What would you change to improve Dawntrail’s MSQ writing?

[PaleYonder]

This is a good topic, thanks! Gotta cut this in parts:

I would completely cut out the succession plot. It's unnecessary, we don't have any real business there (outside the memes about installing a puppet government), and it doesn't do anything for the world at large. And for a "low-stakes adventure" it's actually too serious. So keep it out; let them solve their own politics.

Meanwhile, we actually go to explore and have adventures with a select small group of people who have a reason to be there/with us. And let us start by doing only the things that we are there for. And I'd include factors that were specifically set up or promised before. For example:

Us: We want to go back to adventuring for a bit to relax and have fun and see the world, be Azem and play tourist and solve people's problems in fun and unconventional ways that are our idea. Give our character the initiative of the person that jumped into a volcano. Let us make a difference by merit of being us, regardless of powerlevels. And also we've just been set up as wanting to see the cities of gold, so let us see the cities of gold and make them something suitably cool and fun to explore. This was a travel recommendation by someone who knows us, and whoever picks up the MSQ writing has to account for that.

Krile: Also wants to see the cities of gold, wants to find out about her background, wants to go on an adventure with us, and especially and emphatically wants to fight and be useful in battle situations with us. That's been her big gripe all this time. Let her do that. Give her a proper training arc that deserves its name. We don't need a new character for that, give that to Krile, let us teach her and explore the world together and have fun.

Erenville: Is a cool guy I want around, and I love adventuring with him for the 5 minutes that we got on our own. He can have the New World backstory he got here or not, and he can have the goal of also finding the city or not; coming from Endwalker they could have taken that in various directions, but if we're going with it, have him also be motivated, and maybe want to see his mom on a detour, and we oblige him early on because that's what friends and decent people do. Whether it goes well or not can go either way, depending on what the plot needs, but let us earnestly attempt to go along with him in a timely fashion.

[PaleYonder]

And we're already three people who really want to see the cities of gold, with lots of time on our hands, and the opportunity for an Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider-esque classic fun adventure, with exploration, fun times, action, personal problems and sad moments perhaps.
And while not everyone would agree, I'd say that's just the thing to take Raha along with too, whom we repeatedly promised an adventure, and what we got was certainly not it, and there's also no good reason for him to stay home and do paperwork, as exemplified by him joining us anyway. And Krile would understand that that's important for him too, and I don't think she'd actually have the heart to have him stay home on this; they're friends, they care for each other, they're both people who put others first - and since this matters to both of them, just get a replacement secretary, for goodness's sake.
And we've got our adventuring party.

And I would get our party's wants get taken of first, as far as we get. Krile's search for her roots and her research, Erenville's family visit. If there are later repercussions or developments, cool, but we have the momentum to do this stuff for our own group. It's no good to keep stalling and stalling and telling our own people "Later, other stuff is more important". This is our trip, so they and we are most important. And then when stuff turns serious later, we don't have to interrupt that momentum because "oh wait, there was Krile's whole business, uh.... here, read a tablet and have some ice cream."

[PaleYonder]

So then we find the city at some point, and it can be either a completely different story to what we have and stay in the adventure realm, which would be fun; I wouldn't mind that at all if it was good.
Or we segue into something similar to what we got in the second half, give us Solution 9, but make that explicitly the city of gold, invest time and room in it, let it really shine. Let us get there early and make it the focus. For example, since the game likes its 10-level plot structure, make the city reveal the equivalent of the Endwalker Zodiark twist around level 93/94, "we did a bunch of exciting stuff, and now things just got real, and got turned over. Have fun exploring your horrifying dystopian cyberpunk city." That's what I expected of DT when I first saw the images of Heritage Found and Solution 9, and I'd have enjoyed that. That's why I started the game patient and positive with the early parts, cause I was expecting a big twist anytime now. I love those twists, so I'd want one.
And then, if we're still doing the Sphene thing, let us explore on our own/with our own friends, let us all be out of our depth and figuring it out. No tour guides, neither robot mothers nor obviously evil queens; let our small group figure it out, look at environments, talk to locals, chat with the adventurer party, give us dialogue options speculating what this is all about and what we think about it, while not yet knowing what's up. Old JRPGs used to be great at slowly conveying that "something is very wrong" feeling in these small steps, with a few words and pixels and music cues. And let us and our group feel smart and like we're investigating. And then the truth can come out, and then we can make decisions.

And on the philosophy of it all, the narrative needs to have a clear line of what is going on. If they're the enemy, make that clear and cut out all the sentimentality and the happiness and the heartwarming moments. Make it all eerie. We've had so many cases of feeling sorry to have to fight someone. Make this a different type of story then, not Amaurot 3.0, make this creepy, bring in the horror, make them all unsettling.
And when we fight them, let it feel satisfying, and I think it's perfectly fine to tie off the story here as complete. We don't need to hang around the region forever. But don't just run credits right after the fight; give us something nice where we hang out at the beach or whatever, vacationing. End it on a good note.

