Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[ChromaQuack]

like the credits should’ve been rolling as soon as Wuk Lamat was made dawnservant

I think it should have ended after we slap the jotaro-lizard into not existing, but the post-dawnservant trooncat bit should have been heavily modified to remove any and all mentions of spleene, she can be the post-expansion content and real "boss" much easier that way.

It's not like we find out who exactly was talking to blue lizard when he opens the gate, it could have remained a mystery until 7.1, at most give me a post-credits scene in 7.0 of someone picking up that weird cup-key thing, introduce living memory if you must but don't elaborate on what the endless even are until 7.1, just mention that the Queen presides over the golden city and has *somehow* turned it into some sort of afterlife.

HW and SHB played a lot of the open ended questions from the expansion like this and it worked, there was no need to rush and explain everything before the credits rolled. It's like they forgot that it's ok for the players not to know everything instantly all the time.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

I haven't played the expansion but after having it explained to me I can say I'm glad I couldn't care less about the plot and won't have to experience XIV's Poochie.

 

[Übertroon]

I would have preferred it if the void storyline was relegated to patch 6.1 to 6.3.
Let it be a teaser for possible future expansions, the 6.3 trial being a fight against void corrupted Azdaja.
Golbez and the four archfiends remain alive as future antagonists for if the void gets a proper expansion.
Mercidia and the conflict there also gets teased through info from the first brood.
Zero has a small arch going from nearly complete voidsent to regaining some of her humanity. Three patches should make the place quicker and we'll get less fedora tipping.

6.4 to 6.55 is the Tural teaser as claimants have come to Eorzea to seek champions.
I would very much like to have had Wuk Lamat to not be furry bait, but the least they could have done is get a proper female voice actress.
Anyway you get introduced to Wuk Lamat through Erenville who knows her beforehand.
The Warrior of Light gets roped into the succession affair when there's an assassinations attempt on Lamat.
Then later another claimant in the same vein as Bakool Ja Ja, perhaps another Mamool or one of the giants kidnap her and you fight the claimant and a small army as his retinue, to save her.

The Warrior of Light then agrees to help Wuk as she promises an adventure in Tural and that there's plenty more fierce opposition to the throne.

 

[RIPRhongoBongo]

Living Memory had SO MUCH going for it, but like everything else in Dawntrail, it just gets left in the dust

 

[Dopey Cunt]

Living Memory had SO MUCH going for it, but like everything else in Dawntrail, it just gets left in the dust

It was my fave zone even though the actual msq in it is basically just character arcs reaching their last minute conclusions. The side quests there are rather interesting though. It was bittersweet watching all the whimzy get sucked away in our wake. Gives you the feeling of waking up to a bitter reality.

Also side note, the MSQ tells you that you can't restore living memory after shutting off the terminals but you can revert it back by activating NG+ for shadowbringers. Happens instantly and you can set it back whenever you want. Useful for taking screenshots or if you want to explore the zone more in depth but didn't get a change to.

 

[Dave.]

It was my fave zone even though the actual msq in it is basically just character arcs reaching their last minute conclusions. The side quests there are rather interesting though. It was bittersweet watching all the whimzy get sucked away in our wake. Gives you the feeling of waking up to a bitter reality.

Also side note, the MSQ tells you that you can't restore living memory after shutting off the terminals but you can revert it back by activating NG+ for shadowbringers. Happens instantly and you can set it back whenever you want. Useful for taking screenshots or if you want to explore the zone more in depth but didn't get a change to.

I found that to be a really odd choice at the end of the zone to have it just be this boring, sludge looking zone that looks utterly fucking miserable to explore. I'm not saying it needs to return to what it was after the story was complete, but can you at least add some overgrowth or some foliage to it given that we already have a blue skyline cascading it now that the dome's gone?

