Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Darnuss]

There's no moral ethics on this story because in reality nothing happens, for starters we are told by Cahciua before entering Solution 9 that the "people" here are basically replicas of their memories, and when one of them dies they go back to the cloud and everyone gets a reset. This could be a nice idea but Hiroi didn't know what to do with it, like none of the NPCs showed something any emotion or at least some interest to keep "living" even when you do the "quests" (The elezen looking for his ring) He would tell you that he knows he is dead, that he knows that people don't come back (when asked for his SO) because the server doesn't have enough aether/souls to recreate everyone, if you want the player to have a """""conflict""""" at least put a scene in which you have NPCs telling you "This might be an illusion, but i'm alive! Who are you to decide what is a living being? I don't want my home destroyed"

We had any of that? No, in fact when you are going to shut down the last tower Cahciua would drop casually "oh yeah, that's not the real Sphene. Its this program following her wishes" so again if the story doesn't care, why should the reader? The ideas were there but Daichi Hiroi never used anything that he establishes, the gondola scene was good but is there anything besides that? You have Graha telling you about "bring someone back" I mean that's interesting but the only NPC (The Elezen) with that story he's just "It's ok, i haven't manage to meet with my fiance due to the lack of bandwidth" there's no urgency, there's none "I WANT TO SEE HER AGAIN" there's no little quest to using the bandwidth you liberate after shutting down some towers so the server could "miraculously" bring her fiance back, so they have a reunion and you could have the "we are happy and alive" but no.

Some time one of the lobotomized scions would tell you "it's sad" so you feel something, i guess? The difference between Living Memory and Amaouroth it's that for the later we are seeing everything on Emet's side, he tried to bring back his colleagues and the guy is so jaded that he couldn't see anything beyond that. And of course we spent a lot of time with Emet to undersand something that the last 5 hrs of DT trying (and failing) to set up Meteon from Temu as this tragic villain, but she just doesn't work. The trial is cool tho.

Again, there's ideas in here but sadly the writers were way over their heads for this project, which is funny because everything could be stayed "low stakes" by only making a somewhat a war between Zoraal and Gulool ja (the proud son going mad and then corrupting himself looking for power) but no "world ending scenario" lol.

[Eyrilona]

if the story doesn't care, why should the reader?

Yes, that is pretty much the argument why people are saying this is a badly written story. And then other people act as apologists for the story by making arguments that you can reduce to "the story never told us that the story was bad, so it isn't bad".

I can recognize that yes, by the internal logic of Dawntrail 95-100, this was the right course of action. But I can also recognize that any story that has this logic in it that contradicts the entire tradition of what the game has always been about, should have been stopped at quality assurance. For Dawntrail to be valid, all of ARR through EW and our character's involvement in it must not be. And people are taking offense with that.