As I said it's apparent the writers deliberately avoided the opportunities for interesting stories, probably to fellate the myth of a continent of heckin wholesome latinxes that have never heard of colonialism.
I really don't think that this was caused by the cultural consultants and whatever else who collected a steady paycheck while nothing-doing. Sure, maybe that played into here-and-there, but I think the bulk is that Hiroi is just a shit writer who thinks like a fourteen-year-old. Cultural consultants don't explain the absolute deluge of "wouldn't this idea be cool?" moments that then have absolutely no follow up and make absolutely zero sense, such as Koana's love for buffalo. Japanese guilt over imperialism takes on a decidedly different flavor from western guilt about it, and this one really doesn't smack to me as 'white guilt weeb edition.'
I genuinely get the impression that this guy sat around and jerked people around with a half-baked script that was barely finished before the deadline, and that's why everything is so flat and empty and feels so rushed. There's this idea trending that the expansion tried to shove two stories' worth together like Endwalker did, which makes sense, but I'm more of the persuasion that it feels shoved together because homeslice had to shit it out in a month.
This would explain why the US studio's audio quality was such fucking shit but shipped anyways - they can't do voice lines until the script is finalized. By the time SPEEN! gets finished, there's no time to schedule a reshoot. This would also explain why the MSQ's camerawork is almost-entirely static and flat, lacking any dynamism that you would see in terms of camera movement and angle that the prior titles all had. You could have the level designers build everything out, and leave the character & camera animations for once the script was finalized. Hell, this explains why they tried to spin it as "the most MSQ content ever!" because they wouldn't have had time to
fucking edit his goddamn script. If you've ever, well, written anything - your first draft is probably going to be so much wordier than the final product, because you'll realize most of it's crap. DT really, really feels like a first-draft.
Maybe the jobs team was in on it, too, explaining why they largely just fucked every job that got any real change, and the rest all got pointless 'finishers' atop their other 2-3 finishers that they press at the end of their rotation. I just really suspect almost everything about this expansion was phoned in at the last second and they wasted a fuckton of development time.
It honestly makes me wonder what in the world the devs are going to be doing next.
Well, it really depends on who gets put in the writer's seat. Ishikawa genuinely had the heft to make a soft reboot in Shadowbringers, but Oda was largely content to just continue what Maehiro had settled into. Hiroi doesn't seem like someone who has actually played any of the rest of the game and apparently had so little oversight that no-one noticed he genuinely wasn't doing anything for such a long time, but we know we're stuck with him for probably at least the next patch storyline.
At the same time, if there's one thing that corporations can be relied on to do, it's respond to metrics. And fuck me, the metrics for DT cannot be good. It's the worst-reviewed in every language by a longshot. Its player retention has to be abysmal - a few weeks into 7.1 I was noticing longer queue times as a tank than I think I'd ever really seen before. There's this real sentiment of "I'm done with the game" that I'm getting from tons of people who had been seemingly with it for years and years and years, which you could track based on the people who either skipped DT or skipped 7.1 (who, say, did not skip 6.1 or 5.1 etc etc). Hiroi's atrocious EW postgame got a lot of grace as all of the postgame writing does (I found Shadowbringers' to be a noticeable step down in many ways), which necessarily masked the turd that was brewing. But now that it's out, I really don't think Square can ignore that something went wrong with this one. And given that the systems are basically the same they've been since Shadowbringers, well gee, I think even they can figure it out.
