Given that this has become such a hot button subject please be respectful to each other, and remember people are allowed to have their own opinions whether it be the positive or negative towards the expansion. I would also ask that you be willing to listen and try to understand the other viewpoints being presented by people even if it may be counter to how you feel about Dawntrail. Also because I keep seeing comments about it Wuk Lamat begins the story as a naive, self-doubting, idealist who is constantly overcompensating because she compares herself to her kin. Her Naivety is improved through the rite of succession as she begins the story as the candidate for the people only to learn that she knows very little about them, and in learning about her people she begins to see her own strengths and thus is able to forge her own path no longer comparing herself to brothers. Then after the rite she recognizes that her ideals are not infallible and the multiple different viewpoints are needed to truly succeed recognizing and accepting that she has weakness, and so she makes the decision to appoint Koana as her co-dawnservant to make up for what she lacks. Then after the invasion she resolves to kill Zuraal Ja rather than seeking a peaceful outcome as she recognizes that while she strives for peace it isn’t always an option. If Wuk Lamat did not grow as a character then 1.) She would have taken the path the other took in trying to force their way through the tests rather than truly understanding them never addressing her naivety for the land she has pledged to lead 2.) She would have never gained confidence and continued to compare herself to her brothers 3.) She would have falling back into her idealism, never appointed Koana as her co-dawnservant and would have refuse to kill Zuraal Ja still believing there would be another way Look I’m not saying it’s perfect, nor am I going to try and defend her overuse in the story. But to say she doesn’t grow is just false. She isn’t the same character at the beginning of the story as she is at the end. Also because others have said I contradicted myself by saying she has growth but also character inconsistency. Both can be true at the same time. For a character, growth is what sets the new standard. Inconsistency, is a disruption of the standard and is most often used because the plot demands it. Y’shtola has become obsessed with finding a way to travel between the shards, yet once presented with the key in Dawntrail she doesn’t say much beyond helping us. This is inconsistent with her character, but it doesn’t reflect negatively on her, but the story as the inconsistency exists to put her in it.
Wuk Lamat became a flawless character never to be questioned for her decisions. She gained everything we have achieved over multiple expansions. We also had extremely very little battle content and im not just talking about dungeons.
I feel like the story had potential. It really did. But a lot of focus was put in the wrong areas, and not enough was given elsewhere. Wuk is a great example - there's nothing I felt was wrong with her character other than the writers stretching her out for far too much screen time. I don't want to see less of her because I don't like her. I want to see less of her because I genuinely believe she'd be a better character if she had more time off-screen so we could contrast her presence with how things are when she's not present. Not just Wuk, though. A lot of facets of DT feel that way to me.
I completely agree I loved her in first half of story and I still like her but omg was I super tired of her by the end. I actually am dreading her showing up in patches now 😢. They made me dislike her presence even though I like the character it’s wild 😅
One top what most everyone else has said, one thing that really broke my immersion is that Wuk Lamat's voice actor seemed to have trouble emoting any time she had to yell with emotion. She's fine in normal conversation and even good in some sad moments, but every time she had to yell, it just comes out flat. Might be an issue with the voice direction, but either way, it actually took away hype towards the end of the MSQ for me. I don't think I've ever experienced this in previous expansions from one of the main cast.
It seems likely that it was a problem with voice direction since almost all characters had voice acting problems some more noticeable some less, Wuk Lamat is just the easiest to see cause shes the one with the most dialogues in the whole expansion
This is well observed. I liked Wuk and had no issues with her VA, but I did notice those "yells with emotion" being off, and just loud talking, rather than emotional or raw. When I think back on good VA, Otis and his delivery at the end when he asks if A--- still exist was the only moment I can recall being very impressed with the VA. Thanks for pointing this out.
I feel like they leaned so hard into rejuvenating the gameplay that they completely overlooked the quality of the story itself. The dungeons and trials were excellent, but getting to them is a slog through peak mediocrity.
Fortunately, I think the game as a whole will be fine despite this. There’s always a chance they build upon this new lore and make it better in retrospect like they did with other expansions.
@@JorgeM270what I overheard was in some interview she said she was busy rewriting the story. Square decided to give Ishikawa bigger positions and have young writers chance maybe she have the rough plot ok then young writers came up with bad ones so maybe Ishikawa could not fix (or she told young ones to rewrite and they failed bc she’s busy with (people speculate) ff17
I've seen so many people hating on Shaaloani, when my thoughts are like the exact opposite. I was happy that we were done with WL babysitting; I actually enjoyed her journey for the most part but I felt it should have been finished after the 95 dungeon. Shaaloani really felt like the only zone storyline that delivered on the promise of the "vacation experience" that we were given during previews. After Shaaloani, it's just more WL babysitting, this time with an extra helping of naivete, and with the added bonus of the WOL not really getting anything to do. There were so many points where I felt like "can I just fucking kill this guy/girl already? Please!" For the record, I actually still have really enjoyed the expansion. Just annoyed at the MSQ; the battle content and the dol/doh content has been amazing so far
This is how I felt, the story up to that point relied heavily on plot armor and plot conviences. Shaaloani and the characters we got felt stunted and squeezed by the pre and post parts of the area. I mean even some of the characters were a bit more interesting overall.
Soo true Shaaloani was really interesting. Maybe it’s because I liked Erenville as a character more than Wukki. We are hardly given an opportunity to connect with her at all other than being a side character. Also like you said, a break from doing… ‘fetch quests’ from Wuk and locals…
I hope the second part is mainly Krile not Wuk Lamat but overall MSQ still okay. Role quest though, they just boring (granted, I only finished magic DPS, healer and melee DPS). SE really need to fix them
To sum up negatives you mention, it felt to me like they wanted to try to do new things with story and msq structure, but didn't commit to it enough to make it actually good. See the mentor role - it felt off because it was there, but wasn't too much of a focus; make it a central point of why WoL is even there, and you have something to build off of. Maybe they were scared of displeasing people that want to be main character of the story, but what we've got made everyone unhappy. On topic of solo duties - I tend to treat msq like visual novel with some gameplay extras attached, and DT shift was very welcome: every solo duty was meaningful, fitting and good combat-wise; compared to Endwalker where half of the duties felt forced - pushing it gameplay for gameplay sake, when it could've been a cool cutscene instead. Having less duties that force you to play a different character was also a welcome challenge, I like comfort of playing my job(s) of choice, and being suddenly thrown on a butchered kit of something unfamiliar kills the pacing, since suddenly I spend few mintues reading tooltips and figuring out wtf I'm even doing. Fourth zone issue - again, they didn't commit to it enough. This sort of "filler" can work as setup to let you know area and people there before some events that play off of that as payoff. And here, payoff was underwhelming - again, they tried, but there was too little to make it work. Shadowbringers did the same just before level 79 dungeon/trial, but in much larger scope and - overall - better. In fact, I wouldn't mind whole expansion being just aimless travel and dealing with local problems, to have last segment be high stakes backtracking and playing off of all the random work we put in.
About FATEs: they didnt cut out the amount of FATEs you need to clear before getting max rank on a zone, they just split it into 4 ranks instead of 3, same amount of FATEs.
1st half is okay for Wuk to be in the spotlight as we are there to help her in this quest of hers but the 2nd half should have been Wuk taking a step back and letting the scions lead the way to the unknown, as they got the experience in dealing with stuff like that. Oh and Wuk interfering in the final boss fight was a dick move on her part. Don't steal our hero thunder!
@@cablefeed3738 because thats what a world saving hero does, saves the world. Also its not a good idea to have an npc overshadow the player characters this much.
@@cablefeed3738 You didn't mentor jack at no point in the story do you teach anyone anything. And frankly the warrior of light is an adventurer, not Mary Poppins. You are only present in this story to clean up after Wuk Lamat and save her from herself.
I think what really annoyed me was wuk in the story she would just talk to much and at the end boss fight when we have a moment to show off how powerful and cool we are she just jumps in and gives the most cringey line so hopefully we see less of her
My pt was laughing so hard on the final fight. Like, WoL steam rolled and Wuk randomly jumps in and almost gets squashed like a bug. Lucky for her, her power of cringe is transcendent.
I hate to say it mate, if you’re not enjoying it now, it will continue to slog. The final zone was pretty interesting at least, as well as the final dungeon. I’ll give it that much.
This is the first time in this game where I could understand cutscene skipping. I found this msq pretty boring and I found myself rolling my eyes at times because it was so tedious, repetitive, and overly simplistic in its storytelling.
First 5 hours was the worst. But now i have about 10+ hours, and i am enjoing it a lot actually. First trial was also great. Story is pretty average at the moment, but i have heard it gets better around lvl 95-96 or something. I hope lol. Ps. I love the new zones.
I think the first trial is absolutely AMAZING! As soon as I beat it with like 3 wipes, I immediately qued in 4 more times! And I still havent got to the second one yet lol. This expansion is Wild! And im not just talking bout the Wild West zone!!! 🤠
I noticed that too. You cannot "have growth" and "then revert back" and credibly claim some small net gain in change occurred. Real examples here would have helped this video, as 'she had growth' is contrary to what we all have in front of us, which is that Wuk is the same "lets talk it out and be friends" at the end as she was in the beginning.
Yeah I heard that too. Haha By the end he sounds like he understands that she did change but only marginally. Being weak and then strong isn’t character growth though, specially because “peace” and “understand each other” was there from level 90 quests to level 100. Her ideals and motivations were set in stone, and often to the detriment of the story and pacing.
I would've loved the train sequence to be a turret section. Hell, even if it was part of the level 96 dungeon, that would've been cooler than what we got. That being said, it was a cool scene to watch.
@@silentking3310 Yeah you end the story in a sad / bittersweet mood after shutting down living memory and then suddenly a happy song appears right after, I think it would be more impacful if they just kept a more neutral song towards the end.
Go play the L98 Solo Duty again, it's treated like Duty Support where it goes fast or slow regardless of your engagement, and will complete itself. They fake player agency, so I don't even feel good about them adding extra duties if they're just going to give me the unplugged little brother controller and fake my agency as a player. It's not fun. It's incredibly insulting.
Really made me feel embarrassed playing that section lol, especially the big agency with civilians dying and then the fucking walls stopping progress, like there's better ways to handle this man, play the dialogue out as we run and separate the objectives more.
I never felt that, it's perhaps my favorite solo duty in the expansion, I really wanted to save everyone I could. It gives you back the amount of engagement you put in
The writing, pacing, and a lot of voice direction made this the first expansion I have actually looked forward to being over. Wuk Lamat as a character was fine. I rather liked her but the writers dropped the ball. The VA did great. I liked the voice and due to the extreme lack of agency the voice cast gets with line delivery direction, I don't blame anyone but the recording directors. You can really feel the loss of Ishikawa here. To create a compelling and engaging character, a writer has to understand that this person did not just form from nothingness the day before. They are a person with experiences that they don't just remember but have learned from. There is a progression through life of lesson learned or hardship faced that informs decisions and colors how a character interacts to a given scenario. In the past, characters would be presented to us as a point in the progression of their existence. They don't just exposit and list off all of the things they did in the past to tell you what they have done before, they act in your presence and slowly over time you learn how the types of actions they take have been shaped by the past that you then slowly uncover. A good character will encounter a scenario and the reader (in this case, player) can fairly accurately predict how that character will react to stimulus. In a way, you do feel like you know them because you know their logical progression. The majority of DT characters are cardboard cutouts. They are two dimensional, their personality is right out in the open, no ambiguity. They want X. They came from Y. They are going to Z. This causes a lack of interest in supporting characters and a complete lack of emotional investment in them when something dramatic happens. I'm avoiding spoilers but there are two particular occurrences with two of the claimants that I could tell the writers thought were supposed to have emotional weight that had absolutely none. At first I was glad to hear the writing team behind Werlyt was taking over but now I think the reality is, they were fine at a 3 segment trial series but didn't have the overall capability to handle an MSQ. I really hope 8.0 is better. It's really depressing that any real chance to salvage is two and a half years out.
To add onto your VA and poor voice direction. Spanish language is a very passionate filled language. Its very poetic and romantic from a linguistic standpoint. So when you're crafting a zone that takes heavy influence from Latin American-Southwest United States culture there has to be that passion point in the verbiage, that was completely absent from majority of the dialogue. It was sparsely shown and you can kind of tell there was a distinct cultural blind spot from the Japanese writers....Its a bit easy to blame localization but they are given the scripts to translate...and sometimes loss in translation can harm the product. The Voice Acting can make or break enjoyment of the expansion and its not just Wuk's (although her forced fake Spanish accent is grating if not outright insulting) but everyone else is dispassionate.
@@grygaming5519 That's definitely true. Her accent actually sounded better in 6.55 than in a lot of the 7.0 MSQ. I didn't have much of a problem with the rest from a tonal perspective except that everyone in Shaaloani sounded like I was in Fallout 3.
@@25xxfrostxx Apparently she's Puerto Rican....and honestly I could not hear that flare from her at all. Then given on top of the fact her vocal range is just not there. Some actors and actresses have better ranges for characters thus I fully argue that the fault lies at the feet of the director of Voice Acting. Agreed her accent was more pronounced in 6.55 and disappeared for a Generic "this is what Spanish should sound like" accent. Its as if the director just slapped them down. I was also expecting a bit more of a slightly higher pitch range with a softer tone at least in my minds eye on how Wuk should sound. More vocalized and animated to their surroundings....but we didn't get as much of that being shown through the dialogue at all. Then where there was no need for it, that's when it showed up....so yes a big negative on the Director for the overall VA work. Then again the biggest issue is Wuk overstaying her welcome and....the whole "no matter what crimes you can be forgiven" trope that Japan loves to use.
@@grygaming5519blud, whole yer tirade on a "direction" can be answered if you only compare english voiced scenes/subtitled and compared to what was actually said in original script (jp). They royally fucked up translation of japanese script (in some parts even google translate could've made more sense) but also failed to localize properly (which lead to some logical problems, cause cutscene play along with jp script and eng translation just doesn't work)
@@Kairax Pretty much what I was getting at the direction was just overall garbage and its clear that as you said the translation team dropped the ball hard.
i vibe alot with this. i def see some of the issues in the story you bring up though in others just dont agree but thats how the convo should go. Def gonna be continuing the convo with a more positive lean while not being afraid to bring up issues (i also think some of the character use wasnt as clean and i do wish they poushed the mentor aspect fuirther) i like what we got but WANT more and thats such a fair ask
Yeah, something that I think people tend to forget is that people are different and will have different reactions and views on different things. I enjoyed the open part, but many others didn't. That doesn't make them wrong or me right it just means we enjoy different things.
