Revelations from Dawntrail (7.0)

[EdwinLi]

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.

Sphene danger signs....

I mark this down to being obvious but down the line between is she doing this intentionally because of her own goals or she is being forced to do it to keep her people safe.

I notice WoL picks up on all the warning signs with Sphene which was something he/she was never good at during his/her younger years starting out in 2.0. Something that will have obviously developed as a result of WoL's experiences through 2.0 to 6.X

The Endless situation....

The Endless plot feels like they should have given more time to properly develop in this expansion. It felt rushed in my opinion due to how they were trying to pack together all as much as possible down to the last two maps.

The MSQ present the view of Sphene as living people but within the short amount of time we are given, the MSQ is obviously trying to rush the aspect about how the Endless are really just AI copies of people who once lived. Flawed copies as well which is shown with Sphene and those who have become endless in Living Memories.

Everyone of them can only copy a person at a surface level because they only mimic the individual from their memories only. They lack the Soul required to really understand the person they copy internally. This is greatly shown with Sphene since despite saying she Loves her people and will do anything to protect them even if she has to slaughter entire planets to keep powering the Living Memories of her people, she lacked compromised and will to try to find alternative solution. Not to mention any form of sympathy for anyone who are not "her people" because she only mimics the real Sphene's love for only her people.

The real Sphene would have been horrified to even consider murdering entire planets to save the Living memories of her people and probably would have pull the plug herself. However, this Sphene cannot because she can only mimic Sphene's love for only her people.

The Endless are also more like broken records in the Living Memory. They live over and over again only the happiest moments of the person's life without any memories of all the experiences of their future experiences before they died. They are unable to move forward and discover new happiness nor aware enough to be themselves as individuals because they are Living the memories of their past when they were the most happy.

Living memory on the other hand obviously has the issue why WoL needed to shutdown the place even if it means ending the Living Memories of everyone who have a AI copy created into it. The place has grown so big that if it was to stop consuming souls of countless people who are alive (or once alive before they were killed to have their souls harvested) at any moment it will literally shutdown. Sphene has to keep it running 24/7 with the demand to maintain it growing with every addition to Living Memory. If Sphene is not stopped then there will literally be no people lefts to reincarnate into a new life. Their situation was already bad enough that they are preventing people from returning to the aetherial sea to go through the process of reincarnation just so they can turn them into soul food to keep the people alive well alive.

Their Soul system being presented as wrong is obviously rushed as well. It is made very clear that they become so dependent on it so much they basically treat it like a drug in a way as shown with the NPC who ran out of Souls to consume if he died. At the sametime they also become negligent to their own safety to a point they waste souls away easily.

They try to present all these things in the last part of 7.0 within two maps quickly but they obviously needed the MSQ a bit longer in these areas to properly build up and present these obvious issues.

Constant trend of learning about People's past in each expansion but never WoL before 1.0/2.0

I notice it is always a constant trend with the storyline to completely avoid asking WoL about his/her past before they began their adventure in 1.0 or 2.0 (depending on your character being legacy or not).

It is always every other character we get to know about that WoL and his/her allies ask but they never seem to ask about WoL. Only being interested with WoL life around 2.0 and after.

However, we atleast learned about WoL's connection to Azem in 6.0 and from it that the old world before the sundering was not free from threats. Heck Azem literally jump into a Volcano to save a entire town and they still needed law enforcements to deal with any people who may have develop dangerous needs and desires.

At this point, I wonder if one expansion in the future may involve learning more about Azem while also learning about who WoL was before 1.0/2.0.

[Fenral]

Arcadion

Honestly, any time people slip into overly-tolerant mode this expansion it kind of pulls me out of things like I'm being talked down to, so it's especially jarring that we're forced to disagree strongly (with a choice of wording) just so we can this time be on the receiving end of the kind of wooden and artificial tolerance we've gotten a lot of lately. I would have settled for "I'll pass" or, "I've prepped my own supports" (but I guess the Azem crystal is still technically a secret reserved for existential crises only). Still, I once again feel like I'm not actually allowed to demonstrate that I've been paying attention in class.

