Wow, Wuk Lamat is really single-handedly ruining the DT story...

[Raven2014]

I genuinely do not feel like she really developed over the expansion past gaining self-confidence.

She just endlessly follows/repeats her mantra of "peace and understanding" and everyone else is just around to enable that by dealing with any problems she can't solve herself, to the point where you start questioning how that's gonna pan out once us and the Scions are gone.

Frankly the whole set up is just stupid. It's not the first time we playing kingmaker but:

- Americ was already a knight-commander and experience stateman.

- Hein is actually an exiled King.

- Lyse while inexperience, was just a member of a council full of elders. Not to mention Rabaun is with her.

- The Crystarium were left with people worked under G'ahara for decades.

- Eulmore is left with an ex-CEO of the largest company.


This is the first time we put someone who has zero leadership experience nor any special talent, oversee a territory that would eclipse any nation prior. The more I think about it, the more this story appears to be targeting middleschooler at the oldest. It's really just a peace and friendship cake with no frosting, filling or even basic topping.

[Katt_Felista]

Frankly the whole set up is just stupid. It's not the first time we playing kingmaker but:

- Americ was already a knight-commander and experience stateman.

- Hein is actually an exiled King.

- Lyse while inexperience, was just a member of a council full of elders. Not to mention Rabaun is with her.

- The Crystarium were left with people worked under G'ahara for decades.

- Eulmore is left with an ex-CEO of the largest company.


This is the first time we put someone who has zero leadership experience nor any special talent, oversee a territory that would eclipse any nation prior. The more I think about it, the more this story appears to be targeting middleschooler at the oldest. It's really just a peace and friendship cake with no frosting, filling or even basic topping.

I see you no liek my supergirl naruto hyperoptimistic princesshokage of the 4th wall breaching during most of the story, and especially during final bosses, how dare you expect seriousness from my new marketting team at nintendo.

[Elissar]

[Ramiee]

(Spoilers ahead about the first half of d
Dawntrail)


My main problem with Wuk Lamat is that she's just naive and her mistakes amount to her losing confidence in herself.
When we had this exact arc in Alphinaud already, in ARR he was arrogant and incredibly naive but by the end into the intro of HW he was basically hit wave after wave with how badly he messed up.

He did literally everything wrong because of his naivety and it completely crushed him and even going into HW he held onto that naivety trying to see if he could end the dragonsong war peacefully which he couldn't. We had to see him grow from a naive and arrogant child to a optimistic but grounded young man because he literally suffered from his mistakes.

Due to that Wuk Lamat being mostly upset that she didn't know enough about how the people she's going to rule over instead of actually causing big mistakes due to it. (Outside of her candy rock getting stolen) Kinda just makes me feel like we are seeing Alphinaud HW arc again but with none of the work.

[SirShady]

I could pull the same trick you just did for literally every Final Fantasy game ever released and for every FFXIV (and FFXI) expansion so far. It's incredibly easy to disingenuously oversimplify a story to make it sound worse than it is, and having seen your other posts, disingenuity for the sake of supporting a false point is indeed my probable explanation.

Except nothing that I said was untrue. It is pure coincidence and the villain's motivations are exactly as I described. I'd love to be proven wrong. You just said anyone that doesn't share your enjoyment of the story is "DISTORTING REALITY" but I'm the disingenuous one? Ok, buddy.

Now, it's obvious to me that some either played a different game from the one I'm playing, or are simply distorting reality for the sake of painting Dawntrail in an undeservedly negative light...

Hyperbole has never been very suitable to make valid points.

Hyperbole much? Some people can hold opinions that are different from your own. Shocking, I know.

[Striker44]

Frankly the whole set up is just stupid. It's not the first time we playing kingmaker but:

- Americ was already a knight-commander and experience stateman.

- Hein is actually an exiled King.

- Lyse while inexperience, was just a member of a council full of elders. Not to mention Rabaun is with her.