There is one HUGE no-no sin that was commited in DT. Golden rule "Show, don't tell" was brutally ravaged amd sent on a long journey. Many interesting and important situations were "told" to us. Instead of shown. At least show echo being used, visual hints, nods/winks. Nope X just happened, deal with it. (Oh and explanation of how and why we leaving to forums/patches/next expansion)
Something I find really, really funny/odd in DT is it's meant to celebrate indigenous people, but like... everyone to the south has a Hispanic accent i.e. after South America was conquered by the Spanish... And the north has a bunch of white cowboys with trains and guns, but they have native sounding names. So post colonization of North America. It has this really weird after taste when that sets in.
The main problem with the pacing at Shaaloani is expectation. You, the player, expect the story to continue since you're still not at level 100. That mean the story has to go on right? But your WoL has no idea. You're here to help WL become Dawnservant and that's it. Your business here is done. It's now adventuring time. Think of Shaaloani as a fresh new adventure in Tural after your main business is done and it will make a lot more sense.
my biggest problem with shaaloani is that the story was clear from the first cutscene. they went with the most common trope in the setting with no twist. That grated me so much that i really hated the zone. It just felt lazy and like they needed filler and they went with the first thing that came up when you google wild west story.
Been playing since Heavensward, I LOVE FFXIV as much as anyone else. Where every expansion had me watching all cut scenes, in literal tears with Stormblood and Endwalker, I found myself skipping scenes with no regret in Dawntrail. Just because we go to a "new" area doesn't mean we have bring on the basic bus stop fetch questing. It's truly exhausting and by now, the WOL who has literally saved the universe, should be tasked with a lot more relevant tasks than filler content. Wut Lamat is a character I was forced to be aware of through the story, and for the scenes I did stick around to watch, I eye rolled a lot. Bottom line, we are many expansions into FFXIV, and the development team needs to change the quest designs, they are too simplistic for a character that irl would say no, I won't help with that.
You can be the main character of your story without being the main character of the world's story. The core issue (besides WL) is the story is not told from our perspective. It's told from WL's. Our story, *as the mentor*, is not told.
I think the point of the fourth zone was ultimately the duel. That sometimes, you can't talk things out, and the only way to resolve something is brute force (and this is called back by the wol before the final fight where we have the option to say "then let's resolve this" before we kick ass) But just bc I see what they were trying to do thematically doesn't mean I think they did it well. For example. Wuq Lamat wasn't even there for that - so it had no bearing on her decision to fight her brother or Sphene. I think they should have dug further into the morality of that. Like. When is it okay to use force? How can you be sure you're right? I think it would have benefited from another duel where a character in the wrong wins to show the danger of that kind of method. Either way they could have done a waaay better job tying it into the bigger themes.
On day 3 of early access I completed the msq. I will say there are points in this video I agree with such as it being a world building expansion and people needing to adjust expectations for that. However like 90% of this video I heavily disagree with. Just because that expansion was a world building one doesn't mean it needed to be this terrible of a story or way of telling you its world. I don't need a hour long fetch quest to understand that the traders like to trade. Also the amount of plot holes or straight up plot armor because reasons is insane this expansion. Almost comically so. Let's not forget the writers activity made characters with us more stupid in order for Wak to shine. Alphi and Ali two people who are almost Archon level couldn't figure out what Than or Uri told Kona to do in one of the rites. As for the gameplay design adding instance fights will never happen. We already had these back in STB and because there was two of them so close to one another it flat out almost crushed the front in of the expansion for days. They told us years ago instance fights use the same system as the dungeons. Putting to many in the msq would cripple the system at the launch of an expansion. This is an issue of the code of the game. As for the difficulty being accepted that is entirely depends on the echo chamber you live in. Even as a raider myself. Many of my own friends who only play msq and casual content have straight up quit the game before finishing even the second or first dungeons. Almost all of there reasons being they didn't ask sqaure to kick up the difficulty of the msq so why should they be made to have to suffer when it was the loud youtubers who did. Most casual gamers will just leave the game. I believe yoshi p even has kinda a famous quote about this. The silent majority will just leave your game if they don't like it. Let me tell you. If I didn't enjoy anything about the msq. Somebody who has played since 1.0 and stuck with this game. Garentee the casual audience straight up left without a word, and that's not a good thing for the health of this game at all. Need to start talking to players that aren't just on social media all the time.
Yup, the world design itself should be able to tell a story. To force feed an obvious narrative into MSQ is beating a dead horse and incredibly insulting to the player.
Wait, dungeons are harder? Outside of first boss in iirc lvl 93 dungeon that had me confused with the ammount of ground aoe covering whole ground but going off gradually (like free other bosses so that's not new, just me briefly not paying attention where to stand) I found them... the same difficulty wise.
The story its shit, the amount of plot holes is insane, in one phrase this expansion is "conveniently made up bullshit". That's it. Natsuko Ishikawa lead story designer for Shadowbringers and Endwalker did not write for this expansion. Instead one of the 2 MSQ writers was the person who wrote the Fairy Forest in Shadowbringers. I think this saids it all.
0:35 If we're being honest, then I think we know why, in your early impressions, the story was "brilliant" th-cam.com/video/Lj8PgLE-8QY/w-d-xo.html. You also say "...the characters, this is something Dawntrails had done, so far, a FANTASTIC job at. ALL the major characters, you know, the people that have significance, whether side or main, are all just FANTASTIC". The reality is that the dialogue is the same and without cutscenes or names, no one can identify who spoke what dialogue because they are all the same ad nauseum, and while this is early impressions, it raises the question of what game YOU were playing. The community split appears to come down to this: Some people are not heavy readers, and/or read at a Jr. High level, or even skip story entirely; and these people are more or less satisfied with DT. Some people are heavy readers, from 2 books a week to it being part of their profession/passion; and those people did not get a cohesive (or even consistent) narrative that FF14 has always prided itself on, lamenting the maturity that HW brought and ShB hit with a bullseye, and those people are more or less dissatisfied. I thought your first video was little more than shilling for SE, given the mountains of evidence to the contrary of what you claimed about those first impressions of story, esp given how far your footage shows you had to have progressed. In this video, I think you may hold a unique definition of character growth, its not 'simply knows more things' or "had to make new choices to new problems" but involves a change from the person in the beginning to the person at the end. I liked Wuk, despite her being oppressively in every aspect of the story, but she was the same "everything can be solved if we just talk it out cause we're all friends. I like peace" in the beginning as the end. The closest thing to growth was her building the resolve to kill her brother, and they pulled that out from her because it wasnt growth, but 'the only path' (Wuk would have talked it out if Zoraal Ja gave her any opportunity to) and even replaced the now missing big blue family member with a tiny blue family member. The situation with Sphene was the same, and she had less agency as Scions took over as the boots on the ground to deal with the new/old threat to the star and its reflections. Sources: I spoke to 3 residents about this.
I despise Wuk Lamat. I don't know if it's dialog or voice direction or VA ability, but she's nails on a chalkboard to me. Apart from her, the MSQ started incredibly slowly and was a boring slog filled with a lot of filler.
There's a lot of bad VA in the expansion, Wuk Lamat was hardly the worst. I thought Gulool Ja Ja was a great character but the voice acting sounded very strange and made it hard to take an otherwise great character seriously.
The solo duties, while I enjoyed them, felt like they forgot that they had to put in solo duties and just put them somewhere. Only meaningful was the Bakool Ja Ja one imo.
"A lot lower" he says as the stakes are star wide genocide by a technologically superior culture who don't blink at slaughtering people to rip their souls for selfish reasons. I wanted a vacation arc where they set up stories for later while getting to know the new npcs and maybe future villians. Instead I get shadowbringers lite and another villain of the week I care nothing about.
One of my few gripes of DT is this. Second city is great, but it definitely would have been better held off until 98 or post patches. Though probably would have been rushed.
SPOILERS 1.she didnt grow as a character.. at all. she was all about peace and happines but even when faced with the notion that alexandria and sphene literaly did not want that at all and only cared for her people and where going to KILL everyone on the source, STILL she didnt get that, maybe, just maybe peace is just not an option when meet with such an enemy. she still wanted peace and sphen STILL UNTIL THE VERY END she didnt want to have peace... like.. hello? 2. we never where the main character. ever. 3. they robbed krilles story and erenvilles. wuk lmat should have been less in the story, we should have gone to the new world with krille and erenville an dwuk lamat should have stay in the new world.
She did grow as a character, but I think a lot of people don't really get imposter syndrome as a concept. She didn't have a 180 worldview shift, she had flaws she got over but she was still mostly the same. That doesn't mean there isn't character growth, I just think people aren't clicking with it, which is valid. Trying time and again to achieve peace until the last minute isn't a flaw, and she was still willing to end the threat with violence when necessary. Erenville and Krille's plot where just kinda where it was because their plot is kinda all there. Their arc is literally about reconciling the past and letting go, and that's ghost time. As for us being "not the main character", literally everything that happens is because we get stuff done. It's kinda hard to make a voiceless character a central focus in plot when they're also supposed to be cardboard cutout self inserts for the player. Almost every other expansion was mostly other people doing the main plot driving with us doing stuff until really just the tail end of Shadowbringers, where it's still the scions just saying what we're all thinking. This is about normal.
Having consistent values doesn't mean you can't grow as a person though? Yes she wants peace and happiness for others, those are her core values. But there's more to a person than just their morals. Most characters in FF14 have morals that they follow, even the WoL doesn't change their core values to protect what they hold dearest and save as many people as they can.
@@Naoto-kun1085 I'm convinced that a bunch of people just wanted another Zenos to stan with about killing for the thrill of it. WL and DT as a whole represent a negation of that and they're not happy.
I wholeheartedly disagree that the solo duties of this expansion were better than EW. Many felt contrived or that you were waiting for the planned moment to rescue you. (Looks at the Solution Nine duty with annoyance.) The Thancred Stealth operation and the Body-Swap duties still stand out as pillars of great solo duties.
As someone that did not enjoy the Thancred solo operation, I think they did a lot better with these solo duties. I often feel like solo duties are used just for the sake of adding in gameplay instead of having a dungeon. Normally I groan when I see the solo duty glow aura, but in Dawntrail I got excited everytime I saw it! Each solo duty had fun mechanics and felt like you actually had to learn them, and you really got to participate in the story. They felt like they were better as solo duties than dungeons.
@Naoto-kun1085 The only solo duty of Dawntrail that felt decent was the WoL duel. It was well paced and amusing. Each other solo duty felt like there was always something that we had to wait for to save us. I don't want to get too specific cause spoilers, but the autonomy and stakes of most DT solo duties irked me. For a summer vacation, the gameplay was lacking and what little we got didn't let us really come to play. I am glad that others enjoyed them though! Just felt disappointing for me.
4:48 That's fair point but there is a problem with that non the less: from the beginning of the story we are Cloud Strife of this game, we are Cecil and Noctis, we are the main character and that's what Final Fantasy games are about: a hero's jorney. If we no more the important hero of this story, who has connections with different characters in it, than Final Fantasy game just stops being itself, simple as that.
This is like the most valid criticism I can see. It’s jarring being the secondary character right? But I don’t have a problem with it I practice, I just think we were a too uninvolved with wuk lamats progression. Yes we nodded our heads here and there, but overall we were very much a silent mentor. I wished that it leaned more into us the WoL really helping shape wuk lamat into the dawnservant she needs to be. It’s hard with a silent protag sure, but maybe if we had more physical agency. Kind of like when we saved her. Give us more of those moments where we directly interact with xyz. Maybe wuk lamat is stumped at how to help someone in need, but she’s sees our wol already gearing up to do it. Maybe a collapse of a thing happens it’s through our strength that the entire building doesn’t crumble immediately, give wuk a reason to look up to us that we can see. How about her struggling and confiding to us, and we’re just their to listen and offer 5 branching conversation paths like with alisae in 3.4 I like the idea of a saged mentor but aside from us inputting our limited thoughts here and there, we really don’t seem like the vaunted hero who she is looking is up to as 😢
@verar2247 Well said. We are the hero, we have been the hero, and if we aren't anymore, we are playing an FF14 spinoff not FF. They've found many ways to reveal to us what our character is despite the fact we rarely speak and have created something unique in the world of narrative: A character who is quite tightly defined in general terms (Azem/Ardbert/Tenzin) while leaving us considerable freedom to fill in our own details. One could hardly do this in a novel. As for being "too powerful" that's not a problem - many of our important battles have included other people, and not everything we do involves mere "strength". Our gift is understanding the intentions of others (the Echo) and gathering those around us (Azem's crystal/Scions) who can help us put the pieces of the puzzle together. We forge alliances and we attact (and create) trouble, depending on whose side you are on. That's what makes the series so fun. Being an extra in someone else's movie is not fun.
Lol, wtf are you talking about ff games rarely focus on the main characters, but rather the main party, that's the main theme of the series, friendsip and teamwork not the main character. Cloud got over his PTSD because of tifa, cecil only managed to become a paladin so he could defen his loved ones better, squall opened up because rinoa kept egging him on, FFX isn't about tidus, bit mostly about yuna and the world of spira, tidus is just the wrench in the world. Reading comprehension is really bad with people these days i swear
@@guilhermecardoso2365 You should really go and replay Final Fantasy games right now and also read few articles of Final Fantasy writers talking about their own games, then: The party is connected with main character or main plot and so their stories, each and everyone of them has background and role to play and it leads to either equal importance like it was in FF3 and FF6 or directly connects them with protagonist whose role often is to be the story catalyst
I agree with Namazu that the MSQ was alright. The first two zone were world building and it was as good as expected. I felt like the 3rd zone was where the story really started to pick up. It was there that we got to know one of the antagonist and where the player gets to feel some emotion. I agree the 4th zone was strange because after the 3rd zone it then goes back to the world building of the first two zones. I agree that Luk Wamat was an okay character that I didn't mind having there...up to a point. After the 2nd trial I felt like she was done. If I had agency I would of said to her "time for you to go home and go back to work, the rest of this is my work". After the second trial it really should of hard focused on Krile and Eren. She was totally third wheeling it after 2nd trial
@@insertcognomen I think I am a rare Wuk enjoyer. For me she stayed around to see things through with her friends ya know. They also may have needed a tank for duties if you chose to run em with NPCs lol.
@@Oneofthecoments but raha is an all rounder...he does all 3. krile was a healer and now also dps. i'm not anti wuk. i enjoyed wuk but to certain point...that point being 2nd trial
I definitely feel the same! Even as a Wuk Lamat lover, I feel the writers were afraid to give other characters agency in the story. There is such thing as too much of a good thing!
It was a careless cash grab it felt like they the B team step in and just checklisted off EW parts redid them but worse also fuck Wuk Lamut most annoying character yet
I didn't mind WL, she got annoying sometimes but overall, I kind of liked being the "sidekick" in this expansion, but my biggest gripe so far is everything after Zoraal Ja felt dragged out and was honestly hella boring.
