Maggie was a top contender for bestgirl
Maggie was a top contender for bestgirl
I buy every expansion at early access and beat the MSQ in about a week. This time I completed the MSQ today. It was really bad so it took a whole month. Wuk is a terrible character and they put her in everything.
This is the first time I skipped cutscenes in any expansion -- all without reading any community notes. I don't even use the forums.
The entire expansion was boring, rote, and extremely predictable. I was hoping for a nice, big, new world to explore. I got very enclosed and drawn out story with extremely predictable filler scenes.
I would take the time to write more of a review here, but honestly the fact that this production is how it is says way more about the focus of CBU3 during development than anything I could write.
Having them ship FF16 (with DLC) AND a really big FF14 expansion one after another has really put strain on FF14.
I hope they are able to edit down this expansion like they did with ARR. It's bloated.
Anyway, nice combat design, dungeons, and cool gameplay! I wish there was more of that, and less "Speak to Wuk Lamat". If you want to enjoy this expansion, I recommend skimming 90% of the textboxes or skipping things until it grabs your attention.
Spheene pre-death age has to be pushing 30, potentially more.
https://i.gyazo.com/3d10a8776595538b...834f56ab87.png
I don't know if I agree 100% with the previous example, at least. I feel like Maggie gets a pass because she was just a vehicle (I seem to recall her having some weird minor autonomy, but maybe that's my memory playing tricks). It's like John Action Hero man looking solemnly at his prized car he just had to jump out of as it sinks into the sea.
But Dawntrail's WoL did have a couple overly dramatic reactions to stuff. I couldn't tell you if it's more than usual or just the complete apathy I felt for the expac, however.
Well, it kinda did.
https://i.imgur.com/Wk1Ia9X.jpeg
I still think it was a very unnecessary reaction. In the original scene you can already see the WoL getting frustrated with the magitek armor losing power. Now he needs to make sad face? Seeing emotion and life in machines is Wedge's quirk, not mine.
Still amazing how someone with her amount of screen time couldn't make the top 10.
https://i.imgur.com/lmHRx6u.png
I'm going to be real with you, Honey B. Lovely is more of a character than Wuk and I'm not even joking. Her song alone actually gives a neat bit of depth to her - it's not massive or anything, but it's *Something*, and it frames her in an interesting light. The fact that with 5 minutes they managed to characterize someone more than the character that has had dozens of hours of nonstop screentime is amazing.
In the sense that it displays how amazingly bad poochie's writing is.
What I learned about Honey B.:
She's a danger to everyone around her when transformed. because of the toxics and mind influencing strategies she uses to easily dispatch her foes. She has a temper when things don't go as planned, meaning her entire sweet personality is just a show she puts on for the crowd. And that she's actually really good at pandering to her crowd, since she knows exactly what they're here for.
What I learned about Wuk Lmao:
She likes peace. And tacos. And is grossly incompetent at everything she does unless the plot needs her to not be. And, that she's the daughter of that one leader. (This will not be talked about again.)
It's pathetic that I learned more about a character through a raid fight than I did an entire expansion.
that one leader? that reminds me about something else... in iq br'aax.... do they send away every female baby now to keep tgem safe?
Yeah, she made the 11th spot. Which is honestly way too high. And I am not sure if they fixed some of the poll options or if Yaana got robbed of being in the top 10. The last time I checked Yaana and Black Cat were listed separate for some reason.
It basically mirrors the scores and reviews I would say.
It was an expansion that depents on liking Wuk Lamat.
If she is 10th or 11th place (so ~ middle) than I think that fits pretty good the general consens of the expansion being mixed.
Wuk Lamat has 4,9%
Yaana and black cat together are at 4,6%
She would still not be in the top 10 then but pretty high.
Source
https://blog.with2.net/votes/item/245723/result
It all depends on the methodology. 1,000 cases is considered representative, but only if the sample is statistically random (the way most professional organizations conduct political polls, for example). With a playerbase of over 1 million people (and Japanese playerbase probably ~400k), a poll of 17k all depends on how the data was gathered. I don't know this specific poll, but many "unofficial" online ones just become what are called "voluntary samples" (some even prone to allowing people to vote multiple times), which in the statistics world are known for being very unreliable.
On your question on how the data was gathered:
It was just a link to a poll on a japanese side that seems to just gather FF14 news or something like that (yes I have some freetime at work when my data gets compiled...).
I can link it if you are interested.
I think even a voluntary sample should give a good outlook on the japanese player opinion at least.
You are correct that a voluntary sample is kinda biased because the voters are self chosen but that is normaly not the case with a "who are your favourite characters in video game" because there is no direction in the question or the wording of that question to press the voter in one direction.
Also a voluntary sample can have its bias mitigated by clear wording, short questions or avoiding leading questions.
I think middle is a good spot for her.
I don't disagree with your opinion on voluntary samples though.
Bear in mind this magitek armor was animated by a mammet heart, with some measure of emotion, and on its own risks its neck twice to save your ass--once at the very end of Praetorium. We didn't walk out of that firestorm, let me tell you.
Maggie kind of became your partner in crime in the later part of ARR main. You're allowed to have emotion over the presumed death of your faithful steed.
