There's good-bad, like Neil Breen: of course it's bumbling and incompetent, but there's something just utterly charming about it.
There's forgettable-bad, like Shadowrun Returns. I remember it existed, I remember experiencing it, and I remember absolutely nothing else about it.
And of course there's just plain bad, like Ghostbusters 2016, where maybe there's a few things that aren't atrocious but on the whole it's not worth the experience.
Dawntrail managed to be so agonizingly boring and so baffling that I feel like it needs its own category.
I was genuinely annoyed at just how fucking often this expansion feels the need to waste your time. The way that it holds your hand to explain the stupidest shit over and over and over again, and yet it fucking speeds right on by things that are way the fuck more important. The first half of the story and the second half of the story are just grafted onto each other and it makes zero sense as to why-the-fuck they are. Sphene is barely a character, and I can't even agree with hating her for being a retard because my immediate question is "who?"
Everything is just so fucking forgettable and flat. Bakool Ja Ja just becomes a completely different character, with zero trace of the previous self or even an actual redemptive arc. Galool Ja Ja's actions seem fucking stupid and pointless. Zoraal Ja's motivations are so incredibly threadbare and stupid that the only possible way to save the character is to make him ham it right the fuck up constantly, and yet zero effort is put in that regard - and so the 99 trial feels a lot like "what the fuck is this? Who cares?" than did 89 or 79, and it lacks the fun spectacle of 69 or 59.
Every single twist and turn, every single moment of this story... was boring, paper-thin, and nonsensical.
A game that had spent a lot of time really fleshing out cultures suddenly brings to bear five or six separate cultures that all boil down to some stupid stereotype and are so fucking retarded that they can't solve basic problems that every civilization on the planet has figured out - not without the help of a bunch of dipshits. It never explains why a militaristic Tural would matter to the rest of the world, or indeed why no-one has tried colonizing the land. Other nations are almost not fucking mentioned in the story altogether - the only one that stands out to me is the appearance of Vrtra, which made me laugh out loud: they had no fucking clue what to do about the flying skybarge death-lasers they introduced as a "very serious" plot point, and so he just came up with it.
It's the perfect encapsulation: the dipshit who wrote this is stream-of-consciousness four-year-old. "Wouldn't it be cool if Tuliyollal was attacked?" -> The city looks so completely defenseless and useless that any other nation on the planet could knock it over in an afternoon, but this gets forgotten about.
"Wouldn't it be cool if Zoraal Ja had challenged Wuk, and will destroy the city if she doesn't face him!" -> The game forgets that this threat exists, and he doesn't order an all-out assault... literally until he comes face-to-face with Wuk? So he was holding off to lure her in, even though he was gonna do it anyway? And then he's mad that the city has recouped its defenses? Huh?
Oh, that's because "It'd be so cool if Vrtra showed up! See, I'm really making use of the rest of the lore!" -> The threat of the future-army is literally dealt with off-screen, and the story has to invent a long series of asspulls apropos of nothing to make you feel "the stakes are high!" This is part of a really fucking weird sequence where you have dialogue choices to make callbacks to other games - a lot of them get shoved in all in this one area, and it's serious whiplash: like someone told the writer "this story has fucking nothing to do with the world we made," and he shoved in a five-minute section and pushed it to prod with some reference humor.
Living Memory contains the only good sequence-concept in the game, which is Krile's reunion with her parents... which becomes a fucking exposition dump about the magic macguffin that the story doesn't fucking need. Krile exists in this story literally just to be an exposition dump, and it's just so goddamn wild. The 100 dungeon is so pathetic that I couldn't stop laughing at it - I genuinely don't know what the fuck it was supposed to represent, because all I could focus on was "it's just amaurot again" and "why the fuck did they get people to do such shitty UK accents when they have a UK voice-acting studio?" The Sphene trial is a cool fight but seriously just a long "who cares? who the fuck cares?" the whole time. I can't even be mad at them trying, once again, to make us like Wuk because my response to Wuk's appearance was "who the fuck cares? who the fuck is this for?" which are the two questions I had been asking for the entire runtime of this story.
