fight but having watched all of your videos on dawntrail multiple times i can say that every point you make in all your videos is how i felt throughout my experience. Im not dwelling on the negativity, i unsubbed and wont be coming back again. This game has been feeling like a scam and we keep being led on with carrots on sticks with empty promise after empty promise again and again and this expansion really exemplifies that feeling. It really sucks too but i feel the game should have ended with endwalker and paved the way for a new FF mmo.
I'm going to bat for the devil here and say that Sphene was programmed to do the things she was doing, and the Sphene part was actively resisting. A case of her programming and memories conflicting, which is why she removed them. EDIT: Yeah your rewrite is better
Living memory was like a painful slow death where instead of trying to stop and maybe save the one you came for, you are hanging around with memory ghosts. All while being unable to fly because you cannot get all the aether currents until you deal with this slog. Turning Sphene into the final antagonist was really wrong based on the context we had been given about it. It makes no sense for her established character. I like your idea of making the Endless convince Sphene to give up though.
The weird thing is the Endless behave functionally identically to humans, being able to gain new memories and learn, to the point where they could easily pass as a human for extended periods of time. But then they abruptly start acting like ghosts when the terminal shuts down in the side quests. Suddenly not displaying any care about their surroundings. I can only assume that the power disappearing corrupted them somewhat, so they couldn’t fully think. It’s just stupidly convenient writing designed to make us not see the consequences of our actions. Awful writing.
This expansion is like a training platform for the writers (juniors??). FFIX as the inspiration for the story, not something fresh out of the FF history. All the resources are there for them, I hope they just take this opportunity and grow further in talents. 😅
It seens to me that the writers stop creating a final fantasy setting from endwalker (included) onward. Remember the first in shadowbringers? It was original and didnt resemble anything we have on earth really. Stormblood? Ye it looks like japan, mongolia or china BUT it contains a lot of original folklore stories. Heavensward is totally original, like there is nothing i can connect to real countries apart from castles. But endwalker? Radz at han is india entirely, imperial region is russia entirely. And tulloyal or whatever its called its mexico or sud america entirely ( there are even tacos). This is fortnite level of lore.
everything in DT (except the dungeons and raids because they are outsourced and created outside) was just blatantly stupid executed, virtually no braincell was active during development, a literal insult not only to the franchise, to one of my all time favorites FF9 and the game itself but even more so to us players... if i ever get the chance i will hold them accountable for their atrocities... should be illegal to fuck up a franchise that was once so legendary this bad...
Heres the fix. Go to loving memory before solution 9. Then you can do your "getting to know everyone" quests and make us loke the place, and still get your emotional tear jerker when we have to shut it down. Having it be the kast rhing was so stupid. "Hey, I have to kill everyone here, but first, imma dress as an elephant and play with these kids I'm about to murder!"
I agree with practically everything except erasing the endless is Murder.. That makes no sense.. They’re memories. The place requires living souls to fund the expenditure of dead people’s memories.. I don’t get your logic on that at all..
Despite the problems, despite the mishandling, despite all that can be said in the way that it was wasted...And even if it is emotional Manipulation or what not, At the very least the zone did give me a genuine real emotion. One that made me halt half halfway through to think about it all. Well that and the music. It hits really hard and it's a beautiful musical piece. And unlike Ultima Thuel, when you finish the MSQ it does not constantly uses any lyrics on repeat visits and kills the zone (That and I found most of Ultima Thuel meh after the second part aside G'raha's speech) but instead fades into a 'Long lost' memory. It invokes a Nostalgia you cannot relive but can remember... Ironic considering how many people are feeling Nostalgia for the narrative when it was better written.
Oh boy, Living Memory, Ultima Thule 2.0 but it is far the worst and the most pointless zone in the entire damn game. The only "worth" I had going for during my time with Dawntrail is over cutscenes about Krile's parents and Erenville due to a friend mentioning about it but soon enough, it became pointless as if there was ANYTHING GOOD at that point. Watching my WoL commit another genocide on the people of Living Memory with any no real purpose than to "unlock" the final dungeon and trial and then watch Wuk Lamat stealing the moment became my final straw of this game. I'm just glad that I have ended my subscription and focus other things elsewhere.
Honestly you are 💯 about this story and I just found your channel to BUT you fail to realize one critical detail…me as a player help krile find her family and that was the best story part and we got to destroy a beautiful fake city haha we evil as fuk 😂😂😂 but I is a lala the ultimate master race
Annoys me your character is now so often smiling in cutscenes, even if there isnt really any good reason for it. We want to be positive, fine, but i preffer somewhat serious posture, when im the one facing enemy.
Hate that the scions split yet everyone is in the expansion, the only ones that should be there was krile, graha and estinien. You could argue tankred, but no more, everyone else was a waste of space. Hate wuklamat, worst character ever, good luck cause they shoving her down your throat through the next year. First time ever I am taking a 2 year break from ffxiv, Drawntrail is so bad I don't even want to come back tbh.
Listening with Japanese audio made me not hate wuk so much, but the entire time i was just questioning why we were so entirely focused on her. When we first were introduced to the "Alexandrian" areas I was extremely let down. It doesn't really feel FF9 at all. Except the dungeon which just felt like forced memberberries. Unlike places like tower of Zot or tower of Babil. I almost never go back to living memory since I've finished the story, and I've gotten the items from the special fate there with the mascot. I get that they weren't sure how to take it since the first major story arc was complete but I did not expect it to be this bad. Even the FFXI alliance raid... i know you did a video on that too. Really disappointed with the "i just made it from electrope"... we already have a basis to tie them together with that previous event ffs.
considering i played with JP-Audio too and how much i came to hate WuK.. i don't even want to imagine how much more i would hate her if i had played with english audio.
Living Memory was an unnecessary genocide that Cid and Nero could have sorted out in a weekend if we'd bothered calling them. Literally could have told Sphene "hold up we know a guy", but the idiot DT writers simply had to try to redo a worse version of Shadowbringers
Legitimately, if a city as small as solution 9 was able to power living memory for 30 years, Cid and Nero could have easily come up with some way of getting that power.
@@shawnscouten5184 The city itself wasn't the problem. Sustaining its growing population that could only go up, was. Said population were nothing more than simulacrums with the memories of dead people attached to them. Every addition to that population exponentially raised Living Memory's power requirements. There was literally nothing the Ironworks could have done about that.
Hell yes! We already know the solutions to some of these problems but you think they even mention those?! Noooo...let this poor boy rot in his bed and kill all the eternals and get me started on Sphene... instead of mention the cure/solution and work towards them... living memory was the most useless area and story I've seen in the whole game. Seriously, I took a break for 3 days in that part of msq and only very reluctantly kept playing bc I wanted to end this misery. Never had this feeling ever before in XIV but now. It hurts so bad
@@mannifinalsummer4544 There was no reason for the Eternals to exist in the first place, the whole technology was an abomination.
Genocide? Those people were ded, you must be one of those losers that think Replika is a great way to cope with losing a beloved one
Remember the way Emet Selch brushed off the accusation that he was a mass murder? "They're just pale echoes of their former selves, so they're not really alive if you ask me, so of that does not, in fact, make me a murderer from my perspective."
Guess what our justification for wiping the Living Memory nodes was?
The more I hear of Dawntrail, the more I can't help but wonder what they were thinking.
"This is the vacation expansion!"
>Get dragged into a battle for a throne by a character we don't know or have a reason to trust beyond "cute"
>help prevent a people from being destroyed
>genocide another people
>save the world again from annihilation
So what part was the vacation again? oh right tacos or something.... I might completely skip this expansion and just wait for the next one before even considering a subscription again.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Estinein got the vacation we were promised.
I can defintely only recommend that you follow through and skip this one. I very much wish I had, it was not worth the large amount of money and time that it cost me.
you can't genocide fake people
@@spacedoutpirate6599 It still brings me more joy than anything else in this entire expansion to think that our boy, Estinien, walked up to the gates, got told they were closed for the rites, backed away from the guard and then vaulted over that shit right in front of him without saying a word. It's probably not what actually happened, but it's cannon for me.
You don't even get the tacos except in the alliance raid story
Yea. Honestly the entire expansion should have been about Alexandria merging with tural with things worsening overtime as the story goes. The succession should have been the patches that lead to 8.0
Or the other way around. Rite of succession is a great tool for introducing tural. It just would use more time and breathing space to introduce actual problems and have us solve them in better spread out dungeons and trials.
