Venting Grievance #1: Dawntrail's Plot & Writing

Last year, some days after I had finished Final Fantasy XVI, I was so taken with my feelings about it that I had to finally write up and dump out a screed about all of the problems I had with it. I just had it to get it out there because it was just stewing in me - a Devil May Cry-like Final Fantasy, with a key staff member of DMC V on hand and the overall project headed up by CBU3 (now CSU3 in the recent Square Enix internal shuffling) of FFXIV fame, it seemed laser-focused at me personally. And then it failed to live up to any of that in any way.

Dawntrail is the newly released expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, the CSU3-made MMORPG that has run for 10 years, and while it's nowhere near as bad as XVI was (in fact, I would argue that gameplay-wise, this is the strongest the main story quest ("MSQ") has been - the best main dungeons, the best main trials), it has a lot of issues. The ones that are eating at me the most are issues with the story and writing, some admittedly petty or personal and some quite significant - it's not the worst-written that XIV has ever been on the whole (specific parts of ARR, more of Heavensward than people would care to admit and quite a fair bit of Stormblood rank lower, particularly the patches of HW and SB) but some parts of it do go right down there with those.

Hell, in fact, I would say that Dawntrail's moment-to-moment dialogue and writing, its patter, is probably actually the worst it's ever been. Let's start with that, actually.

Spoilers, by the way.

 Shut The Fuck Up, Everyone

 

The dialogue in Dawntrail was such that by the end, I kind of began to hate all of the Scions.

Having thrown that out there like I just fastballed a brick through a window, let me elaborate.

To start, Dawntrail in general has a significant issue with repetition, but it is most glaring with the dialogue, especially the longer the expansion goes on. From about the midpoint on (the 95-96 quests, so around when you get to Zone 4) it kicks into high gear and everyone keeps repeating the same lines, the same phrases and the same ideas over and over and over again. Wuk Lamat is a particular victim of this; people say it's simply a case of her being a shounen manga protagonist, i.e. a red-blooded high-spirited earnest ball of energy with a simple good-and-just worldview who has some screed about friendship or peace to fall back on. And to that I say: read better shounen.

I mean you aren't seeing that shit in Undead Unluck or Sousou no Frieren (yes, that's a shounen, it runs in a shounen magazine!), let me tell you.

I actually quite adored Wuk Lamat in the first half of Dawntrail, she's putting on a tough and assured facade to cover for the fact that she's pretty sheltered and doesn't know much about her homeland, or the world or people. There is a strong will in there, there is an earnest desire to meet people and befriend them and learn about them, she has a real zest for exploration and the people of Tural, she's just also a baby about transportation, has a Goku-like appetite and one-track mind and has deeply entrenched insecurity over feeling inferior to her brothers, who have significant accomplishments and (to her, anyway) worldly experience. Your character basically serves as her mentor as much as her hired muscle, watching over her path through the rite of succession basically in her father's stead (he has to hold some level of neutrality, after all - not much, mind, as halfway through he makes it clear he favours her as the best suited to succeed him) and that's a real good dynamic - you, after all, are actually Goku, you are so strong that your sheer power actively radiates off of you (it's commented on by many NPCs throughout Dawntrail, you get clocked as being tiers above everyone else immediately by several people - doubly hilarious as a short cat girl, I imagine triply so if you're a Lalafell), nothing can threaten you reasonably any more. 

At the midpoint, the rite of succession for Tural's throne ends with her as the victor, and from then on she demonstrates some level of developed maturity from her journey...and with it, she loses a lot of her quirkiness, her charm and her spontaneity and starts repeating the same canned lines over and over. She keeps repeating that she wants to meet the people of Solution Nine, she wants to get to know them, she wants to work together; she keeps telling the people of Tural, her family, you, anyone around that apart we are weak and together we are strong, unity is key, we must be united, I learned from everyone's cultures our history and that unity is strength, when we work together we are unstoppable, we are all Tural's people and are all Turali and we will work together. And she says this like every few quests, or it certainly feels that way, especially as she keeps repeating to Queen Sphene in the latter half that she wants to get to know her, to help her, to come to a compromise because she wants to get to know her and her people and work together so they can come to a compromise etc etc

And I basically began getting sick of her because it was always, always the same shit with very little if any divergence, no matter who she was speaking to or why. And I repeat: if you're going "well that's just shounen manga protagonist speak", read more and better shounen. The writers just either didn't know what to do with her, somehow, or phoned it in or just didn't think people would get it.

Wuk Lamat is far, far from the only perpetrator, though, it's basically fucking everyone. I lost track of the amount of times in the second half of the game where Krile and Alphinaud, appropos of basically nothing decide the only thing to say is to reiterate that Zoraal Ja is a threat to the whole world and thus this is Scion duty, and then they re-re-re-re-pledge their commitment to staying here and seeing this through with Wuk Lamat. It almost makes me believe that for whatever reason, they kept thinking about just turning and leaving and letting this go, and like, why? Were you guys thinking of running? Were you looking for some way to say it isn't part of the Scions' remit and tagging out? Do you guys need an officiated reason categorised as right and proper, on forms signed in triplicate, to stay here and stop the otherworldly cybertech army and its genocidal lizard king? Is that how you were operating on all our past journeys? I was there to do the right thing and help people and add ever grander things to my kill list, what were you guys doing?

