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

[HighlanderClone]

I'm assuming we're gonna find out he was a clone and it'll be a Vivi parallel.

Ugh I sincerely hope not. They butchered FF9 enough already.

[Eskat]

Hi, excellent write up to start, I was pointed to you by a mutual friend of ours. I wanted to share something that personally bugged me. It has nothing to do with Wuk Lamat.

Towards the latter half of the Solution 9 arc, Erenville begins to realize that his mom is dead, and you can very clearly notice his behavior changing from that point up until the very last part of the last bit of Living Memory. If you talk to him between quests, he literally just sits there pacing back and fourth, only saying "..." because he knows he's going to have to come to terms with it. And that's where my problem is. Why did no one comfort him? He got like one offhand comment thrown his way, but where's the actual consolation? I lost a parent recently, so this part probably personally bugs me more than it should, but I felt so bad that I took a gpose of my character hugging him in some strange attempt to convince myself the WOL actually notices that their friend is grieving about their dead parent and that they actually care about him. It just felt so wrong and bizarre at the same time, and was easily the most infuriating thing about the entire expansion to me that made me feel downright awful, not just "this is boring".

This, this so much. As much as I think the complaints of good character writing being lacking in this expansion, Erenville was a specific exception for me, especially towards the end. There are times earlier in the expansion where he solves problems in line with his character and skillset, our watery-carriage lost its steed? Erenville knows what it eats, and how to behave around it, providing a solution that is as effective as it is humble in its execution. He reacts with cynicism quite often in the story, but never in a place where it felt like he was being written to be cynical simply because it was his trope to fill, normally his dour attitude would lift when everything was operating as intended, and fall back to a more pessimistic standpoint when he was pointing out accurate criticisms or problems.

In Living Memory, where he is simultaneously being wrenched back and forth between trying to grapple with the loss of his mother, while simultaneously being forced to interact with an AI ghost of his mom who looks and acts and talks like his mother, his reaction makes sense. Erenville wildly pivots between withdrawing emotionally and sometimes physically, before being pulled back into a familiar pattern of conversation with said AI ghost, while also getting sad, and angry, offended and insulted by how his trauma is being brushed aside. The whole time, right up until they speedran his acceptance of everything in the resolution, Erenville's felt very human and relatable to me. Which makes how the plot dismisses this all the more frustrating.

[Eskat]

I think for me, my major complaint with the writing is that it felt likely to me that it was... designed by committee? The first half was very basic in its plot setup, which, honestly I was okay with. Wuk Lamat being weak to... every form of travel we encounter, I think? That got a bit tiring. Her Genki Shounen Anime Protag energy where everything is solved by the power of friendship and determination was a bit much. But frankly, I went into this thinking it'd be the new ARR, a fairly bland, but serviceable plot to give us something to do while they start getting their pieces on the board for a new plotline. So I was okay with us just tooling around with Wuk Lamat and letting her go on a simple, but straightforward plot about how working together is cool. It was safe, sanitary, and within my expectations enough that I was, perhaps not thrilled by it, but at least content.

But once we got to Heritage Found and the 2nd arc of the plot really started to kick off, it just felt like it didn't know what story it wanted to tell. For one moment, you're seeing everyone's memories getting stolen into "the cloud" and the horror of it. The next, you're eating snacks with Sphene and having a good time in her techno-utopia. The next, you're seeing people buy souls of once living people as a creature comfort in Sphene's techno-dystopia. Ultimately the collected Scions and Wuk Lamat largely just shrug and give a lukewarm take of "well we don't really like it that much." and proceed to neither give a clear message one way or the other. On one hand they want to tell us that Solution 9 is, whilst flawed, a relatively okay place. Like the Crystarium in Shadowbringers, the people in Solution 9 are doing their best to live out their lives in a world on the brink of total ruin. On the other hand, they try to tell us that Solution 9 is a place that's deeply, and troublingly wrong. But instead of picking one or the other, or at least letting the cast of characters walk away with distinctly different reactions, everyone mouths slightly different platitudes that all boil down to merely being half-hearted platitudes.

(1/2)

[Eskat]

Then once you get to Living Memory, the same thing happens. On one hand they constantly use sad music, and imagery and scenarios to tell us over and over again how these are people living in a dying heaven. Similar to Solution 9, they have problems as the energy demands cannot keep up with the infinitely increasing number of the dead, but they are nevertheless happy, and the last remnants of an era gone, but worthy of preserving. And then on the other hand, they tell us they're not real people, a horrific facsimile of life that is slowly killing the rest of the real world, and we should just pull the plug on this world before it destroys all others before eventually dying itself anyways.

