After Dawntrails abject Failure of a Story, there need to be serious Consequences

[Turnintino]

Chill out.

[honest_psycho]

And yet, these have very reasonable explanations...

-The Urqopacha region is rather isolated, and the giants themselves further intentionally separated themselves from the rest of the population. Valigarmanda gets released, attacks the isolated settlement, and promptly flies off to the mountain to recover and gets defeated before he can. It's likely most of Tural doesn't even know anything happened, and the creature being defeated for good (instead of just imprisoned) could cause the celebration to trump going after Bakool Ja Ja for the time being in the giant's minds.

Sorry but no. The highpriest should absolutely have sent a letter to the King, telling them "Hey, this one contestant actually unleashed this mighty beast that we tried to keep sealed for 80 years and could have wrecked the continent."
Bakool Jaja should have been disqualified, if not outright executed for domestic terrorism.
The only reason this didnt happen is because the writers needed him to have his redemption arc so our dearest Wuk Lamat can befriend him and pretend to be a such caring dawnservant. Blech.

-When Zoraal Ja kills Gulool Ja Ja, we at that point have absolutely no idea how regulators work. All we do know is that Zoraal Ja can come back from the dead (potentially as much as he wants) and just completely wrecked a guy who was a highly competent fighter that took both us and Estinien to a draw. On top of that, Zoraal Ja straight up tells us he's calling off the attack for now and giving us time to hunt him down. Attacking him would have been incredibly boneheaded. Attack a guy with unfathomable power and potentially cause him to continue using his nigh-invincible army to kill everyone in Tuliyollal, or let him go, keep everyone else alive, and have time to learn what we're facing...easy choice.

I do not believe for a second that this is the reason why NOBODY tried to even intervene.
EVEN IF, should have been a moment where the WoL tried to, only to be hold back by Koana or someone else, saying out loud the reason you've given. But we didn't even get a "clenching fists moment" or a "damn we can't do anything"-comment from one of the other Scions.

Also, this scene could have been comepletely avoided if we had "arrived late" and saw this whole scene via the Echo, no awkward "just standing there"-type of garbage writing.

-Wuk Lumat is clearly a skilled warrior and well-built as such from the first moment we meet her. The things she lacked were confidence and real motivation.

Another person already explained why this is total bs, but you didn't adress this for some reason. HMMMMMMMMMMM

Endsinger has the ability to manipulate Dynamis far better than a regular person can by being an Entelechy who runs on Dynamis. Their very essence is heavily affected by the surrounding Dynamis. Meteion naturally has the ability to communicate through Dynamis, soar through Dynamis waves, etc.
And I'll have to repeat again, we fought Endsinger in an area that is aetherically lacking and dynamis is omnipresent over centuries and centuries of build-up. The Final Days isn't something that came out of thin air. It was the collective dynamis of many untold civilizations that Meteion visited before centuries of build-up. That's why it's immensely important to realize Thancred's role in Endwalker in the Final Zone, because whoever's feelings is strongest only matter in an unique zone where emotions dictate reality.

The same cannot be said of the races living in The Source. They have the ability to use Dynamis, but nowhere in any amount like the ones who are specialized in this, nor are they living in an area where emotions are the only factor. Being in an aetherically rich environment and being unable to manipulate aether is why Garleans were shunned and drove them to live in the frigid tundras in the first place. This is a world where aether has far more sway over dynamis where the former drowns out the latter in most instances. That's also why we ourselves need allies to be able to affect the surrounding Dynamis as heavily, because each person has a limited ability to pull the surrounding dynamis. That's why even solo quests that have LB (ex: Alphinaud's solo instance with NPCs fighting alongside him) has only one such use of Limit Break, and it's generally saved at a pivotal moment, not spammed wantonlessly. It's an phenomenon filled by a build-up of emotions, but that has limits as long as we're in The Source because this is an aetherically rich environment where dynamis takes time to gather back up. That's why the shroud of aether works for years to prevent the Final Days.

[Valence]

It's been almost three months, there has been hundreds of threads, negative reviews andhours and hours of essays analysing every possible detail of Dawntrails writing and its myriad of problems.