We disbanded the Scions "officially" (as in, to outside eyes) at the end of Endwalker specifically to slip out of being hounded "officially", which I thought meant we didn't have to give a shit about any 'professional standard' or 'official remit', so why does it keep coming up? Why do you do this like three or four times in the second half of the game?

A lot of the repeats of exact phrases and words are partially predicated on the quest design of this expansion being pretty lacklustre. The actual dungeons and trials and combat scenarios are all great, but the moment-to-moment quests are often a bit piss - at every stop on the rite of succession, there comes a point where you're told "we need more information" verbatim or "We have too little information" verbatim, followed by "Let's divide into two groups", "Let's split up into groups of two" or some variation thereof, always in this order and way, and then always you go and talk to three or four people, only one of whom will provide the information you need and the others will provide nothing. And if you find the person with the info first, you still have to talk to the others and be told dick-all.

This rote layout continues into Heritage Found, Solution Nine and Living Memory, and I get that it's meant to be a mirror of the rite of succession half of the game, of Wuk Lamat (and you) meeting new people and learning of their culture, ways and circumstances, but also the total lack of deviation in the format makes it really glaring and sloppy and the repetition of the format at every single settlement - it gets super piss-taking in Living Memory where you do this four times in the zone - really grinds me down. And it's always "We must get to know them", "We need more information", "We don't have enough information", Wuk Lamat then talks about trust or unity or getting to know people and learn about them, everyone nods, splits into teams, and repeat.

There's quite a bit of reiterating things you can plainly observe with your eyeballs, also from the Scions. Zoraal Ja reveals technology that not only resurrects him after a fatal blow but also activates an empowered rage-beast mode that lets him overpower his incredibly strong father, but it's only after we go to Heritage Found and get a demonstration of that same technology by a random hunter on a random monster that the Scions go "This makes Zoraal Ja a threat to all the world, not just Tural" and also do the re-pledge assistance thing. And, like, he turned up with two separate fleets of giant aerial warships, on par with if not superior to the Garlean military's, that act as carriers for aerial assault brigades, descended on Tural and waged war across its streets, killing soldiers and civilians alike with nigh-impunity before killing the former king uncontested and declaring his intent to annihilate Tural before moving on to the rest of the world.

And it's only now that you get a second demo of the tech he used that you feel like saying aloud that he's a threat to the world? And you needed to say that aloud? He wasn't a threat before that?

Also about the soul harvesting technology of Solution Nine, it works like the actual cycle of life and death in the setting: when people die, their souls re-enter the Lifestream, are gradually shorn of memory and cycle back into a living body after some time. Solution Nine has an artificial version of this where harvested souls are shorn of memories, those memories collected and preserved separately, and the soul is dumped into a cell to be used as energy or as a 1-up for living people. Its similarity to the Lifestream, whose exact workings were explained at length at least twice in Endwalker, is pretty obvious and one of the Scions even comments so.

Then some hours and quests later, when it's re-described again for some fucking reason to a room full of people who should already know how it works, G'raha Tia goes "It's just like the Lifestream...".

Like, yes, hello, nice of you to join us, G'raha, I'm glad you finally fucking caught up.

I mean for fuck's sake, in Heritage Found you see someone immediately and totally forget the entire existence of someone who just died and who he was totally concerned about just seconds ago, and despite this being immediately clear and even being said aloud and also everyone here is wearing these fucking glowing white discs on their heads that clearly fuck with people because we saw Zoraal Ja use the same one to self-resurrect and go beast mode it lit up and played a cheery jingle in a silent room and took like 10 seconds to work we need to split up, talk to three people to find out three times that no-one remembers the lady who just died and that memories of the dead get sucked out so no-one feels sad or thinks about death, and then we need to re-convene, put our heads together and figure this out and then have it explicitly told to us, again, shortly after.

After fucking clearly seeing it happen and observing it happen and being told it happens.

Can you see why I'm annoyed with the cast after this story?

If You've Seen One

 

So, a criticism I have of Endwalker as a whole, complete unit with its full patch content included is that it leaves the world of Final Fantasy XIV feeling "solved". Which is to say, there are basically no mysteries left, there is no mystique left, there is nothing left to do and basically everything has a dry, clinical and often scientific explanation somewhere. This is something Endwalker's post-release content specifically set out to do - the alliance raid series finally answers the question of "Who are The Twelve?", Eorzea's nation-states' gods who have been suspiciously absent since their apparent intervention during the onslaught of Bahamut in the backstory of A Realm Reborn, for example. It provides its answers pretty directly, makes up excuses for why they couldn't do anything (or rather, wouldn't) recently and then promptly resolves them to a permanent end and leaves a device behind that just dumps prayer energy back into the planet. That's it, that's Eorzea's religion done and over with, it never really mattered and like 98% of the rest of the game world, it was The Ancients, again.

Even the raid series got in on this by remembering to bring up The Heart of Sabik, a throwaway name brought up by Lahabrea in the final sequence of ARR that never mattered again (it was the object containing the spell Ultima, nestled at the heart of the Ultima Weapon), just to make sure even that tiny loose end was tied up and tucked away.

If it's not The Ancients, it's The Allagans, who were also made by The Ancients (Emet-Selch apparently got bored and decided to play a nation-building grand strategy game with the world, something he did again with the Garlean Empire); any bit of vaguely technological or unexplained thing is usually traced to the Allagans, and they got fucking everywhere, literally everywhere. They actually make a crack about this in Dawntrail, the moment a bit of old but advanced tech appears Alisaie goes "It's the Allgans again, isn't it?", which is a legitimately good joke. It may also yet turn out to be true, but we'll see where 8.0 takes us in that regard.

