[Thought Experiment] Is Dawntrail's 7.0 MSQ Planned to be "Terrible"?

[DeathNoodles]

Dawntrail was a big 50/50 for me. There were moments and QoL adjustments that would've seriously improved the game. A mini game for the cooking contest for example, that was a total loss of opportunity. Wuk Lamat is naive and frustrating, and I think the biggest issue is that the devs didn't give WOL much agency. You don't have any option of telling her off, expressing disinterest, or emphasizing your actual impartiality. Having WOL on your side is basically a win, WOL slays gods ffs. The bs with the scions competing was so weak it was an insult. At what point did they even make an effort to pretend to compete except for a few seconds in a dungeon? The Milala and much of Alexandria was fascinating, but the attempt to talk about loss and death fell so flat, I honestly cringed at the very end of 7.0 and had an urge to skip the scene. When I realized that, I knew I actually put this as my least fave expac, but frankly not much worse than the storytelling near the end of the 7.x 13th mess. This game is not rated E but we're going on a power of friendship journey with everyone we can find. I'm praying Calyx is not so easily changed.

[Cleretic]

Cleretic's point is that this isn't a "planned failure" or whatever. The writing they gave us was flawed and easily criticized and a lot of people disliked it including you. That's it. It's not some grand conspiracy. There's plenty of people who like Dawntrail's story who don't frequent the forums so they don't comment here because of the Forum's (justified) reputation of a circlejerk of negativity and hateposting.

You're largely correct, but also my point was that quality is not an objective truth. It is meaningless to say that any piece of media is 'good' or 'bad' as accepted fact, because they're not: they're subjective responses to a thing. And we all know this, because the best Simpsons episode would be a terrible Game of Thrones episode, because the subjective audiences for both of those shows are watching them for different things.

If you don't have an explanation for why the thing you don't like is bad, you don't have a fact, or even a reasoned opinion in my book: you have a gut reaction. I'll listen to opinions, but I'm not listening to gut feel masquerading as fact.


To bring it back to FFXIV: I dislike Shadowbringers' story, because a lot of the ideas it has that I consider interesting are ideas that it squanders by either actively defeating the entire purpose elsewhere (Eulmore), or by just having the ideas in complete isolation and never really managing to tie them into anything (Il Mheg). I think it primarily succeeds for people by pinning its appeal on the journeys of two specific characters that hit quite well for a lot of people who are prone to really openly celebrate those types of stories, but in one case I find both the character to be decent but the story to be a complete nothing (the Crystal Exarch), and for the other I find the character to be actively unpleasant and the story to be morally repellant (Emet-Selch). As a result, while Shadowbringers has individual moments that I quite like, the actual story leaves me cold. This is not an objective statement that Shadowbringers is bad; it is a subjective statement that I don't like it.

Meanwhile, I love Dawntrail! I think the story mostly knows what it's doing and is constantly building on itself to compound that particular story (mostly; the first trip to Shaaloani's a dud), which as Dikatis says, is a story about legacy, and understanding; I'd also add 'the purpose and meaning of leadership' to the story's theme, and object to 'toxic nostalgia' only to say that I think Dawntrail is more about the place and purpose of memory, with Yok Tural laying down a positive relationship with it that Alexandria then corrupts and poisons. I find every character and their stories really compelling, with them both being broadly fun to experience and resonating well with my own feelings and experiences. Again, this is not an objective statement that Dawntrail is good: it is a subjective statement that I like it.

Are there ways that I would do it differently? Personally, yes, but I wouldn't even call it improvement, just changing it to be more to my personal tastes and wants for the story.

[Veritas-Ancora]

Post-Endwalker was even worse - it was a storyline lifted right out of older FF games. A raid series sidequest turned into MSQ. As a raid series side story, it would have been more or less acceptable. As MSQ, it got really boring really fast because, instead of more exploration on the 13th (like I had been hoping for), we were forced to spend time with Zero, someone's Deviantart OC.

Some of us enjoyed the FFIV content.

[Chasingstars]

(mostly; the first trip to Shaaloani's a dud)

Personally it was the second trip to Shaaloani where the story went worse, not the first. Rushed pacing where you don't even get to meet the inhabitants of Heritage Found before Zoraal Ja and Sphene's influence happened. Its meant to be some big game-changing moment, but instead its cheapened by the lack of proper emotional connection to what the territory was before. If the dome and solution 9 and the lightning storms happened to somewhere we already visited, it would be more weighted as we been there before. Such as when the various towers that sprang up with the lunar primals and lunar tempered, that was more impactful because those were attacks on established places that we had visited. If the dome appeared where Shaaloani was, not Heritage Found, that would have created a stronger narrative as we actually got to spend time with and learn from the people who lived there as the people met there would have aged 30 years and any who died well nobody would remember them except for the player and Erenville.

