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maybevillage · 2 months ago

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my thoughts on dawntrail

it's been hard for me to organise my thoughts on dawntrail bc of how annoyed it made me so i'm just going to get into it in my usual disorganised way. i apologise from now for how long this is. spoilers for dawntrail and the dawntrail normal raids. and also the br'aaxskin maps slightly?

dawntrail really was a final nail in the coffin for me. i have no expectations for the story in this game to be good right now and am almost frightened by what they might have in store for the incoming alliance raids and post-expansion. i still like ffxiv and intend to subscribe to it despite knowing from before i got back into it that yoshi-p doesn't believe black people belong in fantasy stories. does it have to be so hard to enjoy (?) an mmo? is that an oxymoron? "enjoy ffxiv"? i don't know. this shit is everywhere. so here we are.

i'm going to criticise dt but i will also go a bit further and indulge in a little embarrassing (for me anyways) behaviour where i come up with some things i would've preferred the expansion had done instead. i find this embarrassing bc i don't consider myself a particularly competent writer, and it's not like i think i have any unique ideas where dt is concerned, it's more that it set up many things that could've been really interesting to me had they bothered to use them instead of writing them totally out of the story. i had really been looking forward to the second half of dt complicating and concluding the first half bc of how much i was enjoying it, so trying to expand the ideas they dashed to the side is also out of necessity for me. to pretend my fanfiction version of dawntrail's second half is canon so that i can continue to enjoy my time with this game and my life.

admittedly i can see why automatically assuming bad writing decisions = the writers are acting in bad faith might be strange. so i thought about that for a bit. to be clear, i don't automatically have an issue with "bad" writing generally nor do i assume ffxiv has bad intentions despite how much i criticise this game and the things i read/watch/play generally. but i also find the intentions irrelevant. stormblood has heart and all but its racist despite whatever vision they had for it. i don't think intention unmakes something as racist. and the second half of dawntrail has these same writing issues that i think stem from racist views, so i'm just not interested in what the intentions were. i can be totally fine with things not being "competently" written bc i don't really believe that sort of thing is objective anyways. but this is not that. i don't think arr is perfect. i think hvw and shb have a lot of flaws and i don't think anything needs to be perfect or appeal to my personal tastes at all times; i just think it needs to tell a story. and that story needs to at least be conscious of how it's informed by racism if it's not going to challenge it when it uses it in its story. but instead of that, we get sympathetic colonialism and awkward and lackluster attempts at being bigger and better in ways that don't matter and "content" and appealing to the audience in lieu of just trying to write something interesting and complicated. that being said, let me just get into it.....

i had the luxury of knowing very little going into dawntrail except for one or two of the jungle-y tourist-attraction "come to tural!" videos about it (and i found those videos strange for reasons i will get into) and this tweet talking about how apparently the writers got... experts to help w the writing of another culture or something i don't remember exactly but basically they were going to put a lot more thought into properly representing other cultures in a respectful way. i had no idea what cultures these were going to be so i was very curious. i have my own thoughts on "diversity training" but okay....... cool....

pre-dawntrail was actually a genuinely refreshing surprise. post-ew was regrettably not very compelling to me bc of how out of left-field it felt. i'm not a fan of references of the other games when they smother the ffxiv story to include these references, and the story i found kind of typical, y'know story beats like death and betrayal that play out kind of typically/bank on our familiarity with these common emotional notes, which is not terrible but i didn't feel connected with much of what was going on bc the world-building was moving very fast, and so on, and felt disconnected from a lot of what we were engaged with previously. i realise these are just recurring problems with ffxiv now. but at the time i was happy to be free of that. erenville coming back to sharlayan with wuk lamat was cool, she's really fun. and i loved that really beautiful solo duty on the isle of haam. i think that + the first half of dawntrail is one of my fav parts of the entire game bc it was just fun. going on a fairly straightforward adventure was a nice change from endwalker kind of tripping over itself in its efforts to be complicated that felt more convoluted than anything. i liked that dt was an adventure devoted to (what i thought would be) something smaller in scale, like how hvw is mostly focused on ishgard, rather than once again coming to the rescue on behalf of the entire universe. like the universe does not always need to be in trouble for something to be fun and interesting. i was hoping something as grand and final as endwalker would've had that covered.