I don’t really have many complaints with the story tbh, I liked almost every character, both main villains hit (one very personally) and made sense, and the world was great. I really just don’t get the absolute vitriol online for an expansion that may have paled in comparison to SB and EW but overall was really good in my opinion. Honestly in my opinion it’s next to HW for me and I feel over time it’ll be more liked than it is currently. And I also do get a lot of it will be a vibe thing, especially coming off Endwalker but even then I didn’t really see the hoopla about it 😅
I don't get the hate either but I already know a lot of people disagree with me.Because I, for one, like Stormblood more than Heavensward, and like Dawntrail as much as Shadowbringers. Endwalker being my favorite expansion ever.
@@kyeda Wow, you sure do like talking to multiple people about how they're the ones lying.You really must be delusional, if you think everyone has to think the way you do
I feel like people exaggerate the story's flaws way too much and blow them out of proportion. While there are flaws, that doesn't nullify the good points of the story!
@@Naoto-kun1085 Good ideas not told well, don't end up being good points of a story... This story was not done well. It had potential, but it missed. Badly. It's the worst FF story I've ever sat through. And I've sat through almost all of them throughout Final Fantasy's existence...
Just to add on something I don't see people comenting, I really love the changes they made to the quests mechanics. I play with my boyfriend, and we could actually do almost all of the quests together in a party. Even the parts where we had to fight summoned monsters, where it used to appear one for each, in DT we shared the mobs, and one of us killing it would count for the other! The only exception for it were the solo duties, but that one is quite understandable
This is the second time we have been a somewhat of a mentor. First, was Lyse. Not its Wok Lmao. This side of writing was god fucking awful. Sadly to say the writer was bad in all aspects nothing in DT except one moment way late when someone meets 2 important people was actually good in this expansion for the writing. As a writer myself. This expansion was JUST above High School level writing. But BARELY. It was a disaster, and something that that writer should be put on side quests only. Or no longer writing for FF14 and put somewhere else or let go if thats what it takes. DT is simply the worst execution expansion, and idea so far in the game. Hate to say it, but we should and are forever the main character. And sorry to say but, it shows they fail to be able to deliver; Combat fun, Story fun, AND exploration fun unless we are the main character completely. ESPECIALLY the SHITTIEST cutscene in the game in the final trial.
having the scions there instead of introducing new character to accompany them felt like it was for one reason and one reason only..........the duty support. I'm no expert on character creations or such but i do imagine having to create new characters to replace existing ones not only for the story but to be the roles a player would sellect to do the dungeons with sounds like a ton of effort that they just didnt want to bother with
Also, where y'all are coming with this mentor character thing? This was never once implied, the trailers basically have us having fun and being the main character doing main character stuff with the adult scions, but here we are, babysitting a grown tiger woman and the child scions.
@@forte8227 that's what you get from trailers? Weird, because people I know, in my FC and hunt linkpearl, know that this expansion is about us helping Wuk Lamat be a dawnservant, with side quest of helping Krile. I don't know anyone who said this expansion is about having fun
Overall i thought it was decent, def felt like most of the scions were just afterthoughts. I can remember only seeing thancred like maybe 5x? I was excited to see that they were backing a rival during the event. It would have been awesome if they played into a friendly rivalry, and leaned more into like the race to the goal kind of thing. I know starting a whole story will be a slow start and im fine with that, i think w how they ended it theres hope. I didnt mind Wuk at all either, but overall i thought they had too much to try to broad stoke explain and it showed that the characters took a backseat in a way. That was disappointing. Overall im enjoying DT, dungeons felt fresh and fun, and the dol/doh stuff has been great and fun also. Hoping next patches will add to overall experience, rly excited abt the tournament raid series.
I so wanted to join Thancred and Urianger's side to be honest. I HATED being stuck with Wuk Lamat during that. And why did Estinien look like he was having more fun than I was?
**Light spoiler** I gave it all the chances until the final trial..when there is a forced cutscene in the fight just allowing the "main character" to come out of nowhere and monologue about the power of friendship..the writing took a major hit by losing the head writer
@@neobahumuth6 at least the other stories were well written with twists and real character arcs This was a cookie cutter childrens anime, and people are acting as if it should be praised like the others
@@ChoppedCheeese atm I'm criticizing your 0 IQ take if you really think the problem is power of friendship, like we literally had the first arc ending pretty much on that note. I do really hope you didn't like all the other expansions
I’ve noticed that the older generation of players had more trouble enjoying the story while the younger generation thought it was at most ok. I assume it has to do with experience, which makes me curious to know how if at all will the younger generation change in their opinion in five or ten years after they themselves have built their own experiences with story telling.
Don't want to lecture or monologue at length; lots of folks were caught off-guard by the delivery of the expansion's story and MSQ, but I would like to mention a thing or two (and please take it all with a grain of salt): It could have done a LOT worse for a vacation story where we were already taking the side-seat for someone else's saga and learning journey. It was a touch idealistic, but I had to remind myself that THIS Tural had already had its band of brave adventurers that brought forth the calm that we are now relaxing to. The story of Tural wasn't about us in terms of the Succession Rite; the story for our heroes and our WoL begins as soon as we begin the next adventure, and while this was more like a history lesson it was still an adventure and not all adventures are fraught with life-ending threats. I expect things will pick up moving forward, but we need to temper our expectations to that of an adventurer and enjoy the time we have been afforded with the departing of the Endsinger. There's still much to be uncovered and Tural was just a stepping stone for us, and while it hasn't been terribly exciting thus far, the game could do far worse like some of its counterparts (i.e. WoW, GW2, etc.) in terms of story, development, and things to do. This is all coming from someone whose father read Tolkien and C.S Lewis novels to her when she was a child, so my temperance may be a touch abnormal in comparison to many gamers, but I wanted to pitch in my thoughts on it. It wasn't an exciting expansion so far, but I appreciated its facets and flaws as a collective sum of a story simply being told and having us take the backseat for once. In retrospect I'm glad we're more casual in this MSQ because I wouldn't want to go leaping into the abyss without ALL of my friends there with me (no offense, Wuk, but I will NOT be taking that position as your personal chef. I'll just visit!).
People really should stop using " new story arc and it's a slow because of world building" argument couz it's fuckin stupid ... Every expansion had new zones, new characters and world building.. Wuk Lamat is consistent in being annoying and naive like a toddler. Having character growth consist of changing and being consistent in these changes unlike Wuk she constantly repeat. Being mentor is good and all but we were rly trash mentor with no agency and doing absolutely nothing while some insane shit happens and we could just snap our fingers and be done with it.. it's rly bad and boring story. No surprises no stakes at the trail. I could see think happen way before they do.. it was shit and ppl should stop defending that crap. I love the game and I want it to be good , I'm not hating it just because. The community is really allergic to a legit criticism, they are very quick to brand you as a hater or that u don't get the story like u are some dummy... Very toxic community... Credit where is due the music is awesome, beautiful zones good dungeons and trial.
The only toxicity I'm seeing are people who only have critical things to say but never once say anything positive. What's even the point of playing the game if you only complain about how much you hate it? I've never seen anyone brush aside legitimate criticism, in fact it's quite welcomed in the communuty. The community is not allergic to criticism, they're fed up with critics pushing their opinions on others and being jerks to people who enjoy the game.
@@Naoto-kun1085 On the contrary, I see people giving constructive criticism out of passion for a game they've enjoyed for years. I've been subbed 9 years this month. It's my favorite game, in my 44 years of breathing. I WANT the game to be the best that it can be. The MSQ and characters in Dawntrail were a real big step backwards compared to what we're use to. Even the Japanese players are mixed on it.
4th Zone was my favorite, because it was what I wanted more of as a vacation/adventure. And we had Erenville and not Wuk Lamat, it would have been the worst if Wuk Lamat was there and black holed herself into every cutscene.
@@XXLPIakat Wuk Lamat is the extrovert of extroverts, she is the kind that turns other extroverts into temporary introverts the expansion went too hard on forcing her into the role of the 'main character'
@@MasterLittica The thing is, there is a difference between Main Character and Protagonist. Stray and Hi Fi rush have a protagonist that is not the main character. The Main character is the character that the game is built upon, e.g. rythm fighting in hi fi rush or the mmo gameplay in FF14. The Protagonist can be many other characters. in FF14, in ARR Minfilia and the Scions were the protagonists, while we were just some hired guy. in HW Aymeric and Ysayle were the clear protagonists since they fought against the Church, while Alphinaud as a Scion opposed the Ascians. In Stormblood, Lyse was the protagonist for the Ala Mhigo part and Hien took over the role as protagonist during Doma, with the Garlean Empire being the Antagonist of both. Zenos is the reason why we became a Protagonist, since he was our antagonist. Shadowbringer had the Crystal Exarch and Minfilia as the protagonists with Vauthry and Emet-Selch as the Antagonists. Endwalker we were the protagonist against Zenos, but otherwise it was more of a Survival vs extinction story. Dawntrail has Wuk Lamat as a clear protagonist, but she is also forced into the role of the Main Character, hence why for the first hours you have 0 gameplay at all and you are just talking and walking and talking and walking.
FF14 fucked up "vacation" arc twice. First it was a treasure hunt in 6.1 and now with dawntrail. It seems like creative unit 3 can't handle a lower stakes story. BTW it's my comment so I would count sanctuary island as a 3rd fuckup, cause I was forced to be a manufacture manager instead of fun Stardew valley - like experience
Obviously the story is written around Lamaty'i but I feel like there isn't a point for the WoL to be there there were points where the WoL could like step in and do something especially where a specific someone unleashed a destroyer of worlds like oh were just going to ignore that because the monster is now dead.
I'm sorry, but Wuk Lamat is by all standarts a "Blackhole Sue" that overshadows everything else. Saying stuff that other characters were enjoyable while getting barely any screentime is very confuisng to me.
The expansion became immensely more enjoyable when I started skipping cutscenes around level 96. Great classic FFXIV gameplay and job design. Abysmal characters and story. Worse than ARR, worse than Stormblood, you name it.
Cant disagree. I think the content i really like as far as trials and dungeons and stuff and im excited to see the upcoming stuff in that way. But story... i wasnt so much about this time. Good, but not stb-ew
Speaking of dungeons, I queued into expert roulette and got the lvl 100 msq dungeon, and we wiped to the first boss 9 times because the healer just couldn't wrap their mind around the first mechanic. Was the first time since I started in SHB that we had to vote abandon in a dungeon.
I've been having moments like that while leveling all my other jobs but I try my best to explain or try to guide my party members through the new dungeon bosses. I've been having a blast with the new dungeons, I think it's really refreshing to have dungeons that actually have threatening bosses.
The plot would be fine on paper, but the moment to moment writing is reminiscent of an afternoon children’s cartoon. There’s no real depth beyond the power of friendship and all grit and seriousness is sacrificed either for the same superficial message that is repeated over and over again (friendship, mutual understanding, etc.) or some unfunny ”bit” or another. Wuk lamat would be fine if she had more noticeable character development, and even then she overstays her welcome at the second part of the MSQ. The tribal quests from ARR did a better job of showcasing of understanding between different cultures than this expansion. I was so hyped for this, and I could not be more disappointed after loving pretty much everything this game has had to offer (including ARR and SB)
Around 8:20: While there might be an issue with the quest structure of "interact with X three times, report" being old, in Dawntrail they didn't fill those moments with anything of substance. It really hit me in Zone 5 when were asked to find, specifically, 5 stones. And you pick those 5 stones and went back. It's such an inorganic request, with no added flavor to when you interact with the stones. It could have been a good moment to add descriptions for the places and things you found to set a mood, but they didn't, making it transparent filler. I respect and anticipate XIV to be a text-heavy game, but they didn't use text to their advantage where they could, which is a great letdown. I think a big part of why the there's so many wishes for more Solo duties or branching paths is that the questing felt so underwhelming that there's a much bigger crave for something different.
1. We were lied to about “political divisiveness among the cast.” Without going into spoilers, there was nothing intriguing about it and it was nonexistent. 2. Wuk Lamat was insufferable. Her personality, her voice, was all grating. I’m fine being a side character, but make the main character GOOD and someone I want to learn and support. That’s not even mentioning the.. “interesting” casting for the EN VA. I gave her the entire first half to become decent, and to no surprise, she remained bad. Towards the end I only had resentment towards her. The mentor angle would have been cool if they went with it. Story bad, cast bad, I could go on and on. we’ll see how it stages the next expansion but I’m past this one.
What really bothered me, is 90% of this story only worked because WoL was literally there watching a soap opera. It 100% wasn't our story, this was 40 ours of post expansion filler content.
I think I know what vocal song you speak of when it starts playing at a specific part of the story...it felt like one of my wifes corny reality tv shows whenever something dramatic happened *cue the song!*. That felt very cringey. Wuk Lamat is okay, but she did overstay her welcome at certain parts...and at times. I felt like the Scions were there only to be trusts, nothing more. But I will say this...good god they are way in love too much with walking escort quests....they are repetitive and soul draining.
I don't agree that we don't need to be a hero of the story. Dawntrail with Wuk Lamat is like Shadowbringers were Ryne would be the one sucking all the light from wardens it would suck. Wuk Lamat story should have ended with right of succession after she become dawnservant.
Wuk Lamat was fine in the first half. However, she overstayed her welcome. They should not have sent her to xak tural, that part of the story should have been for fleshing out Krile and Erenvile's stories. I feel like the writers (new leads? idk) didn't flesh things out and then were like "Oh btw, you should feel emotional here, even though we didn't build anything up". Like, they write Bakool Ja Ja as a cartoon villain, then after 1 or 2 random lines that are easy to miss they're suddenly like "actually he's just misunderstood"
He kidnaps the king's daughter and then later unleashes a massive threat from the past that could wipe out their people. And he doesn't even get a slap on the wrist.
I think it was fine that she was present in the second half, but I do think she should have taken a little more of a backseat since she has no knowledge of the other shards, interdimensional travel, ect. I think Bakool would have worked better if he didn't release Valigarmanda. That was unforgivable because of the sheer recklessness of it. They could have very easily have just made it so Valigarmanda escapes and Bakool just doesn't help. That is a significantly more forgivable thing than releasing a being that has caused devastating disasters to countless people and environments in the past. All the things he did prior to that were annoying but not unforgivable. If they wanted him to release Valigarmanda in order to show his desperation, he should not have been so smug about it, and on top of that, should have been booted from the competition after Valigarmanda was defeated by the WoL and Co. The plot beats with Bakool's village would have stayed nearly identical, and the only thing that would have needed to change was the trial prior because it was in teams. It'd just have to be individual and the top 2 dishes would get the keystone instead of the top team
There just really isn't any way for them to make the WoL have any actual impact in the story due to how the game exists. You literally *cannot* say or do anything that diverges the story, so every line of dialogue is just flavor text-one text box response-before moving on. The entire premise of being a 'mentor' is just dead on arrival because... what the hell could you really expect them to do? You have no agency in any part of the story; you're consistently along for the ride while everyone else does things-save combat instances. I have absolutely no idea why they even thought they could pull this kind of story off inside of the systems they're working under, and I feel it was a complete failure on their part for wasting an entire expansion on it when they had infinitely better things they could have been doing instead. Krile and Erenville were sitting RIGHT there, and they did borderline nothing with them throughout the entire story. Instead, we're 'treated' to witness Wuk Lamat acquiring basic-level knowledge about the villages that surround her home and have everyone else's character arcs get wrapped up in the final two zones.
