Underwhelming villain?

[Antoine_Lenheim]

Are there anyone else who thinks that Zoraal Ja and the whole villain arc is a bit underwhelming?

Like, I didn't even understood what were his intentions in first place. First, he wanted to wage war to other nations in order to expand, because in his vision, that's the only path to ultimate peace. In his own words, he wanted to "show the people the folly of war", so that they would grow tired of it and long for everlasting peace. But, like, weren't people alrealy longing for peace because Tural HAD JUST BEEN through a war?

Then he wanted to prove to himself that he is stronger and better than his father, a worthy successor, in which he failed, which drove him to enhance his strengths and voila, Deux Ex Machina in form of portal to Alexandria appears. How convenient.

Then out of nowhere his son appears, how Zoraal Ja even had time to get laid with someone? And who is his mother? Or was it an adopted son but why would he even adopt anyone? I never took him for someone who could be a father.

Then when we fight him, he was yapping about "what is my path, why was I born?". Dude. It almost seems like SE didn't know how they want to write their main villain, they gave him multiple storylines at once and finished none of it.

And the arc itself, it started so unexected and grand, I almost saw a glimpse of ShB storywriting there. Sudden attack on Tuliyollal by an unknown force, Zoraal Ja as a cybernetic raptor killing his father, refuses to elaborate and leaves, looming airships in the sky... Scary! Aaaaand... it's all snuffed out in an instant. The arc barely had any build up to it and it's already over.

Pretty pathetic for a grand villain arc, don't you think? Maybe I am comparing Zoraal Ja to Ascians or Meteion which have been hyped for multiple expansions until we finally meet for a showdown but yeah, still incredibly disappointing.

[Cleretic]

But, like, weren't people alrealy longing for peace because Tural HAD JUST BEEN through a war?

No. I have a lot to say here, but let's stop right here to start, because I think this is gonna be your main problem: no, Tural has not been at war for a very long time. (The rest of this post will be a little bit meaty, but it's basically summarizing Zoraal Ja's whole story, and he's got a decently-sized one.)

That's kind of a big point of the story, and one that's nailed down really hard especially early on; Tural hasn't known war since the ones that Gulool Ja Ja put an end to eighty years ago. That means that at this point there's a whole lot of the younger population of Tural that doesn't really know the horrors of war, and just thinks that's a pretty good way to get what they want; it's why Wuk Lamat's initial supporter base is basically entirely the elderly, who know that the peace they've been in is way better than the war Gulool Ja Ja delivered them from. And I'd also point out that Zoraal Ja is very much the voice of that younger, war-hungry generation: he wants to conquer the entire goddamn world, really follow in what he thinks is his father's main accomplishment. Somewhere in his head he feels that the peace afterwards will be embraced because it'll be better than the war, and he pays that lip service in a couple scenes but mainly he just wants to do the war, and that's a much more prominent focus of those scenes

Zoraal Ja also suffers from a similar weight of expectations to Bakool Ja Ja; the people of Tulliyolal genuinely loved him and exalted him, he's the biological son of a king that shouldn't even be able to have a biological son, so expectations for him were through the roof, the rite of succession by all appearances was his to lose... and he failed, maybe worse than any of the other claimants; he didn't just fail in the Feat of Repast, he's also the only one that got outright disqualified, not even Bakool Ja Ja manages that. So, he cons himself into the reward he felt he was earned, gets to the golden city... and the next time we see him it's thirty years later, and his wounded pride has festered into a desire to conquer the entire continent by force and to show his whole peace-loving family that he can kill them all--in one-on-one combat, because Zoraal Ja's still mad about losing the 1v1 against the shade of Gulool Ja Ja. But then he fails at both of those at the same time, and that just completely breaks him; the next (and last) time we see him he's completely gone, completely broken, physically being haunted by those memories of his people praising him during his trial fight.