so yeah i liked dawntrail a lot at the start. i felt it knew when to be silly and light-hearted bc it wasn't being silly with stakes that were unbelievably high, and i liked the idea of a wacky and frantic adventure on this completely new side of the map. i really liked wuk lamat shaking with nerves after fighting that large bird on the isle of haam. not the most unique character-thing ever but it doesn't have to be unique to be interesting or well-executed is how i feel about cliches/tropes in general. also bc this is the beginning of the story. i think it's fine to utilise quick and easily understandable tropes to set things up--not to use as the only development a character will ever get. and i liked that g'raha was taking on a sort of wiser role where wuk lamat was concerned as well bc it makes sense to me for him to act like he's a billion years old, even where wol is concerned too. i really enjoyed that early moment on the bridge in sharlayan where g'raha reassures wol to just be true to who they are when they were unsure about accompanying wuk lamat on the rite of succession. maybe being yourself is not my exact choice of advice regarding getting directly involved in a foreign country’s affairs but i thought maybe we were going to explore wol having more interpersonal problems/actually growing as a character/experiencing a little introspection, so i appreciated the direction.

but i was clearly being very premature about my expectations for this expansion because most of these little early things that interested me in the first half went absolutely nowhere. g'raha is a good example. i liked the initial group a lot: erenville being a bit standoffish but not unpleasant or unreasonable, wuk lamat being overly optimistic and naive; and g'raha seemed like a good addition to complement what i thought would be a focus on krile, him being one of the chars who's known her for years + their camaraderie as students of baldesion. we spend time with this specific group. and then for some reason, after giving me this expectation... we just don't bring him along. despite the allure of tural being adventure, and g'raha ignoring the gravity of being on omicron back in ew while the world back home is dying to suddenly remind wol how much he wants to go on adventures with them....... you leave him behind to bring the twins. alisaie is one of my ultimate favourite characters in this game and i was still annoyed by this decision. i'm not a g'raha stan. i don't need any character to be anywhere as long as the reasons they are/aren't are compelling. his reasons for coming i found compelling, so i was disappointed because the game had set up something i found interesting and then just takes it nowhere, so that i feel its absence throughout the whole thing. the twins reasons for coming i did not find compelling. even weirder was how they provided about absolutely nothing to the story???? this is something i realise the entire expansion does: makes me expect something, doesn't deliver it, and instead replaces it with something half-assed that it tries to convince me is important with lazy emotional notes. i was genuinely annoyed with the reasoning for the twins being to learn about engaging with other cultures in order to hone their approach to treating with garlemald. it just felt so uninspired, like they couldn't come up with anything else. and garlemald was obviously an afterthought--only an occasional comment after a quest on how they were indeed listening and learning. and i find the very firm “we are engaging with foreigners” mindset, like the conception of anything that isn't fantasy europe as foreign first and foremost before anything else, outdated. yes going to tural is going to teach me about the virtues in life that are diversity and tolerance bc that's really what other cultures are worth to me yes i'm engaging with a human-shaped lesson and not a person. let's call that lesson lamaty'i.

i mean i suppose i shouldn't be surprised about this "foreigners" lens tural has over it. yoshi-p has said that he is reluctant to add non-white characters to things bc he doesn't want their non-whiteness (if it isn't white, it's "ethnic"!) to give players preconceptions that will influence how they're read as characters. he simply wants them to be treated as the people they are on the inside without these apparently monolithic preconceptions not being white would impress upon them. so just an extremely transparent self-report on his part, but i'm the fool bc i still play this game. so now i get to see the twins fully settled into their role of diplomats which i didn't like in ew either. perfect! they didn't feel hastily tacked on at all and had a lot of interesting things to add to the scenes, especially when they were constantly being left behind in the quests and duties bc the game couldn't bother give the entire group things to do together or things to say. it's so hard to come up with things for our characters to do when we can't just kill them off to provide some vague lesson for someone else (rip papalymo) so let's keep constantly splitting the group up for these tasks. and then by the end, everyone will really feel like their relationships with each other have developed. perfect. i was really feeling the twins' open-minded vibes.

you might not believe me but even this wasn't the end of the world for me… early on i was disappointed but through the gift of my blissful ignorance as to what was in store for me i was still very much enjoying myself…!