An exploration of what it means to be alive, or the difficulties of letting go of the past... these are already explored in the game, but are worthy narrative choices to have made. Simultaneously, treating this more as an analogy to the real world's energy consumption, the inherently self-destructive nature of unchecked, infinite growth, and AI or whatever, that could have been a very interesting story for them to tell. But instead they told both, and in doing so, told neither. The Endless could be painted as a tragic, fragile living memory of the past, worthy of preservation even if one would deny them full humanity, or as a parasitic conglomeration of unsustainable chatbots... ones that are remarkably well designed, mind you, but just glorified algorithms putting on a great show of being alive. But these both can't be true simultaneously, you can't both embrace the tragedy of their demise, and say there's no issue with bringing that demise.

It feels like both ideas were pitched in the writing room, and rather than have one be chosen as the preferred direction, they just tried to get all these conflicting narrative structures to exist in the same framework, leaving the entire story scoured clean of nuance. In an attempt to incorporate every view, they watered down every view until they could technically share the same space, as these sterile, surface level looks at everything, making the whole experience vapid.

(2/2)

[AureliaF]

I found the final zone deeply insulting, as an exploration of grief it was nonsensical and wholly inadequate. Grief is such a powerful, scary and sometimes ugly thing. It's not something you can just handwave away. Everything in the final zone just said "yeah it's sad but it's natural so get over it". Erenville was the only one who reacted somewhat naturally to what was going on, but it felt like the game wanted to dismiss or chide his reaction, rather than actually explore it and as soon as it's done he is just fine again? That's not how it works.

Snipped your post down a little bit but I couldn't agree more. I have also suffered major loss and grief in my life, and the "handwave" attitude as you call it was just insufferable during that final map watching Erenville feel tortured by his grief. As someone who had to deal with the loss of a sister, and both parents before 30 essentially on my own, I was desperate, ugh, half dying for the writers to have given us a chance to say something to him about it. Anything. Even if it was as simple as to tell him he's not alone in this.

This is unpopular and I know it, but I actually really enjoyed the Erenville + WoL side adventure into Xak Tural after the ceremony. The moment that explosion/tremor happened, and the dome appeared, I immediately thought of Erenville's mom and his home that we'd steadily been making our way toward. I wanted to just run with him that way, to see the dome at least, but what did the game offer me? (paraphrased) "What will you say?" (1) "We have to follow that ship!" (2) "We have to get back!" (...) basically, the same answer twice, and not what I wanted to do for my friend in that moment. Ugh, so frustrating.

Anyway, unrelated, but just because I haven't commented in this thread yet, this OP has done the best job of summarizing my opinions on the failings of this expansion from a narrative point of view. Thank you, and everyone else who has added to it in the subsequent replies, for your insights. Always nice to know when you're not the only one wondering what in the seven hells happened in the writing room this go around.

[Keumjo]

Snipped your post down a little bit but I couldn't agree more. I have also suffered major loss and grief in my life, and the "handwave" attitude as you call it was just insufferable during that final map watching Erenville feel tortured by his grief. As someone who had to deal with the loss of a sister, and both parents before 30 essentially on my own, I was desperate, ugh, half dying for the writers to have given us a chance to say something to him about it. Anything. Even if it was as simple as to tell him he's not alone in this.

This is unpopular and I know it, but I actually really enjoyed the Erenville + WoL side adventure into Xak Tural after the ceremony. The moment that explosion/tremor happened, and the dome appeared, I immediately thought of Erenville's mom and his home that we'd steadily been making our way toward. I wanted to just run with him that way, to see the dome at least, but what did the game offer me? (paraphrased) "What will you say?" (1) "We have to follow that ship!" (2) "We have to get back!" (...) basically, the same answer twice, and not what I wanted to do for my friend in that moment. Ugh, so frustrating.

Anyway, unrelated, but just because I haven't commented in this thread yet, this OP has done the best job of summarizing my opinions on the failings of this expansion from a narrative point of view. Thank you, and everyone else who has added to it in the subsequent replies, for your insights. Always nice to know when you're not the only one wondering what in the seven hells happened in the writing room this go around.

Especially awful when your character is clearly looking at people looking sad and no one else is noticing and then you just don't acknowledge it again. I laughed at us getting the leather daddy gear right before a sad character moment so I'm just in the background looking like I'm about to go to a fetish club while people are openly weeping.

[TaleraRistain]

I actually hadn't heard of this variation but boy does it fit her to an absolute tee



That scene really irked me for not only how contrived the whole damn setup is with her father but how our character just awkwardly hangs in the background. They're very clearly attempting to portray us as the mentor allowing their pupil to prove themselves except... we don't actually do any mentoring. Which still baffles me why they didn't include even some throwaway scenes of precisely that. It genuinely feels like the writer was so in love with Wuk Lamat they didn't dare want to take the limelight away from her.

I've honestly wondered if she is either a higher up's favorite, something decided upon by committee, or a writer self-insert.