[OgruMogru]

I've been thinking about this a lot and I have a lot of ideas for things i would omit, reshuffle or recontextualize to try to add some value to what DT had to offer. I will limit myself to just 2 suggestions:

1: Editing. I can accept a story not being to my taste. I can grudgingly tolerate illogical and shallow concepts and payoff. I cannot tolerate the amount of redundancies, repetition and reiterations within the script itself. Get rid of all of the superfluous padding between actual story beats if they aren't going to function in service of character growth.

2: Change Wuk Lamat's job to pictomancer. Her focus on peace and bringing cultures together would be strengthened by an interest in the arts and cultures of the people she visits. Give her a unique pictomancer kit that has abilities themed on the zones we visit with her. She could paint Hanuhanu feathers, an alpaca, the Yok Huy grave stone, a cactuar, some bananas and a waterfall, some valigarmanda elemental stuff. something that reflects her journey and how she carries the spirit of her people with her and expresses that dedication through the celebration of culture and folklore. This would help to contextualize her empowerment through the power of friendship and also plays nicely into DT's themes of carrying the memories and experiences of the people you meet along the way. It also parallels Sphene's motives in preserving the memories and culture of the subjects of her kingdom. Giant stagnant memory banks vs vibrant integrated celebrations of life.

[Nitelancer]

I just finished the MSQ. Thank goodness it's over. What a slog. What a bore!

First, I would significantly reduce the amount of cutscenes and the amount of dialogue in the cutscenes. There should be very few.

Second, I would make the rite of succession something that is going on in the background, not something that we are directly involved in. Our MSQ would be similar to what Estinien was doing—exploring the lands and getting involved in a series of random adventures. We would deal with local criminal organizations, murder mysteries, tribal rivalries, legendary treasures, the daily struggles of the locals, etc. Krile's search to learn more about her past would also be a driving factor for us. Only towards the end would we get involved in the succession and follow events.

Third, I would add political intrigue and an assassination. Through our adventures and interacting with the local inhabitants, we could get a sense of who the succession candidates are, and the political groups vying for power in Tural. We might see just a few scenes involving the candidates. We hear more about them from the locals during our adventures, learning about their positive and negative qualities. It would seem to us that the succession could go the way of any of the candidates. Eventually, we see Wuk Lamat as the candidate with the most popular support and who is most loved by the people. She would win the right of succession, but right as she is declared the victor and the people are cheering her, she is assassinated in front of the crowd! We are there too to witness the events first hand. That is when we, the warrior of light, and scions get directly involved, and the MSQ escalates from there.

[genuine_stranger]

What would I change? Scrap everything, and let us explore Tural on our own.
Let the Dawnservant succession be a sub-plot, and if you really want the scions on board, let them be advisors or tackle the problems of the Mamool or Hanuhanu. Let them do their own thing, follow their own interests, or whatever they do in a peaceful time.

[CuteBucket]

First half
The first half was corny and had some cheesy parts, but this was the part of the story I liked better. I'm okay with a low stakes adventure where WoL isn't the lead protagonist. I'm okay with a more lighthearted story with some cartoony/anime style hijinks. The theming and genre were all fine here for me. But there are still some plot points that were a miss for me, and would overall have been pretty easy to resolve. Here's what I would change to improve it:

- Have the Warrior of Light actually mentor Wuk Lamat and have her change in response to this. Have her ask us advice and take it seriously and act in accordance with it, or ignore our advice, have it backfire, and then come back and apologize for letting her ego get to her and not listening. Give us an instanced battle where we have a friendly sparring match with her so she learns more about our fighting style. Wuk Lamat's strength is supposed to be her power of friendship and connecting with others, isn't it? So then where are her other friends? She is apparently childhood friends with Erenville, and they had a cute dynamic that was introduced in 6.55...that we never see again in the actual expansion with the two of them. I can't believe in her Power of Friendship stuff when it seems like WoL is the only friend she cares about and the game shows us little to nothing about her friendship with her brothers or Erenville.

- If we're going to go with the whole "Wuk Lamat gets motion sickness" thing, resolve the matter earlier and stop dragging it out or just don't include it at all. It's not a very funny joke. I get motion sick myself admittedly and thus I fail to see the humor in "wow this person sure is having a terrible time trying not to vomit everywhere, isn't that FUNNY?" No one ever attempts to help her, they pretty much just tell her to tough it out. That's not how motion sickness works. Like someone please offer to get this woman some Fantasy Dramamine or even just sit with her and share some grounding techniques with her or talk with her to help keep her mind distracted during the journey, SOMETHING, sheesh. This could have been used as a moment for character growth on her part, WoL's part as mentor, the Scions part...but no, it's played as a cheap joke. Krile even does the /smug face at Wuk Lamat in Yak'tel about it while offering zero help. It's just really strange and heartless.