bc tural is so awesome. i think the parts that take place in tural on tural's terms about tural are easily the best parts of the expansion. while i don't find competitions personally interesting, i think it was a good storytelling decision bc it gives the player a linear and in-world reason to move through and explore the new areas. what i didn't like in particular was the framing of these new areas as vacation spots, like with the promotional videos. the safari outfit bro was wearing felt outdated to me, and tourism is neo-colonialistic. framing tural as what it can offer to an outsider recreationally is something i think we need to move past already. i also did not appreciate the research we did in sharlayan about ketenramm or his character at all. why are we reading the most typical whitewashed versions of colonial history in this game. why are we calling characters inspired by colonialists “explorers” who "discovered" native lands. at one point i think the game even uses the phrase “the new world” which is crazy to me. surely it's not that much of an ask to not pretend like genocides were some peaceful cultural exchange of crops. it's obviously based on irl like potatoes did come from south america, so surely they could have framed the history of this fictional south america/native american region in some other way. there's a world of fantasy out there. does the way we view the global south always have to be through a colonialist's lens? am i asking a lot?

but okay tural is still awesome so hahaha lets keep moving on. i actually love it there. and you might know this by now but i love erenville. i was so excited when i learned in the pre-dawntrail stuff he had a childhood interest in adventure. particularly discovering the golden city which is a legend i've always found interesting (although i think that's a colonial production as well iirc), and how he seemed to resent that. and i liked that this subtle resentment didn't seem to locate itself in seeing himself as a sort of unrealised adventurer, especially in the company of the ultimate adventurer that is wol, which i would have found cliche. instead he's very pragmatic and focused. is he trying to prove something? maybe to his mentor/mother? will we ever know either way i enjoy this lack of conflict, and how he actually seems very aware of how competent wol is without bringing it up in a way that adds to wol's constant glazing. and i was interested in how adamant he was about his departure from his home, like his new name, not wanting to talk about himself etc. i thought it was all so interesting. thank god they went absolutely nowhere with it by the end of the expansion. i just love when that happens.

i also really like his non-combat role. i think showing his logistical importance was fresh considering characters like tataru always get left behind on the actual adventure. maybe things don't have to be limited to fighting or ability to participate on the frontlines during war…! war in general......! maybe you just need a guy who knows how to handle the punutiy. but we go from the first to the second half of dawntrail so this particular no-more-war dream of mine is a long way away. anyways i was able to guess erenville would be the one narrating the expansion, which i think works really well as he's from tural, so exploring the new areas through the lens of someone who is actually from there i find important. he's also the group’s guide, so in a meta kind of way it’s a fun choice.

i don't think dawntrail had a terribly interesting start story-wise though. for the most part it was the characters and the locations and the actual gameplay that stood out to me, but as i said that might just be my personal lack of interest in competition plots. i feel they're a bit railroaded by the goal being the choosing of a winner at the end. so the story felt kind of flat... but i didn't mind too much. i still liked it, and when the story reaches the first two feats i liked realising that what made wuk lamat different from her more celebrated siblings was her understanding the necessity of engaging with people on their own terms, and the building of a strong community and so on. how she’d meet people along her journey who were so willing to help i found heartening, especially with them showing up across the journey as opposed to the kind of superfluous large crowd of cheers her brothers got at the start of the rite. like i was actually impressed that the story chose to focus on the importance of something so fundamental to life as knowing the people around you and working together with them in this specific way. a lot of things pretend to do this by focusing on the power of friendship etc, but don't actually talk about building community in an aware or complicated way. so this being represented by the feats relating to each location/being tangibly related to the livelihoods of the ppl in these areas was nice to see. it doesn't have to be overly complicated or unique or whatever if it's done well, which i thought this was. and i thought it was interesting bc while i do prefer how esoteric the ffxiv story is usually, i think this kind of plot can actually be complex if only people wouldn't treat it like trusting in those around you was the end of the story. it can be the lesson, it doesn't have to be the whole story. like i think if dawntrail had come at this without the laziness of a shounen manga we could've really had something. it was fairly obvious to me early on that wuk lamat learns to rely on others after the first feat alone, but rather than trying to complicate that in any way it chose instead to just keep repeating this message over and over and over again. through the characters just point blank saying it. i didn't mind too much early on because it was early on and i appreciated the message, like being told by gulool ja ja outright that the purpose of the rite was actually meant to cultivate a ruler was cool. but having finished the expansion i just get so annoyed now that the writing chose to just continually repeat itself as if it thinks the audience isn't paying even like a second of attention to the story, when it could have been doing more with the story/characters like giving zoraal ja speaking lines. what is the reason??? were they just not interested in coming up with more? i wish they would've explained wuk lamat's naivety a bit more, or given her more of a background beyond inadequacy in comparison to her brothers, so that her character development across the expansion could've been more complex? instead they always waste so much time

