Feedback: Dawntrail MSQ thoughts

[Cilia]

I don't dislike Wuk Lamat, but considering how many quests involve talking to her and how she's almost omnipresent (being absent only from the first half-ish of Shaaloani), while I may not have exact statistics it's impossible to deny that she hogs the spotlight. She's the main protagonist and that's fine, but Lyse was the main protagonist of Stormblood and while she had her share of screentime she didn't hog it - at least, not to the degree Wuk Lamat does.

It's also impossible to deny that the Warrior of Light only has a bit part; this may be a "new story arc," but nuggets of wisdom and martial indomitability notwithstanding, we may as well have been an NPC. At least Stormblood had our rivalry with Zenos to keep us invested, and even A Realm Reborn had us playing a bigger part.

[Cleretic]

It's also impossible to deny that the Warrior of Light only has a bit part; this may be a "new story arc," but nuggets of wisdom and martial indomitability notwithstanding, we may as well have been an NPC. At least Stormblood had our rivalry with Zenos to keep us invested, and even A Realm Reborn had us playing a bigger part.

I consider this a positive, personally. People on this forum have spitballed how you possibly could have the WoL take a smaller and less central role, often from the perspective of trying to de-power or kill them, which feels like it solves the problem but doesn't really, because the problem is kinda inherent to the gameplay, you can't just say 'this character's weaker now' and expect it to work. It's a hard solve; how do you keep a story about one singular blank-slate protagonist interesting, when they just keep getting stronger but don't exactly become less of a blank-slate.

I think this takes a clever angle, of instead pivoting us into a different role, that uses our history and presumed strength level without just making us the protagonist. We're taking a mentor role, we're the Auron to Wuk Lamat's Tidus (and please don't try to find a Yuna in that metaphor, it will NOT work). Teaching someone else how to take on the role that they strive to attain, using similar tools to our own. If anything I think we could've served to be de-emphasised more, just because while Wuk Lamat clearly did need our help to get inner strength and confidence, as well as a hefty sword arm that she didn't necessarily have early on, it could've served to have someone else take a role in teaching her political leadership. That's a harder role to fill, though, since all the politicians we know are busy, y'know, being politicians. Alphinaud spends the entire expansion doing basically nothing, his skillset is politics-adjacent, maybe he could've taken that role?


That kinda does by nature involve putting a lot of eggs into the one basket, though; a story primarily about a silent protagonist and their mentee is gonna require said mentee to shoulder a lot of the storytelling weight. That's inevitably gonna not work out for some people, because there's no such thing as a universally beloved character, but I actually don't think that's a new problem for the game; Heavensward and Stormblood put a lot of weight on hoping that Estinien and Lyse got over with people. I'd argue that most of both Shadowbringers and Endwalker actually hinge a lot on you liking specifically Emet-Selch and his story, and he isn't even necessarily a very big character in terms of per-scene presence. I also don't necessarily think that's a flaw, though; FFXIV's story is inherently very character-driven, and everyone has different tastes on what they like in characters, so having a polarizing character sorta just means you did the job right. It means the character is strong enough to provoke opinions and feelings.

Genuinely, I would argue that there's really popular FFXIV characters that couldn't handle the sort of spotlight Wuk Lamat does, because that requires a character to be vibrant and multifaceted enough to remain interesting during the entire spotlight. Harchefaunt, Aymeric, Hien, they couldn't remain interesting across that much time. Most of the Scions couldn't manage it. Hell, their prominence in the expansion indirectly sort of shows that Krile and Erenville don't have strong enough personalities to carry an expansion.

[Cilia]

I think this takes a clever angle, of instead pivoting us into a different role, that uses our history and presumed strength level without just making us the protagonist. We're taking a mentor role, we're the Auron to Wuk Lamat's Tidus (and please don't try to find a Yuna in that metaphor, it will NOT work). Teaching someone else how to take on the role that they strive to attain, using similar tools to our own. If anything I think we could've served to be de-emphasised more, just because while Wuk Lamat clearly did need our help to get inner strength and confidence, as well as a hefty sword arm that she didn't necessarily have early on, it could've served to have someone else take a role in teaching her political leadership. That's a harder role to fill, though, since all the politicians we know are busy, y'know, being politicians. Alphinaud spends the entire expansion doing basically nothing, his skillset is politics-adjacent, maybe he could've taken that role?

The problem with shifting the silent protagonist into a mentor role is that a mentor... necessarily has a lot of things to say. Unlike Auron who, being voiced, was able to provide a lot of exposition, was a minor celebrity in Spira, and actually had a personality and goals, the Warrior of Light has none of those - other than "seeking adventure" after the cosmic crises of the past couple expansions, they're a blank slate. A silent protagonist is a terrible fit for the mentor role because mentors necessarily need to say a lot; the net effect is that it winds up looking like Wuk Lamat mentors herself for the most part, which leads to the question of "Why am I even here?" Even in the Warrior of Light's bread and butter role of taking down threats too powerful for anyone else to handle (Sphene / Queen Eternal), Wuk Lamat manages to upstage them.

Again, I don't have a problem with Wuk Lamat being the main protagonist (we were the deuteragonist of Stormblood and the ultimate protagonist of both Shadowbringers and Endwalker; the train's gotta let up at some point) but that doesn't mean she needs to be in the spotlight for 85% of the story.

Genuinely, I would argue that there's really popular FFXIV characters that couldn't handle the sort of spotlight Wuk Lamat does, because that requires a character to be vibrant and multifaceted enough to remain interesting during the entire spotlight. Harchefaunt, Aymeric, Hien, they couldn't remain interesting across that much time. Most of the Scions couldn't manage it. Hell, their prominence in the expansion indirectly sort of shows that Krile and Erenville don't have strong enough personalities to carry an expansion.