Ima say this. I dont full agree with us not being the main character. I literally believe ppl forgot something important...that or like legit overlooked. Does anyone remember who we are and what we represent....if you say wol I will pvp you till u bleed out. No we embody something great something of a legacy...we are Azem. We embody those who came before us Azem Venat Emet Selch. The fact we are riding coat tail is doing them a disservice. Honestly I would have loved if we came here to honor that wish to explore, to connect, to continue to grow. Our story is far from over. Ppl straight up doing emet selch dirty and literally forgetting our legacy got me wondering....yall really skipped endwalker msq and think dawntrail was after shadow bringers...might make sense. Azem solo journey across the world. How come we can't do the same. Hell I would love if the Wol and Gra'ha went on a journey of discovery and adventure as a way to keep the promise we made in the 1st and to emet selch.
I spent the entire early access until Day 1 release to make it to the last feat. Looking back, I should have skipped all the scenes. They are totally unnecessary. Sad seeing how the Scions are degraded to be mere random NPCs.
I am dissapointed, tbh.... Female hrothgar is a mess. ( You cant create wuk lamat. The face is not available with the right colors ) And even thou female hrothgar came with dawntrail, there are barely any headpieces or hairstyles available. It feels like they did a half-a** job. Just like with viera. Additionally, the glam doesnt match the landscape in any way. I was hoping for more glam like what wuk lamat wears. Something beast-like. So far, i havent found anything remotely like this. Just the same old, same old...boring glam, no headpieces or hairstyles for fem. Hrothgar...
If you can't pinpoint just how Wuk Lamat grew, then that attests to the fact that she didn't have any character growth. Instead of saying "just watch the voiced cutscenes", it's incumbent upon you, the one disagreeing, to provide evidence that she had character growth. I did watch all the voiced cutscenes (I get invested in the story of RPGs), and I can attest to that she did not have any character growth. The closest she had (spoiler coming up) was simply learning that her father wanted her to learn the history of her people, which she was ignorant of. But that's not a development in her character, it's simply learning something she didn't know before. Nothing about her character changed based on that. I didn't like the character of Wuk Lamat at all. For one thing, she monopolized the vast majority of the time throughout the story. I understand this was basically Wuk Lamat's story, but we've gone for the base story and four expansions with the Scions. I would have preferred to spend more time with them, catching up with them, etc., rather than having to get stuck with this character I didn't even know and who had no real character to speak of (and you did touch on their lack of involvement in the story, too). Which leads me to my second point. Wuk Lamat was just boring. She had no real character, and she was incredibly naive, remaining incredibly naive until the very end because it's in line with the story Square Enix wanted to tell. But Wuk Lamat would be a terrible leader in real life and she'd be a terrible leader of her people if not for the fact that people who agree with her naivete are in charge of telling the story. A third point would be all the hand-holding they do throughout the story, rather than allowing you to draw conclusions and find answers yourself. Probably the most glraing example of this was in the last zone, during the quiz you have to take. Instead of letting you find the answers yourself, they literally tell you whether or not the answers match with what the tour guide said. That's not to say I thought the story was all bad. I liked that it at least started more grounded (although it led to world-ending stakes later on), and I liked many of the story elements, although there were definite boring parts. I also like that they pitted two of the Scions against you in the story, which even led to a fun moment in the first dungeon. So Dawntrail was a mixed bag, for me, probably leaning toward more of a disappointing experience.
I made it to Solution 9, got my new motorcycle and burned Disneyland (that was a huge waste of a really gorgious zone IMO). I Stopped after the first boss of the last dungeon. There just wasn't any motivation for any more of that level of irritation for me. This expansion will break a lot of casual players. While some will be all for it, they are the people who pay the bills. They won't post a TH-cam video. They won't post in the forums. They'll just cancel and leave.
It's funny because casual players the ones who are most enjoying it, it's the vocal minority who are annoying them away with their complaining. They won't make a TH-cam video or a forum post because they know they'll get blasted for saying anything remotely positive about the game.
4:48 the problem with this is that this DLC is supposed to not JUST WL journey, It SHOULD be our journey too! We dont have to be the main character, we are not the main character in HW and StB are we? It was Alphinaud+Estinien in HW and Lyse in StB, and yet I enjoyed those because WE'RE STILL PART OF THE STORY. In HW and StB our WoLs grow alongside the Main Protag of that expansion. All I want is for me to feel like my WoL is part of the story. In DT you can feel that the story could move on without you. You are not even the fifth important character in the story, you are a literal extra. You are a fly on the wall. Its literally the "Just Standing There Menacingly" DLC. I want to be a part of the story. The reason I loved FFXIV from HW to EW is because its not just our friend's journey its also our journey, with character growth both for our old friends and new friends along the way. This is not it, your are literally pushed to the side so much you might aswell be a shitstain on the wall. Not important but you make everyone uncomfortable enough by the virtue of your existence.
For my experience the MSQ story was great especially for the start of a brand new adventure, it just had a REALLY slow start but I really enjoyed it especially the new zones as well as trials and dungeons! But I'm also not picky at all when it comes to games.
Im glad people are saying what i was thinking. Im halfway through the story, and I'm like, where is the villain or plot twist. I honestly thought this expansion was going to be about swash buckling pirates and gods.
i simply had higher expectations for the story based on previous content, im totally disappointed wuk lamat is way too much of a lame, one dimensional character to take the spotlight for almost the entire MSQ idk if they could make her a more generic "power of friendship, i want everyone to be happy" character if they tried, its legit the only thing she talks about over and over and over she is the only character in the history of the game i hope vanishes and never appears again after shaaloani contributed nothing to the story, we had 2 zones to build the entire story of alexandria and wrap it up this expansion felt like doing beast tribe quests, then other random sidequests, then going to ishgard on lvl 57 and telling the entire heavensward story in the last 2 zones because the last 2 zones were the only remotely interesting parts of the story, you could skip the entire rite of succession story and miss nothing i wish they decided to completely cut wuk lamat and the rite of succession story, made us find the golden city earlier and focus more on alexandria
I was just upset that they ruined my power fantasy. MY character took a a back seat. I mean this whole story couldn’t have ended if they just let me body the bad guy instead of letting him walking off after he killed the father. Like dude what. Just killed the king and we just let him walk off
To be fair this sort of things happens all the time throughout the MSQ where the WoL just stands there and does nothing because the situation would be fixed otherwise, like when they let the Satrap get killed by a Blasphemy when you could've easily killed it yourself
This expansion, in general, felt like a big let down from the bar that FFXIV has set for itself ( story wise). Whatever interesting story hook it had came at the end, and was rushed over. Instead, for the first half of the expansion I was forced to suffer Wuk Lamar’s snooze fest of a quest to become Hokage. 😢
Is that why even the Japanese are even mixed on the MSQ? Is that why Wuk Lamat isn't even in the top 10 of favorite DT characters? Even losing to 3 of the Raid bosses?
I finished the MSQ on DRK and now I'm going back leveling VPR. Because, honestly, trying to tank the expert dungeons on a DRK is just too punishing to be fun for me.
If this was a world building expansion I gotta say, I can't wait to get the hell out of the world they built. The best part of the MSQ was the end of it, because I finally got rid of Wuk Lamat. PS what music were you listening to? This was EASILY the weakest soundtrack of any expansion in years. You do know stormblood is almost universally considered the worst expansion so far right?
Dawntrail story is trash. Gameplay is a pretty big upgrade. Considering the nature of FF14, that is a net loss. Wuk Lamat's poor VA work coupled with horrible writing is pretty unforgivable as well.
I wouldn’t have minded taking on a mentor role at all for this expansion, had the protege been a likable character who really didn’t just suck all the enjoyment out of every scene. Arenvald, Fordola, Jullius, the last surviving sibling from Werlyt- any one of those characters or knew a character who was as likable and engaging as they were and it would have been fine. But who we were forced into taking a back seat for is not a character that my WoL would ever tolerate or feel proud of training. We all know the exact moment in the last fight you are talking about. That is just insulting to our multi-expansion journey. The WoL was so repeatedly dismissed and made so unimportant that one final moment of glory for the player to enjoy gets ripped out of our hands by a monotone and emotionless war cry of passive indifference. Square had better grab the controls and pull up the nose really quick. Or they are gonna lose their hard earned audience for the rest of this expac. And I adored Stormblood from the second I started playing it. I hate Dawntrail as much as I hated Shadowbringers and that is saying something. I love this FF14 and I PAID for this expansion . I did not get the fun and touching experience that I was expecting. That sucked
I greatly appreciate the ending of this video! I feel like this has particularly become an issue for players who think the game is too hard. God forbid someone thinks the new content is difficult, they’ll INSTANTLY be labeled casual and assumed to be a garbage player with no intention of improving or anything. Even the friendliest people in my FC are comfortable now making jokes about casuals. Yet I SWEAR jokes like that in say ARR or Heavensward could possibly get you in trouble lol. And before yall jump on ME, I’m NOT saying the game is “too hard”. I do think it’s difficult, but that’s what makes it enjoyable when you finally master the mechanics. But it’s sooooo counter productive to just tell someone to “get good”. Idk if it’s just the new players, but I’m noticing a LOT of players more open to making fun of learning players. Basically gatekeeping. There’s just no reason to flat out bully someone because they’re struggling… it’s a VIDEO GAME lol
I keep seeing this idea of a mentor role being thrown around and it sounds terrible. The best parts of this game are all focused on your character and who they are. I want more of that not this baffling mentor idea, but if they did do it they need a far stronger mentee than Wuk
Not to be mean or anything but I think it should be pointed out that those instances of her not learning from things and reverting to previous characterizations and behaviors... Yea, that's how most people understand a lack of character growth. She is too simple and static of a character to dedicate this much of the story to imo. I personally disagree with zone 4 though. Doing a side mission with Erinvelle in Red Dead Fantasy XIV to ambush banditos by weaponizing pterodactyl shit was the most entertaining thing that happened in this expac for me. Even with the cringy American Accents. The story is.. a mess tbh. There's inconsistencies everywhere, plot holes you and drive a tractor through. It has pacing issues, it's boring in some parts, it's exposition heavy in too many places. It opens the doors to so many themes but quickly drops them. It tries to do too much and accomplishes almost nothing. I don't know why you like the culture tour in the beginning. All of them with the exception of the Mamool Ja and Troll guys the rest are some kind of stock-standard staple fantasy culture. The traders, crafters, farmers etc. One of them was so thin all we did for them was make tacos. I am glad the actual content is good zones/dungeon/ex/raids and we are slated to get a content to rival SB.
I think the last trial shows dawntrails core issue. ff14 has always been a power fantasy for the player. dawntrail feels like its a power fantasy for the writers.
The music is not as good as Shadowbringer or even EW. That track that plays after the team is repair is terrible. It is so far removed from FF music that it pulls you out of the narrative.
Given that this has become such a hot button subject please be respectful to each other, and remember people are allowed to have their own opinions whether it be the positive or negative towards the expansion. I would also ask that you be willing to listen and try to understand the other viewpoints being presented by people even if it may be counter to how you feel about Dawntrail.
Also because I keep seeing comments about it
Wuk Lamat begins the story as a naive, self-doubting, idealist who is constantly overcompensating because she compares herself to her kin.
Her Naivety is improved through the rite of succession as she begins the story as the candidate for the people only to learn that she knows very little about them, and in learning about her people she begins to see her own strengths and thus is able to forge her own path no longer comparing herself to brothers. Then after the rite she recognizes that her ideals are not infallible and the multiple different viewpoints are needed to truly succeed recognizing and accepting that she has weakness, and so she makes the decision to appoint Koana as her co-dawnservant to make up for what she lacks. Then after the invasion she resolves to kill Zuraal Ja rather than seeking a peaceful outcome as she recognizes that while she strives for peace it isn’t always an option.
If Wuk Lamat did not grow as a character then
1.) She would have taken the path the other took in trying to force their way through the tests rather than truly understanding them never addressing her naivety for the land she has pledged to lead
2.) She would have never gained confidence and continued to compare herself to her brothers
3.) She would have falling back into her idealism, never appointed Koana as her co-dawnservant and would have refuse to kill Zuraal Ja still believing there would be another way
Look I’m not saying it’s perfect, nor am I going to try and defend her overuse in the story. But to say she doesn’t grow is just false. She isn’t the same character at the beginning of the story as she is at the end.
Also because others have said I contradicted myself by saying she has growth but also character inconsistency. Both can be true at the same time. For a character, growth is what sets the new standard. Inconsistency, is a disruption of the standard and is most often used because the plot demands it.
Y’shtola has become obsessed with finding a way to travel between the shards, yet once presented with the key in Dawntrail she doesn’t say much beyond helping us. This is inconsistent with her character, but it doesn’t reflect negatively on her, but the story as the inconsistency exists to put her in it.
Wuk Lamat became a flawless character never to be questioned for her decisions. She gained everything we have achieved over multiple expansions.
We also had extremely very little battle content and im not just talking about dungeons.
I feel like the story had potential. It really did. But a lot of focus was put in the wrong areas, and not enough was given elsewhere. Wuk is a great example - there's nothing I felt was wrong with her character other than the writers stretching her out for far too much screen time. I don't want to see less of her because I don't like her. I want to see less of her because I genuinely believe she'd be a better character if she had more time off-screen so we could contrast her presence with how things are when she's not present. Not just Wuk, though. A lot of facets of DT feel that way to me.
Yeah. Even Emet Selch would have suck if he had been in to every f*cking cut scene and guest 😂😂🤣🤣
And by the end of MSQ, because she's been hamfisted into the all chapters of the story, you will surely grow to hate her.
I completely agree I loved her in first half of story and I still like her but omg was I super tired of her by the end. I actually am dreading her showing up in patches now 😢. They made me dislike her presence even though I like the character it’s wild 😅
I actually liked the 4th Zone for the reason that there is no Wuk Lamat.
Wait, you get a break from Wuk? I couldnt take anymore
@@leaf241We didn't even call her to warn about incoming.
Truly best zone.
And then they hamfist her back into the plot mid zone 4.
I really liked the Sheriff, and got humidity in my eyes when I realised the train team reference.
@@leaf241 Only for like half an hour if you doing msq very slow.
One top what most everyone else has said, one thing that really broke my immersion is that Wuk Lamat's voice actor seemed to have trouble emoting any time she had to yell with emotion. She's fine in normal conversation and even good in some sad moments, but every time she had to yell, it just comes out flat. Might be an issue with the voice direction, but either way, it actually took away hype towards the end of the MSQ for me. I don't think I've ever experienced this in previous expansions from one of the main cast.