oh well. i need you to believe me i was still enjoying myself a lot. i loved the first dungeon so much. i love how they made it interesting with those scripted moments, like thancred blowing up the path or bakool ja ja destroying your boat. i like when the playable parts feel more connected to the narrative cut-scene stuff. i loved the upbeatness of it and that it was kind of silly. it made it feel more like an old-school adventure. and the areas are so beautiful and interesting. it's like what i like about botw where a mundane geographical feature can be filled with so much wonder. i was having so much fun.

really my only issue at the start was this flatness/repetition with the characters and the story. i think the moblin part is a good example of how it gets particularly weak. after establishing that wuk lamat is supposed to be learning about the continent and finding herself as a ruler who wants to preserve its hard won peace...they suddenly gamified that process or kind of shrank it into a step by step sort of thing. no intrigue or attempt to show and not tell at all. just help this singular potsworn and you'll recieve a "deep" understanding of earthenshire’s way of life in exchange. i think it would have been totally fine to keep wuk lamat’s learning about tural in a kind of nascent stage so as to not undermine the time required for her goals, even in a fantasy game. for eg i like how she voiced her insecurities but it feels like they speedran her getting over them. why does she need to prove she’s immensely capable of being a ruler so early in her life? isn't this expansion about receiving help from all around you in the places you aren't so good at, or even if you are good at something, you can still get help? to make life a little easier and joyful? it’s not like gulool ja ja is going to vanish from the story immediately once she takes the throne lol as if reaching the end of your narrative importance must always result in your death, right? like i would expect that kind of pretending a dead parent is an important character growth moment bullshit from fire emblem, sure. so what's the rush? what are we rushing towards? don't we have an entire expansion to flesh out and luxuriate in the beauty and richness of tural….? remember xak tural? who’s excited for xak tural? HAHAHAHGGFDGASFGHH why keep wuk lamat's development as a character so straight forward and one-note. as a result it kind of just felt like it was making these emotional or revealing moments that were fairly obvious to anyone paying attention more important than they really were, almost awkwardly so.

and then the usual nonsense.... when this game decides that rather than taking the time to come up with an interesting conflict, it instead makes the characters all act really unaware so that it can introduce a conflict that feels really cheap. even though gulool ja ja specifically tells wol to take care of his daughter; erenville specifically says to look out for bandits......we just….let wuk lamat get kidnapped. it felt like we were all being purposefully obtuse and no excuse exists for that except lazy writing. maybe a situation where bakool ja ja takes a hostage and wuk lamat relinquishes her keystones would have gone a lot farther to demonstrate her resolve and care for her people instead of just making a group featuring some of the most capable people in the universe look totally unaware for reasons i don't understand. i don't know. did the game have to bust out the typically dark-skinned and scarred "crook" character as the bandit like please are you kididng me. the only consolation was that wuk lamat questioned the conditions that would make them turn to being bandits in the first place, which genuinely surprised me, so that the woke left can finally stop complaining.

but okay fine, it's what happens so fine. maybe it was just supposed to establish the lengths bakool ja ja would go to to win? or flesh out more of koana's character? that's fine, i don't dislike that. but there were no real emotional or narrative consequences to wuk lamat losing her keystones that weren't obviously going to be solved later. not even re her already existing inadequacy--and i say that as someone who doesn't believe someone needs to be shamed for their mistakes ever, but idk.... like am i just missing out on what that part really did except shake up the rite a little.. the rite should definitely be shaken up, but the scions suddenly lacking awareness for the millionth time is so aggravating. oh well at this point i’m still enjoying myself greatly bc dawntrail is so refreshing and uplifting and spirited and fun and i have the capacity to enjoy things like koana’s legs shaking when he catches wuk lamat. i would praise dawntrail as knowing how to have fun. i can put a few weak story-telling decisions behind me, i promise.