Having the Alexandria plot take all of post patches would be nice, but would require the patches to be longer and bigger. We'd also have grown more fond of tural and would care for it more, so it would feel that more is at stakes.
@janekgaganek3871 that would work too.
I know it's not mentioned in this video but it's relevant to the "player choice", i think it may have been mentioned in the 7.1 video. When asked to go to Sphene's funeral, one of the choices you have is "I don't think that's appropriate" which honestly excited me, because active choice, only for Wuk Lamat to basically be like "Yeah but i want you there" and we go anyway. It deflated that moment almost immediately
Such an insulting moment. But considering who we were speaking to, how could we expect anything other than the WoL bending the knee with a nod.
I would of liked an option to go loudly get a drink from the vending machine and open the can in the middle of the speech.
It's been like that the entire game. We can either give snappy comments or agree to help with whatever but in the end it never mattered what you answered, you have to do the work anyway. Wasted potential ofc, and maybe a part of me wished with DT and all the money Ew and Shb brought, that maaaaaybe the game evolves a bit in the new arc, but nope. Never expect something to grow and get better when one single recipe works for what now, almost 5 years already? Since shb SE didn't give us anything new and exciting anymore. DT was such a disappointment in this regard
@@AOffensiveJokeor just watch our character enjoy a damn taco with the XI characters instead of seeing a black screen.
Why does everyone else get animations but we don't? I just want my precious lala baby enjoy her damn taco!
@mannifinalsummer4544 that's exactly why,they want to animate more than they have to, god forbid your characger moves in cutscenes.
I genuinely hated Dawntrail. The writing we had in Shadowbringers, and for most of Endwalker, was incredible. Setting up finales with enemies that were so well-written. Then this shit. I loathe Wuk Lamat in every facet. Everything about her character was horrible. I've been selling off everything I have, giving me more reason to quit.
One part I liked about Living Memory was the conversation with G'raha Tia in which he drew parallels with the acknowledgement of the ramifications of his time travel on the world he left behind. The acceptance that he was either abandoning an entire timeline or erasing it completely for the chance of a better future. It would of been a great point to drive the necessity of a candid discussion with the Endless regarding their existence. Of course, we fixed a fricking fountain instead.
Thinking about this further, this single conversation for me illustrates one of DT's most frustrating failings. It could of been fine that we were not the protagonist, as long as we could of used the time to show our character's growth.
For me, every step of the way our character and the scions should of been showing how much we've all grown and changed from the key points in our journey as we help Wuk Lamat and the other claimants avoid mistakes we made in the past. Moments of introspection on how far our character has come from the brash young newbie freshly arrived in Eorzea, and if we could go back and give ourselves some advice, what would it of been? What do we regret, what did we learn, how did we grow, and what is still the same; allowing the story to focus on our characters without making us the protagonist.
That conversation made me slightly like Graha after hating him since Shadowbringers. Probably like one of the few good things in the expansion the other being Krile with her parents (both of which last 5 minutes.)
Hey, don't mention fountains. Remember how they make Sodapoppin annoyed~
@@rednova2212 who?
@@MyVanir look up sodapoppins reaction to the endwalker trailer.
He doesn't understand how fountains work and gets annoyed when he see's the water flowing from the pitcher of the giant statue into the sea.
We missed a chance for more Turali to be Endless. Imagine how horrified they would be at Sphene *harvesting their families* to keep the Endless running. What if Namikka had a daughter, and learned that this daughter died in the attack on Tuliyollal. The anger and heartbreak would be so enormously powerful. What if Otis spoke with Namikka and turned on his queen because this isn't the ruler he loved and vowed to serve.
Exactly! I was waiting the whole time for Otis to have a revelation about Sphene's true nature because such fervent belief could only be a set-up for character development, right? And then he just kicks the bucket. Twice. What was even the point of his character outside of giving cheap sympathy points for the former Sphene? Way to subvert our expectations with worse writing, a true achievement.
Erenville is my favorite side character this expansion. I love how his character development happened far away from Wuk Lamat, either ruminating thoughts in his head or off-screen where he finds out about his mother.
He and Krile were done so dirty...
The cutscene of him realizing his mom is dead is easily the best cutscene in solution 9, the dreas given off by that is incredible and it's a shame it only gets referenced from sphene with Erenville somehow making a shocked face rather a pained one and sphene going "surely you knew". Now that could be an interesting bit of character, Erenville up to this point in the expansion has been level headed and a calm anchor (attempting to anyway) to Wuk Lamat, so to see him outright deny his mother's death would be interesting. Sadly living memory is Not all about him and how even the most level headed of us can fall into delusions and must face reality. No that be a cool narrative thing to explore, instead have ice cream which even your in game characters can't taste because it's literally not designed for you. Fun is illegal.
Unironically, this expansion and its story was what made me make an account on the official FFXIV forums to argue against people who were saying that Poochie (Wuk Lamat) had somehow gone through a point of character growth during the expansion and had learned and grown during the story.
I spent numerous posts describing in detail how it was not only wrong that they learned anything at all but also that the character itself refused to learn anything and was left exactly where they started, from start to finish. I didn't even get into the finer details of how weirdly detached living memory was nor how we just kind of bungled through it overall and patted ourselves on the back and said "Good jerb, WoL. Good jerb."
To say it's cathartic to hear my own frustrations coming from someone else about the entirety of the expansion would be an understatement and I thank you for your service, Durantes.
Indeed. Thanks for the support!
There’s only one reason anyone defends Wuk Lamat, and it has nothing to do with anything in universe.
Out of curiosity, how did that posting go? Were you merely ignored? Shouted down? Banned outright?
@5:30 Erenville's mother VA isn't the issue. The fact that they both were from the "Americas" is. Erenville has an Icelandic accent. I have two friends obsessed with Viera lore and they just love watching SE butcher it. And he changes his name to draw less attention because being the rare reclusive male viera from the East isn't noticable.
It is established that Cahciua is from the Shaaloani area (not Shaaloani itself I don't think, but I can't remember the names). They all have plain American accents and really, REALLY bad voice acting, so her accent isn't a problem. Not commenting on Erenville's Icelandic accent - an accent unique to the Viera race hailing from... whatever area they hail from (I'm hazy on Viera lore) - is a problem. It's almost as if they retconned his character's backstory and couldn't figure out how to make this change fit for localization.
@@TheWickedWizardOfOz1Since they're dark skinned, they should originally be from the Golmore Jungle, which you visit in Orbonne Monastery. However, it's every bit possible that the Turali ones have a different origin entirely, with only distant ancestral commonality (perhaps about as similar as Southeast Asians and Native Americans in real life).
@@iPlayOnSpica Perhaps. I fully admit that Viera lore isn't my strong suit.
Something I've discussed with my friend before is why doesn't Wuk Lamat know anything about her country besides from Tuliloyal?
Like it was mention in the patches leading up to Dawntrail that she goes on hunts. And how it's a bonding experience. Pray tell where are her hunting buddies? I hope they aren't hunting the Alpaca inside the city.
She's basically royalty, heir to the throne. How did she ever expect to run a nation without knowing her people? She's made out to be an out going, social person so you would think she's knows a lot about her community. But like half the expansion is her just like "Wow that's so cool, never heard of that before!"
Koana at the start is strangely more in tune with the nation's needs from a logistical stand point. He gave Tuliloyal essentials flying cars!
It's vaguely explained during that whole sequence when her real dad gets kidnapped, about how someone threw her down a cenote at a real young age and so the real dad made big lizard dad swear to keep her safe, so she was mainly confined to the palace, only going out when there were people to keep her safe, at least until she was an adult. At least that's what I vaguely recall. Remembering Dawntrail's story is hard.
I HATE Cahciua in Livng memory.
She is so selfish denying her son even a goodbye. Telling him so bluntly that she is dead and that he should just get over it. “U r my pupil” she says.
No he is your SON. And he is grieving and you are ignoring his feelings!
Living memory isnt Utopia, its hell. I was wondering how many people asked to be turned off, rather than living in amusement park that never changes. I would.
We liberated them. Thats how i see it. Sphene was bad for the body.
The people of living memory were as alive as Omega's recreations of past FF villains.