It seems likely that it was a problem with voice direction since almost all characters had voice acting problems some more noticeable some less, Wuk Lamat is just the easiest to see cause shes the one with the most dialogues in the whole expansion
Preferred the Japanese voices, the west can't act anymore without it being pretentious.
@@feliph64What the hell is wrong with you?
@@feliph64Yon hormone understander hath logged onne
This is well observed. I liked Wuk and had no issues with her VA, but I did notice those "yells with emotion" being off, and just loud talking, rather than emotional or raw. When I think back on good VA, Otis and his delivery at the end when he asks if A--- still exist was the only moment I can recall being very impressed with the VA. Thanks for pointing this out.
I feel like they leaned so hard into rejuvenating the gameplay that they completely overlooked the quality of the story itself. The dungeons and trials were excellent, but getting to them is a slog through peak mediocrity.
What gameplay?
Further simplification of already braindead and disengaging jobs?
We lost Ishikawa, who is probably writing FFXVII. Honestly this will probably be the quality of story for the new few expansions.
Fortunately, I think the game as a whole will be fine despite this. There’s always a chance they build upon this new lore and make it better in retrospect like they did with other expansions.
@@JorgeM270what I overheard was in some interview she said she was busy rewriting the story. Square decided to give Ishikawa bigger positions and have young writers chance maybe she have the rough plot ok then young writers came up with bad ones so maybe Ishikawa could not fix (or she told young ones to rewrite and they failed bc she’s busy with (people speculate) ff17
Those aren’t the same team. The quality of one will have a little to no impact on the other.
I've seen so many people hating on Shaaloani, when my thoughts are like the exact opposite. I was happy that we were done with WL babysitting; I actually enjoyed her journey for the most part but I felt it should have been finished after the 95 dungeon. Shaaloani really felt like the only zone storyline that delivered on the promise of the "vacation experience" that we were given during previews. After Shaaloani, it's just more WL babysitting, this time with an extra helping of naivete, and with the added bonus of the WOL not really getting anything to do. There were so many points where I felt like "can I just fucking kill this guy/girl already? Please!" For the record, I actually still have really enjoyed the expansion. Just annoyed at the MSQ; the battle content and the dol/doh content has been amazing so far
If we end up getting a stormblood 2, where the msq is eh but the content is amazing, I will be extremely happy.
This is how I felt, the story up to that point relied heavily on plot armor and plot conviences.
Shaaloani and the characters we got felt stunted and squeezed by the pre and post parts of the area. I mean even some of the characters were a bit more interesting overall.
Soo true Shaaloani was really interesting. Maybe it’s because I liked Erenville as a character more than Wukki. We are hardly given an opportunity to connect with her at all other than being a side character. Also like you said, a break from doing… ‘fetch quests’ from Wuk and locals…
they gave us 1h free of wuk lamat comfy times with erenville and then it went bad again
I hope the second part is mainly Krile not Wuk Lamat but overall MSQ still okay. Role quest though, they just boring (granted, I only finished magic DPS, healer and melee DPS). SE really need to fix them
To sum up negatives you mention, it felt to me like they wanted to try to do new things with story and msq structure, but didn't commit to it enough to make it actually good. See the mentor role - it felt off because it was there, but wasn't too much of a focus; make it a central point of why WoL is even there, and you have something to build off of. Maybe they were scared of displeasing people that want to be main character of the story, but what we've got made everyone unhappy.
On topic of solo duties - I tend to treat msq like visual novel with some gameplay extras attached, and DT shift was very welcome: every solo duty was meaningful, fitting and good combat-wise; compared to Endwalker where half of the duties felt forced - pushing it gameplay for gameplay sake, when it could've been a cool cutscene instead. Having less duties that force you to play a different character was also a welcome challenge, I like comfort of playing my job(s) of choice, and being suddenly thrown on a butchered kit of something unfamiliar kills the pacing, since suddenly I spend few mintues reading tooltips and figuring out wtf I'm even doing.
Fourth zone issue - again, they didn't commit to it enough. This sort of "filler" can work as setup to let you know area and people there before some events that play off of that as payoff. And here, payoff was underwhelming - again, they tried, but there was too little to make it work. Shadowbringers did the same just before level 79 dungeon/trial, but in much larger scope and - overall - better. In fact, I wouldn't mind whole expansion being just aimless travel and dealing with local problems, to have last segment be high stakes backtracking and playing off of all the random work we put in.
About FATEs: they didnt cut out the amount of FATEs you need to clear before getting max rank on a zone, they just split it into 4 ranks instead of 3, same amount of FATEs.
It caps at rank 3 though. Unless if there is rank 0 when you start?
@@kagamine14 in Dawntrail the highest shared FATE rank is 4. EW and ShB max rank is 3.
@@manesium yeah but rank 4 is just the completion of rank 3 which is 20 fates less per zone (40 compared to 60 for rank 3).
1st half is okay for Wuk to be in the spotlight as we are there to help her in this quest of hers but the 2nd half should have been Wuk taking a step back and letting the scions lead the way to the unknown, as they got the experience in dealing with stuff like that.
Oh and Wuk interfering in the final boss fight was a dick move on her part. Don't steal our hero thunder!
Why do you care about hero thunder?l We can clearly beat anyone and everyone, so why does it matter.
@@cablefeed3738 because thats what a world saving hero does, saves the world.
Also its not a good idea to have an npc overshadow the player characters this much.
@@Nuinwing It's not overshadowing we're mentoring.
@@cablefeed3738 You didn't mentor jack at no point in the story do you teach anyone anything. And frankly the warrior of light is an adventurer, not Mary Poppins. You are only present in this story to clean up after Wuk Lamat and save her from herself.
@@cablefeed3738 bruh who did we mentor? We follower her around like a dog and nodded our head a couple times.
Honestly if moments where she should have grown are regressed it means she never really grew as a character.
I think what really annoyed me was wuk in the story she would just talk to much and at the end boss fight when we have a moment to show off how powerful and cool we are she just jumps in and gives the most cringey line so hopefully we see less of her
My pt was laughing so hard on the final fight. Like, WoL steam rolled and Wuk randomly jumps in and almost gets squashed like a bug. Lucky for her, her power of cringe is transcendent.
I’m about 5 hours in, haven’t even hit a dungeon yet. I’m not enjoying it at all so far.
I hate to say it mate, if you’re not enjoying it now, it will continue to slog. The final zone was pretty interesting at least, as well as the final dungeon. I’ll give it that much.
Probably the only time where I say if its not biting at you, then hit the escape button until you find something that peaks your interest.
maybe you should ask more locals
This is the first time in this game where I could understand cutscene skipping. I found this msq pretty boring and I found myself rolling my eyes at times because it was so tedious, repetitive, and overly simplistic in its storytelling.
First 5 hours was the worst. But now i have about 10+ hours, and i am enjoing it a lot actually. First trial was also great. Story is pretty average at the moment, but i have heard it gets better around lvl 95-96 or something. I hope lol. Ps. I love the new zones.
I think the first trial is absolutely AMAZING! As soon as I beat it with like 3 wipes, I immediately qued in 4 more times! And I still havent got to the second one yet lol. This expansion is Wild! And im not just talking bout the Wild West zone!!! 🤠
"I disagree with the idea that Wuk Lamat didnt undergo any character growth."
Proceeds to explain how Wuk Lamat didn't undergo character growth.
I noticed that too. You cannot "have growth" and "then revert back" and credibly claim some small net gain in change occurred. Real examples here would have helped this video, as 'she had growth' is contrary to what we all have in front of us, which is that Wuk is the same "lets talk it out and be friends" at the end as she was in the beginning.
Yeah I heard that too. Haha By the end he sounds like he understands that she did change but only marginally.
Being weak and then strong isn’t character growth though, specially because “peace” and “understand each other” was there from level 90 quests to level 100.
Her ideals and motivations were set in stone, and often to the detriment of the story and pacing.
I would've loved the train sequence to be a turret section. Hell, even if it was part of the level 96 dungeon, that would've been cooler than what we got. That being said, it was a cool scene to watch.
Yep that "Smile" vocal track Kills the mood of the ending, dont know what they were thinking
Yeah, like I don't hate the song(it's not my favorite of the vocal track), but it just felt out of place when it was used.
I disagree. And I disliked the msq. The smile song is so good.
@@Tom-Pendragon It's not a bad song, but the timings when they used it were off. Like the train mission, it ruined the vibes of how dire things were.
@@silentking3310 Yeah you end the story in a sad / bittersweet mood after shutting down living memory and then suddenly a happy song appears right after, I think it would be more impacful if they just kept a more neutral song towards the end.
Smile didnt fit any scene where it was injected and always took me out of the scene. Worst track in fF14.
Go play the L98 Solo Duty again, it's treated like Duty Support where it goes fast or slow regardless of your engagement, and will complete itself. They fake player agency, so I don't even feel good about them adding extra duties if they're just going to give me the unplugged little brother controller and fake my agency as a player.
It's not fun. It's incredibly insulting.
Really made me feel embarrassed playing that section lol, especially the big agency with civilians dying and then the fucking walls stopping progress, like there's better ways to handle this man, play the dialogue out as we run and separate the objectives more.
I never felt that, it's perhaps my favorite solo duty in the expansion, I really wanted to save everyone I could. It gives you back the amount of engagement you put in
@@Naoto-kun1085 then you fell for the fake gameplay in that duty.
The writing, pacing, and a lot of voice direction made this the first expansion I have actually looked forward to being over. Wuk Lamat as a character was fine. I rather liked her but the writers dropped the ball. The VA did great. I liked the voice and due to the extreme lack of agency the voice cast gets with line delivery direction, I don't blame anyone but the recording directors.
You can really feel the loss of Ishikawa here. To create a compelling and engaging character, a writer has to understand that this person did not just form from nothingness the day before. They are a person with experiences that they don't just remember but have learned from. There is a progression through life of lesson learned or hardship faced that informs decisions and colors how a character interacts to a given scenario.
In the past, characters would be presented to us as a point in the progression of their existence. They don't just exposit and list off all of the things they did in the past to tell you what they have done before, they act in your presence and slowly over time you learn how the types of actions they take have been shaped by the past that you then slowly uncover. A good character will encounter a scenario and the reader (in this case, player) can fairly accurately predict how that character will react to stimulus. In a way, you do feel like you know them because you know their logical progression.
The majority of DT characters are cardboard cutouts. They are two dimensional, their personality is right out in the open, no ambiguity. They want X. They came from Y. They are going to Z. This causes a lack of interest in supporting characters and a complete lack of emotional investment in them when something dramatic happens. I'm avoiding spoilers but there are two particular occurrences with two of the claimants that I could tell the writers thought were supposed to have emotional weight that had absolutely none.
At first I was glad to hear the writing team behind Werlyt was taking over but now I think the reality is, they were fine at a 3 segment trial series but didn't have the overall capability to handle an MSQ. I really hope 8.0 is better. It's really depressing that any real chance to salvage is two and a half years out.
To add onto your VA and poor voice direction. Spanish language is a very passionate filled language. Its very poetic and romantic from a linguistic standpoint. So when you're crafting a zone that takes heavy influence from Latin American-Southwest United States culture there has to be that passion point in the verbiage, that was completely absent from majority of the dialogue. It was sparsely shown and you can kind of tell there was a distinct cultural blind spot from the Japanese writers....Its a bit easy to blame localization but they are given the scripts to translate...and sometimes loss in translation can harm the product.
The Voice Acting can make or break enjoyment of the expansion and its not just Wuk's (although her forced fake Spanish accent is grating if not outright insulting) but everyone else is dispassionate.
@@grygaming5519 That's definitely true. Her accent actually sounded better in 6.55 than in a lot of the 7.0 MSQ.
I didn't have much of a problem with the rest from a tonal perspective except that everyone in Shaaloani sounded like I was in Fallout 3.
@@25xxfrostxx Apparently she's Puerto Rican....and honestly I could not hear that flare from her at all. Then given on top of the fact her vocal range is just not there. Some actors and actresses have better ranges for characters thus I fully argue that the fault lies at the feet of the director of Voice Acting.
Agreed her accent was more pronounced in 6.55 and disappeared for a Generic "this is what Spanish should sound like" accent. Its as if the director just slapped them down. I was also expecting a bit more of a slightly higher pitch range with a softer tone at least in my minds eye on how Wuk should sound. More vocalized and animated to their surroundings....but we didn't get as much of that being shown through the dialogue at all. Then where there was no need for it, that's when it showed up....so yes a big negative on the Director for the overall VA work.
Then again the biggest issue is Wuk overstaying her welcome and....the whole "no matter what crimes you can be forgiven" trope that Japan loves to use.
@@grygaming5519blud, whole yer tirade on a "direction" can be answered if you only compare english voiced scenes/subtitled and compared to what was actually said in original script (jp).
They royally fucked up translation of japanese script (in some parts even google translate could've made more sense) but also failed to localize properly (which lead to some logical problems, cause cutscene play along with jp script and eng translation just doesn't work)
@@Kairax Pretty much what I was getting at the direction was just overall garbage and its clear that as you said the translation team dropped the ball hard.
i vibe alot with this. i def see some of the issues in the story you bring up though in others just dont agree but thats how the convo should go. Def gonna be continuing the convo with a more positive lean while not being afraid to bring up issues (i also think some of the character use wasnt as clean and i do wish they poushed the mentor aspect fuirther) i like what we got but WANT more and thats such a fair ask
Yeah, something that I think people tend to forget is that people are different and will have different reactions and views on different things. I enjoyed the open part, but many others didn't. That doesn't make them wrong or me right it just means we enjoy different things.
There is one HUGE no-no sin that was commited in DT.
Golden rule "Show, don't tell" was brutally ravaged amd sent on a long journey.
Many interesting and important situations were "told" to us. Instead of shown. At least show echo being used, visual hints, nods/winks.
Nope X just happened, deal with it. (Oh and explanation of how and why we leaving to forums/patches/next expansion)
Something I find really, really funny/odd in DT is it's meant to celebrate indigenous people, but like... everyone to the south has a Hispanic accent i.e. after South America was conquered by the Spanish... And the north has a bunch of white cowboys with trains and guns, but they have native sounding names. So post colonization of North America. It has this really weird after taste when that sets in.
The main problem with the pacing at Shaaloani is expectation. You, the player, expect the story to continue since you're still not at level 100. That mean the story has to go on right? But your WoL has no idea. You're here to help WL become Dawnservant and that's it. Your business here is done. It's now adventuring time.
Think of Shaaloani as a fresh new adventure in Tural after your main business is done and it will make a lot more sense.
my biggest problem with shaaloani is that the story was clear from the first cutscene.
they went with the most common trope in the setting with no twist.
That grated me so much that i really hated the zone. It just felt lazy and like they needed filler and they went with the first thing that came up when you google wild west story.
If I wanted to be a background extra I'd play WoW
Good leave.
@@cablefeed3738 How about you leave instead.
@cablefeed have some self respect
Stop fighting, kids.
I said the same thing.