anyways what was next. the yok huy. i thought they were so cool. i really liked hearing about them as mostly legends before actually getting to meet them, and the peace and remoteness of their home. usual disclaimer of fantasy non-white civilisations being attributed to non-humans or beast people, something i should've mentioned earlier given the presence of the mamool ja, but whatever anymore. the yok huy’s philosophy of living forever in the hearts of those who know you i really like. i think what they offer ideologically here would've been good as a foundation for when the story starts to approach the golden city, a place where, we are told, people live forever. (to be fair i think the game does try to make this connection but just sucks at it.) i was excited to learn more about the golden city, to contrast it with the yok huy's version of eternal life. also how the yok huy were originally conquerors but learned to reckon with the land and with life all around them i felt like would've served as a useful fable for zoraal ja, who was set on the path to conquest despite his unknowable reasons. genuinely just felt like he was failing to express a poorly conceived thought experiment he'd had a few times in his room after arguing with his dad. wouldn't be the first time in this game really important plot threads are poorly/barely expressed. i miss sareel ja

i loved that area beyond the cavern where the yok huy have their murals. i thought it was so beautiful…like a portal. i also loved the second dungeon. breaking through into the sky was so awesome. i was kind of let down by the cutscene afterwards with wuk lamat realising once more along her journey that she would be a ruler who would preserve the peace... bc she had already realised that many times …. like not even reassuring herself but genuinely realising as if it's the first time. but it's fine. epic valigarmanda fight. everyone coming together to fight it was so cool. i really think the game didn't have to keep hitting you over the head by having people point blank say working together = good when you could just feel it in moments like this. even with people like zoraal ja. i loved getting to go through that yok huy portal door and to those beautiful colourful mountains. i loved the cinematic feeling of that trial. these were the moments where i would be like dawntrail is so good like i was ready to be defending it on the forums the way i just thought that all the writing flatness and so on was so inconsequential in comparison to how it would really hit these moments in the right places. like even though i have no idea why bakool ja ja wouldn't be disqualified for releasing valigarmanda considering just how much of a threat to the continent everyone constantly said it was, who fucking cares? literally just enjoy life

yak t'el is awesome. the cenotes are so cool.... i think they did a really good job of making the new environments interesting by incorporating real geographical features and making them feel fantastical in fun ways as well as important to the story, like worqor lar dor and the skydeep cenote. and i thought the feat here was cute. i'm glad nobody ever outright said that was wuk lamat’s father.. how it was handled in a kind of indirect way i really liked. but again in retrospect the importance of those parts to the overall story and growth of the characters is lost on me. why didn't bakool ja ja get disqualified for kidnapping him

mamook is also awesome. i love that nobody wanted to talk to you and its darker and more unsettling feeling. the meteors having a harmful effect on the area combined with their beauty was so interesting as well. i cannot overstate just how much i find the locations so lovely and fascinating. i find it kind of ridiculous that zoraal ja got disqualified considering nothing about him indicated he'd make such a foolish lack of judgment, considering he seems very no-nonsense from the little we do get from him, but okay. attacking an elector is worse than releasing valigarmanda. i thought bakool ja ja being a kind of figure of cult worship was really interesting. i think evil baby experiments are ridiculous, just so simplemindedly objectively evil to an extreme that i found it both hard to take seriously or move on from, two things the game was requiring from me immediately. but we move. focusing on helping the town of mamook outside of it being necessary for the feat was cool, and i like that koana decided to relinquish his role--deviations from the typical competition win-lose plot are fun, so i was a fan of bakool ja ja and zoraal ja no longer competing as well even if it was so sudden in comparison to how much they cared to win before

ketenramm showing up felt so fucking random to me. i genuinely feel like removing him would change nothing except delaying zoraal ja getting a key to the golden city in the most unexplained and asinine way possible but i get it the game needed their blue-eyes representation in there somewhere. and don't you forget it bc the residents of mamook naming his house after them would be all for naught if you did. also that he only showed up to again remind you the only way you can get past trials is through the close bonds you form with others, in case you forgot. but weirdly enough that made me realise that aside from erenville, everyone else in the party is from eorzea. i think despite koana’s focus on introducing foreign technology to tural and that being the solution for mamook's problems, him and wuk lamat taking charge on that helped to avoid an outright foreign saviours plot. but i do wish there had been someone else from tural in the main group overall. like maybe another childhood friend or some kind of character that could provide a different viewpoint for tural, so that the future of tural was in more of tural's hands. i mean turalis still contribute along the way so this isn't egregious or anything, but a 1:2 ratio in wuk lamat's entourage sticks out to me

