Revelations from Dawntrail (7.0)

[Denishia]

I’m convinced that

Living Memory’s shard not only hasn’t been rejoined but the rest of it has recovered or is in the process. Alexandria is that Shard’s equivalent of an Allagan ruin. The Chekov’s Gun waiting to fire for a future expansion is stumbling into a party of native adventurers who need our help and we go explore the rest of the Shard, which thanks to electrode’s rarity and Alexandria’s self-imposed isolation is enough of a blank slate to be whatever they want.
Ideally I want 8.0 to explore more of Tural or go to Meracydia and the rest of Ilsabard, but the unconfirmed shard has its gateway established and relative freedom for worldbuilding. The only hiccup is transferring its aetherytes from Miscellaneous to a unique page.

[Austratus]

There are a lot of parallels in IX to stuff from Dawntrail, though it's often recontextualized to make it feel fresher and less predictable.

A couple more references I've thought of, in response to your post!

The first boss of the Skydeep Cenote is based on the Feather Circle enemy in FFIX, down to its use of the "trouble" status (an effect relatively unique to IX).

The area inside the volcano in zone 6, where you do the "quiz" about the Milalla, is based on Oeilvert: in particular the stained glass on the wall of the first room, the globe like decorations in the passages between the first and second rooms, and the masks on the wall in the second room. You also have to light braziers for the correct answers on the first part of the quiz, something that's associated with the Desert Palace.

Daguerreo is mentioned as a location point in the Canal Town area. A much closer approximation of the Lindblum Air Cab is one of the rides in Yesterland, and another enemy type, the Mu, is referenced in a location point only available with flight.

The Yesterland play that the player character and Wuk Lamat take part in is reframed as a history of Alexandria, but a sword-fight does happen as in the original I Want to be Your Canary (albeit with PC/Lamaty'i portraying soldiers on opposite sides of the Storm Surge conflict).

[Alleo]

So about most of the story (lvl 100 still missing)

I'm not quite through with the story yet, but I already know most of the story elements that are still to come.

In general, I have to say that I liked the first half of the story much more. I thought it was great to learn more about the cultures and I also quite liked Wuk Lamat. (Her German dubbing is great)

This is how I imagined a story with more low-level threats. You can tell that the author is still rather inexperienced in writing such long quests, but I could also make out the overarching theme and found it quite good. At that point in time it also made perfectly sense, that our character stood to the side. They simply knew that they could handle it if it went south.

For the second part, I would have liked us to act more like Estinien. Traveling alone or with Erenville + Krile together through the second continent and having little adventures that might culminate in us defeating a dangerous monster that would pose a threat to the local environment. A tick of danger but still a little vacation flair.

Instead, we have to watch as some of the inhabitants and then their former king are murdered and then comes the concentrated misery in the last two zones. At the end, our character is once again faced with a world-threatening foe, and that's where the thought comes back to me: If our character hadn't been here, the world might already be doomed again.

I really wished for an expansion where I didn't have to cry again because interesting characters were killed off or because there were some devastating realizations. I do like that Death is a theme in this game. I just wished that it was not one of the main themes in every expansion.

And because the reaction to it seems to be quite mixed I am afraid that we might not get anything that low stakes (but a bit more better written) again.

Edit:

A few more thoughts on how Dawntrail would have been better for me (even though I quite like it):

We're like Estinien all the way through. We reach the new land just before the others arrive and explore the city alone. This, of course, allows us to hear the inhabitants' views on the potential successors.

We then also travel the whole area, but with alternating company. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Estinien, sometimes we meet Koana or Wuk Lamat and their followers and help out the respective group. (Sometimes obviously, sometimes hidden from the shadows)

In certain events (abduction + first trial) we then join the assembled team and can still take on a certain mentoring role.

It also gives us the freedom to interact more freely with characters like Bakool Ja Ja. Perhaps the echo will give us an insight into his character earlier on without giving everything away completely. We could start to support him a little bit and our friends could really wonder what's going on with us for a little while because they don't know the whole background.

Like I said, just ideas that were going through my head. Who knows if that wouldn't have gotten boring in the long run.

