The Negative Impact of Poor Character Writing on the Quality of Dawntrail's MSQ

[Kaecilius]

As a character that fails, Wuk Lamat is not a mary sue - but simply a character that is never challenged in any way for their failures, nor is ever stimulated to grow and develop, which makes her difficult to relate to and root for. She is presented with very few problems that cannot be solved immediately by the mere suggestion of platitudes of peace and happiness (or, if the situation is really difficult, food), and any difficulties she faces are summarily eliminated by the Scions near uncritical support for her regardless of any legitimate concerns we may have about her capacity to lead a massive, diverse continent. This fundamentally makes her unrelatable to us as an audience, and makes it impossible to connect with her as a human being.

If we're forced to continue hanging out with Wuk Lamat I want the patches to at least address the consequences of her actions.

From the Alexandrians' point of view, we killed their king and queen, destroyed their "heaven", pushed a child as the new ruler and then Wuk Lamat, a foreign ruler, proclaimed herself her guardian, essentially making Alexandria part of the Tuliyollal alliance whether they like it or not.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Talking about anything positive very quickly has to go to spoiler territory, but the main part I can freely say is that Shaaloani where we're just on a chill low-stakes adventure with Erenville and they acknowledge it as such is actually enjoyable and it feels like the WoL is actually a part of the story whereas with wuk it feels like we just exist to carry her through her trial.

But to go further, and into spoilers...

First, Bakuul Ja Ja, he was first introduced a big evil rival who's going to try to mess with the others and cheat his way through... But then they explore his backstory, and he's actually has a good bit of depth to him... But then they just drop him from the story and consider him redeemed after 2 cutscenes.
If they wanted a good story, he should have come with us to Alexandria and have his redemption arc there.


And moving onto Alexandria itself, most of the story with it was pretty good, except for Sphene... Sphene kind of can't decide if she's supposed to be a sentient person, or a machine wanting to harvest souls to maintain the Endless' power supply.

And when talking with her about Alexandria's past, the WoL kind of just stands there quietly when (s)he could just fill in a lot of blanks to the story, like the Flood of Lightning... And when talking about the extra Lightning aether causing paralysis, that they'd very likely have somewhat of a cure for it...

And then in Living Memory, the first two areas out of the four are kind of just padding, they don't really add anything to the story and they could have spent that extra time on Krile's parents and Cahciua...

[duckorz]

The weakness they have is they want to say everything instead of show everything, and because they want to say everything they overlook the nuances that they unintentionally put into the world lore that would heavily impact several of the events in the game. The fact our character remains silent on several key points in the story of dawntrail despite having experiences relating to an immediate situation is definitely felt through the entire thing.

This is a massive, massive problem that imposes an exponential entropy of narrative incoherence as things go along. This is why I say that sensible, empathy-driven (that is, being able to think through what a character would do/say) character writing is the biggest issue, and the core matter at hand that every other problem stems from. Characters not asking the right questions breaks the plot and the worldbuilding, characters not having sensible reactions to the situations and contexts they're placed in ruins the themes and the nuance they could have, characters suggesting that we do inane things to go from point A to point B ruins the pacing (I would take just one blue/yellow quests from the zones that are written way better than MSQ is than talk to/reassure 3 random citizens again). This was tolerable in 6.x because the narrative outline and premise were less complicated, posed less questions, and we had less time for the poor character writing to negatively affect the narrative. Even the first 2-3 levels of DT, while still having all the problems of the later MSQ, were still more enjoyable because we didn't have as many stacks of this "horrible writing" debuff. It just gets worse and worse and worse and I'm mortified at the thought of the patch quests trying to deal with stuff like the inexplicable unexplained baby of Zoraal Ja being the king of Solution 9 and actually trying to address the insane implications of that.

[Vyrerus]

And for me, I feel her absence, and feel a great concern for the game should it continue.

Big same. And an excellent write up.

Some things to quibble with, though.

You could remove the names from the dialogue boxes, and you would still be able to tell who was talking, due to the context of what each person talks about with regards to the narrative's advancement. You could also potshot Wuk Lamat, and be right about 80% of the time. Her presence is all consuming, and she does meet the criteria for being a Blackhole Sue because of it. In other words, it's not that this writing team couldn't have delivered to us some hearty, subtext laden Scions as people scenes, they did that for Krile, Erenville, and G'raha in Living Memory. It's that they chose not to, in favor of pandering to Wuk Lamat.