i thought the skydeep cenote looked kind of random for what i expected of the golden city, which i admit is my fault for forgetting this is a final fantasy game. that isn't to say i dislike it, i actually thought it was pretty cool and i kind of liked the calmness and warmth of the gold yellow lights, how it felt like it was thrumming with secret life, along with the deep and shadowy and secret darkness. but somehow the intersection of technology and fantasy felt more jarring than usual. i think i'm just over the false correlation of advanced (or more specifically desirable since everyone was looking for it) society = "advanced" technology, especially because that advancement is honestly usually just decoration. it's like they fall into the trap of sleek surfaces and lights as progress and don't come up with anything actually innovative beyond that, which i'm only saying having played the whole thing and seeing that they really did not do much. electrope is only advanced insofar as they can use it for everything rather than it being actually interesting. (also the most they could do with this advanced technology was the same kind of convenient comfort bullshit we're inundated with in real life, empty novelties like clear touch screens and astronaut food; souls-as-currency, but i will get to that later). i think the ancients are a good example of an "advanced" society because they don't rely on cheap thrills we've seen before, like there's no big machines that can transport you to different worlds. rather creation magics, being able to wrangle and interact with something that plays with the limits/limitlessness of human creativity, etc. i don't even agree with a lot of the beliefs the ancients had but i enjoyed how its focus as an advanced society was on engaging with the things i think people live for, as opposed to inventions that keep our drinks warm for us. to be fair, i think i said this already, alexandria does try to introduce some thoughts on death and memory etc, i just think it does a bad job of it

anyways, after we leave mamook, what now? the ceremony where we crowned two new rulers was a better decision than i thought ffxiv capable of. but two heads are better than one can't be the only thing this expansion has to say, even if it says it so much. at this point i'm dying to go to xak tural like i am repeatedly saying to my sister and my cousin how much i want to get there to finally see where erenville's story might go, and finally get anything re lore for vieras in the first, and also the previous locations were so lovely like life was looking up......hehehehahahahaHAHAHA

i like shaaloani but i am unhappy with how arbitrary the story there was. why drop a filler arc in the middle of the expansion? i don't want a date with erenville in the middle of the expansion, i want something that connects the first part of the story to the other and develops what we've already been given. i know that's asking for a lot. what is this game's absolute refusal to use its characters or its own interesting plot hooks. not even use them effectively at this point i literally would just be happy if they used them. i'd expect a police corruption (redundant btw) b-plot from the post-expansion maybe. i don't totally dislike it or anything i just think introducing shalaaoni could have been handled way better. and even with the spotlight on him the only thing we learn about erenville in that moment is his real name. nothing insightful about why he left his home or why he chose a new name or even about what his life in his hometown was like. just his name.

the dome itself i thought was cool. that feeling of urgency and disbelief as erenville realises that's where his home is. i was still feeling pretty positive about where the story would lead despite all these things, if you can believe it. the blissful ignorance thing, if you remember. and then we get back to tulioyallal.

dawntrail’s second half:

i split this up into parts bc of how difficult writing this has been. i actually could not believe we were doing this again. yet another expansion with non-white characters being invaded by some hostile force. this happens in rhalgr’s reach, it happens in thavnair, and now tuliyollal. it feels lazy every single time. all my hopes for an interesting and complicated story were dashed instantly. i mean genuinely plummeted. time for another meaningless war with a force they're going to try and make both unquestionably hostile and sympathetic. the problem is that i’m playing a fantasy rpg game, but i still have to ask if its really so impossible for something to be fun and complex without having to rely on conquest. does there have to be some flimsy, simple-minded understanding of good and evil pick a side slog premise for this game to have purpose. was this really the only way they could think to test wuk lamat.