And I think it's safe to say that the Story this time was an absolute abject failure that warrants serious consquences.

For a game that advertised itself as the "Story-MMO", the story this time around did some serious damage to the game's reputation.

Who will look for an MMO, see the good reviews of Shadobringers and Endwalker and NOT be bewildered of the mixed to negative review of Dawntrail?
I, for one, cannot recommend this game to anyone, despite the free trial and the quality up until Endwalkers MSQ, when the future looks like THIS.

So what consequences should this have?

While I'd prefer an actual 100% re-write of the MSQ, with a year long stop on development and free gametime like with 1.0 and ARR, I know this is not feasable.
So I will focus on the things that can and SHOULD be done, to prevent a desaster like this from happening again.

1. Let Yoshi-P focus on FF14 exclusivley.
When I heard that Yoshi-P would ALSO be the director of FF16, I was worried if the quality of FF14 would suffer for it, and unfortunately I was right to worry.
The lack of oversight this story had is obvious to everyone.

Don't waste Yoshi-P's time on side-rpojects that get "underperforming sales".

2. The current writers need to be replaced or outright fired.
For the sake of brevity, I will refer to all the threads in this forum, who already did the work to point out the many problems/plotholes/basic logic etc. this story had, with Wuk Lamat taking the top position as a textbook case of a 'Mary Sue'.

It is clear that the current writers don't have the skill or talent required for this game and need to be replaced or even outright fired.

I refuse to believe that Ichikawa and Yoshi-P gave their ok out of their own volition.

3. The MSQ needs to be heavily re-written and edited to fix the most blatant mistakes and problems (I don't care if this happens at a later point or within a year long break).
Also, some more solo-duties like a playable trainride should be seriously considered.

There are other things I'd like to see, like an actual public apology from Squares management, saying that they will take responsibility (Nintendo'S CEO took a paycut cause the Wii U underperformed, so this has already happened).
But I will hold on for now.

Closing words:
I'm aware that I'm demanding a lot of things but after playing this game for over 3 years and the game itself being over 10 years old, we should expect for a product that at least WORKS.

The main product is the story and needs all the quality it gets to set it appart from the competition.
I love the game too much to let it go down in flames.

Would you like to speak to the manager?

[honest_psycho]

Would you like to speak to the manager?

Unironically yes.

[Basteala]

I get it, you dont like it. it happens.

however.. the game DOES work, you just dont like the story. you are not alone, but this is completely out there for a demand. since the delivered product DOES actually work.. and wow.. over 3 years... congrats.. some people have been playing since 1.0 so... so what?

look, I am not saying that you are wrong, or the story was perfect or anything... but this is a complete Karen post. they will never re-write the MSQ, no matter how long you hold your breath for. I doubt anyone will be fired, and an apology from the CEO of SE is a pipe dream. is DawnTrail bad sure... but it isnt like millions have left and the sub levels are down to 100k or something, so while bad, it isnt catastrophic. not every bit of music is a platinum record, not every movie is a box office smash... and not every story is a hit.

I understand your point of view and I think giving people the axe for one poor performance is a blatant overreaction. However, I will say that I feel you're understating the importance of story a little bit. This is an RPG, not Call of Duty. The story experience is part of an RPG's gameplay and if the story is broken, so is the RPG.

Now granted, I do think retconning the story is a terrible idea that creates more problems than it fixes--Star Wars sequels anyone?--Dawntrail had some good concepts even if the execution missed, and a good writing team will take those, and put things that weren't so great into perspective to make them compelling. They did that with Lahabrea. They did that--some would say--with Zenos. The writing team doesn't need to give anything or anyone the axe, they just need to course correct like they have a dozen times before.

To the OP, the good news is that the biggest problems were less with Dawntrail's *concepts* and more with the pacing and a lack of nuance and attention to detail in the narrative. Yes those are big problems, but rectifying those is arguably easier than trying to perform acrobatics to fix lore that fell flat on its face.

Now if the team can't do that after a patch or two, then maybe find someone else to head the next MSQ story, but let's keep the insanity to a minimum for now, eh?

[honest_psycho]

The only insanity here is that the story was allowed to ship in this state.