(EW Spoilers) Tales from the Dawn #5 - Days Gone By, Days Yet to Come

[Enkidoh]

This story's focus was specifically stated as being chosen by player poll though, so those that like Azem and the Ancients must be in the majority (I'm one of them ).

And really, there was no need to give any new massive lorebombs here, it was simply a nice finale for Hythlodaeus, Emet and some of the other Ancients and his thoughts about the rest of the Amaurot Gang, specifically the WoL's 'Unsundered counterpart'. And also seeing Hyth unsucessfully chasing down Azem through Amaurot was quite funny and yet also touching, and we also see some more of Emet's hidden soft side finally come out to play.

And we also get more context from the cutscene during the Final Days of Amaurot the WoL saw when returning to the present day during EW, where Hyth left to join the Zodiark summoning sacrifices - it was clear during that scene it hit Emet pretty hard and was probably the last straw that sent him into the 'dark, depressed megalomaniac' he then spent the next 12000 years as he had nothing left (first he lost his headcanon-ex-lover, then his why-is-this-jerk-my-best-friend, and finally his hetrosexual-life-partner, that would send anyone into despair frankly), and seeing what Hyth was thinking as he bidded Emet farewell on that street in Amaurot as he left to fulfil his destiny put it into a new light.

So I really enjoyed this one - the side stories on the Lodestone don't always need massive revelations or lorebombs to be enjoyed.

[Cleretic]

This story's focus was specifically stated as being chosen by player poll though, so those that like Azem and the Ancients must be in the majority (I'm one of them ).

Yeah, if there's any time for nostalgic glurge it's this, and it's the reason I left my complaint of 'this is the fifth goddamn short story about the Ancients' aside. But as someone who didn't vote for the Ancients, I feel like I'm allowed to feel a little annoyed that I'm not listened to at all here, and it's just Ancient reiteration with nothing new at all.

It's not even that I wanted 'lore bombs' that majorly reassessed how we look at everything, I just wanted anything at all. Like, consider the Jullus short story just as a random pick: that didn't re-evaluate everything we knew about Garlemald, it's very plausibly missable, but it gave us windows into the Garlean way of thinking around death, and the Solus royal family; it was neat. Hell, it's even true about every single Ancient short story we've had before, which is genuinely kind of impressive for how little they actually had to work with. But this just gives us nothing. It wouldn't even be that bad in a whole batch of stories, because at least you could go 'well, maybe next week's will be better'/'at least last week's was good'. This is the only thing we get, and it's not exactly a pleasing meal for a lot of us.

And the worst part is, they had to have seen this coming, right? Like, we all knew that poll was gonna result in an Ancient story involving Emet-Selch, we've seen the character popularity polls. They painted themselves into a corner where they had to know they had nothing that wasn't a rerun.