Living Memory is the perfect representation of what not just Dawntrail, but the game as a whole became: Very hyped up and looks very flashy, but strip away the superficial aspects and you're left with a hollow husk of what could have been amazing.
Living memory felt like they looked at Ultima Thule and went "can we copy your homework?" "sure just change it a little so they dont notice" like instead of the scions sacrificing themselves you have to kill these poeple, with a long bridge to hte final boss, the dungeons being civilizations in the process of collapse, to even when Wuk Lamat broke through reality to help with the final boss, just like Zenos in Ultima Thule.
Its as if they saw how much people liked it and tried to do it again without any of the build up or proper character development for any of it to really matter.
If anything Living Memory should have been saved for its own expansion.
that notion... can be applied to the entirety of Dawntrail. cheap copys of what FF14 did before without the built-up and understanding why it previously worked.
Doesn’t really help that Ultima Thule wasn’t really that great either. The entire weight of that area is based around fake out deaths you can see coming a mile away, and pretending like half the scions even had a character arc to conclude.
Even good music can’t redeem it.
Then the Meteon phase has one of the most generic power of friendship moments in it. Thankfully you can skip like half the voicelines in the phase even now. That does give it an edge over the final Dawntrail trial.
Some of the societies in Ultima Thule were kind of interesting, to be fair, but some were just dumb, like the EA care way, way too much about the universe ending in 5 billion years. The rest were okay though, I would have liked to explore more of them.
Tldr: they copied a concept that they didn’t even do that well the first time.
Felt really heroic doing all those murders, with Cahciua saying "no it's okay they aren't actually people"
Lady YOU are one of them and literally passed the Turing test without breaking a digital sweat, pretty sure you're full of it sorry
@@CrispBaker Cahciua also state the only ones who remain after the Terminals are shut down are those with something left undone. Does that not imply that everyone else vanished immediately because there's nothing rooting them in place anymore?
@@shawnscouten5184 Yeah, Ultima Thule wasn't as great as some people say it is. The Walk was great, but after a bit it became very obvious that none of these sacrifices would stick. AT FIRST it worked. If it was just Thancred.... maybe. Losing ONE Scion was conceivable. And if we're ever going to lose another Scion, Thancred is probably the one who's gonna go. Estinien.... veeeery big maybe. But Y'Shtola and Urianger? Nah. If there was any scrap of doubt that we might be losing characters here, it went there. No way were we losing this many Scions all together and we certainly weren't losing Y'Shtola and Urianger. They're way too important to supply solutions to problems.
The thing they pulled off with Wuk stealing our moment in the final battle was truly unforgivable. They took the nice twist from the Endsinger fight and ruined it.
Best of EW too, imagine taking a moment that be read like 30 ways and delving it into a show off for how cool and "close" you are eith the new character. Gross.
And with that flat delivery they couldn’t even pull off her show stealing well. She’s diving in anime style with a huge Getsuga Tensho to a giant robot and she has all the energy of someone reading a terms of service.
@@clintmatthews3500 I played it with the JP voices so it might be different for the EN version.
@@octapusxft No doubt her voice is infinitely better in Japanese.
@@clintmatthews3500 the JP voice acting had her sound more... Resolute.
"SO BE IT" kind of deal.
The disappointing part is that instead of hearing the criticism yoshida just took it as attacks on his staff and isnt gonna listen to the criticism at all. And while i hear the mass murder part, by that point of the story i didnt care about a single character and just wanted to force teset everything there.
I don’t know how they fix things at this point. Just need to leave tural as soon as possible and never go there again.
To be fair, the "criticism" of English VA was way out of control, but I do hope they take the general criticism of DT and make the next story expansion not focus on a sympathetic good guy turn villain for their greater good ideal. I want an expansion villain to be the expansion villain, but just a steppingstone for a twist villain.
@@FoxiestDuck it really wasn't though wuk got 90% of the voices lines this expansion so the VA being bad stuck out like a sore thumb, especially compared to every other languages VA's choosing a man to voice wuk just shows that producing a quality game was not the English teams priority. The VA's online profile didn't help them either.
Honest question: what are you basing his reaction on? Was it an interview comment or something?
@@FubukiShiromiya yoshida did a Japanese media interview and pretty much just blamed attacks on staff, but the "attacks" he listed were mostly just criticism. Weather he actually heard the criticism and was just being a boss defending his staff to the public, or actually thought it was attacks is unknown but it's not a good sign.
Dawntrail - Speak to Three NPCS: The Expansion
na mate, i just unsubbed
this time not because i need to focus IRL
but because i am just...not hyped
my indifference grew stronger when i noticed that Kate isn't Mr. Fox and new writer team doens't know how to do storytelling properly
Dawntrail has a decent gameplay but they are messing around with jobs again (specially on pvp)
honestly i am just...hopeless. I accepted the fact that i played one of the best story of all time and now i can go and play something else until the next FF MMORPG.
Kate is an activist
@@omensoffate Honestly feels like we finished something like Lord of the Rings and now it's time for the Rings of Power Era.
@ it’s been rings of power since 5.4
I am very close to jumping to WoW with the upcoming playerhousing.
@@Grandmaster-KushIs Wow any better though? I heard their story also ruined itself, and just kinda sucked in general. Maybe I should consider it, but idk if I want to get invested in another story that will ruin itself later.
I have an even bigger problem with Erenville. He was really popular with the fanbase as part of the bunboi craze in EW, being the first male viera NPC introduced in the game. He was clever, witty, had an exotic accent and kinda dunked on the scions during the whole frog questline in labyrinthos. But most importantly, he had that air of mystery and intrigue about him that made him interesting. I can clearly see how such a character can go on many people's husbando list. And I feel they should've kept it like that. To me personally, I never felt that he adds anything of value to the WoL's entourage. We didnt need to know his backstory nor did we need to be on his journey of giving him a closure. Now they have completely removed the intrigue and mystery behind erenville. Imagine if we didnt have erenville with us in Shaaloani, it would've actually felt like a vacation/adventure where we were just exploring the wild west zone all by ourselves and continue the story by talking to new people and learning from them without having an NPC to tag along with us. As a friend of the new dawnservant, that should've given us enough privilege to meet the important people in different settlements in Shaaloani. But now, with showing his story (which wasnt even good or compelling) he is just a tour guide with no combat skills, and the skills or information that he does have to offer could've easily been sourced from the local NPCs all by ourselves.. like we did till now from ARR to EW.
Honestly for Wuk voice acting? They should hired someone who had a Brazilian accent.
They would not be minority enough for the DEI checklist.
It feels like the VA was hired over other reasons give the atrocious performance that some people said "slaps" without providing any snippets of which. The Japanese VA is a lot better, but that still doesn't retract much from the dialog from a modern cartoon.
@@MaverickhunterXZeroI agree Japanese VAs were better picked, especially Cahciua, but both JP and EN were terrible with Shaaloani residents (especially the foul-mouthed rubber bullet toy gun dueling boy).
@@iPlayOnSpica Shaaloani was poorly thought out which sucks because that seemed like the most interesting area.
Didn’t like Wuk Lamat, felt like they put more effort into Krile’s backstory pre-Dawntrail than they did in the actual expansion (and tbh, I didn’t care about Krile anyway. She’s one of the least interesting Scions to me but whatever), it was just… it was like they took all of the feedback from ARR to Endwalker and decided to do the opposite of what the players enjoyed.
As someone who plays FFXIV for the story, I was so shocked when I actually found the trials, raids and dungeons for Dawntrail more enjoyable than the actual content and story itself.
And I’m about as filthy casual as they come. This rewrite is much better than what we actually got. I’ve been so disappointed that I don’t even care about the new patch because I’m sure it will be more Wuk Lamat 2.0.