and why on earth do we do meaningless shit like watch gulool ja ja die. why is his honour worth more than his life. and then they're gonna have wol continue to say that people we can yet save/not doing so is indolence adage as the answer to any remotely challenging ethical argument they face despite the group of us just watching him die. that just pissed me off so bad.

in my opinion the expansion just totally loses focus once all this happens. no time to mourn gulool ja ja but plenty of time to go on tours with sphene to try fake grapes. it's like i'm back on mare lamentorum but the only rabbits for malms around that were making me feel less homicidal was erenville. recounting this half of the expansion is actually difficult for me bc of how much i dislike it but i’ll try. i realise part of my problem is i've been trying to engage with the story as if it's worthwhile to me personally, which it isn't, because i think it's such a departure from what came before it shouldn't exist. so i'm just going to try my best. i will say that if you like the second half of dawntrail and me criticising it will upset you beyond disagreeing with another person on a video game, then here is your chance to stop reading. i'm serious, bc i know criticising things is par the course for me but i really do not like this part of the game!!

first of all, finally getting to erenville’s home and it not even existing anymore was such a disappointment i was starting to feel deeply unsettled. ffxiv is no stranger to just getting rid of the parts it doesn't want to develop (rip ysayle) but this was a new level to me. except for shaaloani, they throw the entire upper half of the CONTINENT away. the south americans had their moment but alas the well of good ideas has run dry and it's time to introduce reskinned shadowbringers. remember shadowbringers? everyone loves shadowbringers. forget doing anything new and interesting--although considering how they could barely lift a finger to give the turali characters any introspection maybe i should've forseen this--its time to focus on the feelings of a singular white woman. wake up!

what disturbs me about this half of the expansion is that in its refusal to give a damn about the characters from the first half, it upends what it established in that half as well. krile has been totally forgotten at this point and because of how the golden city actually gets realised her backstory feels weak, and erenville's backstory can now go literally nowhere. and in the ways the latter half does engage with tural, it is now no longer on tural's terms, but a coloniser's. the story is no longer about tural as tural does, but about its reaction to colonialism. the only way they could think to complicate a story about a non-white location is through its reaction to colonialism. erenville's home is not only completely displaced, the remaining citizens get assimilated into a totally other nation. now i don't care what anyone thinks, you cannot create or consume media and think that those actions are totally separate from the world we live in, because people are not objective creatures. they make decisions in real life and we interact with and understand those decisions in real life. the "necessity" of a fictional plot point cannot justify a real life decision made by people who can control their writing decisions. i say this because it is not lost on me that in an expansion initially focused on a south american inspired region that also draws a lot from native cultures, the plotline diverts into turali people being forcibly assimilated (because out of necessity is still force) into a more modern and technological society, for their "benefit". and this is framed as a good thing because the colonialist ruler is soooooo nice to her people you can't believe how nice she is. like it doesn't matter if she's a complex villain or w/e actually and the narrative is actually trying to say she's bad because we're going to kill her by the end because of how bad she is. because she's sooo nice and everyone loves her and she loves them. so she's sympathetic. and now turali citizens can enjoy modern conveniences like food that comes in bags and energy drinks and somehow still waiting in lines at offices. forget the fact that we displaced an entire village in the process. like what in the capitalism

i genuinely think this game believes more in koana's original philosophy, in the “virtue” of modern technology, than in anything else. even if we use wuk lamat's increasingly simplified good triumphs over evil mantra to lead us to the end. i say this because alexandria's advanced technology is what rescued people from the destabilized lives they were living as a result of the storm surge and so on, and because of solution nine even being a location in this game. it justifies what happens to yyasulani. you get a tour from the queen herself (who everyone constantly praises along the way, although all she does is walk and talk) that demonstrates how the technology improves their lives and so on. everyone is so quick to tell you that they love their lives, that it's fine, things are okay etc. except i do not care. i do not care what the fictional characters think about this because i cannot accept this is what they chose to do with the the story of tural. "we're okay with colonialism!" why.