In this way, this makes her incomparable to characters like Lyse when you go beneath the surface. Lyse was a character who was young and naive, but she was still educated and still immediately realized her failures. Already a Scion as it was, and she set about course correcting herself and growing on her own over the course of Stormblood. She also took the backseat to let other new characters have their moments. You don't play through Stormblood and see Hien gushing over Lyse for several quests in sequence like Koana does for Llama Tea. Every time Lyse is absent from a scene, other characters do not speak of her incessantly even in situations that have no bearing on her. The plot also does not warp in on itself to insert something important to her as the mainstay of the narrative's drive. There is no Shaaloani segment in Stormblood where the WoL goes off with another character to experience that character's arc, only for the WoL and that character to have to redirect their pursuits in service of the absent character. It is as if the writers really expected us to fall so deeply in love with this plastic cup persona that we would miss her if she wasn't brought up within 5 quests of leaving her behind.

You have to have a screw loose or extremely poor perception if you think Lyse's portion of her narrative behaved in this manner.

But I do fully agree that every past character's actual characterization was turned off. I'm just disagreeing about the why that was.

You see, some of the characters do have strong feelings about things. These strong feelings almost always interplay into revolving around Wuk Lamat. Koana was so passionate about his sister's well being that he sustained personal injury to aid her, even though they are supposed to compete. Every one of his actions screams that he loves her above all else, even more than him. The subtext here is that he lacks self-worth. Bakool Ja Ja views Wuk Lamat as inferior to himself, but he obsesses over Wuk Lamat because he wants to make sure that's true. Some subtext there is that he doesn't truly believe that she's inferior to him, because he thinks she will succeed at the trials as he banks on her doing them so he can steal the keystones, and if he truly believed himself her superior in all ways, then he would just do the trials. Then there's Zoraal Ja whose motivation was to surpass his father, and in that way, perhaps earn his love. There's subtext in his death rattles that he never felt his father's love, while Wuk Lamat received it without doing nearly as much as he did (another case where show don't tell would have worked wonders).

Have you noticed the pattern? Strong emotions are allowed, if and only if they pertain to Wuk Lamat. Subtext is also there, if it pertains to Wuk Lamat. The older characters don't have the real connection to Wuk Lamat that the antagonists do, and I agree fully that the writer's didn't even try to make them behave as themselves and be the real characters they have been in the past, but that was because the characters they had been would have stepped on Wuk Lamat's toes, and that is not allowed in Dawntrail (until other characters are finally allowed to eat where the food tastes like nothing... unintentional meta narrative hilarity?).

I mean... in a meta sense, Wuk loves to eat, and she sure did swallow up most of Dawntrail like John Goodman in that Family Guy sketch.

[SirShady]

If we're forced to continue hanging out with Wuk Lamat I want the patches to at least address the consequences of her actions.

From the Alexandrians' point of view, we killed their king and queen, destroyed their "heaven", pushed a child as the new ruler and then Wuk Lamat, a foreign ruler, proclaimed herself her guardian, essentially making Alexandria part of the Tuliyollal alliance whether they like it or not.

That part made me so mad. Like they actually are appealing to an audience of preteens with no regard for logical storytelling at this point.

Yes, let's install the 5 year old son of the man who was forcibly installed as the new king. Queen Sphene must have truly "loved" her people to put a power hungry dictator in charge of her armies. A decision that leads to him slaughtering her subjects senselessly. What a wise and kind ruler she is! Just put his kid in charge. A kid I doubt they even knew he had. The people will love that. Who would question that?

Oh yeah and remember that whole plot point about everyone freaking out over not having extra lives? Don't worry, the soul harvesting factory is STILL OPEN! Yeah, that makes total sense! No reason to revolt now! Let's go party it up with Wuk Lamat, slayer of our beloved queen!

Did NOBODY check this script?!

[ReynTime]

Ishikawa didn't write the main scenario for Stormblood, 2.X or Heavensward did she?
Not to downplay how well she writes the characters, I just thought the last paragraph was reductive of the other writers' work. I don't think the problem is her absence so much as the supervision, mentoring and dare I say production's oversight towards the de facto scenario writers. Remember, everything goes through Yoshida to check and greenlight, he said so himself in numerous occasions. He read the scenario for this, and he thought it was good.

[duckorz]

That part made me so mad. Like they actually are appealing to an audience of preteens with no regard for logical storytelling at this point.

