A Retrospective on Dawntrail - full spoilers

(1/2)
Finished Dawntrail, and I am of two minds about it. I play XIV primarily for the story first, as I've had atrocious luck with endgame content, and as such, most of my critique comes from a storytelling perspective.

Let's start with what I found enjoyable. I was happy to go into Dawntrail without the full Scion cast and ecstatic experiencing one zone without the core cast. It felt legitimately refreshing and allowed my WoL to just be truly another adventurer rather than yet again being dragged on some quest. I also enjoyed the keystone storyline for the same reason. I'm not the main character of this story, nor should I be, it's Wuk Lamat's role.

As infuriating as her indecisiveness and lack of self confidence was at the start, I did like her overall character arc. It's clear they tried learning from what they did with Lyse in Stormblood and I'd argue they've largely succeeded in the keystone arc. From Bakool Ja Ja's mewling housekitten to a young, compassionate and humbled ruler of Tural, she did well there.

The idea of journeying to each village and working with their elector for a keystone was interesting, as many of those quests didn't use combat. It's nice to see that force isn't always the answer, and being incentivized to learn about the cultures - trope filled or not - and why they became the way they are was nice to see as an anthropologist.

The music, for the most part, slaps. Many of the tracks used invoke their locations, and no one zone's music could be mistaken for another. However, I do have to question some of the choices used, e.g. the hub city. I like jazz and saxophones as much as the next person, but the capital city of Tural doesn't look like it has much of an industry for making brass instruments, nor does evoke 1800s America where such instruments were made. I would have preferred something that fit the architecture, so to speak.

Speaking of architecture and critique though, I feel that CBS3 has learned some of the wrong lessons from ShB and EW. First off, Tulliyoyal feels too big. This was a problem starting with the Crystarium and Sharlayan, but feels blatant here. The stairs next to the inn - you could fit the entire Limsa aetheryte plaza there, and while that blursed plaza feels alive, much of Tural's capital feels like those stairs. I for one would like the hub zones to be smaller - easier to get around and feel more like actual places rather than abandoned theme parks.

Another issue was the reliance on the Scions. The build up to a confrontation with Thancred and Urianger goes nowhere, and the manifestations of G'raha and Y'shtola make no sense when you think about the logistics of them getting to Tural on such short notice for more than a moment. When considering how relatively little they do in the story after being introduced, it genuinely makes me wish we could abandon the Scions entirely and try developing a new cast instead of feeling compelled to call upon fanservice for the sake of it.

2/2

More of these inconsistencies can be found as you look into the last third of the game where the Alexandria arc takes place. Zoraal Ja is hamstrug by conflicting motivations switching between wanting to achieve peace by making people sick of war to being power-hungry and mad, only to find he's motivated by issues we barely get inklings about. Sphene, being forced entirely into the last third of the act, serves as a dark mirror to Wuk Lumat as opposed to her brother being a foil, but outside of the most basic characterization of 'is nice' and 'will do anything for her people,' has nothing really compelling going on about her.

Furthermore, the entire plot point of the Endless seems to contradict what we know about souls and aether, and is contradicted by both pre-existing material and its own characters. Being able to make perfect clones of people, memories and all, was something that was achieved by Allag thousands of years before Sphene's time, and they seem to have a similar technology base to Alexandria. These clones don't need souls to sustain themselves - why do Sphene's Endless need them? And lest we forget, there are no other Mamool Ja in Alexandria that we know of - so how did Zoraal Ja have a son that's the spitting image of him down to the otherwise unique blue scales, if not for cloning?

Even disbarring that, we have the existence of Otis, a soul placed into a machine, memories and all, that functions perfectly fine for hundreds of years. There's hordes of Alexandrian soldier bots that Sphene herself can project herself onto; why couldn't the memory data of the Endless just be installed in the Alexanderian robots and keep Living Memory as simply backup storage? No souls seem to be needed for the animation of these robots, or the storage of digital memories.

All of that is to say, Sphene and her motivations feel incredibly contrived to the point of straining credulity. Even if she is essentially an AI falling into the paperclip maximizer loop, there are too many more efficient ways for her to choose a path of co-existence that would have guaranteed the preservation of her people, a capability she demonstrated when she opted to work with Zoraal Ja. This makes the last zone and dungeon, obvious callbacks to Amaurot, Ultima Thule and The Dead Ends, feel hollow, and the final trial just existing as something we have to defeat rather than any meaningful triumph.

I was worried about the direction the writing would go as the 6.x storyline went on, and knew that it would take time to course correct. I am sad to see my fears proven right, especially when two thirds of the expansion itself resonated so well with me and had it stuck to that storyline, it would have been one of the more enjoyable expansions I've experienced. As of now though, I am genuinely concerned about where our next journey will take us.