[This will include spoilers for the entirety of the 7.0 MSQ]

The (good faith) complaints that I've seen about Dawntrail, on the forums and on social media and amongst some youtubers, have largely been in regards to story focus moving away from our WoL and onto Wuk Lamat. Throughout the game our character takes on much more of a mentorship role as we experience Tural mostly through Wuk Lamat's eyes and perspective rather than our own. In any other Final Fantasy game or RPG she would be our player character and this would be fine, but with the establishment of our own role and agency in the story, I can absolutely see how this shift would rub some people the wrong way.

From a personal perspective I think our WoL's inhabiting a mentorship role at the start of a new campaign arc is kind of amazing, and I was deeply amused by the mmo trope meta narrative of essentially powerleveling Wuk Lamat through the story. I thought it was fun haha, but I can also see how this may have felt rushed or unrealistic based on the established lore of the game. She goes from struggling to land a single hit on Bakool Ja Ja to being strong enough to assist us with Sphene's Queen Eternal form. Again, I thought from a mmo meta-narrative power leveling approach this is fun, but I can see people struggling to accept it. All I can say is that FFXIV seems to operate on Gurren Lagann fighting spirit rules; and if your fighting spirit/haki/dynamis is high enough, you can pull off a lot~

Where I think some things fell apart for me, and maybe did for others also having a problem with how our WoL acted, is in the agency of our decisions. ARR was notoriously bad for having our WoL stand around doing nothing when we very clearly should have been doing something. We'd just stand there looking at a situation escalate that we could jump in and help out in. And to the games credit, each expansion has seemingly gotten better about this. In Shadowbringers and Endwalker we're actively running around in battles and preparing to fight. Shadowbringers especially having Ardbert talk for us and giving us a brief but welcome 'voice' helped bring a lot of tension and weight to the moment against Emet Selch.

But this seemed to take a step back once again in Dawntrail unfortuantely... way too often it felt like my character should step in and help, and didn't. The game constantly suggested that I could step in, and trivialize things, but I just don't. There's times we literally let people just walk away when we could attack them immediately and potentially solve a lot of issues.

Gubool Ja Ja vs Zoraal Ja Ja, stands out to me the most. Gubuul says he wants to take out Zoraal on his own, which is fine, but as soon as he regulates back to life it feels very weird that we don't step in and help. Especially since Wuk Lamat does so and fails.