Yes, let's install the 5 year son of the man who was forcibly installed as the new king. The guy who slaughtered his own people. Queen Sphene truly did "love" her people to a power hungry dictator in charge of her armies. A decision that leads to him murdering them senselessly. What a wise and kind ruler she is! Just put his kid in charge, the people will love that.

Oh yeah and remember that whole plot point about everyone freaking out over not having extra lives? Don't worry, the soul harvesting factory is STILL OPEN! Yeah, that makes total sense! No reason to revolt now! Let's go party it up with Wuk Lamat, slayer of our beloved queen!

Did NOBODY check this script?!

And like, no, this isn't something that can simply be addressed by the patch quests. Any issue that should be obvious to us should be obvious to the scions at the very least as canonical geniuses that know more way more than us about statesmanship, magic, the rules of the setting, everything, really. If something this egregious just blows past the consciousness of every single character as it happens - it's not material to explore in future patch content, it's a plot hole.

[duckorz]

Ishikawa didn't write the main scenario for Stormblood, 2.X or Heavensward did she?
Not to downplay how well she writes the characters, I just thought the last paragraph was reductive of the other writers' work. I don't think the problem is her absence so much as the supervision, mentoring and dare I say production's oversight towards the de facto scenario writers. Remember, everything goes through Yoshida to check and greenlight, he said so himself in numerous occasions. He read the scenario for this, and he thought it was good.

Ishikawa wrote the Coerthas section of ARR, the Estinien/Y'sayle arc of HW and 3.2 and 3.4, the Doman arc of Stormblood, ROG/DRK/ALC job quests, Omega and the 6.3 follow-up, and ShB/EW. This is what she's been credited for at least, not to say of anything else she might have worked on and not been credited for outright in liveletters. I think, in any case, while there have been other good writers that have worked on the story, her name is undoubtedly associated with some of the highest quality content in the game.

[ReynTime]

Ishikawa wrote the Coerthas section of ARR, the Estinien/Y'sayle arc of HW and 3.2 and 3.4, the Doman arc of Stormblood, ROG/DRK/ALC job quests, Omega and the 6.3 follow-up, and ShB/EW. This is what she's been credited for at least, not to say of anything else she might have worked on and not been credited for outright in liveletters. I think, in any case, while there have been other good writers that have worked on the story, her name is undoubtedly associated with some of the highest quality content in the game.

My point is mainly that DT didn't necessarily needed to be her level to be good. It already falls short of being on the level of the entirety of 2.X~4.55 and that's a problem. Even Stormblood's most dull moments were far more grounded in reality compared to Dawntrail's best moments.
Ishikawa is the best writer XIV had, but the game's story was praised since 2015.

[SirShady]

And like, no, this isn't something that can simply be addressed by the patch quests. Any issue that should be obvious to us should be obvious to the scions at the very least as canonical geniuses that know more way more than us about statesmanship, magic, the rules of the setting, everything, really. If something this egregious just blows past the consciousness of every single character as it happens - it's not material to explore in future patch content, it's a plot hole.

This is what I've been saying. I've had some people tell me "well don't worry, it's setting up for the next part of the story" and "you can't say that Dawntrail's writing hurts what will come after when we haven't even seen it".

Bro. This is stuff that HAD to be addressed in the moment! Why?! Why would any of this be ok? How can they possibly address this many plotholes? Who allowed any of this to happen? I can't wait for 7.1 to come out and it's just going over every horribly written plotpoint in Dawntrail and having the characters explain their reasoning and retroactively adding nuance and logic to 30+ hours of childish MSQ writing.

"Well actually, the bird people weren't REALLY starving because they couldn't remember the ritual they do to harvest their crops every year. They just were pretending for the sake of the feat. It was all a funny ruse!" "Ohhhh, okay!"

"Well actually, a lot of the people of Solution 9 WERE pissed, and there's a rebel faction trying to kill Wuk Lamat and the newly installed king. And he HAS to be the king, because all operations of Solution 9 will cease without him since he was given authority and there's no way to give it to someone else." "Ohhhh, okay!"

"Well actually, a lot of the people of Erenville's village do harbor a grudge against the Alexandrian's after they were forcibly taken from their home and forced to live in a sci-fi hellscape for 30 years. You just never met them in the MSQ until now." "Ohhhh, okay!"

I would legitimately actually prefer that at this point instead of anything new. Give me Ishikawa's Dawntrail. Bring some level of humanity into this script. Salvage something from this garbage.