I usually call Living Memory just Golden Ultima Thule because it’s essentially a cheap grab at emotions in the final zone. While I love absolutely adore the ost for this area, it’s adds to the cheapness of what the writing is attempting to do. While I have my take on Ultima Thule (mostly with the Scions not dying), it actually was a culmination of a very long journey since ARR, characters from every expansion talking to us in that final stretch before we confront Meteion was a good sight and it felt genuine because it has proper build up for it to be utilized. Add the score on top of it where the music is quite literally singing about the journey we’ve taken in XIV is what encapsulated the situation perfectly. EW is far from perfect and at times was significantly lacking or didn’t conclude things properly, but they still managed for the most part to make things emotionally impactful when in regards to our journey and Meteion being out ultimate enemy (I’m ignoring Hermes on purpose). Also also to the people who deflect the criticism of the WoL not being a prominent character in DT need to understand a major difference between *The Most Important Character* and *The Main Character*, the two can very well be the same thing in many stories but it most certainly isn’t an absolute. The WoL pretty much HAS to be the main character otherwise what’s the point. If we’re not the most important, this is completely fine, but we don’t even take a backseat, we’re basically in the trunk for like 85% of Dawntrail. Anyways keep up the great videos, I’m loving the critical analysis of a game I so desperately love
The reason they can't have Endless standing around after you turn off a zone because what would they do besides beg for their lives and then people would realize they are acting like psychotic murderhobos. Turning them off changes nothing. Even if you had no choice but to kill Sphene they'd all shut down when that happened. Playing with them first is just twisted and sick.
DT was so insultingly bad it was enough to make me willing to give up my house just to stop paying for this turd.
Yeah, the Endless die too fast to have time to react. Where are all the people panicking as they disappear, or people rushing to find their families or loved ones? The Endless are supposed to have the same personality as the people whose memories they have, and most people aren’t happy with just disintegrating with no warning.
That guy we help to find his wedding ring right before we erase him was just horrifying.
But we can’t deal with consequences, so everyone has to display complete and total apathy to everyone they know and love vanishing in the side quests, despite them behaving the same as any human would before this.
They can’t deal with the natural consequences of their own story setup, so they try to bury and gloss over it. It’s disgusting, and horrendously bad writing.
@@shawnscouten5184 They aren't panicking because they accepted the end when it came. To put forward an analogy, imagine a nursing home in the middle of a desolate land controlled by an AI programmed to keep everyone alive and happy at all cost. Meaning the elderly can't pass on even if they want to. Then you arrive at a point where everyone wants in there wants to pass on, but can't because the AI won't let them. You go to the different rooms, you talk to those interned, pull the plug, and then shut down the AI when you eventually reach it. That is Living Memory in a nutshell.
Even the most perfect Paradise becomes stale eventually, and because those in it can't leave; it becomes a very ironic hell given enough time.
And more to the point, Cahciua explicitly state the only Endless who remain after the Terminals are shut down are those with one thing left undone. Everyone else disappeared immediately because they've had their fill - most of whom have been "alive" for centuries doing the same thing over and over again - and embraced the end the moment they had the opportunity to.
@@cordar7547 Some of the first people we meet are a couple who have waited hundreds of years to finally get married and now that they are finally together we shut them off cause...reasons...
What you're describing did not happen in that zone. It's how you fixed what happened in that zone in your head because what actually happened was nonsensical.
The only person begging to die is Cahciua and not because she's ready to die, but because she has a moral objection to the version of afterlife she knowingly signed up for. She's there for no other reason than to strong arm the player into shutting down the terminals even though doing so nets us no benefit. We do it because she finds them disgusting and wants them destroyed, herself included.
If the AI was forcing her to be happy she wouldn't be able to run a revolution both inside it and outside of it insuring it's destruction and she spends her last moments lamenting that she doesn't have more time, but then apologizes for being a downer before going back to insisting we off her.
When Krile's parents ask if we're deleting them, the whole party looks down in shame, because what they are doing is in fact shameful. They are wiping out a civilian population to possibly demoralize a leader they have conflict with. But Krile's parents are like, "Nooooo, we want to die, it's all good, off us now," so that the player might not consider for one moment how twisted what they are doing actually is.
Shame the people Emet-Selch killed in mass were able to beg for their lives. Had the writers just decided they were all for some reason cool with their destruction we would have had a very different story.
@@MissKashira Sphene would not be persuaded because of the protocol Preservation programmed her with, and she started erasing her memories in the middle of their final discourse about the issue right after she's asked to "Find another option!" Intent on committing multiversal genocide to fuel Living Memory. The only tangible way forward for the Scions, much as they disliked it, was to try and erase the impetus of her decision to drain entire worlds; Living Memory's perpetually worsening power requirements. With so little time, the only option was to shut down the Terminals.
Ultimately it came down to the Needs of the Many. The choice between the multiverse, and a single city of digital ghosts.
And if you want to drag Emet-Selch into the conversation, his famous quote does fit into their decision to converse and "playing" with the denizens of Living Memory. To learn about them so that at least something of them would live on after all is said and done. That's much more than can be said about Alexandria, whose living doesn't remember their dead at all.
@@MissKashira We shut them off because there is no way to keep the thing powered without syphoning our world of life energy and because AI based on dead people is a fucking creepy idea. I hope someone makes an AI based on your grandpa and keep it turned on and around you at all times.
Answer: Ruin everyones day, get half-baked lore for Krile, more ff9 music (in fates), Wuk Lamat pissin off everyone again
When we finally get to the "Golden City" halfway through.
Whatever the Ja Ja Binks name was (leader with two heads, all their names sound the same and end in Ja)- "Congrats, this is the golden city."
WoL- "This glowy room with an obvious gate of some kind?"
"Yes, the Golden City!"
"... A single room. And a gate. Did anyone try to, idk, reopen it after Krile's parents came through?"
"No, why would we do that? Instead we sealed it off with special Sharlayan technology and left it as it is all these years."
WoL- "Does anyone in Old Sharlayan know that their wet dream of research material is potentially this gate and/ or what is behind it? "
"Nope. Just sealed off this glowy room with an ominous gate and perpetuated the rumour that the Golden City exists, though we have never actually seen it with our eyes."
Later in the plot development with Solution Nine.
"Hey dumbasses... WHY DIDN'T YOU RESEARCH THIS INSTEAD OF SEALING IT OFF?"
Anyway, does anyone actually want to find something we can actually call the "City of Gold"? Something that is actually a city? Perhaps made of gold? And not a room with a gate leading to an alternate shard of reality? Cause I do!
Also, dropping the final days from DT felt weird. Like honestly imo it was a decent expansion overall, but surely the final days was not a localized event to our continent. The song of oblivion had to affect the New World in some way but... Nope. Not even a single mention by an NPC. It would have added an interesting twist to the right of succession, with a nation recovering from their population turning into beasties and whatnot.
@@floatingposeidon I hate that I just realized that there was no mention of it anywhere. The writing team managed to erase it from my memory too.
@@MyVanirI knew it was gonna be a problem because a disaster of that scale would prove to make all the new threats "small" and that's a bad thing to a lot of writers, so often times a story with new threats after the world ending one just pretend it didn't effect the new places.
I remember thinking "either Tural is a really happy place or Gaulool ja ja is a really good leader. Which as we know,is not the case.
@@floatingposeidon The excuse is that the effects of the Final Days start at one particular point and then spread out over time. Given how rushed that segment of Endwalker was, it didn't spread very far.
Not that it's a good excuse, but it's the canon excuse.
@@Corvus7159 They start from Ultima Thule, from Meteion and her sisters. That's established in Elpis. It affects areas of weak atmospheric aether first, as we learn from the Watcher on the moon. We saw that it affected Doma (and Hien mentions that it is affecting the steppes, though not to a great degree) as well as Eorzea and Garlemald in the class quests, and it is mentioned iirc that it's also affecting the land Kugane is attached to (can never remember it's name) and it first appeared in Thavnair, which happens to be close enough that Vrtra and a bunch of his buddies could get together and fly to Tully's defense in a manner of days, and arrive with enough strength to enter right into combat, and that was after alliance talks began after the initial invasion of Tully. So... who said that was canon, and can we smack them around the head.
I don't believe deleting data from an SSD is murder, but I agree with absolutely everything else. The second part of the game was so bad... That your proposed alternative is now my head canon. Thank you for putting basically all my thoughts about what's wrong with this expansion into words.
living memory is the greatest zone ever created especially if you have friends to farm fates with its literally twilight town from kh and you get to pretend to be a nobody like roxas xion and axel its so genius
Right?? The music reminded me of twilight town right away
I also had an immediate KH vibe from second 1 on. The music, the City design... but everything else was just shell and boring.
But maaaaybe that's a hint for an upcoming KH crossover? I wish for it so badly, with the shards and world travel on both sides there's no reason to not have Sora visit us someday!
