It occurred to me, earlier, that other than the appearance of Vrtra (which is a clear and obvious deus ex machina to get Hiroi out of a tricky situation he thought sounded cool but literally had no way out of, contributed to in part because he wrote the tribes of tural as so retardedly incompetent that they literally could do nothing against a few flying ships and so could have been conquered by just about any other nation in an afternoon and some change)... there is basically no mention of the outside world in Dawntrail's main story.
There's that one guy from Ishgard on the boat, I think. Like, Shadowbringers is a different plane of existence and it spends a lot of time talking about events in the Source, and even has you running around in the source a good bit. There's not a single part of the DT MSQ where you go to anywhere but Tural, right? I don't remember there being. Certainly contributes to the worldbuilding feeling like actual shit. The twins spout shit about "learning how the turali tribes came together might help us with Garlemald," which goes nowhere and feels like someone said "Hiroi, why are they here? Literally why are they here, they have way more important shit to do" and he went UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. So many sequences abruptly having no voice-acting (and all of them having such flat camera angles) makes me feel like they ran with a first-draft and did some vigorous editing on-the-go.
Honestly I'm getting tired of these role quests. I miss the characters I met when jobs had their own questlines.
I see why they cut down on them - there's a lot of classes - but at the same time, I don't see why they cut down on them. It really hasn't felt like these last few expansions launched with more on-launch content than Stormblood, but the MSQs have bloated in size.
Why not trim that garbage down, and put that saved time into Job quests again? Sure, it'd be weird to have 30 levels of 'role quests,' but they don't teach you anything and aren't precursors to using the roulette. Frankly, if there was a quest about unlocking Flare Star, I might like that awfully-designed ability 1% more.
The role quests are very clearly portraying the whole treasure hunter/explorer motif as 'white colonialism' or whatever and how you're not heckin' respectin' cultures enough.
Honestly, I didn't even make that connection. I would prefer that - given my preferred fantasy version of this story genuinely is the Eorzean rush to conquer and plunder. Man, hell, you could even have a reversal of that where the Eorzeans, bent on colonizing Tural, get a rude awakening and a bit of a mirror held up to them by Alexandria bent on colonizing Eorzea.
I genuinely don't remember what happened in the tank role quest. I went to Ishgard, they made some bad jokes about it being cold. There was some stupid cringe shit about "authority sucks" written by a teenager or something, I don't remember. It had like, nothing to do with Ishgard.
Just think, they could have done that in the MSQ if they hadn't decided to nuke that part of the map for the second half of the MSQ.
Nonsense! The Alexandrians are so great. Like, let's chew this through:
Is Murder still possible if everyone forgets that the person you murdered existed in the first place?
What are souls, exactly? Is it evil? Shouldn't we tell them to stop doing it?
If everyone knows that someone mysteriously forgotten-about is someone that has died, doesn't that defeat the point of erasing their memory? Like, if they ever get brought up again, wouldn't everyone go "damn, I don't remember them, and isn't it kindof freaky that they could have been my own mother? What is the point of this, exactly?"
Wouldn't people leave, like, diaries and shit to be remembered by? Or did they forget how to write and it's commentary about social media and smartphones?
If everyone forgets everything about a person who has died while hooked into the whatever, how does anyone remember the WWE former-fighters that died of AIDS? Do they pull their headset off right before they die so everyone can remember? But then, everyone does remember, and acknowledges that they're dead - so wouldn't those people still feel grief and loss, defeating the entire point? Wouldn't they recognize that "I can feel this for a WWE Superstar I loved, but I'm going to be barred from feeling this if my mother passes? I'll just forget everything about my own mother?"
There was a resistance, but literally what was it doing for apparently 30 years?
Why didn't Sphene just take the macguffin she wanted and kill the very-obviously-weak Zoraal-Ja rather than giving him a button to juice himself with?
And I'm just getting started! They're such a deep, meaningful addition to the FF14 canon!
OK, so it's going to be catch and let that puppy loose to let him observe how its spell is cast and...he's going to eat the whole thing.
but it funny!!!! it funny!!!! see he eat da fish he eat dA WHOLE FISH!!!! if naruto gotted da fish, n he eated it make me laff haha funny -Hiroi
I will take a zillion storylines about an actual culture filled to the brim with retards who just want to cause trouble and fight things while doing nothing to solve their own problems over the absolute nothingness that is literally everything with Tural. Mhiggers are infinitely more interesting than gray, formless blobs that LOVE TACOS xD
The guy can't even fight, why is he even with us?
In a competently-told story, Erenville would be a Bard. I guess not the FF14 type. He would have a reason to know a lot of esoteric things and have insight into a bunch of different cultures, and a performative nature would explain both why he would be narrating the game (remember that he did that? Yeah I don't know why him either) and why he would delve into exposition so often.
Instead, Erenville is presented as an antisocial loner - exactly like Estinien. And whereas Estinien was still used to provide insight into Ishgardian culture, Erenville doesn't get to do that. He gets five minutes to show that he has problem-solving knowledge, and otherwise he's completely useless. But how could he be? He can't explain cultures when there are no cultures in Tural. He can't explain esoteric facts about history or geography when the writer didn't really spend any time figuring out anything about either. Even his own little aside is ultimately just a quest to tell us about how cool Wuk Lamat is, because Wuk Lamat gave grandma her necklace or whatever.