Primals? Solved. Tempering? Solved. The Allagans? Explained in every possible way - their reach, their technology, their origin, their emperor, their cloning and more. The Garleans? Solved. The Twelve? Solved. The Void, also known as the Thirteenth? Solved. The First? Solved. Zodiark? Solved. Hydaelyn? Solved. The Ascians? Solved. The Final Days? Solved. All that's fine if you end at Endwalker, but we're continuing past Endwalker.

And the writers apparently don't have shit left.

Dawntrail is supposed to introduce a whole new set of things, a whole bounty of things to see and do and set the stage for the next grand arc of Final Fantasy XIV, and by the end it too mostly felt solved and like there wasn't much else to do or see. Yes, each of the cultures new to us that we see are interesting and fun, but the Hanu Hanu and Moblins are mostly the same as the Vanu Vanu and Goblins that we know, and also we solve the only problems they have as part of the rite of succession. Stick a pin in the Hanu in particular, we'll come back to them. The Pelupelu are fun, but they don't have much going on in terms of what we can see and interact with - we have no and cannot provide any insight into merchant business nor can we really glean much from it to come away with beyond that doing good clean business is culturally critical to them.

The rite of succession is basically just a whistlestop edutainment tour for Wuk Lamat so you don't really get that much meaningful time or insight into most of the populaces you pass.

The Yok Huy have a pretty active problem, they keep watch over the sealed tural vidraal Valigarmanda, and by the end of their section we have gutted Valigarmanda like a fish (it's just what the WOL does) so they don't need to do that any more. There is a rogue faction of Yok Huy who long for the days when their people were the ruling conquerers of Tural, but they're pretty insignificant and outside of one truly foolish attempt to step to you to interrupt the rite of succession, they just stay in their corner. They aren't tempered, they're just Tories. That's it for the Yok Huy - put a pin in tural vidraals, we'll come back to those.

Likewise, Mamook and the Mamool Ja who live there have a pretty significant and active problem of their rulership bending the entire village towards facilitating eugenicist breeding to produce super-soldier children to take the throne of Tural and ensure Mamook's supremacy, but this whole aspect just kind of fades away with a nebulous reckoning for the current leader after you destroy his beloved phantasm of the current Dawnservant, previous child supersoldier Gulool Ja. The amount of premature child deaths that have to be moved through before a two-headed Mamool Ja is born is enough to litter the bed of a lake outside the town, but we never see any active reckoning or any true form of making the town's ruler answer and atone for his crimes, they just say that he will and he stops being a pest.

That was all in service of acquiring better land to live on, incidentally, which, put a pin in that too.

The latter plotline feels like it really could've made up the 7.1-7.3 post-release patch plotline if they needed it to, but it's compressed to fit the Lv94-early 95 quest section and just doesn't come up again despite the, you know, significant trauma and emotional damage spanning apparent generations of the people of Mamook as this was an institution they've been reliant on long enough to produce Bakool Ja, fourth entrant in the rite of succession, and raise him to adulthood. An entire underground lakebed of dead babies, and not much is made of it after all's said and done. It's Solved, go away, Bakool's a good boy now and his dad isn't being an active dick and you're having plants shipped in from Sharlayan to grow in the meteorite-tainted forest so they don't need to leave it.

No, that one coming back up in the patch cycle later won't change my feelings about it. We skip past that entirely and basically resolve the whole thing, anything more will intrinsically feel like cleanup where we just apply a bit of schmooze to facilitate the emotional healing. Not that we necessarily need to kill somebody or something, but like, it makes Tural feel a bit cheap, doesn't it?

All of this, incidentally, is Yok Tural, the southern half of Tural. The entire rite of succession and appointing a new Dawnservant doesn't involve Xak Tural, the north, at all, despite them also being part of Tural and apparently ruled from Tuliyollal. You'd think that means Xak Tural is ripe and fresh for the picking in terms of finding new and interesting things, but it's not; the cowboy towns in the one bit of Xak Tural that we see are centred around ceruleum, which is blue magic oil, something heavily present in all things Garlean before now, and we spend catastrophically little time with the indigenous people. So little it actually causes problems, put a pin in that, and most of our time in Xak Tural before the Ninth and Alexandria show up to change the plot's vector entirely is dealing with Source copies of people from The First, spending three minutes with some indigenous people to ask for some wood and also a whole filler plot arc that makes me seethingly mad to think about, but that's for later.

As an aside, I call it "the Ninth" because it's a big pile of Final Fantasy IX references, and each of the shards is numbered. It's not officially called that, I don't think, at least not at the time of writing.

Alexandria and its remaining city, Solution Nine, appear in a big dome over Erenville's hometown and basically occupy a city-sized chunk of Xak Tural. We see nothing else of Xak Tural for the plot, as the remaining areas and time are dedicated to Solution Nine and the people of the Ninth. If there's anything of interest there, the writers haven't cared to mention it, and to be frank it's dubious that there is. I'll come back to why in a bit.