Big KH vibes
The game should have been a vacation. And a humbling experience for our character that can slay universe ending gods. We enter the new continent and the trial boss is already causing havok not a storm and its attacking the main city. We solo duty fight it, we get it to half health and we go into phase two of its epic fight, we the character get a bit to pumped and just instantly slay it cutting the fight short. Hundreds of people see our power and fear it, we a foreigner just slew to them a world ending threat without seemingly a throught. That would be TERRIFYING to see. Then it would be an expansion of regaining the peoples trust. It would push the first promise into a power hungry craze, along with a major part of the public cause holyshit we are under prepared for an invasion from the east!. Bakool ja ja would be justified in underhanded tactics because they KNOW they have no chance and so on.
Also to add onto the final fight. Remove wuk lamat breaking in and have Otis break in instead, youve had to fight him all throughout living memory once he realises what you are going to do and one last stand he joins Sphene to protect her. Then after the fight he is still going strong he is impervious his will to protect the queen is impossible to break and then the kids come in to talk him down, it breaks him, collapsing into a silent mess unable to figure out what and who he swore to protect. The Queen, the AI or the people aka the children he's looked after for too long to keep track of. Then proceed with Sphene the AI seeing Otis break also begin to malfunction as no matter what some fragment of the original soul of all these endless are still there in their stripped memories.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with the scene of Krile and her parents.
The writers want to tell me that they didn't have ANYTHING to talk about?
Krile had no stories to tell about Galuf? How he raised her with 'so much love' etc etc?
And her parents had no stories to tell what they did after leaving her kid behind? Nothing about their hometown? Nothing about how they were pursued from the other scientist because they had ethical objections?
This scene needs to be shit on like everything esle in Dawntrails writing.
There was no good reason for any awkward silence to occur in the first place.
The awkward silence at the beginning makes sense, since it's hard for both sides to initiate the conversation, but yes, there should have been more of the sort of thing real people would talk about, rather than goofy ice cream scenes.
@@honest_psycho7237 the silence is natural at the start. Imagine being Krile, you spent your entire life knowing you were adopted and focused on following your adoptive fathers work, then you find out your parents are (kinda) alive and then you meet them. There will be an awkwardness of emotions and an inability to know how to initiate the conversation but after the ice is broken they had a lot to talk about.
Bout the 4:00 portion.
They do state that there are other, still functioning, terminals. That's why there are still npcs other than the travel ones that are still running around. I'm pretty sure that the npc that says it is the one that unlocks the spooky dungeon.
That being said, I don't see any reason why we can't just flip the place back on and use it as a housing district or a super golden saucer. It's pretty yknow.
Update: And about the 27:00 portion, I remember the game saying something along the lines of turning off the servers deletes everyone and turning it back on won't recover their data.
I mean we could still turn it back on, and use the Endless’s abandoned houses as a housing district. I wouldn’t really put it past them to be honest, I mean they did add the freaking sundering as an emote. Still waiting on a black rose emote to this day.
There was no reason for the Living memory to be a physical space. I refuse to believe it's the fabled Golden City. As a whole, it feels like there was zero oversight when this story was developed. Zepla recently made a very succinct video about why Dawntrail fell flat. I agreed with her on so many points that it felt like I'd written it myself. Things like the unforgivable amount of Wuk Lumat's presence, the scions not being portrayed as themselves, ideas that are presented poorly and then waved away just to push you to the next area, etc. Honestly, the story feels like a rough draft outline--This happens and then this happens and then this happens. No room for "because," "therefore," or "despite."
i pkay with jp voices and hated the moment when wuk inserts herself into the last fight
but MAN the english voice acting make it even worse...
like she was forced to act in a shitty kindergarden level play...
Man, I thought I was down on the Dawntrail story, but you take it to the next level. Very interesting take on things. This MSQ sucked ass!
I think they're going to go with the "there were always two Sphenes" direction. That's why right before the trial we see a montage of her voice lines with them alternating between being direct and confident or gentle and either afraid or begging. One being the mind of the original or something while the other was the machine itself or some other entity running the place.
I felt like living memory was pointless with the exception of one or two moments and us wanting to "get to know" these holodeck programs before we turned them off was a waste of time. That is a good point about people in other areas vanishing when we turn off their terminal. We should have arrived in the amusement park to a pack of screaming panicked people because a bunch of them dissipated mid conversation.
Yeah, I mentioned it before, but the Endless displaying complete apathy to all their friends disappearing, when they had previously behaved exactly the same as humans was exceedingly dumb, and blatantly only happens so that we don’t have to see the consequences of our actions.
@@shawnscouten5184 I actually liked it, since it emphasized their AI nature and added to the uncanny valley effect of the whole zone.
I still skipped 99% of the zone's cutscenes, because I was growing nauseous from the writing by that point.
here for the Wuk hate,
As a 2.0 player, I try very hard to be optimistic of DT... But holy shit, I never took this long to clear MSQ within the first week... It took me 2 months cause how boring as shit this story was.
You hit the nails of area that should of improved.
Wuk was a story killer and u have to be a 7 year old or less to kiss up this dumbed down story. If I didn't know any better, DEI had their dirty claws on it. And nobody can change my mind.
This was a weakest story in the entirely of FFXIV, even ARR was better
UPDATE - please be mindful, I'm only talking about is Story.
Everything else like music, post raids, etc is amazing.
ARR is still the worst imo
4:48 DAMN YOU, DAMN YOU FOR FLASHBANGING ME WITH THAT
I honestly believe Sweet Baby inc. had their creepy little claws in this expansion.
Only the localization, Japan has a very steady track record of not giving a fuck about the political correctness us gaijin seem to be enamoured with.
@@MyVanir : japan has that track record.. but there are always exceptions. Square Enix being one of them.
Likely. Square was featured on their website and given how Wuk Lamat is written to side-step everyone other character to be the "Bestest Evar!" I wouldn't be surprised why this game's story was such a missive let down.
I don't know if it was necessary, I think SE has their own DEI department.
@@MyVanir I hate to break it to you, but this steady track record is broken. Wokesh** has infiltrated the East, and yes it is totally and utterly incompatible with it. That said, when China (a literal communist country) and Korea have become better and more free at producing anime-esque games and related media than the homeland of anime itself, this highlights a significant issue.
Japan is no longer making products for a domestic audience.
I generally hate the direction they’re going with FFXIV, so much so in fact that I’m considering cancelling my subscription after 10 years. Plus the new content is too hard for me. Literally. My eyes and hands can’t react fast enough. And it’s not fun. I know some people like it. Good for you.
@22:25
This brings up another point that runs along side this.
They need to tone down the references and allusions to other FF games. I let it pass with ff4 and the post patch content of endwalker but FF9 was just massacred. The play didn't sit right with me and that was at the beginning of ix
Ah, Living Memory. The zone where Krile finally gets to "eat." Where the food tastes like nothing. Much like all of Dawntrail, where we get to have a new expansion where the story reads like nothing. It's just a vehicle to watch Wuk Lamat debase the entire game.
Even back before 7.0 they tried making her out to be stronger than our WoL. Remember that duty where everyone was caught in a monsters grip and it was charging the attack? She was the only one to break out of it and then jump aside only to pull everyone else out of the way with her chains ability. That alone showed her apparent greater strength than our WoL, which should NOT have been the case.
@@rednova2212and how many of such exact moments did we had throughout FF14? But sure , let's pretend that it all started with Wuk Lamat and DT. Way to tell you have no recollection of the story thus far and just want to sound smart among dumb crowd
@@rednova2212 It really didn't, at all, as there are quite a few fights where someone else breaks out of mechanics first. I mean, seriously. If she was stronger than the WoL, bog standard roadside bandits would not have been able to kidnap her.
@@yuriel9699 Those moments had happened way earlier in the story tho. like before we traveled to the EDGE of existence. The WoL regardless of how YOU feel is basically a walking deity and to get surpassed by Wuk who isnt even travelled enough to know her own culture is baffling. Wheres her experience and power coming from other than a writer?
@@yuriel9699Honestly, we haven’t had that many moments of someone else rescuing us since Endwalker. Fitting, because Endwalker is basically when we reached god levels of strength. Zero seals some voidsent that would just keep regenerating otherwise, so I guess that counts, but that’s more saving us time than anything. But yeah, I’ll chalk up Wuk Lamat escaping the chains first as just good luck.
