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

[KylePearlsand]

I tend towards localisation myself because:
A
He was shooting at the weapon anyway so rubber bullets didn't make sense and I'm pretty sure the other guy did not have rubber bullets.

B
We saw bandits being killed by dinosaurs right beforehand and a massacre right aftr this scene.

It's a really strange mood swing tbh. I get it that they wanted to go for a lighter tone for the most part but this scene imo is one of the few things not the fault of the writing but of the localisation.

Even then, it looked like the bullet hit Vulture in the shoulder. So it's not like it was going to be a fatal shot in a setting where magic is commonplace. It was such a swing in the mood that it took me out of what was otherwise as fun zone to run through.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

One of the criticism I've had with this game for a while is the gradual PG-13:fication of the story.

It feels like before the writers really got their hands dirty in showing the horrors of oppression, pulling zero punches with moments like Arenvald's, Fordola's and Yotsuyu's backstories. So why is it suddenly too much to match the, still much lighter, western tone? The sudden family friendliness was really jarring and took me out of the zone's mood immediately. It feels like another writer took over, who had not been properly briefed on the target audience of the game. Like people use real weapons in the rest of the story - Is it because they didn't want "a good guy" to be the one using lethal force that wasn't strictly in self defense? Or Tural having harsh frontier laws in part of its regions would have made their nation have just tiny bit of shade of grey, which we can't have anymore for some reason? Help me out here.

I was just thinking about this, how we've gone from Merlwyb explaining to Alphinaud that her people come first, then the alliance and then if there is anything left over, everyone else and if he didn't understand that then he didn't belong in that room to Conan the Barbarian with scales conquering two continents of warring tribes with the power of friendship. The man's primary trait is his ability to fight and he seemingly didn't take control over a single people by force, he just talked them all into making him their ruler. What kind of kindergarten crap is this? That's not how countries are formed. When they first tell us in the beginning I thought it was a fiction they tell the new generation, but then we go on the trip only to discover that no, his kingdom is built on the power of friendship... Dude, you were genetically engineered for combat. How did you build a kingdom with love and kisses?!

[ThorneDynasty]

I was just thinking about this, how we've gone from Merlwyb explaining to Alphinaud that her people come first, then the alliance and then if there is anything left over, everyone else and if he didn't understand that then he didn't belong in that room to Conan the Barbarian with scales conquering two continents of warring tribes with the power of friendship. The man's primary trait is his ability to fight and he seemingly didn't take control over a single people by force, he just talked them all into making him their ruler. What kind of kindergarten crap is this? That's not how countries are formed. When they first tell us in the beginning I thought it was a fiction they tell the new generation, but then we go on the trip only to discover that no, his kingdom is built on the power of friendship... Dude, you were genetically engineered for combat. How did you build a kingdom with love and kisses?!

I get that they wanted us to have a very good opinion of Gulool Ja. And just quickly thinking on it, one way would have been to have the Tural still be only tenuously unified, because he didn't want to iron fist all the various people into a single nation. Which realistically would probably be the only way to do it as fast as he did.

You know.... The other big problem being that the whole "peace and love" theme doesn't really have stakes when Tural is already almost perfectly peaceful. Having it still be far more volatile and interesting politically would have given Wuk Lamat's motivation a lot more gravitas.

[SableHahma]

So, I want to echo what everyone else has been saying first. You have beautifully portrayed the thoughts and feelings of the community so elegantly and I'm very grateful for your thoughtful reaction to the story.

Hearing people talk about Erenville and the death of his mother, and how poorly that entire arc happened reminded me of a particularly personal complaint I have about the story. At the end of the first half of Yak T'el's story, after Wuk Lamat defeats Bakool Ja Ja and frees her birth father. She ask him if it was true that he was her birthfather, but she has no reaction to this revelation, no thoughts or feelings about being face to face with her own flesh and blood. Instead she loudly yells in his face 'I AM GALOOL JA JA'S DAUGHTER".

I was adopted, a closed adoption. I do not know who my birth parents are, and while I don't often feel a need or desire to know who they are, it is something I will never know because that information is locked away. The fact that she couldn't even acknowledge this man as her birth father all while shouting in his face how she was someone else's daughter felt so cold to me. It felt so inhumane. If I was ever given the opportunity to meet my birth parents I would savor every second of it. I would never not acknowledge them as my parents, even if I might not feel the same way about them as I do the people who raised me. In that moment I felt so uncomfortable and disgusted with Wuk Lamat.