The thing about Solution Nine/Alexandria is that over the course of the plot, we basically answer every single question we could possibly have about it and resolve every last detail of it. We know how Zoraal Ja got there (the City of Gold is a place in Alexandria, we see the portal to it, he goes through it), we know how he took power and then built an army in such a short time (it was 30 years for him, as the shard moved at a different flow of time compared to the Source until it was brought here), we learn every aspect of Alexandria's soul-harvesting and expenditure system and how it's an artificial bastard version of the Lifestream, we kill Zoraal Ja, we kill all the memory phantoms in Living Memory by turning off the computers and thus end the need for soul-harvesting, we kill Queen Sphene and find out that there's plenty of governmental infrastructure and institutions already in place to keep Solution Nine ticking over anyway.

We find out that the Ninth was wiped out in a lightning apocalypse caused by a super-weapon, likely as part of an Ascian attempt to merge it into the Source via calamity, and that Alexandria is the only place left. They're the only survivors, Solution Nine is the last civilisation and Sphene needs the souls of the Source to power Living Memory forever. In bringing it over entirely to the Source, except for Living Memory, there is now nothing left on the Ninth, no-one's there. And we bring a permanent end to Living Memory, so the Ninth has nothing left. It's just over and done with, and there's at most a little more to find (Sphene's tiara crown is shown after the credits, so it's the object of 7.1-7.3, as the .1-.3 patches are usually a follow-up/continuation/epilogue to the MSQ).

The mystery of Krile's origin and birth is not only brought up but also answered within the expansion! Her parents are descendants of south sea islanders from the Source who fled to the Ninth to escape the ice-aspected calamity (the 5th Umbral Calamity, I believe) ages ago. If there's anything more to that, that'll be 8.0, as it's telegraphed as being the next obvious place to go to.

So the Ninth basically replaces Xak Tural and occupies the space it would have filled, and all but two things are left unanswered or unresolved. Those two things are Sphene's tiara regulator, whose importance isn't actually known yet, not even in-universe as we literally just see a still image of it against a black background after the credits so its significance to the cast is currently nothing, and the hourglass artefact that opens the City of Gold gate to the Ninth and was used by the south sea islanders to escape to the Ninth in the first place.

There's a moment where we see the hourglass artefact suddenly display the sigil of Azem in the pre-fight cutscene for the final battle, but rather than make me excited, it just deflates me - it's the fucking Ancients again! It all comes back to the fucking Ancients inventing literally everything, even the monsters and animals we see about, eons ago and the world hasn't changed a fundamental bit since!

 

Yes, I may be being pre-emptive in saying that, there's no telling what they may actually come up with, but I've not got a lot of hope for the XIV writing team at the moment. And that's because I'm not sure they actually can come up with anything truly new, because at every possible juncture in Dawntrail, when it's not something they can actively resolve and explain then and there, they just directly point to an existing concept and say "it's basically just that". Many of Tural's new concepts are just the same shit you've already seen or heard of elsewhere, and even for distinctly more universal things you're just constantly reminded of shit you've already seen.

Like, I dunno, did Krile really need to see a restaurant and go "JUST LIKE THE BISMARCK IN LIMSA LOMINSA! JUST LIKE THAT ONE THAT YOU KNOW!" the second she saw the place? When we saw the Yok Huy's mountain in Urqopacha, did we really need someone to go "IT'S JUST LIKE SOHM AL! I CLAPPED WHEN I SAW THE MOUNTAIN THAT LOOKS LIKE SOHM AL!!!". Couldn't we just appreciate the mountain for being a mountain, and one that actually is quite distinct from Sohm Al in terrain and appearance, with its environs tinged and altered by the undying lightning, fire and ice aether of Valigarmanda?

We can fucking tell that the Moblins must be related to the Goblins, they have identical dress and similar patterns of speech denoting an original shared language. Their resembleance would be funny and neat except for the fact that Alphinaud hones in on it and babbles about it at length if you make the mistake of talking to him, going on about "cultural inclinations" because the Moblin town is called Earthenshire, and the one Goblin town we know of is called Idyllshire. It stops being cute and just starts highlighting how there's not really much new to see or do here.

There's two particularly galling examples that annoy me, too; the tural vidraals, let's get back to that pin. They are massive, ancient beasts of awesome power, a thing becomes one when it lives an unnatural amount of time and after a certain length of time, tips over and transforms into one. It is conceptually similar to the auspices of Hingashi introduced in Stormblood and whom you meet and interact with in Stormblood's trial series, and I know this because shortly after tural vidraals are explained someone instantaneously pipes up and draws the explicit connection such that the two are said to be basically identical. These new giant beasts of fearsome power and strange abilities, such as aether that never fades and thus creates permanent ice, undying fire and eternal lightning? It's just another one of those things that you know, you're friends with a bunch of them even, it's just them, it's not new or special or interesting. You already know this, don't worry about it.

As an aside, surely that means that the auspice we had to seal in Stormblood's trial series is now below us and we can easily just kill it like we did Valigarmanda? We'll never see it again but like, I'll always think about that.

In similar vein, we see a statue of the Hanu's bird god as part of their religious festival during the rite of succession. It looks more or less as you might imagine a statue made of reeds in the image of a divine bird might look like, so of course Alphinaud has to say it looks the same as Quetzalcoatl, the phantasmic storm bird demon from the end of optional Shadowbringers dungeon Akademia Anyder (and its image is used by Zodiark during his trial in Endwalker - its design is a lift of the summon of the same name from FFVIII). Like, it fucking doesn't! And even if it does, only insofar as both are birds! Why would you make that fucking reach? Is it the name, you realised you burnt the name Quetzalcoatl on the FFVIII reference and wanted it in this region somewhere? It's just a bird, it doesn't have to be a specific thing that we already know! And double points for tying it to a direct construct of the fucking Ancients again!