[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.

[Denishia]

Re: the voice of the final boss of 100 dungeon was so charmingly childlike and silly that it's honestly my favorite part of that dungeon, what endears the dungeon to me when the rest of it is rather bland.

[Fenral]

Level 100 Trusts

I would have put money on something like ARR outfits for everyone, because the last few ranks have been mostly recycled from earlier.

Not so much. The Scions get actual swimsuits. Unlike the other Trust Glamours, these haven't been seen in events yet, so perhaps they'll make an appearance in 7.1 now that the sky is done falling for the moment. This really is the beach episode...

[EdwinLi]

They really took the new PvP gear into use for Solution 9 and some of the older gear sets with the NPCs there.


WoL during the final part of 7.0

I notice this time WoL is the one who picks up on all the danger signs near the ending of 7.0 MSQ. Everytime Wuk Lamat and WoL talks to Sphene, it is always WoL noticing something wrong with how Sphene talks and mentions certain things. Something that WoL use to not do a lot back during his/her younger years around the time of 2.0 but slowly develop through the story from there to 6.X era each expansion while it is usually another chaarcter who picks up the small warning signs.

Wuk Lamat (despite people's mix opinions about her) acts more like WoL during the early years as she does not pick up on the warning signs easily and a bit more trusting. A bit of a reflection towards WoL's early years when he/she was more openly trusting with almost everyone and lack experience from all the past expansion storylines.

[Iscah]

Finished now and I think I got all the big thoughts out of my system already.

A couple last things bothering me:

They never really got Bakool Ja Ja to properly feel like both heads were equally important as the identity of the combined person; it was more like "Bakool Ja Ja the Mighty and his built-in cheerleader". And of course they sidestepped the whole issue for Gulool Ja Ja by making the second head a non-character.

That said, they really need to get a Mamool Ja-fitting version of the Landsguard outfits sorted out. Just needs to be a cape and a bit of armour. It would be really sweet to have that visual reveal that Bakool has joined the Landsguard as soon as the camera cuts to him instead of waiting for the narration to confirm it.

One question that I thought was going to get dealt with (and perhaps is looming for the patches) is that both Zoraal Ja and Gulool Ja have indications that there's some kind of mystery regarding their births, with no mention of a mother for either of them - I thought we were going to get some kind of revelation that Gulool Ja Ja had gotten hold of Alexandrian cloning technology or something.

We could also have done with an establishing of young Gulool Ja's age, unless I missed it. Old enough to take up being king with some assistance, evidently.

Reading a different thread has reminded me that it occurred to me partway through Living Memory there is a mismatch between the "they're just recreated memories and not real" theme here and the entire emotional point of the Omicron / Last Dregs storyline with the characters concluding that they're alive despite being artificial recreations. Different writers not keeping track of mood consistency? Though I suppose it circles back to them being fully aware and in the present, while Living Memory's inhabitants are just sort of existing without any agency. But then Cahciua messes with that interpretation.

Lingering shot of Sphene's tiara - what would the significance of this be? We're told in passing that it's a custom regulator, although it's possible that the population are simply told this to avoid the question of why she doesn't need one. But if it is, then what might it contain...?

Also, Azem's sigil turning up on the dimensional "key". Did we do something to it or is it inherently part of the object?

Post-game dungeons

All hail the great serpent of ...Tural?

So what does this mean for the previous kinda-sorta-implicit indication that the Source equivalent to the Ronkan serpent might have influenced the Gelmorran "serpent and lily" sigil? Why is it turning up a continent away? Are the serpents we've seen only tiny upwellings of the serpent's true world-spanning form?

Also, if we're taking the "direct character clones turning up across shards" route, it was a really missed opportunity that they didn't have Quinfort as the researcher. Or would that have given the game away too soon?

And now I can read other people's posts...

Overall MSQ

...our support meant Wuk Lamat had an almost insurmountable advantage thanks both to our martial prowess and practical wisdom we've picked up on our adventures. Combat trials or no, having most of the (ex-)Scions in her corner, including the famed hero who saved the star times over, made the Rite a foregone conclusion.

