Dawntrail Predictions

[Cleretic]

I don’t really know how visible named characters have to be to count. I think endwalker base probably beats dt, shb might too.

Arr: the waking sands guys including lettuce and amnesiacs, dolorous bear’s team and edda’s fiancé, namingway the spy [~11]
Hw: ysael, haruchfant, lahabrea, iggy, thordan, a dozen knights but they don’t really count. [5-17]
Sb: old resistance man, Zenos, namedayboy, papalymo just missed out by a hair, the guy Zenos or fordola killed from arr [~4]
Shb: tesleen, vauthry, hades, ardbert and his friends. Also alphinaud, alise and the player character in the calamity timeline [8-11+]
Ew: king man, hermes, zenos, fandaniel, hydaelyn, zodiark/elidibus, quintus, (Elvis and the contacted civilisations if they count too) [7+]
Dt: 57 year old nurse, gajaja, zaja, untrustworthy vizier, erenville ‘s mother, (all the npcs in living memory), the head of reason can count separately. [6+]

My metric is specifically 'on-screen death, or confirmation of death, of a named character with on-screen characterization, that is not reversed somehow'. Basically, someone that your average player could at least plausibly recognize, remember and describe. There's some iffy ones, but I lean towards allowing the weird edge cases. And specifically looking at the MSQ, which I'll concede does shrink ShB and EW's counts.

That counting basically leaves Dawntrail with Namikka, both Gulool Ja Ja's heads (I agree on counting them separately), Sareel Ja, Zoraal Ja, Otis, Cahciua, Sphene, and I'd personally count Krile's parents but I recognize that's an odd edge case. That's ten by my count before we get to patches.

Thanks for lining up the others, so I can say that I'd personally put EW at six (I do count Hermes and Amon-Fandaniel separately, but I don't count Elidibus), ShB at four (I would count Ardbert, I wouldn't count the rest of his crew if only talking MSQ), StB at a surprisingly low four (five if we stretch to allow Yotsuyu), and HW at a... kind of indeterminate amount, depending entirely on how many of the Heaven's Ward we decide crossed the threshold of 'is an actual character'; personally I'd go for four (the three Vault bosses, and the guy in the courtroom), bringing that expansion to a pretty competitive nine, but I admit that feels generous. I'd really have to replay ARR to get my count for that.

I admit I lean towards the generous count for every expansion, and DT has a few edge cases not everyone else would count, but I feel like it's unarguably pretty high up there.

[MikkoAkure]

The Garleans/Ilsabard will get some sort of blink-and-you'll-miss-it update on what's going on over there.

There were two whole lines in the expansion about the Garleans and it was just the twins reiterating their purpose of being in the New World as having to do with learning about multiculturalism to help the Garleans...

While I'm glad there was no far-flung Garlean legion like people had predicted in other threads long ago, it feels a bit awkward that practically nothing that happens in Endwalker gets mentioned in Dawntrail except for Montichaigne's lesson on souls. I feel like the story could very well have gotten away with being a spin-off that while being meant to follow Endwalker and the Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga, could have been a fresh start for new players and not have that as a hard requirement like how FFXI handled its expansions.


By the way, has anyone figured out what we were supposed to remember Convocation seats or the Myths of the Realm for? I don't feel like the shot of Azem's symbol would be it and unless I missed something, maybe it's something that happens later in the patches for the 2 raid series or MSQ.

[Cleretic]

By the way, has anyone figured out what we were supposed to remember Convocation seats or the Myths of the Realm for? I don't feel like the shot of Azem's symbol would be it

I think it actually was. Like I pointed out when that reminder was recent, it was likely never going to be anything big, the equivalent for Endwalker was basically just a list of things that got referenced with conditional text. That sounds like exactly the way that they'd prime us to keep a Convocation member's duties (in this case, Azem's) in mind without giving us too much to go on.

That doesn't really explain Myths of the Realm, and nothing particularly rings a bell there for me (unless you want to make a connection between Nald'thal and the blessed siblings' really bad mortality rate), but maybe that just had really quiet conditional text somewhere?