There's a point, in dealing with Living Memory and Alexandria's handling of avoiding death and prolonging life through soul harvesting, that Alisaie comments "This reminds me of the Ea...", those being one of the idiot alien races we met during the great pointless suicide run at the end of Endwalker. It's not an unfitting comment to make, in that the entire section of Dawntrail about Alexandria feels like a continuation/reuse/rehash/epilogue for Endwalker's themes about death, but also I never wanted to twat her over the head more than that moment.

There is nothing new under the sun, it seems, and half of the things this bountiful new world has to show us are just things we already know. Not variants of, not vague similarities, just wholesale copies of the things we already know. There's not really any mystique left and basically no new mysteries.

Is the hourglass bearing Azem's symbol really a new mystery? I guess so but it's a mystery rooted in the shit we have been dealing with the whole time before this, it doesn't feel that new or exciting. The south sea islanders were just Source Lalafells and their technology is Ancient Etheirian tech to some extent. Perhaps it's because I didn't like Endwalker's ending and was hoping to break away from this more, but I feel like they've written themselves into a corner and don't know how to escape it. Space isn't an answer because Meteion's words, the people in Ultima Thule and even the Manderville quests in Endwalker reveal that the Final Days hit a lot more than just Etheirys. So a lot of the universe, already killing itself before Meteion, has also been laid waste to! So they fucked themselves there too, anything they want to do out there has to produce an excuse for why it survived the Final Days!

 

Idiotrail

There are some sequences and parts of Dawntrail's plot that I can only really describe as pure idiocy.

The first major one is after Earthenshire; on the path out of the area, the party is stopped by a stranger who tells Wuk Lamat that she's wanted back at Earthenshire for urgent business. He won't say what it is or why, and no-one questions that; Wuk Lamat goes "oh okay" and wanders off after him, and the rest of the party - at this point consisting of the cynical and intelligent Erenville, the twin prodigies Alphinaud and Alisaie who are both now quite worldly in their experiences through war and disaster relief, and Krile who is quite savvy and intelligent herself - just let her go and stand ramrod stiff waiting for her to come back. She doesn't, and they go to Earthenshire and shock and horror, Wuk Lamat was not asked for there, she got tricked and was kidnapped.

I want to establish that at this point we know that the other competitors in the rite of succession are not above tricks to inconvenience or actively remove their opponents. Bakool Ja Ja in particular is pretty open about his intent to steal the keystones from his rivals and beat them through sabotage - he busted up your boat on the way up the river to get here, even! And surprise, he hired local bandits to kidnap Wuk Lamat so he could steal her keystones and keep her out of the way (or kill her, even). Letting the crown princess walk off into the woods is blindingly stupid by itself, moreso as the presence of very active bandits is attested to by NPCs and sidequests in the area before you pass through, and again, you know her competition is either actively out to get her or willing to let bad things happen to her. The only way the entire kidnapping sequence can happen is if everyone in the party suddenly becomes immensely, incredibly stupid - and it's a party of the 'smart ones', excepting Wuk and possibly your WOL depending on your personal characterisation!

Also, the path back to Earthenshire from the point you stop at?

IT'S AN OPEN NEAR-STRAIGHT LINE OF A ROAD

WHERE DID SHE EVEN GET KIDNAPPED

HOW DID WE NOT SEE IT

"The map design is an abstraction for gameplay" No it is not! Fuck you!

Paired with this truly idiotic sequence is the tail end of Zoraal Ja's assault on Tuliyollal, when Zoraal ja himself is in the palace and facing off against Gulool Ja. He gets killed, and then resurrects with his soul tech - a process that is noisy and comes with a miniature light show that draws everyone's attention for several seconds - and then activates a super mode by burning a monster's soul to kill Gulool Ja. During this entire sequence, no-one intervenes or moves to assist, Gulool is run through. Wuk then jumps Zoraal and is effectively warded off, and then Alisaie steps forward to...just hold Wuk back. Zoraal Ja declares that he wants Wuk to invade, and then gets to leave unmolested, Alisaie preventing Wuk from trying to attack him.

Your character stands there staring at the four walls, disassociating the entire time and refusing to do anything for no reason.

Healers tend to Gulool; Alisaie steps forward, a Red Mage, to help out. If you're a healer class, you stand there and watch them and refuse to do anything, for no reason.

It's a full return to the absolute worst of Heavensward-era XIV, where the writers want the scene to go a specific way, realise it actually can't at all if the player is involved, so the player character is simply ignored for the entire proceeding, making them look unfathomably stupid, unfathomably incompetent, or simply and truly callous and uncaring, if not all three. Heavensward's patches were especially dependent on this in order to 'put over' the Warriors of Darkness; the sequence where they attack the party has your character stand there and watch them almost kill Y'shtola and others and just not do anything for no fucking reason, because they wanted Thancred to rejoin the party with a cool guy intercept and the writers already completely and utterly disregarded the WOL for most of Heavensward, why change now?

"But animating player combat is hard" No it isn't! They've been using the existing animations for class attacks all over the place! Consider:

• Y'shtola uses Black Mage casting animations to throw fireballs in cutscenes frequently
• Alisaie uses Red Mage casting and attack animations
• The Lalafell gladiators in the arena cutscene in Living Memory use Summoner/Scholar spell cast animations
• Krile now uses Pictomancer animations
• Estinien uses Dragoon animations for cutscenes
• Multiple characters use Samurai, Ninja and Monk animations for Stormblood cutscenes and elsewhere (the hunter in Heritage Found uses Monk ones this expac!)
  