Moving Forward

One last note - the Twelfth was the reflection rejoined in the Second Umbral Calamity of Lightning, meaning time dilation aside it was probably not Alexandria's reflection. Rather, we know from the First and Thirteenth that a Flood (and thus plausibly a Rejoining) tips the aetheric balance of another reflection towards the opposite element. The Third was rejoined to the Source in the Fourth Umbral Calamity of Earth, so my guess is that the reflection Living Memory is on (that was destroyed by the Storm Surge / "Flood of Lightning") would have been the Eleventh. Time dilation being a thing, that's just a guess though.

Re. advantage in the trial, Gulool Ja Ja makes it clear to us early on that fairness in the competition is irrelevant because he isn't going to just hand over his position to the winner, and the actual ulterior motive is to encourage the participants to grow as people and potential rulers.

Re. elements in the reflections, I don't think we have anywhere near enough proof to say for sure that the shards develop "equivalent" elemental balances. The Ascians told Cyella that to justify causing the Flood of Light, but that doesn't mean that it's happening in parallel on every shard.

[Re. Shepetto's design]

Face 1 Eye 6 is the largest mancat eyes can go (over Face 3, surprisingly, as compared in the benchmark 2 editor) and even a side-by-side comparison shows Shepetto has some ginormous peepers. I think he might actually be using a female Miqo'te face (they're noticeably wider) but with the texture of male face 3 (including eyelashes), since the update standardized the UVs. Not the most important Lore topic, to be sure, but I think it narrowly slides in under sekai settei (世界設定).

That's an interesting thought and I'll have to have another look at Shepetto's model later. There's something unusual about his face, certainly.

Face 3 eyes are smaller than they were before; you'd have to get hold of one of the past expansion's benchmarks now to compare which face previously had bigger eyes.

[Re. Viera]

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.

I know the real-world recommended approach is to refer to the person as if they've always been their current/preferred gender, but there's still potential for Viera to have a very different mindset about gender and how they define it.

With little canon discussion to go on (hence my hoping we'd get a bit more commentary about it) my headcanon take on it for the sake of figuring out how my Viera character would regard it is that while kits are understood to be potentially either gender they're treated as female until they aren't.

This interpretation was partly based on... I'll have to say my memory of a sidequest that may have been altered since, because I've just checked it and can't find what I recall. The quest is Delivery Time in Fanow, where they are preparing for the birth of a child, and I thought there was a point where the baby was referred to as "she" (which would indicate they default to treating all children as female) but now it's all neutral language.

But anyway, if they did treat all children as girls by default then there might be nothing odd to them about a "girl" growing into a man, and talking about it as such.

I just think it's fun to toy around with when they give the races non-human aspects, rather than falling back to handling it how humans handle the closest equivalent thing.

Level 100 Trusts

I would have put money on something like ARR outfits for everyone, because the last few ranks have been mostly recycled from earlier.

Not so much. The Scions get actual swimsuits. Unlike the other Trust Glamours, these haven't been seen in events yet, so perhaps they'll make an appearance in 7.1 now that the sky is done falling for the moment. This really is the beach episode...

They're really trying to get people to level trusts, huh?

[Alleo]

Lvl 99 before the dungeon

I am really crying way too often for this so called summer vacation expansion. I love little Gulool Ja and I was so happy that his father showed at least some sort of mercy by just letting him go.

Seeing him afterswards and hearing how loney he feels and then listening to Wuk Lamats words really brought me to tears. And when he started to cry it was over for me. The VA really nailed it. Why SE Q_Q. Emotional damage +99

I am a bit miffed that nobody in this story knows how to give hugs though..let me hug him damnit.

I kinda wonder if Sphene being a traitor was just a bit too obvious written as a mistake or if they wanted to show us that our character has learned a lot and might have had a bad feeling about her. Anyway she always behaved way too cute for it to be normal.

The only thing that I really dont understand: Why did Zooral Ja kill all these people? If he wants souls it does not make sense to kill them over and over again since every soul in the regulator is used then...wouldnt it be easier to just take away their soul filled regulators? But who knows maybe I will get the answers in story soon.