I think this is putting the horse before the cart - any flaws in characterization (or a lack of depth) can be remedied through clever writing and giving them more screentime. Krile and Erenville don't fall flat because they're poorly characterized, they're poorly characterized because they're not written all that well and don't get a lot of time to shine thanks to the story focusing so heavily on Wuk Lamat. Erenville guides you across Tural and has some moments in the back half of the story, while Krile is basically just there to provide a plot device to get into the final zone (they both have their moments in Living Memory, but Wuk Lamat has her own things there too). They could have had bigger roles in the story, but weren't written to; saying "they lack personality" because of this is a pretty poor defense, IMO.

I want to say this is just a consequence of Hiroi being unused to the ensemble cast, but I couldn't say for sure. Either way, Wuk Lamat being the focus character at the expense of the rest of the cast just didn't work for me. I don't dislike her or anything, but she held the spotlight in places that really would have been better suited to giving it to other people (mostly in the back half of the story).

[Cleretic]

They could have had bigger roles in the story, but weren't written to; saying "they lack personality" because of this is a pretty poor defense, IMO.

I don't think this is a problem with Daichi Hiroi at all, but the challenge with Krile and Erenville is that they're designed for a different purpose than 'being the central character of a story', and so giving them a story that they're central to, even a side-story like Dawntrail does, leads to a bit of difficulty in crafting that story. You can't just give them a story like Estinien's or Wuk Lamat's, that doesn't work for them. That's not a problem with them as characters, nor is it a problem of a writer that can't or won't do it; it's like arguing that a motorcycle has entirely the wrong amount of wheels to be an effective bus. So what you need to do is to instead put them in stories that suit the kind of character they were made to be. (Fair warning, exploring this takes a bit, it got away from me.)

Starting with the more typical one first, Erenville was made to be a very low-key supporting character, as well as, chiefly, a non-combat one. He's deliberately a very quiet and reserved character, because he's not designed to have a lot of feelings or opinions; he was designed to idly drop plot details that the main cast acts on later. But unlike Zero, the character Hiroi made to not have a lot to say, he doesn't really have a story reason that begs for the spotlight, nor does he have a skillset that forces it onto him; he's just naturally a quiet character without a massive amount to add to the sort of story MSQs tell. I actually admire them sticking to that, a character in the entourage that just won't fight is genuinely interesting, but he'd really be more at home in a gatherer questline or variant dungeon, and is also what would happen if you took a character from one of those storylines and plopped them into the MSQ.

Krile's a bit more interesting, because while she's not an O.G. Scion, she's designed in much the same vein; she's intended to be a consistent contact of a larger story, someone who gives you the 'Kill Ten Rats' quest, but also gives you a greater context for why doing that is important. Like someone like Y'shtola, that means she's not designed to be an extremely expressive character, or to have a deeply personal story, as it's implied that her major personal growth moments have already happened. Hell, I'm fairly sure she's heavily based on Krile from FFV to shortcut most of that; 'it's Krile, you know Krile' kinda clips past a lot of those questions. To that end, a story like Stormblood Eureka treats her very well; a mystery, and one that requires a lot of legwork for us to do, is a perfect story for her, giving her a lot to do and discover without necessarily needing a lot of emotional storytelling. Even Stormblood Eureka needed Ejika there to be the emotional foil, though.


I actually feel like Dawntrail treats them very well as the characters they are, by building a lot of their parts of the story around what they can and can't do. Erenville mostly takes the backseat, providing worldbuilding information and non-combat solutions to problems, but for a lot of the early story is the straight man to the more emotionally expressive Wuk Lamat... and when it gets to his part of the story, they give him Cahcuia as the emotional counterweight, someone to be emotionally expressive in a way that wouldn't be true for Erenville himself--and to provide the eventual environment for him to be expressive when it comes time for that. Meanwhile, Krile gets a mystery to play to those same strengths as Stormblood Eureka did; but this time, she gets a lot of scenes talking to people about the mystery and its emotional weight, with everyone else in the cast filling the role as Ejika did... and the fact all of her big reveal scenes are voice acted meaning that she can do more than she used to there, too. Her English voice actor is a low-key champion there, she's really good at those quiet, trembling emotions of someone who's just received huge news but isn't the type to be loudly open about it.

I don't think it's perfectly executed, but I think they took the right angles with both of them, they both have the story that suits them. I think to perfectly nail them they'd just need one more scene each; maybe one of Erenville getting clever in front of Cahcuia in Heritage Found, so she can gush about how far he's come, and I'd maybe like to replace the scene of Krile telling us what Gulool Ja Ja told her with just the scene of Gulool Ja Ja telling her himself, or add one with Koana contrasting her quiet optimism with his simmering resentment about the same subject.

[honest_psycho]

Most of the Scions couldn't manage it. Hell, their prominence in the expansion indirectly sort of shows that Krile and Erenville don't have strong enough personalities to carry an expansion.

This is entirely due to a lack of talent and creativity of the writer, because he wanted to put WL on a pedestal, WHICH IS THE POINT OF CONTENTION, NOT THE LACK OF UNDERSTANDING.

And again, I don't care about your wordsalad, implying that everyone who doesnt get it is just an idiot.

Bu now I'm 100% sure, you have some personal, emotional reason to defend WL this much, and youre just hidding behind some intellectual mumbo-jumbo to hide it.
Otherwise you would have accepted that other people just have a different opinion about her exessive screentime.

But go ahead, write as many paragraphs as you want, we're not dumb enough to fall for this.