- The Crystarium were left with people worked under G'ahara for decades.

- Eulmore is left with an ex-CEO of the largest company.


This is the first time we put someone who has zero leadership experience nor any special talent, oversee a territory that would eclipse any nation prior. The more I think about it, the more this story appears to be targeting middleschooler at the oldest. It's really just a peace and friendship cake with no frosting, filling or even basic topping.

So, almost half of the people we have supported (2 out of 5) have no direct experience, while we count the people working under G'raha but don't count Wuk's experience being taught by her father...I fail to see the disparity. Also, what Wuk lacks is confidence, not talent. She has talent, just doesn't believe she does. What she also has is empathy, which is perhaps one of the most important qualities a leader can have and likewise one of the few that can't easily be "learned" over time. Leadership is ultimately about managing people, and Wuk is particularly strong in that area.

[SirShady]

To be fair,

Zoraal does know the Golden City holds immense power to shape reality, as Seraal tells him much earlier. He's also certainly just aware of the potential given the lengths his father went to to seal off the Golden City, and the stories from the giants. So it's not exactly coincidental. Sphene also did say the tech was adapted to war after their agreement, so it's not like the death army was sitting there entirely. We're told many times there was a huge shift in production of war machines, and the 8-man raid was closed off to fuel Zoraal's war efforts. Plus it's been 30 years, that's a long time in a technologically advanced society. As for him doing it because he's evil, we're shown he's got major daddy issues and a severe inferiority complex, which is only exacerbated when our team succeeds after he fails. Plus he has an... admittedly very stupid "peace for everyone by making everyone suffer" view on global politics. I do wish they went into where he got that idea beyond "well Tural was suffering from war, and then Dad stopped it, and now people are happy.. so 'War -> not war -> happiness'!" It's very dumb. They could have spent some time going into it but... they didn't. They might in the future but that doesn't solve the issue now. Then yeah at the end his motivation, probably after 30 years of stewing in his own emotions, shifted to feeling like his father screwed him out of inheritance. Which is a pretty major shift to happen off-screen.

Good point!

This just raises more questions on why Zoraal of all people would know that! Why does he know about the key? What gave them the idea that there was a spare set of keystones laying around? Why did Zoraal know about shaping reality or what that entailed? If "shaping reality" didn't involve the power to summon a massive sci-fi army from out of nowhere, the villain would have been screwed and the MSQ would be over.

See, but I was hoping they would explain WHY he has daddy issues and an inferiority complex. In the same way I was expecting them to explain why he thinks causing war will lead to greater peace. They never explain why. He's just evil for the sake of it, and he's not anywhere close to being compelling about it like Zenos was.

I respect your points, but I still can't fathom the reasoning behind these writing choices.

[Lusarae]

I'm all for having a "vacation" and "low stakes" adventure. But it didn't have to be paired with what essentially feels like an entire expansion of babysitting a wannabe leader who's never led before and enduring the story from essentially their perspective. Aymeric, Hien, Lyse, were in our stories. Doing their own thing, alongside our own thing. Your character will literally just sit back and watch Wuk do all the hard work. Literally. She also doesn't have any real weaknesses outside of a jokey seasickness gag. Compare that to her brother, who is strong in one area and weak in an area she fills in. With the limited screentime he gets compared to his sister and he is far more interesting despite wearing a very ugly and not very pleasing outfit.

It doesn't really help that our team is heavily lopsided with characters that work better with different character types yet are horrible with who they are currently stuck with. The twins are great, but not when they are the most "seasoned" of the group. They work far better when they have an Estinien, Thancred, or Y'shtola type to be paired up with. Krile would have been good, if the story was more about her trying to prove herself and not getting overshadowed by yet another person also trying to prove themselves. And then we have Wuk, who's biggest claim to her birthrate is the fact she lucked out and got the WoL on her team.