Still, you can’t exactly argue that Wuk Lamat isn’t OP when she is spamming dynamis LBs repeatedly on the source (despite dynamis supposedly having little influence there) and dealing 15% of damage to Sphene way faster than us, after somehow just breaking through a rift in reality.
Wuk Lamat is just unnaturally strong for some reason.
I did find it very convenient that every person you run into in Living Memory is like, ready to die. Like they're just straight up tired of being alive. That's immediately when I knew that Living Memory was whack.
Hearing your version of the story just through words alone made me feel more emotion than the entirety of Dawntrail did.... visuals, audio, writing team and all.
Honestly, Dawntrail is so bad it genuinely makes me feel uncomfortable on an instinctual level. Its crazy how it has managed to utterly sour me on the game as a whole, and leave me feeling like I should be avoiding this product like the plague in the future.
Reminds me of a lot of the similar types of IP-assassination we've seen across the gaming industry. Surely that's just a coincidence right? Haha.... ha...
Dead on for 90% of this. But i did like the direction 7.1 msq took with how the Alexandrian people are now being forced to confront grief for the first time. It will be interesting to see how this will play out
Tbh I liked how they did the sphene extreme and I am pretty sure the transitions between the wind stage, earth, and ice are sphene moving us in between reflections and making us fight in them. Maybe sphene could’ve travelled to those reflections and taken souls from there before turning her eyes to the source solidifying her as some reflection hopping villain. Perhaps us the WoL could’ve fight sphene to the end and instead of having wuk join in she convinces sphene to let the endless go after the fight citing the aetherial sea allows the endless to technically live on after death and that generations will remember their ancestors after death so they aren’t technically dead. and she lets all of the souls go releasing a bunch of souls back into the aetherial sea and perhaps at some point in another expansion it causes a problem maybe villains from those reflections break out of the aetherial sea and invade the source or something perhaps they have a mastery of aether that allows them to break out.
I really do wish Dawntrail was just a vacation to find a mythical treasure, it didn't need world-end catastrophe and the fable that was hinted so long ago was a disappointment. The fact the the the WoL, you the player turn the "golden city" into a dead husk feels like a slap in the face. It really does emphasize modern gaming as something that is so hyped up, but turn into a miserable experience.
I understand the endless likely wouldn't have wanted to be kept alive if it meant the slaughtering of nations to entire world, but more thought into that would have helped instead of just blinking them out of existence. The idea of Living memory should have a means of people to see their loved once off, to get a proper good-bye, but because of Sphene, it was twisted into a non-existence. No one knew they were there because she "spared" them the grief of loss by removing the memories of them. If anything, she should go down as the most hated queen for robbing people of their loved ones and keeping them as pets in a gilded cage.
Living (now what I call Dead) Memory, is just the most bitter icing on this cake that was just there to celebrate their new star, Their New Lightning/Rey Palpatine to be shoved in everywhere. If Dissidia was still on-going, I imagine she would not only be a character, but take up a good portion of the story as the lead in that. I'm convinced they not only rushed the script, but kept making rewrites only to make her more awesome and the Story feels like it was written by a modern western writer, the biggest insult I can give.
I really hope sqeenix gets out of their "feelings" and gives us some actual content we're ok with paying a monthly sub for...
Living Memory is just a really bad taken on El Dorado, because "HMMM DUHHHHH THIS EXPANSION IS SOUTH AMERICA... YOU GET IT GUYS... TELL ME YOU GET IT"
I miss when XIV's moralizing was more subtle, but it feels like it's been beating people over the head with the themes/messaging since EW...which is made worse when there are some gaping holes in the logic used by the writers that can end up making those elements fail to resonate with the viewer as was the case with both the Ancients and Endless who had an obvious "intended" interpretation but could also be easily perceived in a light that totally undermines what the writers were aiming for.
I also suddenly realized that Stormblood was the last expansion where we actually had solo duties in the final zone to spice things up (Two, in fact).
Yeah, there are issues with the story’s intended message not lining up with what the story actually shows.
Like, the plenty was clearly intended to be what the ancients would have ended up like. But if you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense.
The people in the plenty valued pleasure to the detriment of everything else, and seemed incredibly hedonistic.
In comparison, the Ancients are much more selfless, dedicated to improving the star, and making the world a better place.
Not to mention the plenty refused to acknowledge death as a concept, and kinda went crazy when they couldn’t find a way to make the world better and made a murder beast.
The Ancients have a better relationship with death, they allow it if you want it, but it is by no means forced. They would have no reason to create Ra La, no matter how long they existed for as a result. Those that wish to die would die, and those that didn’t would continue to do so.
The Ancients and the Plenty share basically nothing in common outside of fashion choices, so it is just objectively a poor comparison. Sure, they “could” eventually become like plenty, but to do so would require altering the ancient’s fundamental values as a culture, so it is extremely unlikely to say the least. Much less likely than the source dying to war or disease, something that is nearly impossible to happen to the ancients.
@@shawnscouten5184 The thing was that the Ancients were stagnating, and it's implied that the Nibirun(Plenty) would have been the end result for when they ran out of ways to improve the world. And the Ancients were showing signs of that extremity where the Nibirun bettered the world to the point they even removed sorrow by their willingness to embrace a paradise where pain and sorrow did not exist.
We treated Living Memory like the Amaroutines did their creations.
This was the climax of the game and it is also the first cutscenes I have skipped ever
I absolutly disagree with your take on Otis and how to change his involvement in Living Memory.. simply because of the fact that Otis being there already goes against everything the game has thought us before.
It was made clear when we first meet him that he is a prototype from a time before alexandria learned to to detach memory-aether from soul-aether.. meaning his soul is still intact in that bucket and that he can't become an endless. that was done in an effort to raise the stakes and impact of his sacrifice.
In Living Memory at no point it is even hinted at, that "the system" can reconstitute entitys from the memories of other's. and even if it could, that entity should not have the PTSD Otis had in Living Memorys because.. you know.. its reconstituted from other ppls memories. Not that it matters, considering that, as far as i remember, Sphene didnt even die due to him failing to protect her but due to lightning-sickness, meaning that PTSD is already a long shot to begin with. for every reason i can come up with for otis being there, something else in the games call that reasoning into question. that lead's me only to one conclusion.
the whole Otis-bit doesnt make sense and was a cheap play at emotion. and almost everyone fell for it due to him being fun character. ( which leads to quite some interesting implications in itself).
Also, Otis sacrificing himself the first time was also pointless, as Sphene (or any of us) could have just mentioned that Sphene can body swap drones at will, so there is 0 need to guard her. Instead we all just stand there and let her die.
@@shawnscouten5184 : true the initial sacrifice was also pointless in the way it was depicted and a cheap play for emotions.
but there are only slight adjustments needed to make that one work. endless-Ortis on the other hand would need major rewrite to even justify his existence.
@@renemuller7383Fair enough, I don’t disagree with that. Maybe robot Otis could just live and go with us and have the ptsd moment trying to comfort the worried children briefly with a play. That way you get both of the good moments in the story without the cringe ones.
@@shawnscouten5184 I mean, robot otis's sacrifice could easily have been to deflect the paralysis beam from all of us, taking it like a lightning rod to enable us to keep fighting. Doesn't even need a change in the scene, just add a line in the aftermath about him initially moving on blind instinct and then realizing the utility of leaving the WoL and gang free.
Dawntrail is the Warlords of Darenor of WoW. The game is going to go down hill from here, and never get back to what it was. Watched it happened before.
It's got better content than endwalker dude, don't farm anger.
But Legion was good though. It wasn't completely downhill from WoD
I turned off the terminal and felt nothing lol this whole place tried to get an emotion out of me but I just didn't care for these people.
Personally speaking,I was bored because I wanted the expansion over and after the gang for the second time let the villan do whatever they wanted for the scene (Wuk's dad did not have to die like that,we have literally 6 plus people in the room), Sphere should not have gotten the key like that and being allpwed to walk free. Most of the people there have fought a primal,I'm sure 1 of them can take a chalice from a corpse.
I will never stop being mad for how they pushed aside Krille in DT. I was so happy they said she will shine more this expansion only to get bombarded with infinite WL and barely any Krille. Heck, even with my pretty low bar for fun story, I feel annoyed at how hard they are trying to push WL in scenes. Emotional scene with Krille? Speak to WL. Emotional scene with Erenville? Speak to WL. Give it a fucking rest already.
can i repost a rough rewrite of Zoraal ja i posted in the Forums ^^´?