 

[Dopey Cunt]

I found that to be a really odd choice at the end of the zone to have it just be this boring, sludge looking zone that looks utterly fucking miserable to explore. I'm not saying it needs to return to what it was after the story was complete, but can you at least add some overgrowth or some foliage to it given that we already have a blue skyline cascading it now that the dome's gone?

iirc, the trees remain as well as the flowers and foliage in the aero garden. I think it's because the plants were the only things that weren't fabricated. Water remains too but it looks dull because what gave it the pop out color was from the floor below it.

I can only guess that the point of making the zone look like that afterwards is to show what an empty wasteland it's become and what it really it beneath all the programming and simulations. The music also becomes very muted and echoed. Although you'd think it's a bad thing that now all this electrope is just sitting around waiting to be plundered.

 

[ChromaQuack]

I found that to be a really odd choice at the end of the zone to have it just be this boring, sludge looking zone that looks utterly fucking miserable to explore. I'm not saying it needs to return to what it was after the story was complete, but can you at least add some overgrowth or some foliage to it given that we already have a blue skyline cascading it now that the dome's gone?

Optimistic, but maybe that's what the 7.1+ patches will bring? either via MSQ or restoration, at least I would hope.

 

[Iselda]

I found that to be a really odd choice at the end of the zone to have it just be this boring, sludge looking zone that looks utterly fucking miserable to explore. I'm not saying it needs to return to what it was after the story was complete, but can you at least add some overgrowth or some foliage to it given that we already have a blue skyline cascading it now that the dome's gone?

This left me flabbergasted as well. Like, at the very least, there's still the obligatory shared fate grind to do out there out there, plus any quests they decide to use it for in the future. It appears that miner and botanist can't find any nodes here thankfully.
The more generic "zone" type stuff there is to do here, the more we will have to endure this grey blob of a zone.

Edit: there ARE fishing nodes out here however, and it's possible my level 93 miner / botanist just can't detect the nodes that are out here.

 

[Drifting Panzer]

I've been playing around with pictomancer and have one question: why wasn't Fire in Red and Blizzard in Cyan one button?
They do the same thing (minor difference in potency and cast time), use the same buffs to rotate (aetherhues I and II) and they cant be used at the same time as they switch with Subtractive Palette. Unless that changes between 90 and 100 there is no reason I see why Subtractive Palette cant just change red with cyan, green with yellow and blue with magenta for the 3 uses, and the same for the AoE version.

Now, picto doesnt have an overflowing amount of buttons to keep track of so its no big issue, just seem weird to me when they have crammed as many different uses as possible in very few button on Viper.

 

[Dopey Cunt]

I've been playing around with pictomancer and have one question: why wasn't Fire in Red and Blizzard in Cyan one button?
They do the same thing (minor difference in potency and cast time), use the same buffs to rotate (aetherhues I and II) and they cant be used at the same time as they switch with Subtractive Palette. Unless that changes between 90 and 100 there is no reason I see why Subtractive Palette cant just change red with cyan, green with yellow and blue with magenta for the 3 uses, and the same for the AoE version.

Now, picto doesnt have an overflowing amount of buttons to keep track of so its no big issue, just seem weird to me when they have crammed as many different uses as possible in very few button on Viper.

I have picto at max level.
My only guess as to why they have it a seperate button is because I imagine they didn't want to make 1 singular button do literally everything. People complained about tapping the same button over and over again. I'm speculating that they just wanted you to feel like you were pressing a lot of buttons instead of just mindlessly tapping on 1 key/button.

 

[ChromaQuack]

and it's possible my level 93 miner / botanist just can't detect the nodes that are out here.

It's precisely that, there's also an alexandria folklore tome.

I gotta say I wasn't expecting broccoli to the final boss of gathering.

 

[Bankingway]

Kate's just a localizer, and part of why I say she's a larger issue is because I noticed that the dialogue in DT is very casual and basic. The 'George RR Martin' English (eg, "needs must", "pray return"), helped offer an otherworldlyness but also required some actual knowledge of the fucking language.