That explanation I can buy, and same for Wicked Thunder. Her story actually seems genuinely interesting and I hope we see more of her in the rest of Arcadion's story.
A few pages back people were talking about rubber bullets, and yes they specifically say it in the JP text too
「た、隊長……止めなくていいんですか? 非致死性のゴム弾とはいえ……町中ですよ……!」
"Captain... shouldn't we stop them? Those may be non-lethal rubber bullets... but it's in the middle of town...!"
Personally, after playing Yakuza 4 I don't think any mention of rubber bullets can phase me anymore lmao
I do encourage people to read through any quest dialogue in Japanese (there are sites that have all the quest dialogues archived for all game language versions), as it's definitely given me a new perspective on some characters/quests and just the localisation in general. I feel the English version of FF14 has been great up until now, but now because the writing has fallen very flat with DT there's not enough character in the writing to make the characters themselves feel exciting. In Japanese you can show personality through speech patterns/pronoun usage but you're limited in English as there's only one word for "I" and "you". The kid in Shaaloni (Dekowa?) who has the duel for example, refers to himself as 俺様 (oresama) which immediately gives you the impression he has an ego the size of Jupiter without him having to do much else.
English makes most of the characters feel very ""polite"" I guess? But the Japanese version makes it feel like there's a bit more of a spectrum- Wuk Lamat is very tomboyish and rough around the edges, Erenville feels kind of distant with everyone and Cahcuia has this air about her that I can't really describe that well, but I think the way Erenville describes her as イラつく話しぶり (having an irritating way of speaking) is pretty good. I think the English does an ok job of showing this honestly, but its not quite the same energy lol. In English when you first meet her, for example, she says "why the long face?" to Erenville, but in Japanese its straight up like "what's with that dumb look on your face?" (in a jolly, teasing way). Honestly it's been like a little treasure hunt for me reading through these quest logs- made me feel a bit better about DT overall too tbh. I play with JP audio, but obviously not all scenes are voiced so it's nice to go back and get this new perspective.
It's probably safe to assume that a lot of DT's localization was done while Koji was focused on XVI. He could get overly flowery(I remember people cross referencing dialogue across multiple languages because they didn't understand what Midgardsormr did or why at the end of ARR), but he generally tried to keep things accurate, tone especially. I'm out of the loop on this, so I don't know if he's back on XIV for future stuff or if it's all Kate.
I think I remember hearing Koji, like Ishikawa, was in more of a supervisory role now and Kate took over as the localisation lead? Can't give you the source on that though unfortunately, maybe it was a fanfest panel? Kate was definitely in the credits for it, and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing Koji's name there too
Obviously there's been some oversights- I mean the "??!?" face I pulled when my friend told me Cahcuia is American lmao, but I don't know how much of the issue is just the poor overall writing and how much is how it was localised. I've definitely seen lines that were only in the Japanese text (Ketenramm saying Cahcuia seemed like a difficult/harsh mentor) or many cases of small things being left out that make the meaning of a line seem more ambiguous when it was clear cut in Japanese (Iyate saying Erenville would cry & beg to go with his mother on adventures, which could be read as he was throwing tantrums, when in the Japanese it specifies he was lonely/missed her so much he would cry and he was frantically/desperately begging her to take him with her).
But it's very likely this is something that happens in all previous expansions too- I know I've heard Haurchefant was characterised differently between EN and JP dialogues, so I'm not gonna sit here and act like this is some new issue that only DT is suffering with. It's probably only more of an issue because the base materials they had to work with weren't up to standard. I'd rather it felt empty than find they added in a bunch of plot stuff that wasn't in the original tbh.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ay_spoiler_70/
♬♬♬
You're walking in Kozama’uka
There's no one around And your linkpearl is dead
Out of the corner of your eye you spot her
Wuk Lamat
♬♬♬
She's following you about thirty fulms back
She gets down on all fours and breaks into a sprint
She's got a quest to give you
Wuk Lamat
♬♬♬
You're looking for your mount, but you're all turned around
She's almost upon you now and you can see there's repetitive dialog on her face
My God, there's repetitive dialog everywhere
♬♬♬
RUNNING FOR YOUR LIFE
From Wuk Lamat
She's brandishing her Axe
It's Wuk Lamat
Lurking in the foregrouuuund
It's Endless Dialog Wuk Lamat
♬♬♬
Living in the MSQ
Stealing Krile's Limelight
Eating all the dialogue
Dialogue cannibal Wuk Lamat
♬♬♬
She finishes her story arc, and you leave for Xak Tural..
You are safe from Wuk Lamat....
WAIT- SHE ISN'T DONE
LAMAT SURPRISE!
There's a plot to your head and quests in her eyes!
But you can do Skip Cutscene (and you) silencing quest yapper Wuk Lamat.
♬♬♬
You have just silenced Wuk Lamat!
---
This might be my last post here since Im no longer subbed. I figured I'd at least try and lighten the mood. (Song by the folks at r/ffxiv as linked in the thread)
Kate Kate was introduced officially via a Live Letter or fan Fest to have taken over Lead Localization for the game. This was done before Endwalker after Shadow Bringers. Announced in about 2021.