Been playing since Heavensward, I LOVE FFXIV as much as anyone else. Where every expansion had me watching all cut scenes, in literal tears with Stormblood and Endwalker, I found myself skipping scenes with no regret in Dawntrail. Just because we go to a "new" area doesn't mean we have bring on the basic bus stop fetch questing. It's truly exhausting and by now, the WOL who has literally saved the universe, should be tasked with a lot more relevant tasks than filler content. Wut Lamat is a character I was forced to be aware of through the story, and for the scenes I did stick around to watch, I eye rolled a lot. Bottom line, we are many expansions into FFXIV, and the development team needs to change the quest designs, they are too simplistic for a character that irl would say no, I won't help with that.
The WoL wouldn’t NOT help with that stuff but the Scions should be jumping on that, saying ‘no, you go do some buttkicking, we’ll take care of this.’
It's also not our job to insert new rulers. Regardless of what version of Azem we would be, we'd never do that.
You can be the main character of your story without being the main character of the world's story. The core issue (besides WL) is the story is not told from our perspective. It's told from WL's. Our story, *as the mentor*, is not told.
I think the point of the fourth zone was ultimately the duel. That sometimes, you can't talk things out, and the only way to resolve something is brute force (and this is called back by the wol before the final fight where we have the option to say "then let's resolve this" before we kick ass)
But just bc I see what they were trying to do thematically doesn't mean I think they did it well. For example. Wuq Lamat wasn't even there for that - so it had no bearing on her decision to fight her brother or Sphene. I think they should have dug further into the morality of that. Like. When is it okay to use force? How can you be sure you're right? I think it would have benefited from another duel where a character in the wrong wins to show the danger of that kind of method.
Either way they could have done a waaay better job tying it into the bigger themes.
On day 3 of early access I completed the msq. I will say there are points in this video I agree with such as it being a world building expansion and people needing to adjust expectations for that.
However like 90% of this video I heavily disagree with. Just because that expansion was a world building one doesn't mean it needed to be this terrible of a story or way of telling you its world.
I don't need a hour long fetch quest to understand that the traders like to trade. Also the amount of plot holes or straight up plot armor because reasons is insane this expansion.
Almost comically so.
Let's not forget the writers activity made characters with us more stupid in order for Wak to shine.
Alphi and Ali two people who are almost Archon level couldn't figure out what Than or Uri told Kona to do in one of the rites.
As for the gameplay design adding instance fights will never happen. We already had these back in STB and because there was two of them so close to one another it flat out almost crushed the front in of the expansion for days.
They told us years ago instance fights use the same system as the dungeons.
Putting to many in the msq would cripple the system at the launch of an expansion. This is an issue of the code of the game.
As for the difficulty being accepted that is entirely depends on the echo chamber you live in.
Even as a raider myself. Many of my own friends who only play msq and casual content have straight up quit the game before finishing even the second or first dungeons. Almost all of there reasons being they didn't ask sqaure to kick up the difficulty of the msq so why should they be made to have to suffer when it was the loud youtubers who did.
Most casual gamers will just leave the game. I believe yoshi p even has kinda a famous quote about this. The silent majority will just leave your game if they don't like it.
Let me tell you.
If I didn't enjoy anything about the msq. Somebody who has played since 1.0 and stuck with this game. Garentee the casual audience straight up left without a word, and that's not a good thing for the health of this game at all.
Need to start talking to players that aren't just on social media all the time.
I remember a casual girl from my FC that had difficult with that duela with venat in EW, I can't imagine her doing some bosses of this MSQ dungeons.
Yup, the world design itself should be able to tell a story. To force feed an obvious narrative into MSQ is beating a dead horse and incredibly insulting to the player.
Wait, dungeons are harder? Outside of first boss in iirc lvl 93 dungeon that had me confused with the ammount of ground aoe covering whole ground but going off gradually (like free other bosses so that's not new, just me briefly not paying attention where to stand) I found them... the same difficulty wise.
The story its shit, the amount of plot holes is insane, in one phrase this expansion is "conveniently made up bullshit". That's it.
Natsuko Ishikawa lead story designer for Shadowbringers and Endwalker did not write for this expansion. Instead one of the 2 MSQ writers was the person who wrote the Fairy Forest in Shadowbringers. I think this saids it all.
This was the first new story arch since a realm reborn. They really needed Ishikawa to kick start it imo. There really was no saving grace.
Endwalker had more plotholes m8.
can you care to elaborate said "plot holes"?
@fayte0618 we can't even properly target them. Translation is such ass, maybe some plot holes actually explained in original jp text script.
@@LordPlagus777 lol no it didnt XD
0:35 If we're being honest, then I think we know why, in your early impressions, the story was "brilliant" th-cam.com/video/Lj8PgLE-8QY/w-d-xo.html. You also say "...the characters, this is something Dawntrails had done, so far, a FANTASTIC job at. ALL the major characters, you know, the people that have significance, whether side or main, are all just FANTASTIC". The reality is that the dialogue is the same and without cutscenes or names, no one can identify who spoke what dialogue because they are all the same ad nauseum, and while this is early impressions, it raises the question of what game YOU were playing. The community split appears to come down to this: Some people are not heavy readers, and/or read at a Jr. High level, or even skip story entirely; and these people are more or less satisfied with DT. Some people are heavy readers, from 2 books a week to it being part of their profession/passion; and those people did not get a cohesive (or even consistent) narrative that FF14 has always prided itself on, lamenting the maturity that HW brought and ShB hit with a bullseye, and those people are more or less dissatisfied. I thought your first video was little more than shilling for SE, given the mountains of evidence to the contrary of what you claimed about those first impressions of story, esp given how far your footage shows you had to have progressed. In this video, I think you may hold a unique definition of character growth, its not 'simply knows more things' or "had to make new choices to new problems" but involves a change from the person in the beginning to the person at the end. I liked Wuk, despite her being oppressively in every aspect of the story, but she was the same "everything can be solved if we just talk it out cause we're all friends. I like peace" in the beginning as the end. The closest thing to growth was her building the resolve to kill her brother, and they pulled that out from her because it wasnt growth, but 'the only path' (Wuk would have talked it out if Zoraal Ja gave her any opportunity to) and even replaced the now missing big blue family member with a tiny blue family member. The situation with Sphene was the same, and she had less agency as Scions took over as the boots on the ground to deal with the new/old threat to the star and its reflections. Sources: I spoke to 3 residents about this.
I despise Wuk Lamat. I don't know if it's dialog or voice direction or VA ability, but she's nails on a chalkboard to me.
Apart from her, the MSQ started incredibly slowly and was a boring slog filled with a lot of filler.
There's a lot of bad VA in the expansion, Wuk Lamat was hardly the worst. I thought Gulool Ja Ja was a great character but the voice acting sounded very strange and made it hard to take an otherwise great character seriously.
She ruins a lot moments best part of dlc was when she wasn’t around and when the credits rolled
@@trignite I cant disagree more with gulool jaja. i think his VA was pretty much 10/10 the entire time.
The solo duties, while I enjoyed them, felt like they forgot that they had to put in solo duties and just put them somewhere. Only meaningful was the Bakool Ja Ja one imo.
"A lot lower" he says as the stakes are star wide genocide by a technologically superior culture who don't blink at slaughtering people to rip their souls for selfish reasons. I wanted a vacation arc where they set up stories for later while getting to know the new npcs and maybe future villians. Instead I get shadowbringers lite and another villain of the week I care nothing about.
One of my few gripes of DT is this. Second city is great, but it definitely would have been better held off until 98 or post patches. Though probably would have been rushed.
You’re absolutely on point with this take; at least for me.
SPOILERS
1.she didnt grow as a character.. at all. she was all about peace and happines but even when faced with the notion that alexandria and sphene literaly did not want that at all and only cared for her people and where going to KILL everyone on the source, STILL she didnt get that, maybe, just maybe peace is just not an option when meet with such an enemy. she still wanted peace and sphen STILL UNTIL THE VERY END she didnt want to have peace... like.. hello?
2. we never where the main character. ever.
3. they robbed krilles story and erenvilles. wuk lmat should have been less in the story, we should have gone to the new world with krille and erenville an dwuk lamat should have stay in the new world.
She did grow as a character, but I think a lot of people don't really get imposter syndrome as a concept. She didn't have a 180 worldview shift, she had flaws she got over but she was still mostly the same. That doesn't mean there isn't character growth, I just think people aren't clicking with it, which is valid. Trying time and again to achieve peace until the last minute isn't a flaw, and she was still willing to end the threat with violence when necessary. Erenville and Krille's plot where just kinda where it was because their plot is kinda all there. Their arc is literally about reconciling the past and letting go, and that's ghost time.
As for us being "not the main character", literally everything that happens is because we get stuff done. It's kinda hard to make a voiceless character a central focus in plot when they're also supposed to be cardboard cutout self inserts for the player. Almost every other expansion was mostly other people doing the main plot driving with us doing stuff until really just the tail end of Shadowbringers, where it's still the scions just saying what we're all thinking. This is about normal.
Having consistent values doesn't mean you can't grow as a person though? Yes she wants peace and happiness for others, those are her core values. But there's more to a person than just their morals. Most characters in FF14 have morals that they follow, even the WoL doesn't change their core values to protect what they hold dearest and save as many people as they can.
@@Naoto-kun1085 I'm convinced that a bunch of people just wanted another Zenos to stan with about killing for the thrill of it. WL and DT as a whole represent a negation of that and they're not happy.
I wholeheartedly disagree that the solo duties of this expansion were better than EW. Many felt contrived or that you were waiting for the planned moment to rescue you. (Looks at the Solution Nine duty with annoyance.)
The Thancred Stealth operation and the Body-Swap duties still stand out as pillars of great solo duties.
As someone that did not enjoy the Thancred solo operation, I think they did a lot better with these solo duties. I often feel like solo duties are used just for the sake of adding in gameplay instead of having a dungeon. Normally I groan when I see the solo duty glow aura, but in Dawntrail I got excited everytime I saw it! Each solo duty had fun mechanics and felt like you actually had to learn them, and you really got to participate in the story. They felt like they were better as solo duties than dungeons.
@Naoto-kun1085 The only solo duty of Dawntrail that felt decent was the WoL duel. It was well paced and amusing. Each other solo duty felt like there was always something that we had to wait for to save us. I don't want to get too specific cause spoilers, but the autonomy and stakes of most DT solo duties irked me. For a summer vacation, the gameplay was lacking and what little we got didn't let us really come to play. I am glad that others enjoyed them though! Just felt disappointing for me.
Yawntrail is more like it. Im trying to hold out judgment until the patches, but this was a straight up slog.
The worst part of Dawntrail was that it had to end, I would've been glad to "slog" through it for many more hours!
@@Naoto-kun1085 Half of the players would unsub if that were the case.
Why have better MSQ when you can be lazy and do the same old fetch and people will put up with it.
4:48 That's fair point but there is a problem with that non the less: from the beginning of the story we are Cloud Strife of this game, we are Cecil and Noctis, we are the main character and that's what Final Fantasy games are about: a hero's jorney. If we no more the important hero of this story, who has connections with different characters in it, than Final Fantasy game just stops being itself, simple as that.
This is like the most valid criticism I can see. It’s jarring being the secondary character right? But I don’t have a problem with it I practice, I just think we were a too uninvolved with wuk lamats progression. Yes we nodded our heads here and there, but overall we were very much a silent mentor. I wished that it leaned more into us the WoL really helping shape wuk lamat into the dawnservant she needs to be.
It’s hard with a silent protag sure, but maybe if we had more physical agency. Kind of like when we saved her. Give us more of those moments where we directly interact with xyz. Maybe wuk lamat is stumped at how to help someone in need, but she’s sees our wol already gearing up to do it. Maybe a collapse of a thing happens it’s through our strength that the entire building doesn’t crumble immediately, give wuk a reason to look up to us that we can see. How about her struggling and confiding to us, and we’re just their to listen and offer 5 branching conversation paths like with alisae in 3.4
I like the idea of a saged mentor but aside from us inputting our limited thoughts here and there, we really don’t seem like the vaunted hero who she is looking is up to as 😢
@verar2247 Well said. We are the hero, we have been the hero, and if we aren't anymore, we are playing an FF14 spinoff not FF. They've found many ways to reveal to us what our character is despite the fact we rarely speak and have created something unique in the world of narrative: A character who is quite tightly defined in general terms (Azem/Ardbert/Tenzin) while leaving us considerable freedom to fill in our own details. One could hardly do this in a novel. As for being "too powerful" that's not a problem - many of our important battles have included other people, and not everything we do involves mere "strength". Our gift is understanding the intentions of others (the Echo) and gathering those around us (Azem's crystal/Scions) who can help us put the pieces of the puzzle together. We forge alliances and we attact (and create) trouble, depending on whose side you are on. That's what makes the series so fun. Being an extra in someone else's movie is not fun.
Lol, wtf are you talking about ff games rarely focus on the main characters, but rather the main party, that's the main theme of the series, friendsip and teamwork not the main character.
Cloud got over his PTSD because of tifa, cecil only managed to become a paladin so he could defen his loved ones better, squall opened up because rinoa kept egging him on, FFX isn't about tidus, bit mostly about yuna and the world of spira, tidus is just the wrench in the world.
Reading comprehension is really bad with people these days i swear
@@guilhermecardoso2365 You should really go and replay Final Fantasy games right now and also read few articles of Final Fantasy writers talking about their own games, then: The party is connected with main character or main plot and so their stories, each and everyone of them has background and role to play and it leads to either equal importance like it was in FF3 and FF6 or directly connects them with protagonist whose role often is to be the story catalyst
@@guilhermecardoso2365 Yeah you clearly haven't played enough FF games..
I agree with Namazu that the MSQ was alright. The first two zone were world building and it was as good as expected. I felt like the 3rd zone was where the story really started to pick up. It was there that we got to know one of the antagonist and where the player gets to feel some emotion. I agree the 4th zone was strange because after the 3rd zone it then goes back to the world building of the first two zones.
I agree that Luk Wamat was an okay character that I didn't mind having there...up to a point. After the 2nd trial I felt like she was done. If I had agency I would of said to her "time for you to go home and go back to work, the rest of this is my work". After the second trial it really should of hard focused on Krile and Eren. She was totally third wheeling it after 2nd trial
@@insertcognomen I think I am a rare Wuk enjoyer. For me she stayed around to see things through with her friends ya know. They also may have needed a tank for duties if you chose to run em with NPCs lol.
@@Oneofthecoments but raha is an all rounder...he does all 3. krile was a healer and now also dps. i'm not anti wuk. i enjoyed wuk but to certain point...that point being 2nd trial
I definitely feel the same! Even as a Wuk Lamat lover, I feel the writers were afraid to give other characters agency in the story. There is such thing as too much of a good thing!
