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

[Darko]

I was both worried and excited for this expansion. Worried because they were trying something new and I wanted it to succeed because I want 10 more years of FFXIV. Excited because we were promised an adventure. A city of gold. Hanging out with Erenville and Krile. The trailer made me wonder, what was going to happen once I crossed the sea and got off that boat?

Well, what happened is that a third of the way into DT I found myself reading story feedback on the forums instead of watching an MSQ cutscene. Before, I never even skipped lines in a sidequest.

I'm at the halfway point now past

the attack on Tuliyollal

and this is what Alisaie says:

Oh, you're back. By that, I take it to mean Lamaty'i is feeling better.

Alisaie doesn't even use a nickname for Alphinaud but she uses one for someone she's known a few months? This isn't Alisaie. This isn't any of the Scions, WoL included. It's like we got brainwashed into loving Wuk Lamat, on top of having our individual personalities and bonds to each other erased. It creeps me out. There's also the WoL seeing a vision through the Echo, yet nobody reacts to it and they don't tell anyone about it. What has our iconic power become, a flashback device? Not the first time either.

You can say that again! We've been to the literal edge of existence. Some mysterious giant dome shouldn't scare us!

This is an actual line by Alisaie.

Despite the amazing scenery, music, dungeons, for the first time ever I can't bring myself to finish the MSQ. The story is why I play FFXIV, if it's going to be this bad from now on then there's nothing to look forward to. If the XIV team doesn't listen to the feedback and make a U-turn on this, then I will chalk 7.0 up to my WoL having a bad dream and cut my losses.

[Tsubasa_Kuran]

Ι couldn't agree more and I wish I could like this more than once.
I am worried about the future of final fantasy.
(Personal sidenote: I would give my kidney for just one more scene with Emet-selch and Hythlodaeus, meanwhile we got so many pointless poorly written voiced scenes with essentially muppets)

I have been playing and paying for this game for almost 10 years now. They need to deliver with the actual good written characters and quality execution.
We are not asking for perfection, just for the writing team to respect us. Our time and emotional investment.
And the fan-base needs to have standards.
I hope the team hears your voice.

[Zaniel]

I honestly believe that someone took the bones of a story that explored what it means to be a good leader (Wuk Lamat who actually puts the well fare of all societies first and foremost, and Sphene who is unwilling to sacrifice her people's happiness for the good of other societies) and air brushed it so badly that it takes incredible effort to get any real meaning out of the story.

This happens constantly through Dawntrail, there are constantly tiny nuggets of really good ideas and things worth exploring throughout the entire expansion. Every so often some character (even Wuk Lamat) will say something that COULD have been writing gold and you think to yourself "That there, that was someone's post-it note during the whiteboarding session they had right at the very beginning of the dev cycle." Then somewhere along the line all those post-it notes were gathered up, given to the writer who then went and buried them all in a Wuk Lamat fanfic. You can tell there were initially good ideas but they never made it out of the whiteboard meeting room and never got sewn into cohesive whole.

It makes me question their supervision and production methodology, how did they go from lots of little snippets of good ideas, to the smothered mess of what we got? Was there no editorial process? No back and forth? No supervision? Did that whiteboard meeting happen then Yoshi-P and Ishikawa just went on holidays for 2 years and came back to check only after the expansion was baked and done? It makes it even MORE frustrating because it's definitely one of those "see what could have been" things.

EDIT: Also, the vast number of logical inconsistencies and plot holes tells me there was no story editor, or they were asleep at their desk. The only explanation I can come up with is, again, the complete abandonment of the MSQ into the hands of one guy or small group.

[Voidmage]

I'm going to go out on a limb and sayu that this would have been terrible too. The writer can not handle writing one character well for significant screentime, much less six. Otis and Sphene are some of the worst, laziest characters to enter our presence. Bakool Jaja started as a Speed Racer tier villain and heelturned after one chitchat. Koana is more of a symbol to communicate a theme than a character. Wuk, obviously, everyone hates.

I don't understand the fan commitment to Krile. She's fine. She was always fine. She's no more interesting or less interesting than the other Scions--at least until Dawntrail where her entire backstory was rewritten to be bad tearjerk fodder rather than a suitable catharsis.

They're all bad, they've always been bad.

I‘ll be honest.
I don‘t think you will ever get deep characters in this game you are searching for.
Emet Selch was a lucky hit of the writers and they had lot of existing lore beforehand, like a puzzle.

The final fantasy series is full of trope characters and that’s not a bad thing as is the tales of series.
Characters like Otis and Sphene are actually pretty fitting for the series. They are like ff9 characters.
I think trope characters can work if written good and thats where they failed.

With that idea they could have at least used them to ping pong off one another and not just one character 24/7.
I think part of the Wuk problem is also that they really wanted to show their new character like „look everyone, we made this brand new character. Isn’t she great? Isn’t she just like the scions? Don’t you want do go on an adventure with her, hmmm?“

The writing is a problem yes but the biggest problem for me is Wuk Lamat.
She had way too much screentime and at least in my opinion that’s also because the scions are done as characters. They have nothing else to do.
The characters in ff14 were never its strength, it was putting them into an interesting scenario and using them to show our own character. Without us they would be nothing really.

Without the WoL there is no FF14. There was no dynamic between Wuk and the others and an anti dynamic between her and the WoL.

At the end of the day though you are probably right that the writing would have also failed in that regard I‘m just having fun with the idea.
It could have really been a new beginning. Some kind of mini ff9 with a quirky cast and us instead of prodigy’s number 33362.


Edit:
I really need to stop to mumble and write so much.