[Turtledeluxe]

Wuk's father reveal made me laugh out loud. It was so random and unnecessary. Then her rude reaction occurs and they had the audacity to still show him hanging around in the ending. I felt secondhand embarrassment for him because literally no one cares about his truth.

[HammerHead]

I used machine translation for the text I posted.

I found it very interesting to read.
I agree with most of what you said.

As a token of my appreciation, I would like to share the topic of rubber bullets that some have been talking about.
We use rubber bullets in the Japanese version as well.

Perhaps the reason for this is that producer Yoshida previously said,
"If we want to conform to the ratings of each country, we cannot directly depict scenes where people are cut or bleeding."
Until now, scenes like an arrow piercing the body or a neck being cut were hidden in the shadows of a movie,
and were skillfully depicted so that the player could sense them.

In this Western duel, it would have been strange to hide the moment you are shot,
so perhaps they used rubber bullets to express that.
Or perhaps the development of laws in the wilderness has led to an awareness of valuing life...

The content of this forum post gave me an answer to one of my questions.
Thank you.

[Rannie]

Hmm I find Yoshi-P response for the whole can't show blood to be kinda bull. The Pegi for it is 16. ESRB IS Teen and all of those points to violence and or including blood... soo yeah no . I wouldn't be surprised if the CERO was a teen type rating as well.

Which for the T for teen rating on the site itself states blood

Edit: if it were really the case then they need to drop the rating and mark it PG or G and it's equivalents or Other countries...

And at that point if this keeps up I'm probably gone... I didn't ask to play TULIYOLLAL Street staring a character better fit for a trash can than oscar the grouch

[Alleluia]

Wuk's father reveal made me laugh out loud. It was so random and unnecessary. Then her rude reaction occurs and they had the audacity to still show him hanging around in the ending. I felt secondhand embarrassment for him because literally no one cares about his truth.

To be fair, Wuk Lamat didn’t just rudely yell “yup I’m Galool’s daughter!” at her birth father. She said it in reaction to his obviously intentional ignoring of her question about whether he was really her dad. When she asked, he basically cut her off and very intentionally emphasized how her actions showed she was galool’s kid (or reminded him of galool? I forget the exact words.)

It was then that Wuk Lamat paused a second to process that as his hint that he didn’t want to openly acknowledge he was her father, and that she should just consider herself as daughter of the dawnservent; and she then responded by emphatically going along with what he’d said. She accepted his wishes. It wasn’t rude at all.

I hated that revelation for how the WoL was railroaded into agreeing with his silence on the matter, but Wuk Lamat wasn’t a problem there, to me.

[ReynTime]

More than the rubber bullet crap that zone made me question the logic in making those areas look the way they do.
While every region in XIV is based on architecture and cultures of different countries, I just feel like the way they inserted Thavnair and Yak'Ajsgkadasgj as literally Fantasy-India and Fantasy-USA don't really have any good lore explanation. The origin of Thavnair has almost nothing in common with the origin of classic Hindu yet the architecture, fashion, cuisine, etc, just happens to be similar. What reason is given for Yak'Asfgaskf to be so similar to the wild west? Did they actually research why the wild west was the way it was? Did they have literally the same colonization history as the USA?
For the rest of Tulyal the backstories make sense. For all the other nations, Thanalan, La Noscea, Black Shroud, Ishgard, Ala Mhigo, Sharlayan... they take inspirations from real cultures and locations but they feel and look very much like places that could only exist in Final Fantasy XIV. The same really can't be said for Thavnair, YakYakYakYak or even Doma. Aside from the giant dragon leader, those just seem to copy the homework and do very little that's original.

[chizLemons]

Just posting here to keep this thread on top and going because it nailed it. Thank you so much for putting it so well and posting it here.
And I also agree with many of the comments as I have been reading every single page. My one hope to this game's future is to have someone in Square Enix read this feedback and attempt to fix things. Maybe bring Ishikawa back as the main writer, or have her teach them how to treat our precious characters. Or even, I don't know, pay the team a BASIC STORYTELLING ONLINE CLASS.

The characters were so bad, and my favorites felt so out of character, it was actually heartbreaking to speak to them and see nothing. It felt disrespectful to them, and a gross misunderstanding of what people like about them. The story also very much underestimates the intelligence of the player, like we are not supposed to think about it for more than 3 seconds or it just doesn't make any sense. So the characters don't think about it either.
I lost all motivation to log in after finishing the MSQ, even though there's still so much content to play. I don't have any complaints about the gameplay and graphical aspect, and I do enjoy it, but I'm so attached to the story and the characters, that it took every motivation away.