This. I got autistic about it a few pages back, the EN script of DT is so casual it's like they didn't give a fuck, or at best it feels like playing a different game. The JP dialogue is a different story in terms of being more to-the-point and localizers have flubbed shit in the past, but XIV's identity in English and the other languages is fancy vernacular. I'm almost surprised I haven't seen more complaints on this, but then again there's a massive batch of shiteaters that can't fathom criticizing something they care about.

If I had to put this phoned-in dialogue on anything it'd be KojiFox stepping away to work on other CBU3 projects, since he's historically been the one in charge of 14's olde English localizations. FF16 had the same exact vernacular and he was in charge of that game's EN script.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

you know, I've been playing this game since the last 6 months or so of 1.x, and in all that time, I've never truly disliked an expansion MSQ, until now. FFXIV has always been a bit corny on average, but this is the first time the writing has failed so fucking miserably to grasp its typical political and existential themes. I know it's just a gay anime catgirl ERP simulator, but it really started to get under my skin towards the end. I really wanted to kick Wuk Lamat into an active volcano. she's easily the worst story NPC in the history of the game, and having her as the main character for an entire expansion was absolutely brutal. an unconscionable amount of sperg follows.

Spoiler: abandon all hope, ye who enter

first, we have the political narrative. as I mused in my previous spergwall, the theme the game beats you over the head with endlessly is this: that all conflict between both individuals and groups of people are ultimately caused by ignorance and misunderstanding, and thus, that all conflicts are easily resolved by just finding common ground and talking it over. not only is this underscored in every single "trial" Wuk Lamat encounters in the Rite of Succession, it's the pivoting point of every conflict between the protagonists and antagonists. the defining quality that separates the villains is either their refusal to understand others (Bakool Ja Ja, Zoraal Ja) or their refusal to be understood (Zoraal Ja, Sphene), causing unnecessary conflict that could be foregone entirely but for their selfish intractability. but the story's core philosophy is captured best in the so-called Feat of Repast.

in this scenario, we have a struggle between two groups of people over resources. the first group, the uplanders, enjoy fertile soil and easy living. the second, the lowlanders, are stuck in a densely forested valley where barely any sunlight seeps through, and the soil is poisoned by ancient meteorites which have long since become an inseparable part of the landscape. the lowlanders can barely grow enough food to survive, and covet the sunlight and fertile soil of the uplands. so, for generations, the lowlanders have tried to take the uplands by force, but have succeeded only in creating a blasted borderland where nothing grows. that is, until the Culture Respecter - Gulool Ja Ja - interrupts their conflict by kicking both their asses at once, and then while he has their ear, he drops a mother fucking truth bomb: "Ignorance begets strife. Understanding begets fellowship." the two warring tribes make camp together and, despite initial reluctance, the ice is finally broken by the smell of each other's food. this starts a discussion which ends in them combining their two traditional meals, resulting in a new dish that's so delicious they party for three whole days doing nothing but cooking and eating as much of it as they can. the generations of struggle and slaughter are forgotten overnight and the two tribes never fight again. of course, upon learning this, Wuk Lamat & co. manage to recreate the dish flawlessly, due to infusing it with the deep cultural understanding they gained from taking the ten cent tour (this entire revelation was conveyed in a single letter just moments before) while their competition fail due to their lack thereof. well, they also missed a core ingredient, but that was actually because they didn't do the culture understanding thing. later, Wuk Lamat goes on to solve the lowlanders' resource issue anyway due to one of her entourage helpfully identifying the issue with the soil after a hot five minutes of investigation and deduction. she promises to bring some more plants they can grow, causing them to nearly fall at her feet in gratitude and recognize her as their ruler despite being violently opposed to outside authority five minutes earlier.

the amount of wishful Reddit thinking in this one single story is mind-blowing. generational conflicts for the resources needed for survival are ended in an instant by args and tacos. being respectful and understanding of somebody's culture is such a powerfully primary virtue, it completely outweighs other factors like intelligence and general capability. and it's not simply a matter of combining strengths, either: during Wuk Lamat's final duel with Bakool Ja Ja - a foe who instantly overwhelmed her physically at the beginning of her journey - she literally summons the strength to defeat him from all the cultures she's respected along the way. I'm still recovering the brain cells I lost from that shit.