Koji ended up localizing ffxvi if I remember the credits correctly.
I had to gather my thoughts about Wookie Lamat. I fully agree that she ruined DT's story.
They gave us a whole new continent to explore but the world felt so small for me because I was tied to WL all the damn time (except maybe Shaaloani). As a hobby writer, I find this really weird. Even Middy (the father of dragons observing me) or Ardbert (a literal ghost bound to me) gave me more privacy than her. I didn't feel like having a nice laidback adventure but having a summer school trip led by Wookie. Like why couldn't I wander around a bit? It should've been more interesting if they're introduced to the Promises by each zone (before/during the zone-branching) THEN decide who to choose to support. I know I was forced to choose her (worst mistake ever) but at least, it could've given me the illusion to think: why shouldn't I support Koana or heck Zoraal'ja?
I hate the cope about "we're mentoring her" or "we already had our spotlight" or "it's a new arc so ofc it's a slow start". Even as a silent MC, we have NO other choice but to agree with her. If we were her mentor, we would've challenged her ideals based on OUR experiences about the world. How peace and understanding is very hard to earn? How one's ambition could potentially ruin the lives of others? How is keeping one's legacy in respect while moving forward is difficult? It's like the writers couldn't implement those ideas into the story. If we were a mentor for Wookie by nodding and clapping for every small thing she did, I think we failed miserably. We could've been an Auron-like mentor for 'her' Tidus (except he's been a more compelling character overall).
We already had several instances where the focus was shifted to others. HW was mostly about Alphinaud's development yet we had an overall presence within the plot. Yoshi P literally said: 'Alphinaud can be considered to be one of the protagonist's of Final Fantasy XIV'. Yet I don't think he choked us with his presence.
And it's a minor nitpick but I'm not very fond of her design. It's Aloy's hair with Naruto colors plus a cat. It's probably a unique model but the small muzzle looks so uncanny. She reminds me of those toothpaste ads. The more you look at it, the more creepy it becomes. ;-;
At least we know that Final Days never affected anyone on Tural because Wuk Lamat lived there.
For those who play HSR, March 7th's sidequest in patch 2.4 is more interesting than Wak Lamut's arc in Dawntrail.
I'm not surprised honestly. Part of me thinks its a shame, but also up until this point I've felt FF14's story and characters are really engaging so I haven't had the need to even look into localisation differences. I'm sure if I went back and checked everything I'd be more disappointed. Obviously I didn't join up here until DT, so I didn't see that thread, but do you remember if the changes to the dialogue felt jarring/particularly bad? I might try and dig that thread up myself so I can see what people were saying.
I guess the issue I'm personally left with now is that how I look at characters like Wuk Lamat and Erenville is going to be very different than how their EN characterisation show them, so I will probably have to keep going back and reading the quests in JP and come to some middle ground conclusion. Sometimes its great to see the little bits of nuance that can only be shown in the JP text- I love how from a character design perspective you can do so much subtle story telling just through how someone talks, but at the same time that will just come back around and slap me in the face with disappointment if I see something that felt missing in the EN translation.
Guess I have to suck it up and study more Japanese or just get over it lmao
I was pondering watching a streamer play DT to make a list of all my issues with it. But in the end after taking what has felt like forever to drag myself through the expansion (I started on launch day! But I've just found it so difficult to get through this expansion that I frequently just have to stop playing because its so unenjoyable and dull. If it were an anime I'd have stopped watching long ago, same with anything else. Instead because this is FFXIV I keep watching every cutscene and reading everything, talking to NPCs, just in case there's actually something interesting that comes up.) I'm just mentally exhausted by all the constant Wuk Lamat and just abysmal writing and story decisions in general (I actually think her voice is fine, its just her character and the writing that I take issue with).
On the up side? I guess I am starting to learn from it. I now know that if a character talks to mine, they are a) going to actually be talking to Wuk Lamat who is nearby me, b) if she isn't there, they will be asking about her, c) if by some miracle they do talk to me, it will be telling me to go with her.
If I get a private moment alone, Wuk Lamat will interrupt it.
If the group ever needs to split up, I will always be paired with Wuk Lamat.
If I get dialogue choices, 98% of the time all of them will be positive ones in favour of whatever Wuk Lamat wants.
If I need to go anywhere or do anything, I always have to talk to Wuk Lamat first.
Any conversation will always involve or relate to Wuk Lamat.
Wuk Lamat is always the first character to leave a scene, leading the group, I am always the last.
Wuk Lamat makes all the decisions, that rare 2% of the time that I am allowed to disagree? Get ignored.
If I do anything, even side quests, Wuk Lamat gets all the credit. I am not an adventuerer, I am her retainer. I have no identity of my own anymore.
I am not actually needed for combat either, Wuk Lamat could handle all this stuff solo especially with her multi-limit breaks.
I must smile, nod and agree with everything Wuk Lamat says.
I think this expansion has made sure that I really do need a holiday. From Wuk Lamat. I feel like I am absolutely burnt out on FFXIV now. Fortunately I was already considering a break to catch up on other games, so it seems a good time for it.