• Zero is a whole pile of Reaper animations
• Gulool Ja, Zoraal Ja and some others use dual-sword animations; Zoraal even links his swords into the double-ended blade Viper uses!
  
• Thancred once used Ninja animations and now uses Gunbreaker ones
• Wuk Lamat uses Warrior animations
• Vrtra's combat body in the Endwalker patches uses Paladin animations
• Urianger uses Astrologian animations
• Alphinaud uses Sage animations
• Koana uses Machinist animations, and guns are prevalent enough that several others do so since Heavensward
• There has been a generic heal animation used since ARR for healing people in cutscenes - and the WOL has used it before! You get to do it at the start of Stormblood to heal Y'shtola after Zenos' assault on Rhalgr's Reach!
  

So that's what: Dark Knight, White Mage, Bard and Dancer unaccounted for? The devs don't like Dark Knight so that's unsurprising, but these aren't difficult to pick animations for and use! And if, fucking if, somehow playing these animations is somehow too hard or awkward or difficult for the WOL and no-one else, stop writing and directing scenes that would be plainly solved if they could use them! Engineer a solution or work around it, stop falling into this really fucking dumb pit!

There is no reason Zoraal Ja should have been let out of that throne room untouched. He should've been fought there, and used Alexandrian technology to escape after getting his ass handed to him - which would've really been useful for prompting him to get super-high off souls later! "You're meant to be Wuk Lamat's mentor, not the starring role" does not fucking work as an explanation here, the scene is incredibly fucking dumb as it is and that does not excuse or cover it!

And then there's Shaaloani.

After Wuk Lamat becomes Dawnservant, you and Erenville get passes to Xak Tural, and when you go there you find out the train to Erenville's hometown is temporarily out. While stalling in the nearby town, you witness an altercation between a youth and an obviously evil sheriff, meet Estinien who reveals he eats cacti, and then witness Namikka, Wuk Lamat's mother figure and childhood nursemaid, get robbed by some bandits. This starts off what can only be described as a total and pure filler arc.

I don't mean "filler" in the Twitter anime hypebeast mindset where anything that isn't pure rigid plot progression is a sin in the eyes of God and should be punished by death, I mean filler in as pure a sense as you can get. It literally only happens to fill time, there are no character moments, nothing fun happens, nothing neat happens, nothing interesting happens, nothing in it matters and you could excise it entirely and nothing would be lost. You could skip from entering Shaaloani straight to the Alexandrian lightning dome appearing and you would be fine, you would miss nothing, and what little details you need to hear (and I'm not convinced there are any but I'm covering) could be filled in by text bubble or minor dialogue scene during the buffalo ride, before it, after it, at the train station or after the assault on Tuliyollal. If you wanted to meet the Source equivalent of Marsak and crew (including his wife, who's allowed to be alive here because Hrothgar women now exist), you could fit that scene in at the train station and then cut straight to the dome happening.

"What about the indigenous people" What about them? You meet two members of one Mi'qote tribe in the corner of the map to ask for some wood and receive a request to make a quieter train, and see not one tiny bit of any of the others. Wuk Lamat's not here so no-one gives a shit about them. Put one of the pins we freed earlier in that.

The 'filler arc' is about hunting the bandits with Erenville and then discovering that the local sheriff's deputy is the bandit leader, and has abused his power to arrest vigilantes and turn the community against well-meaning people to facilitate his crimes. The way this is done, Erenville tells Namikka that you'll be perfectly safe because you, the WOL, are so powerful that the bandits can do nothing. You then trace the bandits to their lair, and once there, Erenville says "Your methods are too brutal, let us sneak in first" so you can find out who has the bracelet, possibly isolate them and get it back without incident.

Then you find out the exact building it's in and that the bandit leader is in there, but Erenville says "we must leave", and when you leave he says you aren't allowed to do anything because you'll kill someone and fall afoul of the local law enforcement, as if that's something you have to give a remote shit about as both the friend of the new monarchs and also the single most powerful being in the nation, but Erenville is suddenly greatly fearful of outback wild west law enforcement. Instead you must follow his plan: fuck off to the corner of the map and collect dinosaur faeces from their nests so he can concoct dinosaur aphrodisiac, which can be dumped in the base and bring a swarm of horny dinosaurs upon them. You doing anything would hurt and kill people and be too brutal and wrong and also would be unlawful and we must respect the law: horny dinosaurs are beings of pure restraint and respect the law and this way will "avoid conflict" (his words).

The horny dinosaurs cause conflict and kill a man (he is struck down, knocked over and stops moving).

The bandit leader sees Erenville, sneers and at this point I became immensely mad and began skipping cutscenes. The next quest required taking the bandit leader to four different spots on a pointlessly random tour around the outback to buy time before looping back to town so Erenville and the local vigilante could out him to the real sheriff and get him arrested. I know what happens because I watched a friend's VODs and this is how I am absolutely completely 100% sure you can skip cutscenes until after getting wood from the Mi'qote and being told you can get on the train next. Once that happens resume watching, because then the dome appears and the plot turns back on.