It was a careless cash grab it felt like they the B team step in and just checklisted off EW parts redid them but worse also fuck Wuk Lamut most annoying character yet
I didn't mind WL, she got annoying sometimes but overall, I kind of liked being the "sidekick" in this expansion, but my biggest gripe so far is everything after Zoraal Ja felt dragged out and was honestly hella boring.
I don’t really have many complaints with the story tbh, I liked almost every character, both main villains hit (one very personally) and made sense, and the world was great. I really just don’t get the absolute vitriol online for an expansion that may have paled in comparison to SB and EW but overall was really good in my opinion. Honestly in my opinion it’s next to HW for me and I feel over time it’ll be more liked than it is currently. And I also do get a lot of it will be a vibe thing, especially coming off Endwalker but even then I didn’t really see the hoopla about it 😅
I don't get the hate either but I already know a lot of people disagree with me.Because I, for one, like Stormblood more than Heavensward, and like Dawntrail as much as Shadowbringers. Endwalker being my favorite expansion ever.
@@kyeda Wow, you sure do like talking to multiple people about how they're the ones lying.You really must be delusional, if you think everyone has to think the way you do
I feel like people exaggerate the story's flaws way too much and blow them out of proportion. While there are flaws, that doesn't nullify the good points of the story!
@@Naoto-kun1085 Good ideas not told well, don't end up being good points of a story... This story was not done well. It had potential, but it missed. Badly. It's the worst FF story I've ever sat through. And I've sat through almost all of them throughout Final Fantasy's existence...
Just to add on something I don't see people comenting, I really love the changes they made to the quests mechanics. I play with my boyfriend, and we could actually do almost all of the quests together in a party. Even the parts where we had to fight summoned monsters, where it used to appear one for each, in DT we shared the mobs, and one of us killing it would count for the other! The only exception for it were the solo duties, but that one is quite understandable
The lack of voice acting is a BIG complaint for the game, many scenes would have benefitted from voiced delivery.
This is the second time we have been a somewhat of a mentor. First, was Lyse. Not its Wok Lmao. This side of writing was god fucking awful. Sadly to say the writer was bad in all aspects nothing in DT except one moment way late when someone meets 2 important people was actually good in this expansion for the writing. As a writer myself. This expansion was JUST above High School level writing. But BARELY. It was a disaster, and something that that writer should be put on side quests only. Or no longer writing for FF14 and put somewhere else or let go if thats what it takes. DT is simply the worst execution expansion, and idea so far in the game. Hate to say it, but we should and are forever the main character.
And sorry to say but, it shows they fail to be able to deliver; Combat fun, Story fun, AND exploration fun unless we are the main character completely. ESPECIALLY the SHITTIEST cutscene in the game in the final trial.
I am just hoping now we have the world building out the way the patches will be more exciting
having the scions there instead of introducing new character to accompany them felt like it was for one reason and one reason only..........the duty support. I'm no expert on character creations or such but i do imagine having to create new characters to replace existing ones not only for the story but to be the roles a player would sellect to do the dungeons with sounds like a ton of effort that they just didnt want to bother with
Dawntrail? More like Wuk's trail lmao. This is the Wukage's of Light world now, we're just living in it.
Also, where y'all are coming with this mentor character thing? This was never once implied, the trailers basically have us having fun and being the main character doing main character stuff with the adult scions, but here we are, babysitting a grown tiger woman and the child scions.
@@forte8227 ppl that have a little of media literacy are coming up with that, something you seem to lack
@@neobahumuth6 lmao imagine trying to defend this Saturday morning cartoon show with elitism. JFC 🤦♂️
@@ChoppedCheeese No, I'm fully aware of the praises and faults of all XIV's stories, something ppl have really problems to do
@@forte8227 that's what you get from trailers? Weird, because people I know, in my FC and hunt linkpearl, know that this expansion is about us helping Wuk Lamat be a dawnservant, with side quest of helping Krile. I don't know anyone who said this expansion is about having fun
Overall i thought it was decent, def felt like most of the scions were just afterthoughts. I can remember only seeing thancred like maybe 5x? I was excited to see that they were backing a rival during the event. It would have been awesome if they played into a friendly rivalry, and leaned more into like the race to the goal kind of thing.
I know starting a whole story will be a slow start and im fine with that, i think w how they ended it theres hope. I didnt mind Wuk at all either, but overall i thought they had too much to try to broad stoke explain and it showed that the characters took a backseat in a way. That was disappointing. Overall im enjoying DT, dungeons felt fresh and fun, and the dol/doh stuff has been great and fun also. Hoping next patches will add to overall experience, rly excited abt the tournament raid series.
I so wanted to join Thancred and Urianger's side to be honest. I HATED being stuck with Wuk Lamat during that. And why did Estinien look like he was having more fun than I was?
@@JustinStrife bc he prob was having more fun lol
**Light spoiler**
I gave it all the chances until the final trial..when there is a forced cutscene in the fight just allowing the "main character" to come out of nowhere and monologue about the power of friendship..the writing took a major hit by losing the head writer
to me looks like you haven't seen any of the other stories if you have gripes with power of friendship
@@neobahumuth6 at least the other stories were well written with twists and real character arcs
This was a cookie cutter childrens anime, and people are acting as if it should be praised like the others
@@ChoppedCheeese all the other stories had glaring problems too
@@neobahumuth6 so go back to those analysis topics and call it out. What does it have to do with criticism of dawntrail (the topic)
@@ChoppedCheeese atm I'm criticizing your 0 IQ take if you really think the problem is power of friendship, like we literally had the first arc ending pretty much on that note. I do really hope you didn't like all the other expansions
Let's sacrifice Wuk to the Big One, yes yes?
I’ve noticed that the older generation of players had more trouble enjoying the story while the younger generation thought it was at most ok.
I assume it has to do with experience, which makes me curious to know how if at all will the younger generation change in their opinion in five or ten years after they themselves have built their own experiences with story telling.
Don't want to lecture or monologue at length; lots of folks were caught off-guard by the delivery of the expansion's story and MSQ, but I would like to mention a thing or two (and please take it all with a grain of salt):
It could have done a LOT worse for a vacation story where we were already taking the side-seat for someone else's saga and learning journey. It was a touch idealistic, but I had to remind myself that THIS Tural had already had its band of brave adventurers that brought forth the calm that we are now relaxing to. The story of Tural wasn't about us in terms of the Succession Rite; the story for our heroes and our WoL begins as soon as we begin the next adventure, and while this was more like a history lesson it was still an adventure and not all adventures are fraught with life-ending threats.
I expect things will pick up moving forward, but we need to temper our expectations to that of an adventurer and enjoy the time we have been afforded with the departing of the Endsinger. There's still much to be uncovered and Tural was just a stepping stone for us, and while it hasn't been terribly exciting thus far, the game could do far worse like some of its counterparts (i.e. WoW, GW2, etc.) in terms of story, development, and things to do.
This is all coming from someone whose father read Tolkien and C.S Lewis novels to her when she was a child, so my temperance may be a touch abnormal in comparison to many gamers, but I wanted to pitch in my thoughts on it. It wasn't an exciting expansion so far, but I appreciated its facets and flaws as a collective sum of a story simply being told and having us take the backseat for once. In retrospect I'm glad we're more casual in this MSQ because I wouldn't want to go leaping into the abyss without ALL of my friends there with me (no offense, Wuk, but I will NOT be taking that position as your personal chef. I'll just visit!).
People really should stop using " new story arc and it's a slow because of world building" argument couz it's fuckin stupid ... Every expansion had new zones, new characters and world building.. Wuk Lamat is consistent in being annoying and naive like a toddler. Having character growth consist of changing and being consistent in these changes unlike Wuk she constantly repeat. Being mentor is good and all but we were rly trash mentor with no agency and doing absolutely nothing while some insane shit happens and we could just snap our fingers and be done with it.. it's rly bad and boring story. No surprises no stakes at the trail. I could see think happen way before they do.. it was shit and ppl should stop defending that crap. I love the game and I want it to be good , I'm not hating it just because. The community is really allergic to a legit criticism, they are very quick to brand you as a hater or that u don't get the story like u are some dummy... Very toxic community... Credit where is due the music is awesome, beautiful zones good dungeons and trial.
The only toxicity I'm seeing are people who only have critical things to say but never once say anything positive. What's even the point of playing the game if you only complain about how much you hate it? I've never seen anyone brush aside legitimate criticism, in fact it's quite welcomed in the communuty. The community is not allergic to criticism, they're fed up with critics pushing their opinions on others and being jerks to people who enjoy the game.
@@Naoto-kun1085 On the contrary, I see people giving constructive criticism out of passion for a game they've enjoyed for years. I've been subbed 9 years this month. It's my favorite game, in my 44 years of breathing. I WANT the game to be the best that it can be. The MSQ and characters in Dawntrail were a real big step backwards compared to what we're use to. Even the Japanese players are mixed on it.
4th Zone was my favorite, because it was what I wanted more of as a vacation/adventure.
And we had Erenville and not Wuk Lamat, it would have been the worst if Wuk Lamat was there and black holed herself into every cutscene.
She was there in spirit with the stupid bangle side quest
This hate of her is stupid.
@@cablefeed3738 I don't hate Wuk Lamat I liked her initially, but I'm tired of her and I don't care about her at all anymore.
@@XXLPIakat Wuk Lamat is the extrovert of extroverts, she is the kind that turns other extroverts into temporary introverts the expansion went too hard on forcing her into the role of the 'main character'
@@MasterLittica The thing is, there is a difference between Main Character and Protagonist. Stray and Hi Fi rush have a protagonist that is not the main character.
The Main character is the character that the game is built upon, e.g. rythm fighting in hi fi rush or the mmo gameplay in FF14.
The Protagonist can be many other characters.
in FF14, in ARR Minfilia and the Scions were the protagonists, while we were just some hired guy.
in HW Aymeric and Ysayle were the clear protagonists since they fought against the Church, while Alphinaud as a Scion opposed the Ascians.
In Stormblood, Lyse was the protagonist for the Ala Mhigo part and Hien took over the role as protagonist during Doma, with the Garlean Empire being the Antagonist of both.
Zenos is the reason why we became a Protagonist, since he was our antagonist.
Shadowbringer had the Crystal Exarch and Minfilia as the protagonists with Vauthry and Emet-Selch as the Antagonists.
Endwalker we were the protagonist against Zenos, but otherwise it was more of a Survival vs extinction story.
Dawntrail has Wuk Lamat as a clear protagonist, but she is also forced into the role of the Main Character, hence why for the first hours you have 0 gameplay at all and you are just talking and walking and talking and walking.
FF14 fucked up "vacation" arc twice. First it was a treasure hunt in 6.1 and now with dawntrail. It seems like creative unit 3 can't handle a lower stakes story. BTW it's my comment so I would count sanctuary island as a 3rd fuckup, cause I was forced to be a manufacture manager instead of fun Stardew valley - like experience
Obviously the story is written around Lamaty'i but I feel like there isn't a point for the WoL to be there there were points where the WoL could like step in and do something especially where a specific someone unleashed a destroyer of worlds like oh were just going to ignore that because the monster is now dead.
I'm sorry, but Wuk Lamat is by all standarts a "Blackhole Sue" that overshadows everything else.
Saying stuff that other characters were enjoyable while getting barely any screentime is very confuisng to me.
He contradicts himself quite regularly.
The expansion became immensely more enjoyable when I started skipping cutscenes around level 96.
Great classic FFXIV gameplay and job design. Abysmal characters and story. Worse than ARR, worse than Stormblood, you name it.
That 4th zone was a huge slog
@@CrowRider-md9mu Every zone was a huge slog.
I started playing in October 2021 and never skipped a single cutscene but this expansion fucking broke me I also started skipping at lvl 96.
Story skippers actually won.
If you leave only gameplay , this expansion may be one of the best.
Cant disagree. I think the content i really like as far as trials and dungeons and stuff and im excited to see the upcoming stuff in that way. But story... i wasnt so much about this time. Good, but not stb-ew
Speaking of dungeons, I queued into expert roulette and got the lvl 100 msq dungeon, and we wiped to the first boss 9 times because the healer just couldn't wrap their mind around the first mechanic. Was the first time since I started in SHB that we had to vote abandon in a dungeon.
I've been having moments like that while leveling all my other jobs but I try my best to explain or try to guide my party members through the new dungeon bosses. I've been having a blast with the new dungeons, I think it's really refreshing to have dungeons that actually have threatening bosses.
Be kind
@@saladv3028 I had that exact same experience..maybe you were the other DPS or the tank. I ran out of mp to do damage because of all the revives
@@XrayDVD just stating a fact, didn't attack anyone.
@@ChoppedCheeese I was a ninja. The healer kept dying and the other dps wasn't doing so well either. So we kept walling to restart the fight.
The plot would be fine on paper, but the moment to moment writing is reminiscent of an afternoon children’s cartoon. There’s no real depth beyond the power of friendship and all grit and seriousness is sacrificed either for the same superficial message that is repeated over and over again (friendship, mutual understanding, etc.) or some unfunny ”bit” or another. Wuk lamat would be fine if she had more noticeable character development, and even then she overstays her welcome at the second part of the MSQ. The tribal quests from ARR did a better job of showcasing of understanding between different cultures than this expansion. I was so hyped for this, and I could not be more disappointed after loving pretty much everything this game has had to offer (including ARR and SB)
Imagine rpg players wanting to not be a side character to a 5/10 child character..how dare they
Around 8:20: While there might be an issue with the quest structure of "interact with X three times, report" being old, in Dawntrail they didn't fill those moments with anything of substance. It really hit me in Zone 5 when were asked to find, specifically, 5 stones. And you pick those 5 stones and went back. It's such an inorganic request, with no added flavor to when you interact with the stones. It could have been a good moment to add descriptions for the places and things you found to set a mood, but they didn't, making it transparent filler. I respect and anticipate XIV to be a text-heavy game, but they didn't use text to their advantage where they could, which is a great letdown. I think a big part of why the there's so many wishes for more Solo duties or branching paths is that the questing felt so underwhelming that there's a much bigger crave for something different.
1. We were lied to about “political divisiveness among the cast.” Without going into spoilers, there was nothing intriguing about it and it was nonexistent.
2. Wuk Lamat was insufferable. Her personality, her voice, was all grating. I’m fine being a side character, but make the main character GOOD and someone I want to learn and support. That’s not even mentioning the.. “interesting” casting for the EN VA. I gave her the entire first half to become decent, and to no surprise, she remained bad. Towards the end I only had resentment towards her. The mentor angle would have been cool if they went with it.
Story bad, cast bad, I could go on and on. we’ll see how it stages the next expansion but I’m past this one.
What really bothered me, is 90% of this story only worked because WoL was literally there watching a soap opera.
It 100% wasn't our story, this was 40 ours of post expansion filler content.
I think I know what vocal song you speak of when it starts playing at a specific part of the story...it felt like one of my wifes corny reality tv shows whenever something dramatic happened *cue the song!*. That felt very cringey.
