The finale of the Arcadion is an absolute disapointment.

[Stasya]

This is the correct response. I don't really know why you would take a story super seriously when there is a disco frog bunny and 90s surfer bros as a boss. The whole thing is meant to be silly.

Square enix community worker tries to cool complaints and another potential community worker agrees with him.

Hilarious. Story ending is lame and can't wait to be disappointed in savage having no brute bomber secret fight.

[Avoidy]

What is it with the writers in Dawntrail who just wanna "redeem" every villain and avoid to actually kill off characters for once?

DT feels derivative in the sense that it's just taking elements from the rest of the MSQ and trying to reproduce them, but the writers behind it don't understand nuance so we're getting a lot of stuff that falls flat. In this case, it's with the good-villain thing. Sympathetic villains have been a thing far longer than Dawntrail. My memory on the story is kinda bad 'cause it's been so long, but Yotsuyu was absolutely terrible to everyone but got amnesia and had this mini redemption arc which was kinda done well since people didn't forgive her for what she did before she suffered brain damage. Gosetsu protecting her, despite being one of her victims in the past, was also very interesting. There was some slight intrigue to how it was done, some nuance that kept it engaging. Then in shb we obviously had Emet, who, while not being redeemed, became so relatable and understandable that he stopped feeling like a villain to many. He felt like simply another character doing what he felt was right, and that thing happened to stand in the way of what we wanted. In 5.3, he saves us in the seat of sacrifice trial, and by endwalker we're literally having dinner with his pre-ascian counterpart. In fact, EW went out of its way to make nearly every villain sympathetic. Only Zenos really went out there and explicitly said that his reasons didn't matter, but as he laid dying at the end of the universe, he explained (quite eloquently) his reasons for being the way he is. These people weren't exactly redeemed, but by the end of our time with them, we understood where they were coming from and maybe even felt sorry to see them go.

Dawntrail wanted so badly to replicate this, but without the time investment (zenos and emet were in the game for YEARS) or the nuance (yotsuyu was still hated even after her amnesia'd self started acting nicer, and there was a whole debate about what to do with her) that comes with such a heel turn, so we had hilarious bullshit like bakool jaja suddenly joining our team and acting nice after we beat a tragic backstory out of him, or we have stuff like the president suddenly being good, or sphene just coming back as her nice self because she was locked in a pod this whole time or some bullshit. And even now, in 7.4 msq, we have an Ascian who's literally holding a teddy bear (the bear is calyx btw, the last villain? he's a literal stuffed animal now) and fangirling over us in the corner, like --
idk dude. I think they saw how well liked emet was and now they're just desperately trying to repeat the pattern. shb gave us a lot of thematic elements that are getting regurgitated like crazy (see: the narrative final dungeon).

[Kelg]

Square enix community worker tries to cool complaints and another potential community worker agrees with him.

Hilarious. Story ending is lame and can't wait to be disappointed in savage having no brute bomber secret fight.

Uh huh, right. You sound like a fun and reasonable person.

[Straticus]

I completely agree. Everything was great up til after M11.
I feel like they changed the ending late in development for some reason.

I think originally the tyrant was meant to be M12. Ixion. Fenrir. Behemoth. It makes so much more sense than Lindwurm. I just don't get why they'd pick a lindwurm of all things. The design in xiv didn't even look good. The model looks low quality with a weird shine.

Mechanically speaking the M12 fight is okay. Not good. Just okay.

Music wise M12 was a huge disappointment too. Good song if you like that genre. But it didn't fit the fight. It doesn't feel like raid music. It's too short with too few lyrics. It repeats too much.

Story wise it disappointed me in the worst way. The story up til M12 had me invested. And boom. Everyone lives. Brute bomber never even died was just in the infirmary. There's no stakes. No consequences.
The lindwurm somehow having the cure for it also was just bollocks.

It's really silly for a story that preaches about mortality and death and all that to be too fraid to kill off a character.

The tier gets a 8/10. Not including anything after M11. That gets a 2/10.

Please. Get some better writers.

[Straticus]

The reason none of the characters in the Arcadion end up being evil is because it is based on Professional Wrestling and that's how Professional Wrestling works. They are all good people in real life but some of them "play" evil characters known as heels.

That's why Brute Bomber legitimately makes you feel like he's evil and then turns out not to be. That's why the President creates a situation where you are the heel trying to tear down the Arcadion, then before the finale they do a double turn (President is revealed as the biggest heel in history and you become the biggest babyface in history). And then they reveal all that was just characters they were playing and that they are of course good people in real life, because that's how wrestling works.

For that reason, I thought they did an extremely good job with the story. Most people don't understand nor appreciate wrestling (if they know anything about it, they just say it's fake and they don't get it). If there is one story that can help people appreciate what it's supposed to be, it's this.

That arguement is bollocks. If they wanted to go with the silly wrestling angle then they should've done that tone throughout the tiers. You can't just do a rug pull like that. It's like having a book series go "and it was all just a dream" at the end.

[Terhix]

If they wanted to go with the silly wrestling angle then they should've done that tone throughout the tiers.

WDYM??? The whole raid is literally wrestling from the very beginning, Arcadion is entertainment on S9, there is a literal robot referee at the end of every fight, you have Brute Bomber fake-cheating in M3, the first set is called Dark Horse, the second set is called Babyface, how many clues do you need?

[Aidorouge]

I'm not into wrestling and don't understand any of its terms, so I imagine I'll end up bored of this one and skipping cutscenes when/if I get around to it.

[OdrN]

Fights are greats, story is dull. Everyone is fine, everyone is nice, everyone unite by the power of friendship. What a boring and quickly expedited end. Sometimes they should go with fan theories.
But they was no way they good introduce a proper vilain just in the last quests. The disappointment wasto be expected.

[Jeeqbit]

If they wanted to go with the silly wrestling angle then they should've done that tone throughout the tiers. You can't just do a rug pull like that. It's like having a book series go "and it was all just a dream" at the end.

They did though. If you weren't able to tell that it was about wrestling then it's just that you didn't notice. They didn't flat out say that it's wrestling, because they wanted to drip the hints and clues. When they flat out tell us things, we get the Dawntrail base MSQ where they didn't trust us to figure things out on our own.

Dark Horse, the name of the first tier gear, is sometimes used in wrestling to refer to an unexpected winner out of nowhere or an underdog.

The rewards for the previous tier had "babyface" in the name. Which is very clearly a wrestling reference that means "good person".

But we had other references throughout, such as when we were told that Brute Bomber didn't actually cheat by drinking what they did. It gave them no advantage at all. We were told that it was all for show. We also had Honey B Lovely constantly talking about "putting on a show" for everyone. Dancing Green revealed they didn't even care about dancing, implying it was just their wrestling gimmick. Doing things for show is how wrestling works because it's a show.

And then of course we had a tag team in the latest tier, another thing taken straight from wrestling.

A detail not everyone will appreciate is the fact that the President and the announcer were part of the wrestling storyline. This is because in wrestling, sometimes the announcers and people in charge can be part of the storyline "plot" against a wrestler.

[CaptainLagbeard]

That arguement is bollocks. If they wanted to go with the silly wrestling angle then they should've done that tone throughout the tiers. You can't just do a rug pull like that. It's like having a book series go "and it was all just a dream" at the end.

Them telling us that the reason Brute Bomber didn't get disqualified for supposedly doping during the match and punching the referee bot out of the arena because it was a part of his act didn't clue you in that there's a wrestling angle?