No, that single bit later on where the vigilante youth and the sheriff shoot at some robots before Estinien wipes them all out does not justify any of this, that can be cut too because it doesn't matter and didn't need to be shown either. You didn't need any of this to see Source-Marsak or set up the train. You could've just met Namikka at the train station and seen her bracelet there. This whole sequence is incredibly fucking dumb, it's completely pointless, it doesn't matter for anything, it's not fun, it's awful to even play, it makes Erenville out to be a fucking incompetent idiot and I no longer like him or respect him, it's full-tilt stupid bullshit and shouldn't be in the game. It's unbelievably bad.

Also this is a petty thing but slightly later Wuk Lamat suggests ram-raiding the front door of the Alexandrian dome, kicking it in and killing everyone in your way to get inside, and everyone including Erenville nods and agrees. But you suggest just beating your way through the bandit camp and it's "No, shut the fuck up. Conflict bad".

This expansion is already a weird pile-up of two different expansion stories crammed together and awkwardly tilted to be relevant to each other, and they still had to put in a fucking completely pointless zone and sequence. What happened? The expansion didn't need to be longer or anything. Why did they do this? It's not a good Wild West story, even! We don't get to see any of the rest of Xak Tural or actually do anything of interest with the locals - one of the post-game dungeons reveals there's fucking Source-equivalent ruins of Ronka from The First out here! We couldn't have looked at that? Or, you know, met any of the indigenous cultures out here? Like the Whalaqee, who we've known about and have known came from here since the original Blue Mage content?

Those are all the big sequences of Dawntrail's plot getting really fucking bad and dumb, but there's also a few minor parts that just stick out as weird and awkward and messy, or that cause problems with other things in a way that XIV's writing before now often tried to avoid, and usually succeeded in doing so. Quickfire, getting rid of those lingering pins:

• Why did we do the whole bit with Fonjeantaine and getting him a job with Wachumeqimeqi if we were just going to come back a level later and bundle him off to Earthenshire instead? There was no point to that, if you wanted to introduce the crafter/gatherer content Wachumeqimeqi manages you could just easily have the scene be about Wuk getting her axe repaired, like the initial setup.
• The Hanu festival restores life to the reed fields by drawing a little from the Hanu Hanu, and it's explicitly stated to be a seasonal festival. How did not a single one of them notice their god's statue drawing vividly glowing light (their aether!) from them and sending it out to the fields? Why did none of them know this? This wasn't a long dead festival suddenly renewed, they do this regularly enough that everyone knows what to do still, even with the boat damaged. Why did no-one understand the festival had a specific use? They do a similar thing in the Fisher questline in Stormblood, but there the festival was suppressed 25 years ago by the Garleans, so it made sense it took effort to reinstate.
• The ceruleum of Xak Tural was said to be special to the Whalaqee, the originators of Blue Magic who use blue colouration in their clothing and fabric and homes and more. In particular their homeland has the bulk of it, so this patch of Xak Tural is presumably not that. That means that the Whalaqee land is further inland, so how did the Eorzean would-be ceruleum magnate a) find it and b) plan to actually enforce his capture and control of it? This is Turali land - Tuliyollal's land, not just a small tribal nation but a continent sized nation with a post-Endwalker Estinien tier warrior as its king (with one head down, no less) and full-fledged military - indeed, Zoraal Ja would already be in charge of the Landsguard and be its most capable fighter by now. If we didn't intervene he would simply have been killed or exiled by the Landsguard. The threat of foreign colonisation is one of the things Gulool Ja used to foster unity among Tural's people, so this would be a high priority thing to stamp out. I guess you don't need to do Blue Mage for that aspect to work itself out.
  
• Koana's own ceruleum operations in the area started three years ago - the entire plot of the game has taken months to a year at most per the devs, so the Eorzean coloniser somehow missed Tuliyollal's own ceruleum mining outfit when he reached the Whalaqee lands. And expected to be able to take it and cart the ceruleum back to Eorzea or sell it to Garlemald or globally unmolested.
• Actually if transit to Xak Tural from Yok Tural is tightly controlled - you need a special permit from the palace to pass the guarded gate - how did anyone from Eorzea get into Xak Tural before this? Were the Landsguard letting them through? Did they just end up on the coasts and somehow avoid all civilisation as they made it to the Whalaqee? There's a lot of tribes and villages and stuff out there, not just the Whalaqee, and for the railroad and ceruleum operations to be built up even recently still puts heavy Tuliyollal-sanctioned activity in Xak Tural. The vigilante gunners were there before the formal sheriff law enforcement was instituted so they had outback law enforcement and ranching and so on. This shit isn't colonisable without a land war that pre-Stormblood patch Eorzea hasn't a hope in hell of winning, none of that shit works any more.
  
• So Gulool Ja was a chance birth and his success inspired the eugenicist programme in Mamook to replace him, presumably. He was also evidently aware of this to some extent, as he left Ketenramm near Mamook to watch over it...and never devised a solution to Mamook's woes? Never put them to woodworking or found some way of improving the farming or food production in the area? What has he been doing for 80 years as Dawnservant, anyway? It's not an easy problem to solve, sure (the soil is tainted by meteorites) but why didn't he clear away trees or anything? They complain about the lack of sunlight too. 80 years. He sent a letter out to Galuf about Krile's lifespan ago so he knew of Sharlayan, probably through Ketenramm, but never contracted him or others to help with Mamook? He was Autarch of Mamook before he was Dawnservant, did he just like the all-banana and game diet?
  