There's next to no mention of the end-days. There's next to no discussion of earlier calamities. Or Tural doing business with the outside world. We establish the visuals of an oil rush in the wild west zone, and... we don't focus on that? We instead listen to some fucking shit accents so we can have a story about how cool Wuk Lamat's Bracelet is? The Scions all exist to tell us about how cool Wuk Lamat and Koana are? And not even in a manner that feels authentically them, but in this pathetically dry, pastiche imitation?
And all the while that disparity between the US and the UK VA studio never. Fucking. Goes. Away. Crunch and compression: it's there to hide Wuk's fucking garbage range, and that's the only possible explanation I can find for why you'd ever compress audio that way. There's two OK voice actors in the entirety of the US crew: Galool Ja Ja and Cahcuia, both of whom kindof demonstrate to me that this was a one-and-done recording fiasco where the studio took the money, told them to do the line reads, and the rest was up to them. GJJ sounds like that's just the way he talks, but it's honestly a great accent - but when he's supposed to have emotional range, homie has absolutely awful takes. If there was a director, said director would go: "Nah man, let's do it again, let's make you actually sound mad." Cahcuia's voice-actor bounces all over the place and doesn't really seem to be sure of what the performance is supposed to be, and I never had an actual read on how the character's supposed to come off. She has range and she can deliver emotion, but it's really obvious that no-one fucking offered any guidance or direction or vision for what she was supposed to be doing.
BJJ and ZJ have completely boring and unremarkable voice-actors. Koana's VA sucks: he sounds like a guy doing an overdramatic anime performance with a hispanic accent, and that is absolutely every single voice he does. He has one voice - and he can't do any emotion. His "angry" is comically bad, as is his "sad." Everything blends together into one slurry: which leads me to think that, like GJJ, he isn't really acting so much as that's just his voice. And so he does that stupid brooding anime-intonation and calls it a wrap, for every goddamn character.
And does Wuk Lamat need any words? I can't think of a more annoying character in anything, and having listened after-the-fact to the other language voices... Holy fucking shit. The German voice is a really odd but interesting take on the character, the French one sounds like a ton of fun, and the Japanese one is a bit ridiculous but all in good fun in their like... kabuki-voice-acting tradition. Each of those performances gives a different sheen to Wuk's character and frankly makes it more interesting, if still wildly overplayed. But the US actor is just... my god. No highs. No lows. Can't yell. Can't whisper. Can't brood. I have so many voice clips of this absolute leech - who I almost suspect fucking blackmailed their way into the role for how atrocious this is (and how the recording is bent ENTIRELY around trying to make them sound 'normal') - trying to do the most BASIC thing that you could get out of the greenest of theater kids tossed up on a stage... and it's what the fuck? It's softened because their voice breaks. It's compressed because they want to cut out the bassy, masculine undertones. It's a half-asleep performance that sounds like a one-and-done that was so meticulously cleaned up it makes me wonder if they didn't use AI for some of these performances they're so lazy.
I don't think I've ever experienced a story where I was just annoyed the entire time. Genuinely, the fucking redbull quest was the only time I wasn't annoyed. There were so many times that I just sat there, blank-expression, trying to imagine how something this bad made it through any form of QA whatsoever, and all I can conclude is that it's another case of some nimrod in the corporate sphere convincing people "we don't need QA in the process. We're experienced."
This story has no characters. It has character-concepts. These concepts change from one scene to the next based on whatever Hiroi thought would be cool. And Hiroi finds Wuk Lamat really, really cool. I suspect this is because Koana is Hiroi's self-insert, and Wuk Lamat is his furry waifu. For as much of a Mary Sue that Wuk is, Koana is just as bad - he just doesn't get as much screen time and he doesn't have as fucking abominable as a VA. His character always makes the correct decisions, knows basically everything without flaw or fault, never gets mad at the good guys, and is never misled by his convictions so much as he monologues to us about how his convictions were misplaced (for some reason) (and that reason is because Wuk is so smart)
It's so hard to believe this was written in earnest. If your goal, if your central theme, was the idea of diplomacy and overcoming cultural differences through understanding, this story is the worst fucking thing you could possibly write. It convinces everyone that this idea is utterly and unbelievably childish, that you can't tell an interesting story about this idea in any way, and that any attempt to weave a story like this into the greater fabric of FF14 necessarily involves putting it in a bubble removed from everything else.
