Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
I don't think the problem is as simple as 'the story says there's not colonialism so don't think about it like that'. It's sort of an inevitable specter around a story where the base pitch is 'a bunch of white people (who are generally from a European-analogue location even if geographically it's more Africa) go to the unsettled America-analogue'; even if you're not doing a colonialist story, there's a lot of tropes you could accidentally fall into. Which, in fact, they've already been doing: we've been calling it 'the New World' until now, which is... not great.

Perhaps fortunately, the lore and translation panel from FanFest did make a point of basically saying 'we know we haven't been the best at this in the past, we're making an effort to do better with Dawntrail specifically'.
I don't see the issue with saying the New World, personally. It was new to them versus the old, fully charted and explored, world they came from. That goes for both real life and in-game. English says "Earth", Japan says "Ningenkai". Hingashi calls us "the west" and we call Othard "the far east", etc. Descriptors based off your own pov aren't inherently a good or bad thing.

besides, we're getting the proper name from the locals for it when we get there and I'm sure it'll either supplant "New World" or both will be referenced from that point on. New World might still be used to reference the two continents at once, like "The Americas" or "The Three Great Continents".