I actually liked her in the first half. I liked being the mentor (for all the flaws that had) in the first half. I did not like her overshadowing Scions and others like Erenville in the second half when that should have been our time with them so their stories could be told properly. So they shoved her into things so much that I don't ever want to even hear her name again in the story.

[CuteBucket]

Snipped for character limit

I wanted to add on to this myself as someone who has also experienced loss and how insultingly poorly it was handled in the final zone. Erenville is going through HELL and no one around him, including his abomination AI mother, seem to notice or care. I wrote something similar to some friends on discord that I'm going to rephrase here:

Personal pet peeve about theming and something that came up repeatedly in Dawntrail that irked me due to very personal reasons--the whole "the dead live on in our memories, so don't be sad, they live on with you now!" thing. Because as someone who has experienced a traumatic loss and had people repeatedly telling me things like in the wake of it, it's a fucking lie. No, they don't. They're dead and gone, and what memories you have feel like like wisps of smoke. They are nothing. It's one of many similar empty platitudes given more to assuage the feelings of discomfort of the person saying it rather than the person mourning. I got told a lot of shitty "comforting" things in the wake of my father's sudden and tragic death, and that was one of them. Hell, I was once told that my sobbing in the morgue was making other people in the area uncomfortable. It was one of the most hurtful and insulting things to have been told in my life. And it felt like that was how Erenville was being treated by the writers and the other characters. "Well, see, you being upset about your dead mom is kind of a bummer and we don't have the time or artistic knowledge or talent to grapple with that topic, so cheer up buddy! Get on the capybara with your ghost mom!"

I thought this theme was handled okay in the giant's society in Uroqopacha, because there it still seemed like more of a "respect for the dead, respect and reverence for those who came before us" thing, which I can vibe with. I understand from a storytelling standpoint how that is meant then to clash with the people of Solution 9 forgetting the dead, thus making them metaphorically even more dead in the eyes of many. Sure they get to "live" (not really, they're just reconstructed memories given aether) in the data cloud, but they are forgotten by the living! They never dug into that at all, ugh!! Anyway, they bring back the whole "they live on in our memories!" thing a bunch at the end zone and it made me so angry. It feels like whoever wrote that part has never experienced the loss of a loved one in that way, whereas the writing of ShB and EW definitely felt far more real and relatable when it touched on the themes of grief and loss.

[Doriann]

I began to like wuk lamat by the end of the third zone, when she became leader of tuliyolal alongside her brother, but mostly because I thought "yes, finally, you're done, now goodbye and enjoy your city while I venture forth with Erenville"

If things weren't very good before, it all went even further downhill. Shaaloani is shit - it is what Thanalan could've been if they had today's technology/experience back then, nothing new whatsoever just a whole map of nothingness, on top of that godawful wild west aesthethic. The first part of the main story quest, the bracelet, felt 100% filler with no sustenance. It only gets slightly interesting when we try to fix the cerulean train, mostly because we are remembered of the trolley in shadowbringers - this was a nice touch to add.

Why did we have to waste half of Shaaloani's story chasing around a bracelet? Why bring Wuk Lamat again? This was the perfect opportunity to bring Koana with us so that he could prove to everyone else that he's not a bore without feelings, he'd go there and venture forth with us. There's even a Miqote tribe in Shaaloani, we could've had a small side story with them and Koana, since he confesses more than once during the first party of MSQ that he resents being born into a nomadic tribe and abandoned along the way. We could have had character growth, with him working with other nomadic Miqote in order to overcome his resentment of his birthparents. But not, we waste time planting dung bombs on people, waste our time running around after a bracelet and solving a stupid detective "mistery". Shaaloani is by far the lowest I've experienced in FFXIV, and I've been around since we were guiding Yugiri to Mor Dhona in 2.1.

Then we reach Heritage Found. If Shaaloani is Thanalan could have been, this map is a 100% revamp of Northern Thanalan, same aesthethics and the whole blue/purple vibe, only now we are friends with the Garleans (Alexandrians). It's beyond disappointing. The only positive so far has been Solution Nine, which is a really nice map, it has a vibe that reminds me of the main hub area of phantasy star online 2

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

I agree. The decision to couple the erasure of everyone's parents with a trip to the themepark was tonal whiplash. For five minutes you were supposed to be super sad cause everyone's mom is being deleted, and then it was okay, everyone off to the next ride! I couldn't believe what I was experiencing. I had to wonder if a feeling, thinking person wrote this or was it written by AI. Because no, that's now how humans work. I'd be working on a way to save my mom's memories, not eating ice cream and visiting the waterpark. Even if they are just being released back into the aetherial sea, they are on another shard, his mom isn't even in the aetherial sea he'll end up in. They should have at least been looking for a way to take their families home with them. This insistence that we shouldn't be bothered by death for more than six seconds is just weird and I wish they'd stop insisting it.