second, we have the existential narrative. in this part of the story, we are presented with technology that can not only preserve the soul itself, but also the memories attached to it, allowing the dead to be perfectly preserved and recreated separately from their mortal bodies. however, the energy required to maintain this is unsustainable. whatever nuance might have been had from this premise - should we be more selectful of who to preserve? should some of the already preserved be purged from the machines? how do we choose who lives and who dies? - is instantly handwaved by the assertion that any kind of preservation beyond natural death is an unnatural abomination. "We live, and then we're meant to die," proclaims Wuk Lamat, before proceeding to blather some asinine cope about how people never truly die if you remember them. we're shown miracles of deathlessness: missed connections in life being given the chance to unite as lovers in their afterlife; those who died as children being given a second chance to grow; the preservation of history as a real and physical experience along with the memories of those who experienced it, undiminished by time and retelling. and yet we're told this is ultimately a bad thing. people who are living a paradisiacal existence, a true and objectively real afterlife free of want or loss, gush about their happiness from one side of their mouth, and then, unprompted, conveniently claim to be at peace with dying from the other. "Don't feel bad for us; we're only simulacra created from the memories of the living, not real people," smirks Cahciua. HOW? if there is any real substantial difference between the living and the Endless other than flesh, it's never revealed; we're simply expected to take this at face value. despite permanently destroying the Heaven their entire society has labored to build, the actions of the protagonists are never met with anything other than obliviousness, relief, or calm resignation from its denizens. even the few restless shades who are left behind to serve as side quest NPCs have no objection to being destroyed forever aside from the one last anodyne impulse that's keeping them from dispersing with the rest. only Sphene objects, but we're told that she is merely a revenant yearning to be relieved of her eternal burden, so we shouldn't feel bad about killing her either. Wuk Lamat's stupid take is treated as so stunningly profound that reality itself bends to agree with her.

this is only a small selection of the worst issues with the narrative, but this spergwall has already gotten unreadably long, so I'm stopping it here.

tl;dr: Dawntrail is not just the worst MSQ to date, it's bad in ways the story hasn't been previously. for the first time, I'm glad we've got a four month break before we get another serving of this dog shit.

the content, on the other hand, kicks ass so far. love the level 100 non-MSQ dungeons.

 

[Iselda]

the content, on the other hand, kicks ass so far. love the level 100 non-MSQ dungeons.

This is the actual first time reactions, of me (the tank), my friend (the healer), and two duty finder dps randos during the final boss cutscene for Tender Valley when we saw the symbol on the final bosses altar.
The near simultaneous text entry and symmetry in our statements after saying nothing for the rest of the dungeon was some MMO magic you just don't see very much anymore.

 

[Well Intentioned]

This. I got autistic about it a few pages back, the EN script of DT is so casual it's like they didn't give a fuck, or at best it feels like playing a different game. The JP dialogue is a different story in terms of being more to-the-point and localizers have flubbed shit in the past, but XIV's identity in English and the other languages is fancy vernacular. I'm almost surprised I haven't seen more complaints on this, but then again there's a massive batch of shiteaters that can't fathom criticizing something they care about.

If I had to put this phoned-in dialogue on anything it'd be KojiFox stepping away to work on other CBU3 projects, since he's historically been the one in charge of 14's olde English localizations. FF16 had the same exact vernacular and he was in charge of that game's EN script.

Yeah, I'm not saying that the vernacular needs to be the same, but there's no real consideration or attempt to do anything distinct. It just sounds like Fox Kids Anime, which is not particularly great.

Even when you compare it to Stormblood (and I mean, there's very obvious reasons why the Japanese/Asia themed expansion got a ton of TLC) it's a huge difference that jumps out.