Yeah, we still don't really know the mechanics behind Zoraal Ja having a kid, and I'm curious about that too... but I think you're more right than you know when you say you 'never took him for someone who could be a father'. His whole speech to Gulool Ja after his trial clearly shows that he's... frankly just terrible at it, he's got a completely wrong and warped view of what a father is or should be, and he's failed at both what he thought a father should be and what a father actually is. He's a really, really bad dad! And honestly, I suspect the only reason he had a kid was because his father did, and he just keeps trying to be like his dad while never truly knowing what his dad was even good at.

I think Zoraal Ja's great for his story, but I think the last thing I'd correct you on is that you're comparing him to entirely the wrong type of villain. I've noticed that nearly every expansion goes for a 'simple villain' and 'complex villain'; the simple villain gives you a really easy-to-understand story and motivation (Nidhogg, Zenos, Vauthry), perhaps just to clear the mental plate for you to properly digest the complex villain's more elaborate motivation, backstory or strategy (Thordan, Yotsuyu, Emet-Selch). And while I think Dawntrail plays a bit with the ratios, gives Zoraal Ja more to do, in that context Zoraal Ja is absolutely the 'simple villain' of Dawntrail--he's just a guy that wants to conquer as much of the planet as he can reach for no other reason than to prove that he can do it, almost in contrast to Sphene's complicated morality and reasoning for, ultimately, the same end. And there's more layers to Zoraal Ja, I'd honeslty hardly call him simple in execution once we hit Heritage Found, but at the end of the day he's Dawntrail's Vauthry, not its Emet-Selch.

[Denishia]

And once more my contrarian villain tastes strike again. self-conscious laughter

Zoraal Ja is my new favorite XIV villain because I do find him fascinating. He's closer to what I wanted Zenos to be until I actually met Zenos in SB and realized that character was the wrong archetype to entertain me until EW found his purpose (Funnily enough Gulool Ja Ja provided the fun 'battle-hungry rival to test my strength against').

A core theme of DT is that you have to reach out to others to understand them. Mamook before we get Miilal Ja's help highlights stonewalling this. Zoraal Ja's character is one of self-isolation. He doesn't monologue his desires because one of his fatal flaws is stewing in his resentment and insecurities and never opening up so that his internal beliefs can be corrected. What 'allies' he have are self-serving, thus he views all relationships that way.

His overwhelming arrogance is fragile because he has externalized validation of self, and proving that he is greater than his father is the expectation set for him by others. The only path for him to prove that is via martial conquest. A holdover from Mamook's cultural mindset and that of a soldier and viper- he's looking for the enemy that threatens his people so he can do his job to slay it. He doesn't have Wuk Lamat's humility in Mamook where she turned to Koana because she knew he had the skills that she lacked.

Knowing that one of the reasons that his father unified Tural was fear of outside conquest, Zoraal's expansionist ambitions read as a misguided idea of how to prove his father right and finish the job. He disregards the Yok Huy history lesson because of arrogance: "But I'll do it properly". Yes, his expansionist ambitions are doomed because he's naive and a child of peacetime. He's a very big fish in a pond who like the classic Gifted Child self-destructs once he finally meets an opponent who defeats him, because he hasn't tasted that psychological hurt of failure. Glory-seeking Alexander the Great stuff.

And then the thirty years isolation only emphasized said isolation core problem.

And the family dynamics- that Gulool Ja Ja failed as a parent but cannot be blamed from Zoraal's personality and personal choices. And how the father-son generational trauma was reiterated on. This feels like a real dysfunctional family and thus I'm invested in them and how Lamaty'i, Koana, and Gulool Ja heal and grow in the patches.

[Denishia]

Also tangentially Sphene thoughts:

Sphene actively lowered my enjoyment of DT because I found her design overwrought while her character predictable and somewhat shallow, in that she took on the internal character elements of Emet that the fandom emphasized and elevated from subtext over his other qualities: temporary ally, the regret that which causes her to waffle until she hardens her heart to suppress desires for friendship and comradery, to option be her ally was a more concrete choice of becoming Alexandrian citizens instead of a goalpost moving impossibility based on suppressed nostalgic sentiment, and her motivation is love for her people (even if her definition of people includes memories of the dead that only she knows exist at this point) and deciding that her subjects' existence demands the death of entire worlds.