So Black Cat was using the soul of the Cath Palug. That's kind of scary. (The unnamed hero mentioned is King Arthur. It's one of his lesser-known deaths.) I like having her as a sidekick, though.

Honey B. is great and I love her arena. Kind of sad that she didn't get a named soul, though. Not much to say on the last guy, except that I was hoping he was a scripted heel and not actually evil.

Last stage theme sounds a little too much like Leviathan's theme, and it doesn't even have the excuse that Eden did.

And we now have a proper tournament arc with a side of very special episode, with "psychonekrosis" as a stand-in for the long-term injuries usually suffered by prize fighters with a long enough career (i.e. pro boxers with permanent brain damage). I also suspect the truth about Sphene's death is being held back for now just to come to light at the absolute worst (read: most dramatic) time.

It's interesting, sort of an Omega 2 to go with our Stormblood 2, but I kind of miss the scale we had when our raids involved actual raiding.

I rolled a 1 on the minion when it dropped. /10char

[EdwinLi]

Arcadion

Honestly, any time people slip into overly-tolerant mode this expansion it kind of pulls me out of things like I'm being talked down to, so it's especially jarring that we're forced to disagree strongly (with a choice of wording) just so we can this time be on the receiving end of the kind of wooden and artificial tolerance we've gotten a lot of lately. I would have settled for "I'll pass" or, "I've prepped my own supports" (but I guess the Azem crystal is still technically a secret reserved for existential crises only). Still, I once again feel like I'm not actually allowed to demonstrate that I've been paying attention in class.

So Black Cat was using the soul of the Cath Palug. That's kind of scary. (The unnamed hero mentioned is King Arthur. It's one of his lesser-known deaths.) I like having her as a sidekick, though.

Honey B. is great and I love her arena. Kind of sad that she didn't get a named soul, though. Not much to say on the last guy, except that I was hoping he was a scripted heel and not actually evil.

Last stage theme sounds a little too much like Leviathan's theme, and it doesn't even have the excuse that Eden did.

And we now have a proper tournament arc with a side of very special episode, with "psychonekrosis" as a stand-in for the long-term injuries usually suffered by prize fighters with a long enough career (i.e. pro boxers with permanent brain damage). I also suspect the truth about Sphene's death is being held back for now just to come to light at the absolute worst (read: most dramatic) time.

It's interesting, sort of an Omega 2 to go with our Stormblood 2, but I kind of miss the scale we had when our raids involved actual raiding.

I rolled a 1 on the minion when it dropped. /10char

I do enjoy the whole WWE theme they have going for this raid though I have a feeling this was chosen to partly be involved in some WWE comedy in the upcoming Hildibrand storyline.

[Lyth]

I felt like the 30 minutes or so of scenes in Archadion managed to upstage the entire Dawntrail MSQ. Not that this was a difficult task, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised. My gut feeling right now is that anything linked to S9 lore is going to be pretty solid, even if I'm left with the feeling that the Archadion writer almost certainly played Cyberpunk 2077.

The fights are looking really good as well. I'm excited for the raid tier.

[Tehmon]

Arcadion spoilers (not really but still)

Last boss' raidwide is called Wrath of Zeus. So I'm going to need to know who Zeus is. I'll be disappointed if it's just an irrelevant name drop because uuuhhh Zeus, lightning, it fits, durrr.

[Cleretic]

My main takeaways from Arcadion are... well, mostly gleeful incoherent screaming, this is already making a solid case for 'best normal raid series'. But in terms of actual, cohesive and verbalized thoughts, I have to divide them into two.