 

[Dave.]

tl;dr: Dawntrail is not just the worst MSQ to date, it's bad in ways the story hasn't been previously. for the first time, I'm glad we've got a four month break before we get another serving of this dog shit.

the content, on the other hand, kicks ass so far. love the level 100 non-MSQ dungeons.

Spoiler: In Defense Of The Ending

I'm not going to argue that the last part is going to win any awards for everyone because the writing was a little sketchy for me, I do want to defend Cahciua's assessment and the seeming indifference towards powering off the denizens of the "heaven". The endless, technically, are not people. They're essentially mannequins and/or phantoms that were fed programming and memories (there's a bit of unreliability to this as well given that the soul extraction wasn't invented until after the apocalypse of Alexandria) with the big key existential conflict being that they need a shit ton of aether and soul energy to power. There are endless who are aware of this and have kind of an understanding that their existence is still finite because Sphene announces that aether extraction is imminent and, if I had to speculate, they kind of just accept that push back is inevitable and don't want to essentially be the equivalent to voidsent except as virtual mockeries of their past selves. Not to mention, if I'm to take Sphene at her word, that acceptance of termination might've also been apart of their programming as well if I were to read her between the lines about wanting to be stopped or wanting to be powered down.

This also would play in the fact that the endless are technically not people. If their programming restricts them from rebelling against people who want to end them, then they're not thinking sapiently, they're just operating on code that tells them what to do. The children also don't grow as far as I can tell and the couples that find themselves and love each other again are just doing it because that's what their memories are programmed to act. Again, this could also be unreliable and speculative given that Alexandria didn't have this memory soul extraction technology back in the day. Here's the big thing though, their existence is predicated on aether and soul energy. They essentially need to commit genocide against innocent people to exist. They need to die because if they don't, billions could potentially be murdered just so mockeries of past selves can go on. A place where children don't grow up. A place where everyone stays the same as they ever were and never evolve.

But that's just my interpretation on the matter. I'm still not sold on the concept and I find it a little odd that Sphene didn't at any point try to stop us or that anyone tried to rebel. I can only speculate that it's programming.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

snip

Spoiler: dongtrail ending spoilers

that could be a good direction to take the story - that the Endless themselves are being edited in order to create their utopia - but such a thing is never stated. it comes as a shock to the characters that Sphene herself has been edited, as it's previously implied that everyone's memories are being stored and recreated faithfully; but it's also more or less stated that Sphene is the only Endless this has been done to, specifically by Preservation in order to create an eternal sysadmin, since she was patient zero and the beginning of the Endless. Sphene herself often states that her duty is protection of all Alexandrian citizens as individuals in both life and afterlife, and that any unsavory measures she might take to alter the situation in any way - such as killing non-Alexandrians to steal their aether - is prevented by her mostly unaltered nature. so I don't believe it was originally intended for normal citizens to be altered, or that that has changed in the time since the Endless came to be.

furthermore, the story specifically constructs people as vessel + soul + memories. however, the vessel does not seem to make any difference other than giving the soul physical agency. outside of dongtrail, this is seen in the Ascians, who are purely spiritual beings that possess flesh at will, and reform instantly if physically slain; Zenos, who manages to possess a completely different body before removing Elidibus from his corpse and reclaiming it; and the denizens of the Void, who don't possess true bodies, but reform as some kind of physical manifestation of their soul aether and memories. so if the Alexandrians have managed to perfectly isolate and preserve both the soul aether and memories of an individual, where's the part that says these preserved dead are any different from Zero, for instance? this gets more retarded the more you think about it. let's be even more autistic and consider some basic properties of aether:

all living beings possess aether. assuming there are no disruptions in the natural process, when a living being dies, its aether returns to the aetherial sea, which is essentially a standing pool of all the world's aether that is not currently in use. this continues endlessly in a cycle, with any memories a person accrues while living being dispersed as part of their aether rejoining with the sea. this can be altered in various ways; individual souls can be preserved against the cycle (in the case of the Ascians or WoL, due to bespoke enchantments), or the entire cycle can be halted (in the case of the Void, whose mass aspecting towards dark has caused universal stagnation). but aether can never be created or destroyed, only coalesced or dispersed, aspected or de-aspected. all transmissions and transmutations of aether are zero-sum.

