Unpopular Opnion: Dawntrail MSQ one of the best yet! [Spoilers]

[FlowerMilk]

It. Is. A. Fresh. Start. To. A. New. Story.

That new story better be about Krile and not Wuk Lamat or this expansion is dead in the water. If the follow up patch story isn't more Krile focused after she's been sidelined for so long and we were promised she would take a more prominent role this expansion, then they just straight up lied to us. And then dangled little crumbs of a super emotional and intriguing story involving her parents and backstory and then just brushed her under the rug. I would just start skipping cut scenes out of anger honestly.

[Bobby66]

I can see why people don't like it, but I did. I like the intro and excited to see what is to come. This is a nice lull after 10 years of story we left behind.

[Kisshu]

That new story better be about Krile and not Wuk Lamat or this expansion is dead in the water. If the follow up patch story isn't more Krile focused after she's been sidelined for so long and we were promised she would take a more prominent role this expansion, then they just straight up lied to us. And then dangled little crumbs of a super emotional and intriguing story involving her parents and backstory and then just brushed her under the rug. I would just start skipping cut scenes out of anger honestly.

Patch story will be us following Wuk Lamat around the different zones as she tries the local food.

[Firun]

Same, I can see why people didn't like it, but I sure did. It was a nice adventure to follow along with, and for once it was great to not have the "oh we gotta praise the player's ego" that the game had in ShB and EW. It does seem that the writer(s) struggle to have a story style that doesn't put the focus on one character and their achievements, but rather make it all a group adventure and effort.

But I like the overall plot and how they told it, it was well done, it wasn't overly obvious or "garleans bad", it kept me engaged on the evolution. There was some filler there that there could not have been, sure, but every story kinda needs that, otherwise it becomes hard to follow and process if it becomes a rapid fire of exposition and twists.

[Eyrilona]

I dislike that if I accept the events of this expansion as canon, then I now hate my own character for cheerfully nodding through humiliation and just agreeing with no discussion to commit acts of completely unnecessary mass murder and refusing to help so many people we could have helped. And that we are okay with not only installing someone with no proven leadership skills at the throne of Tuliyollal, but also acting like a grand colonizer and giving Tuliyollal effectively regency control of Alexandria's people through a puppet child King.

It also just offends my sense of.. well, of making sense, that the entire Final Days don't seem to have happened in Tural. No mention, no damage to clear up, nobody even seems to have noticed the literal end of the world being in progress there for a whole expansion -- and don't say it is because it is such a happy place that nobody there knew enough despair to have turned into a Blasphemy to kickstart the process, because the whole story of Mamook is pretty much how despairing and miserable that entire society is over the state of how have to live. Despair would have ripped through there like fire through a matchstick factory.

This story had so many failures of continuity and forced so many out of character decision and actions on me that are not my Warrior or Light, I can only continue to enjoy this game by pretending Dawntrail never happened and my character was never there. But that means there is no ground for the future of the story to build on unless we go somewhere else entirely and resume from the state as it should have been at the end of Endwalker.

[Syln]

Patch story will be us following Wuk Lamat around the different zones as she tries the local food.

Or to find her the fabled Dawn servant litter box +100 in power of friendship and mutual understanding.

[ThaCa]

The overall story isn't all that bad, it just gets overshadowed by overexposure of Wuk. They wanted her to be endearing, but she just ends up being exhausting. I don't think she is completely awful, it's just the amount of screentime combined with pointless repetition that brings her character down A LOT. If they had spent bit more time on others and just straight up skipped some of the repetition, it would have been so much better and I think people would have different opinion on her.

[Coratanni]

I dislike that if I accept the events of this expansion as canon, then I now hate my own character for cheerfully nodding through humiliation and just agreeing with no discussion to commit acts of completely unnecessary mass murder and refusing to help so many people we could have helped. And that we are okay with not only installing someone with no proven leadership skills at the throne of Tuliyollal, but also acting like a grand colonizer and giving Tuliyollal effectively regency control of Alexandria's people through a puppet child King.

It also just offends my sense of.. well, of making sense, that the entire Final Days don't seem to have happened in Tural. No mention, no damage to clear up, nobody even seems to have noticed the literal end of the world being in progress there for a whole expansion -- and don't say it is because it is such a happy place that nobody there knew enough despair to have turned into a Blasphemy to kickstart the process, because the whole story of Mamook is pretty much how despairing and miserable that entire society is over the state of how have to live. Despair would have ripped through there like fire through a matchstick factory.

This story had so many failures of continuity and forced so many out of character decision and actions on me that are not my Warrior or Light, I can only continue to enjoy this game by pretending Dawntrail never happened and my character was never there. But that means there is no ground for the future of the story to build on unless we go somewhere else entirely and resume from the state as it should have been at the end of Endwalker.