The closest emotional connections you can even have is Namikka, Wuk Lamat's nurse maid who is already middle-aged, and Cahciua, Erenville's mom, which we didn't even meet her before she became an endless as she was at best mentioned. Imagine how much more impactful the story would've been if we, for example, talked to Cahciua in our first trip to Shaaloani, then we met the robot she is remotely controlling there would be a stronger sense that she is fine because viera are naturally long-lived, only to then much more harder shatter that illusion the player has to reveal that she is an endless.

[Carin-Eri]

Cleretic's point is that this isn't a "planned failure" or whatever. The writing they gave us was flawed and easily criticized and a lot of people disliked it including you. That's it. It's not some grand conspiracy. There's plenty of people who like Dawntrail's story who don't frequent the forums so they don't comment here because of the Forum's (justified) reputation of a circlejerk of negativity and hateposting.

Again, there are plenty of valid criticisms of Dawntrail's writing that I agree with, but it's not intentionally bad.

For all its faults, Dawntrail is sincere in its themes of the weight of legacy, the importance of understanding the people you live with (even your enemies), and the dangers of toxic nostalgia. While it could have been executed better, the writer's themes still showed through and came together powerfully in the finale of the main story. And the patch story continues to build upon this with the dark sides of Alexandria and the reintroduction of Queen Sphene to give a contrasting voice to its current state.

I enjoyed Dawntrail's main story a lot. We asked for a summer vacation expansion and we got it. Heck, I'm more sympathetic to Zoraal Ja than most since I know what golden child burnout looks like.

It's fine to criticize something, but to descend into conspiracy theories like this feels wrong when there's nothing to corroborate it.

I'm in agreement, and to be honest.... it's refreshing to read positive opinion regarding Dawntrail and I've always disagreed with this narrative from many in the community that Dawntrail was the most catastrophic piece of fiction ever produced in gaming.

I've always said I enjoyed it - it wasn't my favourite expansion (Endwalker takes that spot for me, personally) but I did nonetheless enjoy my initial playthrough and didn't reflect on the negative plot points until I'd completed 7.0. In fact, one element I've found difficult is how easy it is to feel gaslit (through the negativity) into thinking the elements I enjoyed were not as good as I remember.
I guess it helps that I don't view Wuk Lamat as negatively as most forumites too - there was only one instance in the story where her presence annoyed me, and that was the Queen Eternal fight - I won't elaborate on that, as I've expressed my thoughts on that matter numerous times in numerous threads.

[Cleretic]

Imagine how much more impactful the story would've been if we, for example, talked to Cahciua in our first trip to Shaaloani, then we met the robot she is remotely controlling there would be a stronger sense that she is fine because viera are naturally long-lived, only to then much more harder shatter that illusion the player has to reveal that she is an endless.

I don't actually think this would do anything.

Cahciua isn't really meant to be a character that exists independently, if that makes sense; her story is an extension of others, and our interactions with Cahciua are rather intentionally all through Erenville as a lens. She largely exists within the story as the person who, through both action and inaction, shaped who he is. Dawntrail is a story preoccupied with legacy, and with Erenville and Cahciua we see that manifest in a more abstract way than the much more concrete form we got with Gulool and the Promises.

...In fact I actually think it's rather telling, when we also keep in mind that theme of memory, that Cahciua only exists in memory; it's actually rather clever that we never meet her ourselves, we only ever meet her memory, as she appears in Gulool's journey across Yok Tural, and then later as an Endless. It might in fact be why we don't see her as an older woman, so she can only exist as that youthful memory. That would've been fun to do more with.

Namikka could've used one more scene during the first trip to Shaaloani, just to define her as a character a little more, but I don't think anything more than that. I don't particularly care about her as a character, but I also don't really think the story falls apart because I don't; I buy that Wuk Lamat cares about her, and that's much more important.


As for the fact that Heritage Found's people don't really get to exist outside of Sphene's presence, I think that's true but I think it's also intentional. In large part I'm thinking about how 7.1 established that A: there's governmental uncertainty about who owns what parts of that stretch, and B: that we actually do see some wobbly interpersonal stuff around people's relationships with that. That there's people from Yyasulani that don't feel comfortable going back to Tural because it's been thirty years and they're just fundamentally different places in terms of day-to-day life. We're never going to be detached and neutral about our own responses to seeing that, but I think by deliberately not letting us visit Yyasulani pre-dome, they're priming us to be a bit more inclined to sympathize with the people in that place who 'grew up Alexandrian', to at least recognize the validity of their stances, whereas if we saw them pre-dome we'd be more inclined to look at that as their 'default state' to return to. (It's actually a little similar to how I generally look at Seven of Nine from Star Trek, but that's too tangential to go into.)