this begs the question: why is there any shortage of aether in Alexandria at all? if the Endless system is running purely on raw aether, which cannot be destroyed, where is the expended aether going? presumably amounts of it are being generally dispersed into the environment; for example, to generate light and heat. in the Source, that would presumably rejoin the reservoir as normal. however, the reflection Alexandria exists in has been subjected to an incomplete cataclysm, meaning everything outside of their dome is presumably volatile, free aether, although lightning-aspected. conveniently, their entire civilization is built on a miracle material - electrope - which can absorb lightning-aspected aether and losslessly reaspect it at will. furthermore, it's stated that almost everyone in their reflection was killed by the cataclysm, meaning the vast majority of the aether that comprises their reflection is free and available for absorption and conversion via electrope. are we to understand that the Endless are so numerous that the sum of their aether has exceeded the amount available in Alexandria's native shard? how? wouldn't births just cease at some point, since there's no more aether to animate them? if they're taking aether from other shards through dimensional translocation, wouldn't any souls created from foreign aether just circulate losslessly through their system? it's all terribly contrived.

furthermore, how does the soul cell system even work? if the devices they wear on their heads can trap soul aether, why would they not simply capture and re-introduce the same soul to the source body before it disperses? this capture process is how soul cells are created in the first place, so what necessitates the constant replacement of souls when somebody takes a fatal injury? how does the soul infusion process even heal fatal wounds? if the natural breakdown of the body cannot be reversed, why does popping in a fresh soul work at all if somebody's had their organs pulped? are there limits to this technology or not?

Spoiler: additional sperg

some additional plot holes:

1. where the fuck did Gulool Ja come from? it's explicitly stated that Zoraal Ja is the only Mamool Ja in Alexandria. additionally, 30 years have passed inside the dome, and Gulool Ja is quite obviously younger than that, so he had to have been born inside the dome. did he just pop out of Zoraal Ja's ass or something? I'm going to hazard a guess that Mamool Ja can't reproduce with mammals since it's stated they hatch from eggs. if some kind of cloning project took place, it's never discussed, nor is it ever implied that Alexandria has that kind of technology.
2. on that note, where the fuck did Zoraal Ja come from? the existence of his mother is never once acknowledged in the entirety of the narrative.
3. during the quest where the Scions are visiting the boy that's been paralyzed by levin poisoning: did the writers completely forget the subplot in Shadowbringers where Alisaie finds a way to reverse aether imbalance? it's no small arc - it sprawls through most of the patch MSQ, involves a number of recurring NPCs, a solo trial, and even culminates in a dungeon (Matoya's Relict). and yet she has no comment on this situation. bizarre.

 

[Iselda]

Continuing on from my previous post, here’s the writeup for the introductory stuff in the 7.0 MSQ. Compared to my previous post, this one has less commentary and is mostly story recap to lay the groundwork necessary to understand the absolute mess we’re about to get ourselves into. It’s also a long one due to it being our starting point where most characters and basic things about Tural are introduced.

Boat Rides, A New City, & The Rite of Succession (Level 90 Quests):
We gather up Alisaie, Alphinaud, Tiger Princess, Diversity Rabbit, and Krile as we board the next ship for Tural. The opening cutscenes play out on this boat, and they do a good job showing off the new character models. A storm kicks up around our ship, but this doesn’t phase our WoL. The twins get knocked around, but they’re fine. In fact, the only thing of note here is the start of a VERY overplayed gag where Wuk Lamat can’t take ANY form of travel without feeling sick. They will repeat this “gag” at least once per zone. A few pretty panning shots of the city later, and we finally arrive at our newest capital city Tuliyollal.