I agree completely. My character did not feel like my Warrior of Light who I have been playing for almost a decade through 90 levels of story. And there is NO WAY IN HELL I'd have helped Wuk Lamat become Leader.

[Eyrilona]

The overall story isn't all that bad, it just gets overshadowed by overexposure of Wuk. They wanted her to be endearing, but she just ends up being exhausting. I don't think she is completely awful, it's just the amount of screentime combined with pointless repetition that brings her character down A LOT. If they had spent bit more time on others and just straight up skipped some of the repetition, it would have been so much better and I think people would have different opinion on her.

Removing Wuk Lamat from the experience would just take away the most glaring lightning rod for criticism, and it would have instead found its way to the innumerable plot holes, loss of individual personality of the Scions, non-continuity regarding how Tural seems to have missed out several global events such as the Final Days and a small moon disappearing from the sky five years ago, the failure of the WoL to connect anything we see in Tural to anything we have seen before. I get it that they maybe do not want to always fall back on the old cast, but then it needs more plausible reasons given why not. Why were we not curing that aetheric unbalance with porxies? Why did we not reach out to Beq Lugg when our problem was souls? Super high tech airships appear, and we have time to somehow convince the ruler of a nation halfway around the world to personally fly over to breathe them out of the sky, but nobody put in a call to let Cid and Nero know? Memories being recorded as data without soul and yet living on was already being done by the Omicrons who clearly possessed ways of doing so without needing to be stealing souls from elsewhere -- didn't it occur to us to solve the Endless problem with their help? Us being assured that something is not really alive without aether and therefore we shouldn't feel bad about ending their existence, right after the tribe/allied society/reputation quests in Ultima Thule have us rebuilding societies recreated from Dynamis and celebrating how hopeful this all is for the denizens there, who.. do not have aether either.

It is as if whoever wrote Dawntrail just hasn't played the previous expansions.

Edit: And I would add to that; that the expansion was sold as something completely different from what we got. Summer vacation? Did any part of this feel like us being free to enjoy ourselves at our own pace? All those complaints echoed by many different people now that only Estinien got what the marketing had promised us we'd get are not coming from nowhere. And did you notice how many parts of the teaser trailer just don't happen in the game at all? Did you see Estinien hunt a huge beast in the jungle anywhere in this story, echoing the 6.55 line about Worthy Prey as if part of this trial would involve a hunting competition or something? The source of most of the video in the teaser trailer, is in fact the end credits!

[Iams-Cat]

Yeah, I can totally see how you'd love the Dawntrail MSQ. Because your defense of it basically boiled down to explaining exactly what is happening in the plot with no reference to personality or emotion, just like what every single character's dialogue in DT is!

Okay now I'm done being sarcastic, the real problem with DT's story is not DT's story. The overall story is pretty good, there's some intrigue, some emotional moments, new cultures to learn about, all good. I like Tural, I think it's interesting and fun. I liked the golden city mystery, and the Alexandria arc.. I think could've been handled better but it was okay.

The REAL problem with this MSQ is the dialogue writing. Because, much like your post, characters will simply explain matter-of-factly the things that are happening, describing exactly the plot points as they would've been written down in the writers' room, rather than like fictional characters in a story. So many times I found myself saying to myself "this..... is just not how real people talk". I WANTED the adventure in a new land, with all these new cultures to explore, but.... I really don't feel like I got to meet the people of Tural, or Alexandria. I feel like I got to talk to a bunch of museum exhibits, explaining what happens in these places that I am not in. There were very few times I felt like I had gotten to look into this fantasy world, full of life, which was my favourite thing about the MSQs before.

The other issue, is the use of the scions. Most of the scions are there to be trust NPCs, and for no other reason. What were the twins' character arc over the expansion? Y'shtola? Urianger and Thancred? Estinien? Raha? They were just being the same characters they became after Endwalker, which, yeah cool, I like these guys, but I'd much prefer stories with characters that grow and change and have interesting shifts over the course of them.

Why could we not have just had Turali warriors alongside us as trust NPCs? In the expansion all about learning the culture of Tural, surely fighting alongside the Turali people would have been the best thing for this! I would have loved to have gotten to meet some Turali warrior who has dialogue over the course of the dungeon, explaining the world by pointing out dangers, or telling stories about the place we're in. It's one of the few places where characters simply turning around and explaining what's happening around you makes sense, because you're in a combat situation!

In summary I think the overarching story of this expansion is good, but its execution in dialogue and how it uses its characters shows a complete lack of creativity and inspiration.