Dawntrail vs. Stormblood? [possible spoilers]

I feel like SB was better mainly because it was still part of the established arc. We were in developed locations (we knew about Othard and Ala Mhigo long before SB), fighting established enemies (Girlybald and beast tribes, standard EW arc fare), wrapping up story beats that were cooking since the very start of the story (Doman & Ala Mhigan occupation, etc).

Compare to DT, where we know nothing about where we are and they did a terrible job developing it, fought one-and-done enemies with questionable motives, in an expansion meant to be the beginning of another 10 year arc that barely set up anything of note other than "ermagerd this dude is Azem poggers" (like we didn't know that already).

Both had very middling characters, but the Scions were still the Scions in SB, whereas in DT they couldn't decide on whether to move on without them or have them tag along, instead having them occupy an unsatisfying middle ground where they may as well have been LoZ faeries for all the good they did. I only liked two characters from DT (four if you count the fact that both have two heads), whereas SB had many standouts. Lyse is the only one I can think of that I explicitly disliked.

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Originally Posted by Zackneifein

And at the end, yes, if Lyse had as much spotlight as Wuk Lamat, she would be 100x worse. Wuk Lamat isn't as bad as many say, but her omnipresence made her unbearable for many. Even me, that didn't disliked her at first, on the contrary, just wished that she received the "Lyse treatment" mid-MSQ, making her disappear from the plot.

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Fact is, I don't think this matters as much as people make it out to be. If you took a popular character like say Graha Tia, most would be ok with him being around nonstop especially considering he expressed going on that adventure with us someday, so even canonically it makes sense. We are only in Tural because of Wuk Lamat to assist her with HER ascension to the throne so I'm not even sure how removing her from that even makes sense. Do people think Thancred and Urianger we're not with Koana the entire time? Feels like a silly argument to make.

Now I would say the second half of the story they had an opportunity to switch focus to say Koana since it was a more "tech" based area but ultimately Wuk Lamat has the better connection to Sphene and Zoraal Ja for both empathic and antithetical cases than he does.

Now we can dog on where the story went in general, but in terms of the story that is written, it makes sense that Wuk Lamat is present throughout.
Lyse wasn't as present as Wuk Lamat and these forums and overall community crapped on her all the same for being equally annoying. The fact that people claim Lyse was such a good character now is WILD. The defense of SB MSQ and Lyse as a character on the forums 2024, was on no ones bingo board for the year and that is a FACT.

Guess we just need to wait 7 years for people to defend Wuk and DT on these forums now.

Zenos strenght ironically was quite reasonable: By then the WoL was basically a frog in a well, yeah they were super strong... in Eorzea, while Zenos was considered abnormal amongst the entire garlean empire that controlled the majority of the 3 continents and was considered the strongest Empire of the entire world.

The WoL was the equivalent of a top country fighter vs a top world fighter that was Zenos. The WoL gets better though and improves a lot, but even so canon wise the WoL beating Zenos was nothing short of a miracle in SB


In comparison Ran'jit despite being depicted as some kind of relentless chasing force, his strenght is not as inmense but he overhwhelms his enemies with his experience and special techniques, thats why the more he reveals his hand the less menacing he becomes to the point that Thancred can solo him albeit barely and later the WoL just crush him once hes out of tricks

The rite of succession is by far the biggest disappointment to me. I'm with Zoraal Ja's butt buddy on this one. They all felt like rather pointless errands. I didn't necessarily mind that for the first two: the early zones are supposed to ease us into the lore, and you could argue some tangible ruler points there: know your people, weighing tradition vs innovation, rags to riches...these are all important elements of holding the throne.

But like a lot of Wuk Lamat's mannerisms, these themes really overstay their welcome. They become a little too errand based. A little too pointless where a narrative is concerned. The Yok Hoy and the Moblins are the biggest offenders here for me. Mamook was a breath of fresh air because the challenge itself was kind of trivial compared to the situation at hand.

