Revelations from Dawntrail (7.0)

[Iscah]

Notes at the threshold of the level 99 dungeon:

So yeah, called it on both counts with Cahciua and Sphene.

Sphene was suspect... well, right from the start with her so-perfectly-perfectness and kinda Meteion vibes, but particularly as soon as she said her people come first, it was pretty guessable that line was going to come back ominously later.

Zoraal Ja's attack on S9 seemed thoroughly ill-thought-out for thirty years of scheming. He needs to gather lots of souls for power so he gets the robot army to repeatedly kill the citizens and waste souls until they can finally claim the last one? How about snatching all the regulators first and optionally then killing them for additional souls? That could have been even more potent story-wise because suddenly the survivors are all actually having to comprehend what happened instead of getting memory-wiped and carrying on.

Also, planning to enter the 99 dungeon facility makes no sense. "We can't get to floor 12 from here on floor 9 because the elevators are deactivated. Come and meet me on the ground floor." Did we abseil down? (It would probably be a great deal more straightforward to get to floor 12 via the roof.)

Side note, need to investigate: We're told all of the S9 races are named after precious stones but it seems like that might be a mistranslation? As far as I can tell, it's only the Elezen using stones (precious or otherwise) for individual names and the race-names are just plays on the Eorzean terms.

Final zone - having done the first two major objectives

Sphene went full Meteion. It feels too soon to be doing this again.

Also her terminal/tomb statue looks like the Endsinger, but maybe that's just "all Amano's faces look the same" thing.

(It's a rather neat linguistic lining up of a "terminal" in this case being a tomb, though.)

I feel like the convoluted pre-established nature of souls and memories works against the nature of this zone. From what we understand of we're not "freeing" any eternal aspect of them, just deleting/dissipating them from existence, plus it's vague what would happen to memory aether when not in the aetherial sea.

Plus it feels like the Endless are at least partly stuck in an illusion of not-necessarily-happy moments of their life, like finding Namikka panicking that she can't find Wuk Lamat - it seems as if she just popped into existence thinking herself still in that particular moment, in total contrast to our arrival at the plaza welcomed by a greeter. There's another character in a sidequest who is likewise looking for his brother, talking as if they've been together here all along, only to snap out of it and realise his brother was never brought to Living Memory at all. And there are also indications that people have to "wait for another turn" at being resurrected sometimes, which suggests that either they can die in this world or after a while they get arbitrarily sent back to storage so someone else can have a turn at being alive.

So I guess it is freeing them from this trapped-in-a-dream existence, but perhaps there needed to be a few more hints of people feeling dissatisfied with it. There was one NPC who remarked on there being less and less people around and less lights in the distant buildings, so there's a sense of this being "dying embers" already. But it feels like everything is not quite clicking together properly.

Also, I'd really like it if we could get an expansion with a final zone that isn't some kind of existential horror for once. Maybe next time.

Waiting for the final trial

Meeting Krile's parents was lovely, but ye gods, that middle part with the ice creams was awkward and disruptive.

I really need to do Aloalo Island.

The Endless seem thoroughly unfussed by the prospect of ceasing to exist, or being the last one left behind after everyone else vanished.

It strikes me as odd that the first zone has this very conspicuous design aspect of being deliberately fake, where you can step out-of-bounds and discover that all the charming buildings are empty facades with nothing behind, and yet the rest of the zones have none of it.

Re. Viera kids and gender, a reminiscing Cahciua talks about Erenville specifically as her "boy" at one point, so.... do Shetona not have the same mystery gender thing going on as Othardian Viera? Or just applying the correct gender retroactively? Or it's just the writers being terrible with acknowledging non-human quirks about the races again.

I liked the detail that all the Alexandrian Elezen are Duskwight, given the lack of sunlight in their realm (but don't like being reminded that yet again we're exploring all these newly invented races and still know so little about some of the existing ones), until it got undermined by them all being Duskwight in the recreation of Alexandria as well. Maybe it can be explained as not a direct copy of reality but a flexible memory and some of the details have been misremembered.

The Eliminator battle voiceover was kind of weird. The cartoony rising "annihilation, annihilation" line sounded like something I'd expect out of a Ratchet & Clank boss, not the penultimate battle of something trying to be serious.

Currently in the final trial waiting room and the graphics "update" continues to disappoint. Azem's light pillars used to be the most fantastic temporary opportunity to take gpose photos with good lighting coming from all directions, now it's pretty meh.

Will report back soon with the final showdown!

...there's something in this final trial music that sounds like the game's "cancel menu" sound effect and it catches my attention every time it goes off.

[Vallavia]

Re. Viera kids and gender, a reminiscing Cahciua talks about Erenville specifically as her "boy" at one point, so.... do Shetona not have the same mystery gender thing going on as Othardian Viera? Or just applying the correct gender retroactively? Or it's just the writers being terrible with acknowledging non-human quirks about the races again.

In my opinion...

I believe that all Viera (even Othardians) would speak in the past tense with whatever gender they identify with in the present. This is generally considered to be the polite thing to do in real life regarding people who once identified with a different gender, and I gather based on the newer information from the male naming conventions that while Viera gender roles are pretty stringent, gender itself is not, since it's a somewhat mutable biological trait to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised if Viera children were considered entirely gender neutral until they came of age, given that the vast majority of their names are already gender neutral, sort of like how a lot of cultures historically didn't give their children names until they had outlived the general threshold for infant mortality.

All that said, Viera culture is said to be extremely pluralistic, and Shetona are well outside of that bubble anyway, so mileage could vary vastly from village to village much less from one continent to another.