Please do
Fine... The obvious stuff first
Starting from the cooking Contest
We of course pair wuk and zoral ja together
So that both there Ideologies clash, allowing a glimps behinds phrases and platitudes.
With both winning the contest, the Situation is now alot more tense, compared to the original rotes, With zoral ja having now 6 keystones.
In the aftermath there could be a seed of doubt shown in the path he is walking or in the negativity He is trapped in.
During the final Trial, we actually See him fight Daddy Phantom, were he defeats it by destroying the summon Pot. Which mamool chieftain uses as Personal attack to disqualify him wrongfuly from the rite. Which destroys the glimps of betterment he had and gives far more credit to his claim to the throne and somewhat explains his piece through war as he fell victim to the stagnant believes, traditions and pettyness of the tribes, especially the mamool ja (aka, people have become to confy)
After that, He doesnt attack ketteram, He murders the chieftain Out of spite and also he had still the final stone that he needs (and maybe even frames the Hrothgar), deposes Sareel ja, and cutting lose everything that bound him to tural by going through the golden Gate.
Now i would keep him as the angry tyrant as we see him after he returns.
However, we use the Echo to See what happened to him in these 30, and what we see clashes completely with what we experienced during the Invasion.
We see a more calmer, more adult zoral ja, a more rational ruler, someone who uses the Military for protection, not for Invasion. Someone who i might even Care about the people (in a more stoic manner)
Glimpses of a wife, a Family, of fulfilment and regret, a zoral that just walked out of his fathers Shadow.
30 years or more, are a long time that Changes people.
And than we get the truth of what happened. His wife died shortly after golul jas birth and the regulator did his thing, making him forget the love of his life and all the good things he had, leaving nothing back outside of the bitternes, anger, and negativity of his young self and a child he had no connection towards anymore.
Something that shows the true potential repurcusions of regulators
Also in living memory we meet the wife instead of namika, which can clarify Potential Open questions
My biggest gripe with Living Memory is that they had the perfect chance to call back to Emet Selch's "I will not be guilty of murder line" (my thoughts are that these aren't even the dead- just simulations based on the memories ripped away from souls before being put into vending machines like a Twinkies, but that's neither here nor there). Followed closely by giving us this beautiful zone and then... taking it away.
Actually, my biggest gripe is that a random COLOSSEUM BATTLE that you even barely get to see is where they decide to use Protecting My Devotion from FF9. Not during the solo duty where Steiner-in-all-but-Name is fighting alongside you and ultimately loses his life.
But to build off of Living Memory changing to a spiral, the Meso Terminal should've changed to resemble Alexandria, being a perfect segway into the last dungeon. Still mad they didn't reference Memoria, but maybe they're saving that for 7.3.
This really seems like another 'maybe we should've explored this area before things got serious' moment. Why did we not visit Living Memory before Sphene bamf'd? She could've revealed what she was earlier on to try and gain more of your trust, and just let you wander around talking to everyone. It would've at the very least given you more of a chance to get to know these people, and maybe see them as living beings as Sphene does. But they fumbled it, and I feel like I felt the first time doing the Titan questline. I'm pissed. And the worst part about this is that Dawntrail didn't give me a sassy catgirl to agree with me that the quests were bullshit.
Yeah, learning about the Endless much earlier would be great for the story. Just have her give us a tour of it, just like she did for solution 9. Have us learn about them before we learn what is keeping them alive.
I think traveling through Midgar in the playstation version of ff7 had more security then solution 9, I think it'd be more interesting if we had to rescue Erenville from being deleted. Like he was tied into it still and didn't want to go yet he wanted to experience more of the world.
Great, now I am reminded again how it could've done better. If it was I probably would be still subbing especially for 7.1
An easy fix to the whole Krile situation would be to redo her parents storyline, they could have easy been the founders of oblivion seen how they state they were worried their dimensional travel knowledge was dangerous and wanted to make sure it didnt fall into the hands of preservation. The robot mom storyline could remain unaffected as their guide in the whole operation while Krile's parents stayed the driving force behind Oblivion,meaning they get introduced and developed ealier in the story, just hold off the reveal of them crossing the gate to leave their child (maybe Gulol Ja Ja is killed before revealing this), delay de USB earing a bit so they can have a moment near the end before shutting down the terminal. I swear the moment Krile's parent said they wanted a way to get rid of their knowledge I just didnt buy it, they were pretty confortable just sitting around whatching gladiatorial duels and stuffing their face for milenia.
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts (read: disgusted rant) about the 7.1 msq, like zoraal ja's yandere and koana's buffalo adventure.
I don't outright hate Wuk Lamat, she's a product of the writing. The character would have be fine if she wasn't such a massive focus of the story and content. Literally we have Krile here that we've never even went on an adventure with being once again relegated to the background in what was supposed to be her story as well.
Dawntrail's story reeks of "being changed halfway through development-itis".
Hype up the golden city to show up and ruin it.
I hope this video gets more views since it has super harsh criticism for DT but also some damn good alternative ideas of how the story should have been made and as much as i liked the story i wish it would have been more EDGY and not so tame, so yeah we need more critics like Mr. Durantes to really show the devs that we want more action and violence like the old world of warcraft had or even the early FF14 ARR with its NPC´s using harsh language towards us or making sexual advances towards us depending on what gender our warrior of light is, but those kind of interactions are nowhere to be seen in EW or DT
(Also Durantes your Warrior of light would have fitted perfectly to the way you wanted DT story to go, since he looks like a action hero :D)
The 7.1 story seems like it’s laying the foundation for why this “genocide” had to happen. However, doing illogical shit so that something further down the story can make sense is terrible writing.
"Bestest ever" was that an Overlord DVD reference?
I've heard it used all over the place. But I think he popularized it.
Man, fuck Living Memory so much. I was really checked out by this part of the story, but LM almost broke me, even though I knew how close I was to the end of the story. Such a boring disappointment.
Yeah, it’s kind of impressive how I was both bored and horrified at the same time.
I thought that they were going with the manipulative choice, and at first it seemed like that is what they will do. But i guess halfway the gave up, or were not convincing enough and were asked to change it, or they just did not care
I don't think the memories in living memories are alive, they are more akin to gen-AI trained on memory. Simulacrum of life. I think they should've done a better job of showing or telling that something is not quite right, but instead went for emotional scenes to give something to the zone. So I don't think shutting down the terminals is evil, no more than burning a book.
What I would have wished to be in place is some sort of redundancy in the system, when we get to the final area sphene reboots living memory, and living memory itself becomes the dungeon. Repurposing endless as minions for the dungeon. (like otis, krieles parents, erenvilles mom or wuks handmaiden). And the giant statue becomes the boss.
Also, give some hints to the ancients while you're at it, that the illusion of the golden city was modeled after legends of a golden city of the ancients (and the giants got the vision of the ancient city rather than living memory).
to answer the title, we got tired of babysitting an ignorant cat woman and her constant ranting about "getting to you know you" speech and in WoL fashion causing mass murder, also cause apparently DEI doesn't make good storytelling, who knew...
The golden city did not cause any deep feels for me minus Krile's family reunion. The whole place is just copied memories condensed into projections of a 'version' of themselves. Memories erased/rewritten and not to mention they weren't actual people. Without the shortcomings of the living brain all a computer can do is with the set of memories have the individuals act like they might would. Not to mention depending on your views on cloning I just couldn't care less. These holograms were part of an empire that wanted to murder my world so they can get some Mario 1 Ups. Sometimes the people/robots of an evil nation get destroyed as well. Hell, with the technology of an invading advanced force I wouldn't have been surprised if another nation tried to take solution 9. It was a tech powerhouse that had no leader. Though I haven't played .1 yet so I could be off base on that part.
Brains aren’t magic. Consciousness isn’t magic, it is a trait that a creature displays. The endless proved they were more than capable of developing new memories and even skills (as shown by cachiua hacking out of living memory, something that she was unfamiliar with in life.) to be able to react, adapt and learn to that degree requires an undeniable degree of sapience. They are robot copies of the original person, yes, but they are capable of acting indistinguishably from a human being, and thus are alive by definition.