[CuteBucket]

- Commit to doing something with the Scions and including them more, or including them less. What we got was the lukewarm middle ground of neither. I would either remove all but one or two Scions entirely except for small cameos (like how they did with Estinien), or I would include them more and cut down on more Wuk Lamat dialogue to give them space. As it stands, the Scions exist to fill dungeon party slots and give surface level peanut gallery responses to events. Krile in particular seems to have lost whatever sliver of a personality she had to start with to just mindlessly follow along and offer nothing of substance. You could cut her or replace her character in the first half and nothing would change. The twins at least get a few better moments, but even they are mostly useless. Thancred and Urianger made it onto the poster art, and they are barely in this expansion. We get ONE single moment of friendly rivalry in the first dungeon, and then in the upper half of Kozama'uka get a nice scene with the two of them and Koana...and that's it, really. I was looking forward to a friendly competition with them! This is what we were shown and teased with. It gets resolved before it barely began.

- Cut the whole part where Wuk Lamat gets kidnapped. It was so stupid and unnecessary. Have Bakool Ja Ja attempt to do it, but everyone sees through it right away instead of everyone turning into clueless idiots for the next 30 minutes. Lean into the humor here instead of trying to play it serious. Have Bakool keep trying to sabotage us in increasingly silly and outlandish ways. This would have endeared his character to me much more. If we need a serious moment to show Koana being a caring brother, then have something else happen that doesn't insult the character's intelligence as much. Even something like a natural disaster that separates the party for a time and/or temporarily injures Wuk Lamat and brings out her brother's protective side, something like that.

- Bakool Ja Ja should have been disqualified much earlier. Certainly after the Valigarmanda incident. Right now, he goes and releases the beast because...he's sucks and wants to cause problems on purpose, I guess. This is boring and does nothing to further his character. What would have been better, and what would have made his eventual heel-face-turn in Yak'tel feel less out of nowhere, is if he released Valigarmanda out of hubris for his own abilities and intended to fight and defeat the weakened creature himself, thereby "proving" (at least in his eyes) his superiority over the current Dawnservant and cementing a place for himself in history. But he gets his ass kicked, realizes he's messed up and is in way over his heads, and has to come running back to the other contestants reluctantly for help. After everyone teams up and defeats Valigarmanda, he runs off before we can confront him, and we don't see him again until Yak'tel.

[CuteBucket]

- Show us anything about Zarool Ja and his ambitions and not just tell us. There are two points in the game, one early on when first meeting him in Tulliyolal and another during the cooking competition in Yak'tel where Krile gets some kind of Echo vision or feeling (something that WoL should have also gotten imo), where she tells us his mind is full of darkness...and that it. She fails to expand on what the hell she means or what she saw, us as players don't get to experience any of this, and then we just get told by Wuk Lamat a few times, "oh yeah, Zarool Ja has always been kind of quite, I've never understood him." Then show us that. I would add a scene where WoL tries to talk to him, tries to get to know him at all, asks Wuk Lamat more about her time with him, was he always like this or did he change one day, etc. ANYTHING to characterize him at all, beyond Krile telling us "he's scary his thoughts are dark."

- I would change things so we got to get a real glimpse of the "Lost City of Gold at the end of the 3rd dungeon, as opposed to just a gate. They tried to save that zone as a big dramatic reveal, and in so doing, felt like they were trying to make a callback to Amaurot, but without any of the heart and buildup that Amaurot had. Sorry, a big modern-ish city isn't a shock after we've seen Amaurot and the city of Alexandria. So instead, show us some of it earlier. Have there be some hint or indication that Krile's earring may work here. The fact that she couldn't even use the plot item she had been carrying around the whole time to open the gate later was just another moment of Krile being completely useless in an expansion where she's featured on the poster art. So let us all get in somehow. We don't get to explore the zone fully yet, but have us go in and meet and talk to some of the "residents" before we know the truth of the place. This could be where we meet Caciua first. Perhaps we could introduce Sphene here much earlier. Then give some little clue that something isn't quite right here, something feels off, before a character that stayed behind on the other side warns us the gate is doing something and we all rush back out as the gate closes and we can't figure out how to open it again for now.

[Hirofuji]

It's a difficult question, because literally everything in the MSQ is bad. Any time you focus on any detail at any point in the story, you just see more and more bad writing. The only way to "improve" something in this state is to do a complete and total rewrite.