• The second you hear about the Alexandrian soul tech, you likely instantly realise it's a zero-sum game - souls go out and do not come back in. An NPC even remarks that the birth rate in Alexandria is collapsing, not realising there's no souls to give form to new life. So then, why does it take so long for the Scions to understand that? Krile even says the fucking ridiculous thing of "it's their culture" even as it's become apparent that the soul tech is predicated on burning capital-S Souls. We've been down inside the honest-to-god Lifestream and its proper working has been actually key to some events in Endwalker and so on, how does she not realise the immediate problems of fucking with it and just writes it off as their culture?
• The way the first dungeon plays out, if you just stayed at the boat and waited for it to be repaired you'd have actually saved time and effort. Like yeah, that wouldn't be fun and the fights and freedom to kill interesting wildlife is nice, but plotwise that entire dungeon doesn't need to actually happen. Strange that they didn't put in some reason that justified the wander instead.
  

I'm not done whinging.

Quite apart from all those questions and queries, here's another: why are half the Scions even here? Estinien's a wandering ronin now, that's funny, okay, but why did Y'shtola come? She doesn't actually do anything or provide any insight we couldn't already glean as Krile worked out that the city of gold is in another reflection. Why are the twins here, further? No, their stated reason actually doesn't work, they aren't really studying or learning shit to help Garlemald with and nothing we do or learn about inter-cultural conflict and the resolution thereof is of any use to them anyway. Apart from that they don't really do anything either, nothing that couldn't be filled in for by someone else. And this ends up not being a vacation at all, either.

A lot of hay was made in Live Letters and pre-release material about the competitive nature of the rite of succession, and how it ws going to lead to friendly competition between the Scions as Thancred and Urianger had been hired by another competitor. The trailer showing Y'shtola in Tuliyollal, and G'raha and Krile and all could even be interpreted as suggesting that others were hired by other competitors so we'd get a whole thing going on, but it turns out that Wuk Lamat got the bulk of them and Koana only picked two despite being a weeaboo for Sharlayan. And then after all that, the competition aspect...just doesn't happen. The most that happens is Thancred blows up a tunnel to lightly inconvenience you for a few minutes in the first dungeon, there's no ribbing, you don't end up coming to a sparring match/skirmish duel or anything, nothing. It just doesn't exist in the actual game. There's not even any real debate about who the best pick is - Thancred and Urianger are clearly mentoring Koana with the hopes of influencing him out of his Sharlayan weeaboo ways and approve of when he starts thinking more like Wuk Lamat. They clearly also favour Wuk as the pick for Dawnservant, and hell, so does Gulool Ja himself. Sure, your responses after the duel are flavoured as saying she's not ready and he agrees, but his words also make it clear that he favours her as his successor regardless of if she's ready yet.

It doesn't help that you keep getting partnered and paired with Koana and his double dad crew for basically everything, from rescuing Wuk Lamat to fighting Valigarmanda to the cooking contest trial. There is no actual contest between Scions at any fucking point, and I'm tired of CSUIII's shit on this; I remember the powerpoint slide about how FFXVI actually did have RPG mechanics, only for it to have functionally none. It's one thing to keep content secret or not give too much away, but I'm tired of the active lying to make their games sound better than they end up being.

I mean, fuck's sake, come on, we don't even get to wrestle Estinien. I started as Lancer/Dragoon, I fought him and beat his ass in the Lv50 quest and that was acknowledged in Heavensward. Imagine if there was a spar with him here and he acknowledged it as round 2? That'd have been lovely. Instead we get nothing in this aspect and no good reason for most of the cast to even be here: they're only here for the Trust system requiring sets of 4 and 8 for dungeons and trials, and they're pre-existing assets. I guess they didn't want to make generic Landsguard/Mamool Ja/Yok Huy helpers for those, or make local equivalents out of actual characters to fall back on, and it's really glaring that that's the case.

I'm not one of the people who believed the dissolution of the Scions as a formal, political entity meant that everyone had to fuck off and not see each other again, I know full well that it was just a move to get the governments and others off of their backs instead of making them a player on the world stage. But like, most of them didn't need to be here at any point. G'raha not being here actually makes no fucking sense, even, what are the Students of Baldesion even doing as a three-man crew to warrant him staying behind? Why didn't he just have Ojika cover him or why didn't they determine the rite of succession to be Student business, given the official connection to Galuf Baldesion, from the outset? He shows up anyway! His presence as someone who can flip through tank, DPS and healer would've really eased the early dungeon requirements! What the fuck was going on during the planning stages here, was it just "There's been too much G'raha lately"? I don't think there has been! He wasn't that central in the Endwalker patches and his presence barely registered in those alliance raids!

bhberwbrhbwre

I could probably keep going but I've spent like an entire day writing and thinking about this, and it has served its purpose: pretty much all of the ire has been exorcised. There are still yet things I could complain about, but probably not to the same length - for example, complaining about them introducing and establishing the really fucking cool characters of Gulool Ja and Otis and then killing both of them, though at least Otis got to go out in a really fucking cool way (mostly, it still required turning the player character off for long enough to make it matter). Gulool Ja's death sits wrongly with me not just because he was cool but because it was a badly written and shittly done scene.

I just had to keep myself from ruminating at length about the "why", about CSUIII's structure and schedule and resources. Conversation for another time, perhaps, but this really needs to end here. Dawntrail isn't all bad, it has the best dungeon-and-trial MSQ set of the game, the soundtrack rules, it has a lot of funny and well-animated cutscenes when it isn't being a repetitious sack of shit.

If you actually read this, thank you, and good night.