Let's pause for a sec. There is a running theme this expansion with names that are hard for English speakers to pronounce, and almost certainly impossible for the Japanese to pronounce given how much they love the sequential letters and uncommon sounds like “L”, “R”, “I”, “el”, “cha”, “qo”, among others. Due to this it is almost impossible to remember the actual name of anything found within the first 4 zones. I never thought my chronic addiction to nicknaming people, places, and things in both real life and on the internet would ever come in handy, but life is full of surprises.

This makes discussion about this expansion very difficult in voice or live text chat, as nobody can remember the proper names for anything without looking them up and phonetically sounding them out. While far from the expansion's biggest problem, the simple fact of the matter is that specific aspects of the region that may stand out are simply not going to be discussed as much when nobody can remember the names of anything. Every single group I’ve spoken with that plays this game has a different nickname for almost everything associated with the first 4 zones.

In fact, the only good thing to come out of this naming convention is the new “Crystalline Mean” style subzone in the capital called “Wachumeqimeqi” (What You Makey Makey). The pun is so bad that it loops all the way back around to hilarious and makes me crack up every time I open my map.

Back to the story. We arrive in the new city, and immediately begin the now obligatory capital tour quest. Returning from Endwalker, this tour is a good example of our first common style of quest for this expansion. The groan-worthy “This NPC is now accompanying you” style of quest. While they do manage one or two fun instances of this quest type (like in zone 4), it just boils down to “go to point x and talk to a dood, but there is optional dialogue on the way sometimes”.

During this tour, Krile and Wuk Lamat follow us to an area close-ish to all the baby aetherytes, while we are given a crash course on Tural's history, culture, current status as a nation, and get a general feel for how things operate over here. Our tour ends at 8 pillars with each housing a plaque that depicts the adventures of the current Dawnservant for the last 80 years. The 8th pillar is blank however, and will obviously be used to record the outcome of the first Dawnservant contest.

Speaking of said contest, after our tour we are instructed to head up to the palace to meet the current Dawnservant, and Wuk Lamat’s adoptive papa lizard, Gulool Ja Ja.

Time to take a meta-commentary pit stop again. If you thought Wuk Lamat’s voice acting was bad... just wait till you hear her papa. He has absolutely NO CLUE what he is doing. This is, by far, the worst voice actor in the entire history of this video game. Hell, I’d go so far as to say he’s the worst voice actor I’ve heard in the last decade for ANYTHING... It’s a shame, because while his writing has issues, he had the potential to be one of the more salvageable moments of fun in the story, but his voice acting completely ruined it. Anyway, I already noted the terrible voice acting in my previous post, but this guy... this guy is a level of bad that I didn’t think possible, and it deserved a special call-out.

We enter the throne room, and encounter the Two-Headed lizard king throwing down with everyone’s favorite autistic dragoon Estinien. No, we don’t know what Estinien is doing here, and we don’t know HOW he got here, but he’s here now. The two decide to call their sparring match a draw, and Estinien waddles off to do Estinien things off camera for the entire expansion. He will have like 3 more brief appearances, but is completely irrelevant to the MSQ. While papa lizard is a jovial and fun character, his voice “acting” overshadowed any positive aspects of his character.

The next several cutscenes involve introductions to papa lizard, the other candidates for Dawnservant, and establishing the rules for the rite of succession. For the sake of readability I’m going to treat this batch of cutscenes as a single giant blob and just list out the important bits in bulleted lists.

First off, the candidates.

Zoraal Ja (The First Promise / The Arbiter):

• He is the single-headed son of the current Dawnservant, and his only biological child.
• It was previously thought that two-headed Mamool Ja were infertile and couldn’t have children, so his mere existence has given him monikers such as “The Miracle”.
• He has an expansionist vision for Tural that he wants to enact through military conquest.
• He is a lizard of few words, and glaring menacingly is his love language... in fact it’s his only language.
• He has a massive inferiority complex due to his dad being a larger-than-life legendary hero of the region. His only goal in life is to one-up his father in everything from strength to nation building.
• In his youth, he probably dressed up as The Arbiter from Halo 2 for Halloween/All Saints Wake.