Wuk Lamat is okay, but she did overstay her welcome at certain parts...and at times. I felt like the Scions were there only to be trusts, nothing more.
But I will say this...good god they are way in love too much with walking escort quests....they are repetitive and soul draining.
I don't agree that we don't need to be a hero of the story. Dawntrail with Wuk Lamat is like Shadowbringers were Ryne would be the one sucking all the light from wardens it would suck. Wuk Lamat story should have ended with right of succession after she become dawnservant.
The only point I'll have to disagree with is the music, specifically zone music. Imo it's the worst of all expansions
Final endwalker zone was just too good, final dawntrail zone doesn't even sound like it has music half the time.
I have to disagree, the zone music is the best out of all expansions
Wuk Lamat was fine in the first half. However, she overstayed her welcome.
They should not have sent her to xak tural, that part of the story should have been for fleshing out Krile and Erenvile's stories.
I feel like the writers (new leads? idk) didn't flesh things out and then were like "Oh btw, you should feel emotional here, even though we didn't build anything up".
Like, they write Bakool Ja Ja as a cartoon villain, then after 1 or 2 random lines that are easy to miss they're suddenly like "actually he's just misunderstood"
He kidnaps the king's daughter and then later unleashes a massive threat from the past that could wipe out their people. And he doesn't even get a slap on the wrist.
I think it was fine that she was present in the second half, but I do think she should have taken a little more of a backseat since she has no knowledge of the other shards, interdimensional travel, ect. I think Bakool would have worked better if he didn't release Valigarmanda. That was unforgivable because of the sheer recklessness of it. They could have very easily have just made it so Valigarmanda escapes and Bakool just doesn't help. That is a significantly more forgivable thing than releasing a being that has caused devastating disasters to countless people and environments in the past. All the things he did prior to that were annoying but not unforgivable. If they wanted him to release Valigarmanda in order to show his desperation, he should not have been so smug about it, and on top of that, should have been booted from the competition after Valigarmanda was defeated by the WoL and Co. The plot beats with Bakool's village would have stayed nearly identical, and the only thing that would have needed to change was the trial prior because it was in teams. It'd just have to be individual and the top 2 dishes would get the keystone instead of the top team
I hate solo instances; I want to play with my friends. Screw balancing of them, I just want to be with my friends.
Wuk lamat is terrible
There just really isn't any way for them to make the WoL have any actual impact in the story due to how the game exists. You literally *cannot* say or do anything that diverges the story, so every line of dialogue is just flavor text-one text box response-before moving on. The entire premise of being a 'mentor' is just dead on arrival because... what the hell could you really expect them to do? You have no agency in any part of the story; you're consistently along for the ride while everyone else does things-save combat instances. I have absolutely no idea why they even thought they could pull this kind of story off inside of the systems they're working under, and I feel it was a complete failure on their part for wasting an entire expansion on it when they had infinitely better things they could have been doing instead. Krile and Erenville were sitting RIGHT there, and they did borderline nothing with them throughout the entire story. Instead, we're 'treated' to witness Wuk Lamat acquiring basic-level knowledge about the villages that surround her home and have everyone else's character arcs get wrapped up in the final two zones.
2 solo instances I wish this expansion had:
WoL vs Urianger & Thancred
WoL (loosing) vs the First Promise
Those would've been awesome!
We weren't going to lose to the First Promise unless we were handicapped.
I really wanted to resub to play this expansion. But the thought of having to slog through some BS story is just not selling me
The dungeons, trials and raids are excellent. The people defending the story and WL though are on serious levels of copium.
Ima say this. I dont full agree with us not being the main character. I literally believe ppl forgot something important...that or like legit overlooked. Does anyone remember who we are and what we represent....if you say wol I will pvp you till u bleed out. No we embody something great something of a legacy...we are Azem. We embody those who came before us Azem Venat Emet Selch. The fact we are riding coat tail is doing them a disservice. Honestly I would have loved if we came here to honor that wish to explore, to connect, to continue to grow. Our story is far from over. Ppl straight up doing emet selch dirty and literally forgetting our legacy got me wondering....yall really skipped endwalker msq and think dawntrail was after shadow bringers...might make sense. Azem solo journey across the world. How come we can't do the same. Hell I would love if the Wol and Gra'ha went on a journey of discovery and adventure as a way to keep the promise we made in the 1st and to emet selch.
I spent the entire early access until Day 1 release to make it to the last feat. Looking back, I should have skipped all the scenes. They are totally unnecessary.
Sad seeing how the Scions are degraded to be mere random NPCs.
I am dissapointed, tbh....
Female hrothgar is a mess. ( You cant create wuk lamat. The face is not available with the right colors )
And even thou female hrothgar came with dawntrail, there are barely any headpieces or hairstyles available. It feels like they did a half-a** job. Just like with viera.
Additionally, the glam doesnt match the landscape in any way.
I was hoping for more glam like what wuk lamat wears.
Something beast-like.
So far, i havent found anything remotely like this. Just the same old, same old...boring glam, no headpieces or hairstyles for fem. Hrothgar...
If you can't pinpoint just how Wuk Lamat grew, then that attests to the fact that she didn't have any character growth. Instead of saying "just watch the voiced cutscenes", it's incumbent upon you, the one disagreeing, to provide evidence that she had character growth. I did watch all the voiced cutscenes (I get invested in the story of RPGs), and I can attest to that she did not have any character growth. The closest she had (spoiler coming up) was simply learning that her father wanted her to learn the history of her people, which she was ignorant of. But that's not a development in her character, it's simply learning something she didn't know before. Nothing about her character changed based on that.
I didn't like the character of Wuk Lamat at all. For one thing, she monopolized the vast majority of the time throughout the story. I understand this was basically Wuk Lamat's story, but we've gone for the base story and four expansions with the Scions. I would have preferred to spend more time with them, catching up with them, etc., rather than having to get stuck with this character I didn't even know and who had no real character to speak of (and you did touch on their lack of involvement in the story, too). Which leads me to my second point. Wuk Lamat was just boring. She had no real character, and she was incredibly naive, remaining incredibly naive until the very end because it's in line with the story Square Enix wanted to tell. But Wuk Lamat would be a terrible leader in real life and she'd be a terrible leader of her people if not for the fact that people who agree with her naivete are in charge of telling the story. A third point would be all the hand-holding they do throughout the story, rather than allowing you to draw conclusions and find answers yourself. Probably the most glraing example of this was in the last zone, during the quiz you have to take. Instead of letting you find the answers yourself, they literally tell you whether or not the answers match with what the tour guide said.
That's not to say I thought the story was all bad. I liked that it at least started more grounded (although it led to world-ending stakes later on), and I liked many of the story elements, although there were definite boring parts. I also like that they pitted two of the Scions against you in the story, which even led to a fun moment in the first dungeon. So Dawntrail was a mixed bag, for me, probably leaning toward more of a disappointing experience.
I made it to Solution 9, got my new motorcycle and burned Disneyland (that was a huge waste of a really gorgious zone IMO). I Stopped after the first boss of the last dungeon. There just wasn't any motivation for any more of that level of irritation for me.
This expansion will break a lot of casual players. While some will be all for it, they are the people who pay the bills. They won't post a TH-cam video. They won't post in the forums. They'll just cancel and leave.
It's funny because casual players the ones who are most enjoying it, it's the vocal minority who are annoying them away with their complaining. They won't make a TH-cam video or a forum post because they know they'll get blasted for saying anything remotely positive about the game.
4:48 the problem with this is that this DLC is supposed to not JUST WL journey, It SHOULD be our journey too! We dont have to be the main character, we are not the main character in HW and StB are we? It was Alphinaud+Estinien in HW and Lyse in StB, and yet I enjoyed those because WE'RE STILL PART OF THE STORY. In HW and StB our WoLs grow alongside the Main Protag of that expansion. All I want is for me to feel like my WoL is part of the story. In DT you can feel that the story could move on without you. You are not even the fifth important character in the story, you are a literal extra. You are a fly on the wall. Its literally the "Just Standing There Menacingly" DLC.
I want to be a part of the story. The reason I loved FFXIV from HW to EW is because its not just our friend's journey its also our journey, with character growth both for our old friends and new friends along the way. This is not it, your are literally pushed to the side so much you might aswell be a shitstain on the wall. Not important but you make everyone uncomfortable enough by the virtue of your existence.
Gurgle gurgle~
For my experience the MSQ story was great especially for the start of a brand new adventure, it just had a REALLY slow start but I really enjoyed it especially the new zones as well as trials and dungeons! But I'm also not picky at all when it comes to games.
I love how this guy says zone
Im glad people are saying what i was thinking. Im halfway through the story, and I'm like, where is the villain or plot twist. I honestly thought this expansion was going to be about swash buckling pirates and gods.
😭😭😭 don't remind me of what could have been instead
i simply had higher expectations for the story based on previous content, im totally disappointed
wuk lamat is way too much of a lame, one dimensional character to take the spotlight for almost the entire MSQ
idk if they could make her a more generic "power of friendship, i want everyone to be happy" character if they tried, its legit the only thing she talks about over and over and over
she is the only character in the history of the game i hope vanishes and never appears again
after shaaloani contributed nothing to the story, we had 2 zones to build the entire story of alexandria and wrap it up
this expansion felt like doing beast tribe quests, then other random sidequests, then going to ishgard on lvl 57 and telling the entire heavensward story in the last 2 zones
because the last 2 zones were the only remotely interesting parts of the story, you could skip the entire rite of succession story and miss nothing
i wish they decided to completely cut wuk lamat and the rite of succession story, made us find the golden city earlier and focus more on alexandria
I was just upset that they ruined my power fantasy. MY character took a a back seat. I mean this whole story couldn’t have ended if they just let me body the bad guy instead of letting him walking off after he killed the father. Like dude what. Just killed the king and we just let him walk off
It’s crazy to me that Shadow of the Erdtree treated you more as a main character than this expansion.
To be fair this sort of things happens all the time throughout the MSQ where the WoL just stands there and does nothing because the situation would be fixed otherwise, like when they let the Satrap get killed by a Blasphemy when you could've easily killed it yourself
This expansion, in general, felt like a big let down from the bar that FFXIV has set for itself ( story wise).
Whatever interesting story hook it had came at the end, and was rushed over. Instead, for the first half of the expansion I was forced to suffer Wuk Lamar’s snooze fest of a quest to become Hokage. 😢
I love Dawntrail, but I wish the vocal minority would not drown out the voices of the positive feedback!
Is that why even the Japanese are even mixed on the MSQ? Is that why Wuk Lamat isn't even in the top 10 of favorite DT characters? Even losing to 3 of the Raid bosses?
i'm hoping there's no, or very little, Wuk Lamat in 7.XX MSQ content.
I finished the MSQ on DRK and now I'm going back leveling VPR. Because, honestly, trying to tank the expert dungeons on a DRK is just too punishing to be fun for me.
..... I literally did all of them on DRK today, blind even. It is fine. Do your duty queues and gear up a little may help.
If this was a world building expansion I gotta say, I can't wait to get the hell out of the world they built. The best part of the MSQ was the end of it, because I finally got rid of Wuk Lamat. PS what music were you listening to? This was EASILY the weakest soundtrack of any expansion in years. You do know stormblood is almost universally considered the worst expansion so far right?
DT surpassed Stormblood for worst expansion in terms of story. And I agree. Most of the music in DT was bad.
Dawntrail story is trash. Gameplay is a pretty big upgrade. Considering the nature of FF14, that is a net loss.
Wuk Lamat's poor VA work coupled with horrible writing is pretty unforgivable as well.
I wouldn’t have minded taking on a mentor role at all for this expansion, had the protege been a likable character who really didn’t just suck all the enjoyment out of every scene.
Arenvald, Fordola, Jullius, the last surviving sibling from Werlyt- any one of those characters or knew a character who was as likable and engaging as they were and it would have been fine.
But who we were forced into taking a back seat for is not a character that my WoL would ever tolerate or feel proud of training.
We all know the exact moment in the last fight you are talking about. That is just insulting to our multi-expansion journey. The WoL was so repeatedly dismissed and made so unimportant that one final moment of glory for the player to enjoy gets ripped out of our hands by a monotone and emotionless war cry of passive indifference.
Square had better grab the controls and pull up the nose really quick. Or they are gonna lose their hard earned audience for the rest of this expac.
And I adored Stormblood from the second I started playing it. I hate Dawntrail as much as I hated Shadowbringers and that is saying something. I love this FF14 and I PAID for this expansion . I did not get the fun and touching experience that I was expecting. That sucked
I greatly appreciate the ending of this video! I feel like this has particularly become an issue for players who think the game is too hard.
God forbid someone thinks the new content is difficult, they’ll INSTANTLY be labeled casual and assumed to be a garbage player with no intention of improving or anything.
Even the friendliest people in my FC are comfortable now making jokes about casuals. Yet I SWEAR jokes like that in say ARR or Heavensward could possibly get you in trouble lol.
And before yall jump on ME, I’m NOT saying the game is “too hard”. I do think it’s difficult, but that’s what makes it enjoyable when you finally master the mechanics.
But it’s sooooo counter productive to just tell someone to “get good”.
Idk if it’s just the new players, but I’m noticing a LOT of players more open to making fun of learning players. Basically gatekeeping. There’s just no reason to flat out bully someone because they’re struggling… it’s a VIDEO GAME lol
I keep seeing this idea of a mentor role being thrown around and it sounds terrible. The best parts of this game are all focused on your character and who they are. I want more of that not this baffling mentor idea, but if they did do it they need a far stronger mentee than Wuk
Not to be mean or anything but I think it should be pointed out that those instances of her not learning from things and reverting to previous characterizations and behaviors... Yea, that's how most people understand a lack of character growth. She is too simple and static of a character to dedicate this much of the story to imo.
I personally disagree with zone 4 though. Doing a side mission with Erinvelle in Red Dead Fantasy XIV to ambush banditos by weaponizing pterodactyl shit was the most entertaining thing that happened in this expac for me. Even with the cringy American Accents.
The story is.. a mess tbh. There's inconsistencies everywhere, plot holes you and drive a tractor through. It has pacing issues, it's boring in some parts, it's exposition heavy in too many places. It opens the doors to so many themes but quickly drops them. It tries to do too much and accomplishes almost nothing. I don't know why you like the culture tour in the beginning. All of them with the exception of the Mamool Ja and Troll guys the rest are some kind of stock-standard staple fantasy culture. The traders, crafters, farmers etc. One of them was so thin all we did for them was make tacos.
I am glad the actual content is good zones/dungeon/ex/raids and we are slated to get a content to rival SB.
I think the last trial shows dawntrails core issue.
ff14 has always been a power fantasy for the player. dawntrail feels like its a power fantasy for the writers.
The music is not as good as Shadowbringer or even EW. That track that plays after the team is repair is terrible. It is so far removed from FF music that it pulls you out of the narrative.
I’ve skipped cutscenes for the first time ever in ff14. I didn’t even do that in ARR
Same here.