There was also very little actual searching for the City of Gold. This big quest kind of felt like something that resolved itself passively as we did minigames for the local populace.

For me SB was the worst expansion until now, but I didn't hate it. The parts I had a problem with were:

1) Erasing Yda to make Lyse.
This genuinely pissed me off and was completely unnecessary. There was no reason they couldn't have just kept Yda and let the story play out almost identically. This made me start with negative feelings towards the char. (This was technically pre-patch, not actual SB content)

2) Parachuting Lyse into command as a nepo baby
This was more a mild irritation, worth of an eye-roll but mostly forgettable and had very little impact on the content itself.

3) That damn parade cutscene at the end with Lyse walking front and center as the returning conquering hero, with us trailing along somewhere behind as the muscle.
She didn't do shit to earn that, and I hated being the 'hired help' with a passion

Basically none of that was the msq and content itself. I was honestly fine with the msq. It was a bit squished/rushed to fit both into 1 expansion, but at the same time I don't know there was enough for 2 expansions, and doing the same story twice of freeing them from garlemald wouldn't have gone over well either so I was ok with it. It was bottom of my list more because it didn't do anything to rate higher, and the lingering bad taste in my mouth from some of their decisions.


DT on the other hand, more than earned it's place at the bottom of the list. It didn't just fall to the bottom of the ladder, it started digging. To start with, it took the thing I disliked about SB and amped it up to 11. Worse than making me the hired help, it made me a cardboard bobblehead with a camera glued on to film all of furball's glorious adventure. (Along with gutting all the rest of the scions to soulless mammets with pre-recorded lines about how great wuk was)

I didn't actually mind wuk in the pre-patch. She was the slightly annoying genki character, but not horrible. I thought that at worst, I'd roll my eyes when this side character was around, and I'd enjoy my low stakes exploration.

Instead I was bored and aggravated before the end of the 2nd half zone. I stopped playing repeatedly to do other things, a drastic shift from how quickly I burned through ShB and EW. The story was a mess, and full of nonsense, plot holes and boredom. She was annoying as hell. By the time I was at the 3rd zone, I desperately wanted to tie a heavy rock to her tail and drop kick her into the deepest cenote I could find. And that was only the 3rd zone. It only got worse. And I'm one of those people who never skip anything, and even talk to every single party member between every single quest.

To me there's no comparison, DT was hot trash that I wish I could erase from my memory as easily as the Alexandrians forget their dead.

The biggest problem I have with DT .0 is the same one I had with SB .0.
It makes our WoL into a side character, an npc, taging along. In SB it felt more like we were hired help for the other characters, in DT WE ARE the hired help.

A vacation they said, have fun in the sun they said. I ended up as security detail with no time for having fun in the sun.

DT is infinitely better then Stormblood. Stormblood I was extremely bored all the way through, I watched it all but I was so tempted to skip skip skip. And I have skipped it on all my alts but one. I look forward to doing Dawntrail on all of my alts. There are moments where it dragged sure, but over all I very much enjoyed it. And even though I took longer to complete it because I focused on my crafters and gatherers in between, and was waiting for friends who were at work during the day to get home to run the dungeons together the first times each time, it felt like it took so little time at all. It felt almost too short. Yes it was just the x.0 part of it, but in comparison to 5.0 or 6.0 it felt extremely short. I wanted more. I'm excited to know where we go from here.

We need to wait till 8.0 before I can truly compare the two.

Stormblood I feel is heavily carried by it's Post-Patch content.

This may be true of Dawntrail too, we just don't know yet.

I actually like base Stormblood MSQ and the side-stories (raid/alliance/eureka)

post-patch MSQ, not so much.

As a Gridania start enjoyer, narratively Lyse came in with baggage that Wuk Lamat didn’t have to deal with. Yda and Papalymo played off one another really well. ‘Lyse’ suddenly had to not be Yda while having lost the partner character that grounded her personality in scenes.