With that one we're delving more into the still-ongoing patch storylines, so I can't say with confidence why they're doing it, or if I like the result. But I can say that I do think that they did it deliberately, and that it wasn't just 'rushed writing'.

[Chasingstars]

As for the fact that Heritage Found's people don't really get to exist outside of Sphene's presence, I think that's true but I think it's also intentional. In large part I'm thinking about how 7.1 established that A: there's governmental uncertainty about who owns what parts of that stretch, and B: that we actually do see some wobbly interpersonal stuff around people's relationships with that. That there's people from Yyasulani that don't feel comfortable going back to Tural because it's been thirty years and they're just fundamentally different places in terms of day-to-day life. We're never going to be detached and neutral about our own responses to seeing that, but I think by deliberately not letting us visit Yyasulani pre-dome, they're priming us to be a bit more inclined to sympathize with the people in that place who 'grew up Alexandrian', to at least recognize the validity of their stances, whereas if we saw them pre-dome we'd be more inclined to look at that as their 'default state' to return to. (It's actually a little similar to how I generally look at Seven of Nine from Star Trek, but that's too tangential to go into.)

With that one we're delving more into the still-ongoing patch storylines, so I can't say with confidence why they're doing it, or if I like the result. But I can say that I do think that they did it deliberately, and that it wasn't just 'rushed writing'.

To me the dome is meant to be a shadowbringers moment where the player and the npcs step into what might seem like a warped version of the world that they would have previously known, such as how the WoL visited the first. As the first was similar enough to Ethierys, yet just different enough and known to make it seem alien, and because of the parallels to cultures that we had encountered before, it was more easy for players to feel the weight of that destruction from the flood of light because of familiarity to compare. That is why I harshly critique the dome story plot point as if it was allowed more proper build up and more actively played on audience expectations, I think it would hit harder from a storytelling standpoint.

I can personally only hope that 8.0, assuming the writing expertise continue from 7.2 onwards, is a higher quality story than 7.0's.

[0blivion]

tl;dr OP is overinterpreting and the truth is that Ishikawa giving the reins over to literally anyone else was a mistake

[Dikatis]

tl;dr OP is overinterpreting and the truth is that Ishikawa giving the reins over to literally anyone else was a mistake

This is a bizarre take to have when her fingerprints are all over the expansion. WoL speaking privately with Wuk Lamat atop Vollok Shoonsa directly mirrors the conversation WoL had with the Crystal Exarch while the giant talos was being built. Gulool Ja Ja's death is an escalation of the stakes that forces Wuk Lamat and Koana to truly take charge of the nation, much like how Ahewaan dying during the Final Days forces Vrtra to stop hiding and speak directly to the people of Thavnair. The dogma of Garlean propaganda and the cult of personality around the emperor mirrors the ingrained veneration of blessed siblings in Mamook's culture and how both settlements only start to improve once they relinquish this dogma through the intervention of an outside, sympathetic party. Not to mention the big group project that directly leads into the story's climactic area with the Dawnblazer once again serving as a mirror to the construction of the talos and the Ragnarok. Nevermind how people coming together in understanding has been a thoroughline of all of Ishikawa's work in FFXIV, with it being the backbone of Dawntrail's themes.

People have got to stop using Ishikawa's name as a bludgeon when she's so clearly involved in Dawntrail despite no longer being the main writer.

[Cleretic]

People have got to stop using Ishikawa's name as a bludgeon when she's so clearly involved in Dawntrail despite no longer being the main writer.

Again, 'they made something you didn't like' applies to her too. Don't perform gymnastics to claim she didn't actually sign off on the story you don't like despite every piece of evidence making it clear she did, just to claim that she's a perfect paragon of exactly what you've decided is 'Good FFXIV Writing'. Sometimes, a writer you like makes something you didn't.

...in fact to be completely honest I kinda suspect that for a lot of people, we're not even looking at that, we're looking at 'Ishikawa wrote one or two things they liked'. I genuinely feel like a lot of people just compress her down to 'Shadowbringers and Dark Knight' and ignore that she wrote a lot of things that they have less cohesive and positive opinions about. Because trying to factor in Astrologian, Dawntrail MIN/BTN, or half of Stormblood makes less of a clean narrative that 'Ishikawa Writes X kind of story', or even 'Ishikawa always writes good stories'.