First of all, looks like the Arcadion's gonna be leading the post-MSQ story about the regulators--and is stanchly anti-those, but also recognizing that you're not gonna be able to overhaul society that hard on a dime. That would be like trying to revoke all cars. Or, like, the concept of currency. You're gonna need to find a better angle than that, and 'beating Alexandria's best at the thing that the regulators specifically make them good at' is a pretty solid one.

The story outside of that is sort of a stub here, but it's still a lot better than I could say about the first leg of Pandaemonium; by this point in Panda I still didn't even know what the point of the raids were beyond 'see more of this part of the world we assume you like', while there's some solid stakes and promises of the future here; we are absolutely gonna end this by fighting the President. Because if we're doing a pro wrestling storyline, it's only right to end with us fighting Vince McMahon; after all, the WWE squandered their setup for the best final boss of all time, it's only right that someone else use it.

...but I feel like, while it's not 'lore' per se, there's another very important root in this one, because the actual fights feel very steeped in fighting games.

Specifically, the bosses in this one all feel like they're lifting from Capcom fighting games. That'd feel like a reach, if we didn't already know that Yoshi-P is into Capcom fighting games specifically.

First boss is Felicia from Darkstalkers; 'catgirl with savage attacks' is admittedly sort of a given with Black Cat's aesthetic, in isolation that could be nothing, but in the context of everyone else, it tracks here.
Second boss is Q-Bee, also from Darkstalkers; Q-Bee didn't have that 'pop star' aesthetic, but a surprising amount of her kit is there otherwise. ...and honestly, 'bee lady' is actually a much rarer trope than I'd expect!
Third boss is obvious right from the opening cutscene: that's Zangief, with some Akuma mixed in. There's some actual Zangief poses in there!
And fourth boss is where things get a little fuzzier, but it might be because it's tapping into games I don't play; I can see shades of Cable and Iron Man from Marvel vs. Capcom, and I could make a flimsy case for Morrigan from Darkstalkers but only in later crossover games where they went really hard on giving her mech stuff. None of those feel like they fit as well as the first three, though; maybe the Savage tier's inevitable second form will nail things down. Or maybe it's just not fighting game stuff at all, but that sounds lame.

[EdwinLi]

Arcadion spoilers (not really but still)

Last boss' raidwide is called Wrath of Zeus. So I'm going to need to know who Zeus is. I'll be disappointed if it's just an irrelevant name drop because uuuhhh Zeus, lightning, it fits, durrr.

I won't be surprised if it is just a name drop for the sake of a name drop because "WWE fancy moves need fancy names" reason. If people are going to make a show in a Fantasy WWE, expect each wrestler to probably name all their fancy moves after something to make it sound "cool" for th audience

[Iscah]

I feel like the name "Eutrope" (ユトロープ, Yutoropu) might be a mis-romanisation? It just doesn't look quite right for Hhetsaro names we've seen so far.

I would suspect it might be supposed to start with the double-Y used for several other names in the region, but the existing ones are all Shetona so it comes back to figuring out whether they have a shared or separate language.

[Dikatis]

I feel like the name "Eutrope" (ユトロープ, Yutoropu) might be a mis-romanisation? It just doesn't look quite right for Hhetsaro names we've seen so far.

I would suspect it might be supposed to start with the double-Y used for several other names in the region, but the existing ones are all Shetona so it comes back to figuring out whether they have a shared or separate language.

If you speak with Neyuni after the fact, you'll learn that Eutrope explicitly changed her traditional Hhetsarro name to an Alexandrian one to fit her lifestyle and ideals.

Neyuni: Ah, speaking of Eutrope, have you ever found it strange that her name is so different from ours? It's because she decided to change hers from the one our parents gave us to an Alexandrian name instead. Her progressive ideals are not limited to her ring persona─they are core to who she is.

[Iscah]

If you speak with Neyuni after the fact, you'll learn that Eutrope explicitly changed her traditional Hhetsarro name to an Alexandrian one to fit her lifestyle and ideals.

Thanks, I did miss that line. Though it doesn't sound immediately English like most of the Alexandrian names.