Koana (The Second Promise / Specs):

• He is the first adoptive child of the current Dawnservant,
• He is a Miqo’te boy with teal hair and purple sun-cat eyes.
• Loves “muh science and technology from abroad”.
• Secretly has a protective big-brother instinct for his sister Wuk Lamat
• Won’t learn how to act like a normal person until around level 94.

Wuk-Lamat (The Third Promise / Tiger Princess):

• She is the second adopted child of the current Dawnservant.
• She is the first female member of the furry-bait Hrothgar race that we have ever met.
• Is so dumb that she could not pass an eye exam.
• A naive and sheltered kid, who doesn’t understand a single group of her own people.
• I have given her the nickname “Tiger Princess” because my Miqo’te girl in-game has had a lion-style tail since before Shadowbringers, and by the end of this story I didn’t want any part of my character associated with this cat-failure. Therefore, I’ve revoked her lion race privileges.

Bakool Ja Ja (BJJ / Ba-Cool Ja Ja):

• The only claimant not related to the current Dawnservant by blood or adoption.
• A two-headed Mamool Ja from a village deep in the forest.
• I honestly forget why he was even given the right to participate in the contest.
• Introduced as a thug.
• Steps on your tacos.
• Has no plans or vision for Tural’s future.
• Has an all consuming desire to prove he’s da bestest because he has two heads.
• Will give the viewer the most abrupt case of characterization whiplash they’ve ever experienced around level 95.
• Is the most fun of the candidates.
• A total lizard-failure.
• Bakool Ja Ja 2024. Two heads are better than one!

Next let's break down the rules of the contest they’re going to use to decide the next dawnservant.

The Rite of Succession:

• The right will consist of 7 unique challenges given to the claimants by electors appointed in 6 different towns throughout Tural.
• The claimants will be provided with 7 different tablets mirroring the scenes found on the pillar-plaques we saw earlier. There is an empty gemstone socket on each tablet.
• The claimants will be rewarded with a gemstone for one of their tablets when they complete an electors challenge.
• There are no rules saying one can’t steal a tablet or gemstone from another claimant (this is unclear at first).
• After a claimant completes all 7 challenges and sockets their tablets with the awarded gemstones, they must then locate the entrance to the fabled City of Gold and use the tablets to reach the front door.
• An elector may disqualify any claimant from the entire contest should they attempt to take the gemstone by any means other than the challenge given by the elector.
• Gulool Ja Ja reserves the right to void any claimant’s victory after the contest is concluded if he deems them to be unfit to rule for any reason. (This rule isn’t clarified until much later, but it’s worth remembering now)

Whew, that took awhile to type, but now that the structure is layed out it gives us the groundwork for going over this mess. This ain’t a great setup, but on paper it’s... workable. While the claimants each have their own problems in terms of presentation, the real problems will become VERY clear once we finally get this contest underway and see just what these “challenges” entail. We’ll be jumping right into that in the next post, starting with the start-of-expansion obligatory zone selection between the Alpaca Jews and the Not-Vanu-Vanu.

Have a great day all.

 

[Nicanor]

I've been playing around with pictomancer and have one question: why wasn't Fire in Red and Blizzard in Cyan one button?
They do the same thing (minor difference in potency and cast time), use the same buffs to rotate (aetherhues I and II) and they cant be used at the same time as they switch with Subtractive Palette. Unless that changes between 90 and 100 there is no reason I see why Subtractive Palette cant just change red with cyan, green with yellow and blue with magenta for the 3 uses, and the same for the AoE version.

Now, picto doesnt have an overflowing amount of buttons to keep track of so its no big issue, just seem weird to me when they have crammed as many different uses as possible in very few button on Viper.

Is there a reason they couldn’t condense the first and second step in the painting process? I only just started messing with it but for example why do we need “paint a hammer button” then “make hammer usable button” then “use hammer button?”