Feedback: Dawntrail MSQ thoughts

They delivered on everything they promised in the live letter, except for the fun. The goal was to provide a fun story, but this wasn't it for me, which is why I created this post. Dungeons are crucial for both lore and pacing; ignoring them means ignoring the lore. Shutting down opinions with long texts and gatekeeping tactics won't change my mind.

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Originally Posted by Alenore

I suppose you mean Bakool Ja Ja's fight, in which she fills a LB bar out of nowhere multiple times, which we can most likely attribute to her resolve not to lose, save her father, and win the succession (which arguably fits the definition of how Dynamis would help).

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I don't care about the exact mechanics or about how she defeated Bakool JaJa. I'm talking about that she defeated him AND half an army BY HERSELF. With us just standing besides not doing anything. This is not only plot armor, it lets us, the Warrior of light, look incompetent.

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- She's rather naive, to the point she's following a perfect stranger and gets kidnapped for her trouble ;

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And why didn't Bakool Ja just kill here right there? No one could have proven it was him, his "smart head" should 100% have made that suggestion.
The fact, that she wasn't killed, is plotarmor.

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What would you like for Zoraal Ja exactly, that he repeats us a 7th time that he wants "to unite everybody after they're sick of war"?

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No, I wanted to know WHY he had that goal in the first place.
We didn't get ANY kind of flashback in his childhood, or any interaction with his dad that would have warranted his anger.
Also, didn't Krile get a bit of inside of his "dark thoughts" in his introduction?
Why didnt she tell WukLamat "hey, your brother has some dark thoughts, maybe you should try to know him better, like you try to know all the people in Tural, which is kinda the point of this whole fucking story"?

He was underdeveloped on purpose so that WukLamat doesn't have to "know him better" and just kill him, cause its objecitvely the "good" thing to do for her as the Hero. Imagine if Emet-Selch didnt try to talk to us and just did what he planned to do anyways.

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As for her screentime, this is literally an expansion about helping some girl become the Dawnservant, of course she's going to have screen time.

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I'd agree up until she was made Queen.
But then she STILL got the majority of the lines. She was still around for Erenvilles and Kriles arc there she absolutely had to get some lines in for some reason.

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If that's the reason you don't like Wuk Lamat, you probably shouldn't play this game and JRPGs because all that is pretty much the norm.

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Isn't it weird that most people, me included, liked ShB/EW, but don't like DT because of WukLamat?
Why do you think that is?

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Originally Posted by honest_psycho

And why didn't Bakool Ja just kill here right there? No one could have proven it was him, his "smart head" should 100% have made that suggestion.
The fact, that she wasn't killed, is plotarmor.

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To be fair, if he did kill Wuk Lamat there, he wouldn't have had the chance to steal the sixth keystone from her. Now obviously this failed, but he considered her the weakest by far, so she would be an easy target for getting the keystones he missed, at least in his mind.

Now why he decided to do it piecemeal and not wait until he could grab all at once is another question entirely.

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Originally Posted by honest_psycho

I'd agree up until she was made Queen.
But then she STILL got the majority of the lines. She was still around for Erenvilles and Kriles arc there she absolutely had to get some lines in for some reason.

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A little further for me. I think Wuk Lamat's presence was acceptable up to the 2nd trial. She had a purpose/stake in seeing her brother dead. I was okay with her up till there. But that is it for me. She should have left the party after the return to tuyilolyal. Krile and Enenes'shypa should have taken center stage as well as the WoL. Sphene is a WoL problem.
Even Raubaun had the sense that zenos wasn't his problem.

Looks like this expansion gave our WoL more of a supporting role while Wuk Lamat took center stage, kind of like earlier Final Fantasy games where there is no "main" character, just everyone supporting each other. I think of Tidus from X, or Vaan from XII where at first glance, yeah they're main characters until you play the game and it's the other characters that move the story along.

And I gotta say, for once it's good to have an NPC that doesn't want to stand around while our WoL does all the work. Maybe some players wanted to play the big hero yet again, this time we get an NPC that was capable after a long journey from being shonen trope to someone that

eases in to her role as ruler.

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Originally Posted by Tracewood

And I gotta say, for once it's good to have an NPC that doesn't want to stand around while our WoL does all the work..[/HB]

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I'd agree, but they overdid it way too much.

I don't hate Wuk Lamar, I hate the way she is crowbarred into everything. This is a step above Tumblr level fanfiction terms of writing an OC.

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Originally Posted by Palladiamors

I don't hate Wuk Lamar, I hate the way she is crowbarred into everything. This is a step above Tumblr level fanfiction terms of writing an OC.

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Yeah. In HW Alphinaud was the focus, but Ysaile and Estinien were major supporting cast. SB Lyse was the MC but again Major supporting cast through Alphinaud, Alisaie, Gozetsu, Hien.
ShB it was largely split across Ryne, Ardbert, Alphinaud, Graha. and EW again major cast...

DT it's simply waaaaay too much focus on Wuk. To such a degree that i personally don't want to dislike the character but pretty much becomes forced to.

The first half of DT should have put more emphasis on all 4 of the claimants and better fleshed out why Bakool was such a pos and why Zoraal would completely snap, then the 2nd part put the focus on Erenville and Krile. But no, we got one minor zone as a breather from Wuk.

I think the disconnect here is that people conflate the critizism of her intense involvement with critizism of the Character herself.

I kinda liked WL in the EW patchcontent, but the scope in DT was horrible.

Personally, my feedback on Dawntrail is 'this is my favorite expansion, and it's not even close'. The only real negative I can give after actually finishing it is that the first trip to Shaaloani was really boring, but if the biggest negative I've got is that a part was boring, then that's a damn sight over what I can say about any other expansion, whose negatives for me range from 'actively time-wastingly tedious' to 'infuriating'.

I think it's really interesting to see what Dawntrail doesn't do compared to what we've usually had. It avoided any opportunity to namedrop the usual touchstone figures, it avoided making any back-reference louder than it needed to. In particular I realized that the only reference to the Ascians/Convocation was blink-and-you-miss-it, and so minor that it didn't even get a spoken line. Dawntrail is very quietly but firmly drawing a line and saying that the past is the past--and importantly, it's treating the past differently than the game before it has, and honestly I love it. It's also a story that's crystal-clear about the themes it wants to be about, which I love: this expansion is explicitly about death, legacy and people's relationships with it, and it covers every single part of the expansion.

And Wuk Lamat's great for the role she holds. Dawntrail is her story, more than any other expansion has been any character's, and she shoulders that weight admirably. Yeah, she's not a character everyone will love, but no character would be, and the people she works for are feasting right now. She's definitely my favorite of the 'major' characters, who have to spread their characterization and appeal across pretty much the entire expansion. I think that's an important divide to consider, honestly: like, Bakool Ja Ja is among my favorite characters in Dawntrail, but his entire appeal hinges on basically one single scene that they absolutely nail; Wuk Lamat has to sell probably over a dozen different scenes across the expansion, in like four different ways.