Also, the Endless were mostly unaware so many people were being killed to keep them alive, and even if they were, they could do little to stop it, so you can’t really hold them guilty for that. And I believe killing innocent civilians unnecessarily is a war crime. We didn’t murder random civilians in Garlemald when we invaded it
Living Memory is the exact opposite of Ultima Thule and I hate it
At the start Ultima Thule looks like a place of despair and emptiness but as the story goes on (and with the Omicron quests) the place becomes more alive and filled with hope.
Living Memory becomes from a wonderful place to... a bleak empty grey area. With a music in the background that makes me cut my veins. I don't want to go here to gather, do stories and whatnot.
Worst MSQ final zone so far
Sorry i ruined ylur subscribe count by making it 778 instead of triple 7 now you can no longer deal tons of damage
joke is on you. 7777 is another lucky seven break-point.
@renemuller7383 oh yeah that is true
Wasn't the whole reason for shutting the terminals down specifically to make it so Sphene would have less reasons to put up a bigger fight? Could have sworn that was literal dialogue said in that portion of the msq
no, it was more the reason that it would disrupt the security of the main-frame and create an opening for us to invade in the first place.
@@renemuller7383
Sadly, even that’s a thin explanation. With the Scions right outside the gateway, we’ve all the support needed to assault Sphene at once. Tola or Urianger could find us an in easily.
Given the stakes, that’d be the logical route. Just not the one the writers wanted.
@@durantesI absolutly despise the "oh, the scions are outside WE CAN JUST FRONTALLY ASSAULT HER"
thats NOT how this works, just because we have the scions with us dosnt mean that FRONTALLY ASSAULTING THE ENEMY AT THEIR MOST STRONGLY DEFENDED PLACE would be sucess.
the scions arent all powerfull, they are experts in their fields, and non of their fields would be really aplicable, or FASTER then shutting down the terminals
I checked out right before the zoraal ja fight but having watched all of your videos on dawntrail multiple times i can say that every point you make in all your videos is how i felt throughout my experience. Im not dwelling on the negativity, i unsubbed and wont be coming back again. This game has been feeling like a scam and we keep being led on with carrots on sticks with empty promise after empty promise again and again and this expansion really exemplifies that feeling.
It really sucks too but i feel the game should have ended with endwalker and paved the way for a new FF mmo.
I'm going to bat for the devil here and say that Sphene was programmed to do the things she was doing, and the Sphene part was actively resisting. A case of her programming and memories conflicting, which is why she removed them.
EDIT: Yeah your rewrite is better
Wuk LaTwat
Brilliant!
Living memory was like a painful slow death where instead of trying to stop and maybe save the one you came for, you are hanging around with memory ghosts. All while being unable to fly because you cannot get all the aether currents until you deal with this slog.
Turning Sphene into the final antagonist was really wrong based on the context we had been given about it. It makes no sense for her established character.
I like your idea of making the Endless convince Sphene to give up though.
The weird thing is the Endless behave functionally identically to humans, being able to gain new memories and learn, to the point where they could easily pass as a human for extended periods of time. But then they abruptly start acting like ghosts when the terminal shuts down in the side quests. Suddenly not displaying any care about their surroundings. I can only assume that the power disappearing corrupted them somewhat, so they couldn’t fully think.
It’s just stupidly convenient writing designed to make us not see the consequences of our actions. Awful writing.
This expansion is like a training platform for the writers (juniors??). FFIX as the inspiration for the story, not something fresh out of the FF history. All the resources are there for them, I hope they just take this opportunity and grow further in talents. 😅
The main writer has been writing since the Heavensward alliance raids. I don’t think he is improving.
@@shawnscouten5184 : wasn't the main-writer also the bard-quest-writer? the one that made macross in ff14 boring?
I actually really enjoyed living memory
It seens to me that the writers stop creating a final fantasy setting from endwalker (included) onward. Remember the first in shadowbringers? It was original and didnt resemble anything we have on earth really. Stormblood? Ye it looks like japan, mongolia or china BUT it contains a lot of original folklore stories. Heavensward is totally original, like there is nothing i can connect to real countries apart from castles.
But endwalker? Radz at han is india entirely, imperial region is russia entirely. And tulloyal or whatever its called its mexico or sud america entirely ( there are even tacos). This is fortnite level of lore.
everything in DT (except the dungeons and raids because they are outsourced and created outside) was just blatantly stupid executed, virtually no braincell was active during development, a literal insult not only to the franchise, to one of my all time favorites FF9 and the game itself but even more so to us players... if i ever get the chance i will hold them accountable for their atrocities... should be illegal to fuck up a franchise that was once so legendary this bad...
can someone write this guy idea of fix the story as ao3 fanfic , i would kiss the ground they are walking to
Heres the fix. Go to loving memory before solution 9. Then you can do your "getting to know everyone" quests and make us loke the place, and still get your emotional tear jerker when we have to shut it down. Having it be the kast rhing was so stupid. "Hey, I have to kill everyone here, but first, imma dress as an elephant and play with these kids I'm about to murder!"
I agree with practically everything except erasing the endless is
Murder.. That makes no sense.. They’re memories. The place requires living souls to fund the expenditure of dead people’s memories.. I don’t get your logic on that at all..
Despite the problems, despite the mishandling, despite all that can be said in the way that it was wasted...And even if it is emotional Manipulation or what not, At the very least the zone did give me a genuine real emotion. One that made me halt half halfway through to think about it all. Well that and the music. It hits really hard and it's a beautiful musical piece. And unlike Ultima Thuel, when you finish the MSQ it does not constantly uses any lyrics on repeat visits and kills the zone (That and I found most of Ultima Thuel meh after the second part aside G'raha's speech) but instead fades into a 'Long lost' memory. It invokes a Nostalgia you cannot relive but can remember...
Ironic considering how many people are feeling Nostalgia for the narrative when it was better written.
Oh boy, Living Memory, Ultima Thule 2.0 but it is far the worst and the most pointless zone in the entire damn game. The only "worth" I had going for during my time with Dawntrail is over cutscenes about Krile's parents and Erenville due to a friend mentioning about it but soon enough, it became pointless as if there was ANYTHING GOOD at that point. Watching my WoL commit another genocide on the people of Living Memory with any no real purpose than to "unlock" the final dungeon and trial and then watch Wuk Lamat stealing the moment became my final straw of this game.
I'm just glad that I have ended my subscription and focus other things elsewhere.
Honestly you are 💯 about this story and I just found your channel to BUT you fail to realize one critical detail…me as a player help krile find her family and that was the best story part and we got to destroy a beautiful fake city haha we evil as fuk 😂😂😂 but I is a lala the ultimate master race
For cheap drama, obviously
Cahciua sound like Kaf-KEE-Wa. C'mon, it's no harder than Wuk Lamat.
100%
Annoys me your character is now so often smiling in cutscenes, even if there isnt really any good reason for it. We want to be positive, fine, but i preffer somewhat serious posture, when im the one facing enemy.
Hate that the scions split yet everyone is in the expansion, the only ones that should be there was krile, graha and estinien. You could argue tankred, but no more, everyone else was a waste of space. Hate wuklamat, worst character ever, good luck cause they shoving her down your throat through the next year. First time ever I am taking a 2 year break from ffxiv, Drawntrail is so bad I don't even want to come back tbh.
Least the ff11 raid is cool
It does seem like everything other than the MSQ is good, which sucks.
@@MaverickhunterXZero Further cementing DT as Stormblood 2.0
Just with a worse MSQ
16:44 id pay so much for that
Listening with Japanese audio made me not hate wuk so much, but the entire time i was just questioning why we were so entirely focused on her. When we first were introduced to the "Alexandrian" areas I was extremely let down. It doesn't really feel FF9 at all. Except the dungeon which just felt like forced memberberries. Unlike places like tower of Zot or tower of Babil. I almost never go back to living memory since I've finished the story, and I've gotten the items from the special fate there with the mascot. I get that they weren't sure how to take it since the first major story arc was complete but I did not expect it to be this bad. Even the FFXI alliance raid... i know you did a video on that too. Really disappointed with the "i just made it from electrope"... we already have a basis to tie them together with that previous event ffs.
considering i played with JP-Audio too and how much i came to hate WuK.. i don't even want to imagine how much more i would hate her if i had played with english audio.