For all she also gets compared to Meteion, those are more external (j-pop idol with Garnet costume nods instead of bird/siren) and her plot placement. Partially because Preservation would have been the Hermes equivalent and they are conspicuously absent from the narrative.

It's not to say that Sphene isn't a carbon copy, but what she offered XIV didn't fill any new missing character type or flavor. So from a writing perspective, Sphene felt like the one with less effort put into her and less to chew on. But that's a subjective take, I know.

[LilimoLimomo]

Zoraal Ja suffers from a lot of things, but chief among them is that he is very poorly communicated by the writers.

They start out and it's like "Zoraal Ja wants to do a world war." Okay, that's easy enough to understand.

Then Krile Echoes him and sees some sort of unfathomable darkness in him that she cannot tangibly communicate...which is an abnormal experience for the Echo to provide. Kinda makes you wonder if there's something special going on with him, what's that all about?

Then he gives a speech about how some people in his country want war because they don't know how terrible it is, so he's going to solve that by doing a war and making it clear how terrible that is. And as a viewer, I'm like, "Well that's an exceptionally poorly thought out idea, but not so exceptional that it seems out of place in FF14...I was just hoping for better."

And then he comes and attacks his home with a future army, because apparently his real motivation was wanting to surpass his father and prove that he's as good as everyone says he was? And it's not like we haven't heard how people think he's so special, but this is the first times we've been shown that this is a motivating factor for him. And it outright contradicts his earlier stated motivation, which is literally one of the only things we know about him because he has been so under-developed as a character up until now.

Sure would be great if anyone from his family could weigh in and help us understand a little bit more about this guy's past. But they don't.

The worst thing about Zoraal Ja is that we are never shown who he is, we are always told. Which makes it all the more difficult when what we're told ends up being contradictory. The only bit of meaningful character building we are ever shown for Zoraal Ja is when he attacks the Mamook judge; this demonstrates that whatever it is that he wants, he is willing to hurt his own people and violate the law to get it. Unfortunately, that alone doesn't do anything to help us understand his motivations nor goals as a character; we'll need a series of internally inconsistent monologues to do that for us.

[Denishia]

One of the first things you learn about him when he appears onscreen is that he's the eldest prince, the biological heir, and the one that has already taken over one of his father's kingly positions as head of the Landsguard for the last three years and that he's been off fulfilling said duties by defeating a tural vidraal. Your clear assumption is to intuit that he feels he has already proven that he's next in line to the throne and resentful that the Rite of Succession is upsetting a done-deal, an attitude that his advisor says while Zoraal remains silent. Thus the mystery for the first half of the MSQ is trying to peer behind the red herring of the obviously evil advisor to see how much of that mindset has sunk into Zoraal Ja himself - does the First Promise have loyalty to siblings to outweigh his entitlement? He shows a duty towards his people but we've yet to see love. Just undercurrents of contempt that tie back into those roots of resentment of rejection and inadequacy of the burden of legacy. When you linger after the Valigarmanda fight you learn from the dialogue bubble that Zoraal Ja's preoccupation is with his disappointment of how easy that fight was and how it doesn't satisfy that validation craving to prove he's his father's equal. But because the point of Zoraal Ja is that his personality is *bottles it in so no one can help him before his self-destruction has a massive bodycount*, game mechanic wise he's not confessing these feelings as the player character and NPC until his death scene where he has crashed and burned in all senses.

[LilimoLimomo]

I'll also add one more thing.

Aside from Zoraal Ja being poorly realized, the fact that he is such an absolute monster reflects very poorly on his father, whom the writing suggests we are supposed to love and think only good things about. How on earth did Gulool Ja Ja fail in such a spectacular way at raising his son?

