I normally just lurk around here, but like to keep an eye on this thread. Since I actually have something of substance to say for once, I decided to pop my head out and vomit my thoughts into a post.
Until today, I had completely shut out social media and avoided discussing the story with my friends in order to give this xpac the fairest shot possible while keeping my opinions as uncolored as I can. I had July 4th and 5th off. This gave me enough time to finally get through the MSQ. It has... shoes. Big ol' size 12-wide sized shoes. I can honestly say this is the first xpac story I've just outright hated. I started writing down my thoughts to help process them a bit better. Here’s the bit I’ve scribbled for the 6.1 to 6.55 patches as they relate to Dawntrail. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting.
6.1 - 6.5 (Missed Opportunities):
This is where the root of all the problems start I feel. With a fresh storyline starting up, if they were dead set on using new characters, it would've been a VERY good idea to abandon the whole Zero mess and use this time to get us attached to anyone they wanted us to care about here. They obviously did not do this. Hell, they didn't even use this time to build up existing characters with a connection to Tural like our resident diversity rabbit Erenville or pikachu hooded Krile. Instead they air-drop Krile's connection to Tural into the stinger of 6.5, and don't use Erenville at all.
They could have used this time to get us interested in Tural as a location and hype up the City of Gold as a place of interest to us as both the WOL and a player. They also could've used this time to present to the player aspects of Turali culture and people, so that they don't have to slow-walk the start of the MSQ as hard as they do in 7.0 when they are introducing it later. It wouldn't have been super hard either. Something as simple as having a Bakool-Ja-Ja like figure come to Thavnir and start stirring up trouble for a patch or two because of the upcoming dawnservant contest would've gone a long way to getting both the community excited with speculation about the contest and keeping our WOLs engaged due to the contest directly affecting the lives of those around us. Obviosly, they did not take the opportunity to do this either.
Instead we got little miss hat-tilt. As of the end of the 7.0 MSQ, Zero's story has no relevance aside from a VERY minor bit about how consumption of a living creature's aether dilutes your sense of self like on the 13th. This ends up being a non-factor however, it's simply brought up as a potential side-effect of soul munchin'.
With this, we come to the end of the post-endwalker MSQ. We have a brand new storyline starting up, absolutely no hype built up for the new region we're about to explore aside from a 30 second stinger that gives us zero information, zero reason for our WOL to care about the happenings of this nation, nobody our WOL has met has any reason to drag us over there, and we are going to have to spend an ungodly amount of time introducing absolutely EVERYTHING about the new continent for the entire first half of the upcoming 7.0 MSQ. The 6.55 prepatch MSQ is gonna have to REALLY sell Tural to us if they expect most of the playerbase to be excited to go there. Let's see how it did.
6.55 (Tiger Princess and the Giant Toucan):
The 6.55 prepatch begins by introducing us to Wuk Lamat. At this point we don't know that she's Trooncat, but for those of us that listen to the english dub, we are already aware something is horribly wrong with her voice. Tiger Princess’s first impression on us starts off on the wrong foot with her actor giving one of the WORST dub performances in recent memory. The revelation of her actor being a troon clarifies just how TF this performance is so bad. In addition to a put-on accent, the actor is trying to unnaturally raise the pitch of their voice to sound more feminine.
I am NOT a sub-purist by any stretch of the imagination. I generally prefer dubs when done competently, and have held that most of the 3.0-6.0 MSQ of FF14 (barring a few stumbles) was a great example of quality performances and competent direction... that praise absolutely does not apply for 6.55 or 7.0. I don’t know what has happened over at the localization office, but they totally dropped the ball here. The actors are able to carry most of the returning characters through, but even they feel a bit off with most of their lines. When it comes to the new characters, if you told me that the voice directors just scribbled a few notes in the margins of the script before ploping it on the desk of their actors while they eff’d off to go home early every day, I’d probably believe you. Lets not even get started on Gulool Ja Ja.
Back to the story. After getting over our reaction to her voice acting, Wuk Lamat says she’s from Tural and asks us to go hunt a beast with her. Erenville tags along due to his history with Tural. He might have mentioned that he knew Wuk in the past, but I honestly can’t remember. We go investigate some beast attacks at the dungeon from 2 patches ago, and discover the cause of the attacks is... a big tucan. Tiger Princess has many smooth-brain moments throughout this little investigation and is scared of the big dumb bird. We reassure her that we am stronk, and take her along for some good ol’ toucan punchin’.
Despite having defeated the embodiment of despair itself and slaying many a god, this dumb Toucan has got us on the ropes. Wuk discovers she ain’t afraid of no rainbow colored birb, and busts us out of the bind the Toucan has put us in. We then proceed to give the bird a good boppin’. Krile then shows up just as the bird is getting up for round 2 and paints it a pretty picture which causes the Tucan to commit sudoku.
Wuk is so impressed by our strength that she asks us to accompany her to Tural, and help her become queen of an entire continent we’ve never been to before. Despite only just meeting this cat, having seen many clear instances of her ABSOLUTELY NOT being fit to rule and having little reason to go over there other than Krile’s mysterious note from her grandpa and Erenville wanting to visit home, we decide this is a wonderful idea! We throw our full support behind Tiger Princess right away and are convinced she is the best candidate to become Hokage of the not-south-american villages! And so, after talking Alise and Alphinaud into coming with us, we begin preparation to set sail into the new world!
As you can see, there are many problems with this patch. You might think I left some important details out, but no this is really all that happens. This was the last chance they had to excite us for Tural, and for me, they totally flubbed it. Wuk Lamat is introduced to us terribly and we are railroaded like crazy into backing her. Not only does the introduction of Wuk do nothing to attach the player to her, it also comes at a point where any pivots or adjustments to the upcoming MSQ are now impossible.
It is hard to explain just how BAD this introduction is, and it’s only exacerbated by the 7.0 MSQ casting Wuk-Lamat as the protagonist, with our character filling the role of a glorified cheerleader who occasionally bops stuff too big for her. I see the incredibly stupid “you just have main character syndrome” everywhere when people try to defend Dawntrail, but do they honestly expect me to just be okay with watching the character that I've grown attached to over the past several years be completely written out of the story? If you want to bring other characters into focus I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that, but the WoL is still the POV character for the story. An ACTIVE role suits us best because we, as players, are the ones PLAYING the video game.
To be continued...
I haven't got my thoughts down on paper for the main 7.0 Dawntrail's MSQ yet. If they're semi-cohereant I'll post them in chunks as I get them written over the new couple of weeks.
Have a good day all.
