Dawnblazer Sucks - A Lighthearted Overly Niche Look at Locomotive Design in Dawntrail

[Cleretic]

So, translating for non-train-knowers: The Dawnblazer sucks, but it sucks in ways that actually make sense for the time period being evoked and the route we see. Meanwhile, the Garlemald trains actually don't make any sense at all as trains.

Good to know, I love this kind of super niche analysis!

If I can make a weird request: what about the Phantom Train in the Omega raids? That one's got several levels of excuses thanks to being several layers of 'not real' even in-universe, but it's the other big train this game's had.

[crowwww]

So, translating for non-train-knowers: The Dawnblazer sucks, but it sucks in ways that actually make sense for the time period being evoked and the route we see. Meanwhile, the Garlemald trains actually don't make any sense at all as trains.

Good to know, I love this kind of super niche analysis!

I'm being generous justifying the Dawnblazer, trying to give the devs all the benefit of the doubt I can. I still feel it'd be very dependant on aether / magitek to function, which is valid, just annoying when it's in this uncanny valley of design.

At the same time though... yeah that works as a tl;dr, thanks. https://xkcd.com/2501/

If I can make a weird request: what about the Phantom Train in the Omega raids? That one's got several levels of excuses thanks to being several layers of 'not real' even in-universe, but it's the other big train this game's had.

To be fair, we don't even know if the Phantom Train is from another shard, fiction, or even another shard's fiction etc etc. It's pretty faithful to the original sprite in FFVI, with the long acknowledged exception that you can't suplex it.



I'll invoke Cool Train here, it's huge, it's menacing, it's clearly fantastical yet the sound and the experience is so much more engaging than what we get with the Dawnblazer. It's an unfair comparison really. There's probably someone much more familiar with FFVI that could talk to that, but I like it. Fun encounter, fun design, probably fun nostalgia, full marks.

And it has a set of pilot wheels.

[Cleretic]

I'll invoke Cool Train here, it's huge, it's menacing, it's clearly fantastical yet the sound and the experience is so much more engaging than what we get with the Dawnblazer. It's an unfair comparison really. There's probably someone much more familiar with FFVI that could talk to that, but I like it. Fun encounter, fun design, probably fun nostalgia, full marks.

And it has a set of pilot wheels.

As someone who is quite familiar with FFVI (but again, not with trains), I think the two things I'd add that aren't necessarily clear in FFXIV are these:

1. The Phantom Train is explicitly depicted as a luxury passenger train; big Orient Express vibes, you go through dining cars, find individual passenger cabins, all that, even if it is weirdly haunted and wrong. That's not not present in the XIV fight, the interlude inside the cabin at least looks fairly nice, but the fight itself doesn't really focus on the cabin cars outside of the intro showing that there's clearly a lot of them. My gut says that the front engine car doesn't really read as 'luxury train', but that's without much knowledge of the subject.

2. The Phantom Train is essentially Charon's boat across the River Styx, scaled up; it turns up to ferry the souls of the entire kingdom of Doma after Kefka kills them all. That is to say, even in FFVI it doesn't have a manufacturer, a designated route, or specific energy requirements; it simply exists, running a route that mostly exists on a different level of existence than the world we know.

I was just curious what sort of similar logic could be applied to it, that's all!

[crowwww]

As someone who is quite familiar with FFVI (but again, not with trains), I think the two things I'd add that aren't necessarily clear in FFXIV are these:
[...]
I was just curious what sort of similar logic could be applied to it, that's all!

And that's pretty much what we see in Sigmascape V1! There's no further need to speculate on the route or purpose; it's clearly meant as an express passenger locomotive; designed for a slightly more stylish trip across the Styx into the afterlife.

I suspect the somewhat unusual 2-4-4-0 / "Mallet" configuration was likely chosen more to sell the otherworldly aspect of it rather than picking something resembling the Orient Express inspiration, but either way it fits as a heavy / fast passenger locomotive.

It's design purpose is fairly straightforward, unlike our poor Dawnblazer!