Dawntrail’s Narrative Missteps: Why Natsuko Ishikawa’s Touch Is Sorely Missed

[Voidmage]

Shadowbringer was the 4th chapter of the story. Dawntrail is the first chapter of a new one so of course it's not going to deliver any big story beat just yet.

If you want to compare dawntrail with something, compare it with arr up to operation archon. It wasn't a great story either and was an extremely cliche good versus evil story until hydaelyn and the ascians were recontextualized in shadowbringers.

You can't reach the heights of stories like shadowbringers and endwalker without doing a whole lot of setup first.

Even ARR was better.
It had slavery, racism, a continent on the brink of war and other grey areas.
The bad things about it was atrocious pacing, stiff dialogues and mustache twirling villian tropes.

It doesn't matter if DT is the start of a new story. That should only result in maybe a slow start or lower stakes and not in bad writing.
No one was expecting heights but consistent quality writing without a disney princess.

oh... ok lol

You could at least try to read the rest.