[Malthir]

I‘ll be honest.
I don‘t think you will ever get deep characters in this game you are searching for.
Emet Selch was a lucky hit of the writers and they had lot of existing lore beforehand, like a puzzle.

The final fantasy series is full of trope characters and that’s not a bad thing as is the tales of series.
Characters like Otis and Sphene are actually pretty fitting for the series. They are like ff9 characters.
I think trope characters can work if written good and thats where they failed.

With that idea they could have at least used them to ping pong off one another and not just one character 24/7.
I think part of the Wuk problem is also that they really wanted to show their new character like look everyone, we made this brand new character. Isn’t she great? Isn’t she just like the scions? Don’t you want do go on an adventure with her, hmmm?“

The writing is a problem yes but the biggest problem for me is Wuk Lamat.
She had way too much screentime and at least in my opinion that’s also because the scions are done as characters. They have nothing else to do.
The characters in ff14 were never its strength, it was putting them into an interesting scenario and using them to show our own character. Without us they would be nothing really.

Without the WoL there is no FF14. There was no dynamic between Wuk and the others and an anti dynamic between her and the WoL.

At the end of the day though you are probably right that the writing would have also failed in that regard I‘m just having fun with the idea.
It could have really been a new beginning. Some kind of mini ff9 with a quirky cast and us instead of prodigy’s number 33362.


Edit:
I really need to stop to mumble and write so much.

To be fair Shadowbringers didn't really use much backstory lore, it created it all. The Ascians existed they worshiped Zodiark and that was literally all we knew about them until Shadowbringers. In fact the game didn't really have much of a major narrative outside of Garleans are trying to take over.

I think this is where they missed a beat here with

Sphene and the endless

I think the story and further story would have been better if they

A Never resolve who's going to lead in Tural. As in don't do Wuk corrination, they should have wrote that Gulool was so furious about the eugenics and biases of the mamool that he calls of the contest to be stopped until he resolves this. Then have the betrayal and his death leaving the country without an actual ruler. It would give them so much room with later content to explore character development of the contestants and also give Wuk so much needed developement.
B After defeating Zarool, Sphene does her no peace speach and vanishes with her essentially army. This gives us a unknowable enemy that's tech advanced and could come from anywhere.

FF14 has always been at it's best when the A plot is hidden and sprinkled about inside the B plot.
Ultimately the writers wrote this like endwalker resolving all plot threads, but they should have been writing it like shadowbringer. Setting up plot leaving more unexplained and open than they resolve.

[Turtledeluxe]

That scene with Footfalls just made me immediately want to replay EW rather than continue DT. And we were in the middle of one of the biggest budget scenes in the whole expansion.

[AiKuran]

Beautifully written, thank you for this post. I hope it reaches their ears. Dawntrail MSQ has saddened me, and I’m worried of how it will continue from now on. I hope they will read and pay close attention to posts like this one and fix the writing from its foundations.

I was also quite (positively) perplexed at the end, not only with G’raha, but with Krile and Erenville as well. Their experiences with their parents deeply touched me. And it is for all the reasons you already stated that Wuk Lamat’s loss of Namikka or Gulool Ja Ja did not make me care.
There is some subtext, at least, concerning Erenville, as he slowly builds up the meeting with his mother throughout DT. And then we finally get to meet the person he’s been referring to, only to learn that he has to let her go. I think there was pay off there. Similarly with Krile, however I expected SO much more Krile than what we got, it’s very unfair for the character. Still, the last area helped these two characters come to the spotlight a little more.

I would also like to add that I’m very intrigued by the lore that they have presented, and I think that that part of the MSQ has a lot to give. I’m positive if they fix the writing the lore they have constructed will shine and we’ll get to learn where sweet Emet-Selch is sending us. Unfortunately, however good the lore is it can’t lift the story.

[Bonoki]

That scene with Footfalls just made me immediately want to replay EW rather than continue DT. And we were in the middle of one of the biggest budget scenes in the whole expansion.

It's frustrating that they attacked the city, killed the Dawnservant, and then hovered in the air instead of engaging us directly, then Zereel asked us to confront him while offering no guidance on how to reach his tower. Later, when he grew impatient due to our prolonged delay and took to the field, I found it hard to comprehend how this sequence of events unfolded.

[Loggos]

That scene with Footfalls just made me immediately want to replay EW rather than continue DT. And we were in the middle of one of the biggest budget scenes in the whole expansion.

It was the same for me.

I know the Vtra scene was complete nonsense but it was still my favourite scene in DT, however not in a way that made me like DT more. On the contrary. I liked it because it was distinctively not DT, no matter how absurd and shoehorned it was, because at this point I really didn't care about the expac's story anymore. I just saw my favourite dragon and heard my favourite song and thought wow this is miles better than my last 40 hours of gametime that led up to this. Can I go and do this instead?
Really sad that the best thing about Dawntrail for me is the thing that is the furthest away from Dawntrail lol.

[Eriyu]

Agreed. If Sphene-bot, at the very end had been like "No, you're wrong Wuk, I am right" and then died, I think it would've been a better way for Wuk to have to face the fact that you can't just Talk No Jutsu your way out of every problem.

I ain't reading 20+ pages of comments so idk if this idea went any further, but here's my two cents.

I'd prefer if Zereel Ja had done that. His heel-face turn was cheap and unconvincing in the first place, so nix it. Have Wuk Lamat learn that some problems can't be solved so easily halfway through the expac instead of at the very end. She feels a bit jaded. Everything with Zoraal Ja compounds that feeling. And then Sphene-bot, who despite being uncompromising in her goals is never portrayed as malicious, can teach Wuk Lamat that even though it's not always possible, you always have to try, because sometimes it is possible.

Have Wuk Lamat fall and then rise again, not just fall at the very end.