How did a man renowned for seeing through to the hearts of all manner of conflicts spend 20-ish years with is son without realizing there was a problem? And if he did realize there was a problem, how on earth did he think the solution was to enter his openly pro-war son into a contest for the crown that required collecting all the Pokemon Badges — by any means necessary — and dangling the entrance and keys to an unknown power right in front of his face? That is a Hermes-tier bad decision right there.

When Zoraal Ja lays dying and makes it clear that he doesn't understand fatherhood, what this communicates to us is just how poor Gulool Ja Ja was at being a father to his son. And I get the impression that the writer didn't understand that.

[Zelda206]

The biggest villain was Gulool Ja Ja and here's why:
- He allowed his adopted daughter to have the Warrior of Light as her champion, giving her huge advantage.
- Instead of utilizing the Warrior of Light as a referee to mentor all four children to avoid infighting or catastrophes (such as unleashing a certain monster) as well as understand their plights and help resolve them through this journey, the WoL is reduced to a cheerleader and a Job tool for Wuk Lamat to wield at her behest because she's deemed 'the weakest'. The sidelining isn't the issue; it's the manner of how we were sidelined and what role we played moving forward. We could have been a teacher in the Dawnservant's stead to grant an outsider's opinion, looking into the hearts of his children and potential rulers.
- He shows favoritism to his adopted children, being Wuk Lamat and Koana (especially the former) since Krile's journey is dependent on Wuk Lamat being the winner of the competition or else he wouldn't divulge any secrets.
- He refused to course-correct or confront Bakool Ja Ja and instead frowned and shrugged, allowing the Rite to deal with him instead.
- He gave no attention to his son and did not convey to him about anything he was going to leave behind or in his care, or if there was a future for him. He simply allowed him to roam freely and do as he pleased without so much as an approach to bond with him, and considering Zoraal Ja's ultimate goal, this implies that there was NO interaction between the two since the time he could carry a weapon or understand the magnitude of the Rite. There was no genuine 'father and son' bond that was clearly established with the ADOPTED children, and we've seen NPCs with their children as we would see everyday parents, so it's not tradition for Hoobigo families to estrange their sons at a young age.
- He claimed that the Rite of Succession was a means to CULTIVATE a leader and not simply choose, but the plot carries forward with him already implying that he was going to choose Wuk Lamat, who needed the LEAST amount of course-correcting (a scavenger hunt in the form of several history lessons; she stops needing us the moment she learns how to Limit Break), and that anything that came after would be ultimately HER choice. The one who needed it the MOST was barely ever shown because he'd sally forth almost immediately upon gaining a keystone.
- The tribes living in the southern part of Yak T'el were left there in squalor and the Dawnservant never once reasserted the peace between the peoples that lived in that part of the region. He allowed them to suffer without addressing the agricultural problem they were facing and used it as the footwork of a 'lesson'.

[Tracewood]

Aside from the weight Zoraal Ja put on himself that caused him to eventually break, his pride couldn't allow him to see the brighter picture. He's like Vegeta, right down to the supposed self-inflicted Majin phase in the second half. Heck right up until the end,

he acknowledges his son at the end of his fight before his death.

Story doesn't explain well WHY Zoraal is this way, what led him down this path of wanting war to then usher peace (in his own warped way.). Surely, he knew his father was not one to wage war. Perhaps jealousy that his adopted siblings were more like Gulool than Zoraal will ever be?

[chip793]

It all boiling down to "I have daddy issues" definitely left a bad taste in my mouth, more so than the lackluster normal trial where every single mechanic is telegraphed a year in advance. At least the EX is fun. But yeah, overall he just feels like the "plot demands evil" trope and it isn't even remotely surprising when the "twist" occurs because Krile tells us twice prior that he has evil bad juju. Though in his defence, I felt the same way toward Wuk Lamat somewhere around the 50th time she didn't like something or was seasick.