It just feels like me and Erenville are just here babysitting for ten levels of MSQ. Something that could have been great in a raid sidestory, or a postgame single patch story arc. But having this stretched out for so long... not very wise. People can say whatever they want about Lyse, but I didn't really dislike her much at all. She was surrounded by a better balance of other characters in a more interesting story. Maybe it made it easier for me to swallow who knows.

[Powercow]

Except nothing that I said was untrue. It is pure coincidence and the villain's motivations are exactly as I described. I'd love to be proven wrong.

What is your definition of coincidence? Because

Zoraal Ja isn't just guessing at where he can go get a massive amount of power and show up his father, he explicitly knows the Golden City can give him what he seeks. It's established very early on that there's a great power there. The evil vizier whispering in his ear made sure to mention it to him. It's also established that the great power isn't the giant death army, that was constructed after Sphene gave him control. Sure they had a handful of robots to act as servants and whanot, but the over-militarization of Alexandria came after. Multiple civilians in Solution Nine mention it. It's also been thirty years, and for a society that advanced, thirty years is plenty of time to manufacture a large army.

And his motivation isn't EEEeeEEeEEVILLL. It's that he's been under an immense amount of pressure since he was a baby, with massive expectations put upon him, and he's failed to live up to them. Unlike Bakool Ja Ja, though, he can't accept that he failed. So he goes further and further along a path to show that not only can he be as great as his father, but he can exceed him. He also feels like his father screwed him out of his legacy by favoring Wuk and Koana, thus he has a personal grudge against them. Especially Wuk since she actually succeeded where he could not. His biggest flaw was pride.

The only real issue I found with his character is his original motivation to go to war -- to unite the world in suffering so all people will work together is... a very dumb ideal that makes no real sense. I wish they'd have taken some of the "Wuk Lamat gets motion sickness again!" cutscenes and explored that a bit.

Edit - Oh you found my other post!

Good point!

This just raises more questions on why Zoraal of all people would know that! Why does he know about the key? What gave them the idea that there was a spare set of keystones laying around? Why did Zoraal know about shaping reality or what that entailed? If "shaping reality" didn't involve the power to summon a massive sci-fi army from out of nowhere, the villain would have been screwed and the MSQ would be over.

See, but I was hoping they would explain WHY he has daddy issues and an inferiority complex. In the same way I was expecting them to explain why he thinks causing war will lead to greater peace. They never explain why. He's just evil for the sake of it, and he's not anywhere close to being compelling about it like Zenos was.

I respect your points, but I still can't fathom the reasoning behind these writing choices.

The reason he knows so much is because

Sareel Ja was one of Gulool Ja's advisors, and he mentions very early on that he's eavesdropped (at some point in the past) on Gulool's closest advisors and knows things. Our Roegadyn explorer friend is one of Gulool's closest friends, so it's likely it was mentioned at some point. Lucky? Maybe, but it's not unreasonably so, and this plan sounds like it was long in the making. The only thing Sareel didn't count on was the sheer expedience in which Zoraal would dispose of the useless tool. And in Zoraal's defense, he's too smart to know that Sareel wasn't going to pull something; removing him early is definitely the correct move.

As for specifically reshaping reality, I think he was just being poetic there. Zoraal actually has no desire to shape reality or merge worlds or whatever, so he was likely just being grandiose in his moment of triumph. Dude knew there was some kind of power there, and he wanted it. His robot army can't literally reshape reality, but it can allow him to metaphorically do so by conquering the world.

And yeah I think a big part of the reason Zoraal's motivation is so meh and Zenos' is better is because we had so much more time with him. He's introduced in early Stormblood, pops up from time to time in Shadowbringers, and is all over Endwalker. Zoraal shows up for a fraction of that time, so it just fell flat.

[Nitelancer]

Suggestion: They should add an auto-play mode for MSQ. That way, I can let my character automatically go through the MSQ and watch on a second monitor. It can work until required combat encounters like dungeons.