"need" like whatever....

sphene is my least favourite character in the game. she's not even an actual character to me. i think i hate her more as a concept, not only because she represents to me how dawntrail stopped being even remotely good but also how she represents video game trends that really frustrate me. everyone else looks like they're a part of the world they're in but she looks like a genshin impact character cameo, and i don't even mean that like "genshin is killing character design" i mean that she literally looks like a hoyoverse character to me. i'm assuming the idea was to have her look ethereal considering her situation but it doesn't scream vestiges of a lost culture to me as much as feeling like she's from a completely different intellectual property. i also cannot stand the young girl who is actually a billion years old trope. it's so ridiculous. and i didn't think i was going to have to rehash my distaste for female villains who are young but weirdly knowing and also not human and kind of evil in a coquettish and indirect way but are still very violent, so soon. i was trying to really find the words for it describing meteion back in my post on endwalker but i still find it difficult to really hone in on the trope. still, what stands out to me now is the lack of autonomy these characters have. they're still very much a threat/dangerous, but they're being controlled by something else, but they still have to be put down by the end. it's like a combination of fetishes, like a quirky and alien manic pixie dream-like sort of girl, the only type of this girl you'll ever find, who is also dangerous, but still retains a level of innocence whether through age or morality and so on, because female characters are just not allowed to be autonomous. yotsuyu came close to being villainous and not absolved of this and then they made her regress into a child. i thought sphene was at least going to be evil of her own volition, which was interesting enough, but she couldn't even get that.

i figure part of it also has to do with how sympathetic they tried to make her. her people are working OVERTIME to glaze her. to be clear, i think the idea of a ruler referring to a nation and its people as "my people" is silly no matter who is saying it. i dont care if she views her people as actual people vs her subjects or whatever. its about as relevant as saying "nice prison" to me because the niceness of the prison does not excuse the prison existing, but this is a fantasy game with rulers so sure. what gets me specifically with sphene though is that i find it genuinely bizarre how she literally does nothing to demonstrate how benevolent she is and yet they can't stop saying it. we're literally just constantly told she is nice. at this point the game has just fully stopped bothering to show anything, it just tells it to you. npcs outright tell you that sphene is the best ruler ever, even going so far as to laugh after wuk lamat explains the violence inflicted upon tuliyollal by zoraal ja, because whoops, they would just never believe sphene could be that bad. it doesn't matter to me that the reasons her people love her aren't meant to be known to us just yet, because they don't take the time to demonstrate it in any interesting way. so it just feels disconsonant to wade through this part. and now shene is calling wuk lamat her pet name by accident bc everyone was doing it so she thought it was her name and oh silly sphene you silly girl of course wuk lamat is going to be like of course you can call me that we're so close now even though you are condoning zoraal ja's massacre. why ff is so bent on these gaps in logic and letting characters get away with being imperialists as some cheap way to make the morals grey is beyond me. the scions are apparently willing to tolerate anything once it's delightful enough.

heritage found itself is really flat for the same reasons. the opening parts where you're exploring the ruins of erenville's home were interesting enough but otherwise it felt like the story lacked direction, like it doesn't have anything for you to do. where this location would have really benefited from you discovering what on earth could have happened to erenville's home/what the dome was, and maintaining that intrigue, instead everything you need to know is told to you, as you're toured around from point a to point b and so on, by a character you just get told about rather than see her do anything. i figure this is because we are just over halfway through the story and they've decided to introduce a totally new kingdom with an entirely separate backstory from everything they'd already spent levels 90-96 establishing. why bother do anything interesting with the quests when there's no time to do anything else but spit the worldbuilding at you. oh but don't forget to try the solution nine food that makes you lose weight. and you're just in time to watch wuk lamat's mother die. heritage found is also visually slapdash, which i think could work if it was like a dedicated decision to make the place look like an incohesive combination of the two cultures. but it just looks like a jarring mess of assets, turali rug + electrope table. why would they not just use a regular wooden table. it's not really like me to complain about the aesthetics, i typically prefer to focus on storytelling that i just find bad. but i really cannot express just how much nothing was resonating with me. compared to the richness of the earlier half of the expansion, even when the story had been flat, the second half just felt so rushed and empty to me.

but there is nothing i hate more in this entire game than what they did with cahciua. i was experiencing genuine horror when i realised that's what that marketable purple creature was during the part where we first see it. i actually could not fucking believe it. i genuinely think only erenville's refusal to accept any of what was happening was grounding me at all until the end of the expansion at that point. the first relevant black female character ever in the main story of this game and they can't even bear to have her be physically present because a woman being dark-skinned is just too unsettling for people. they can't even bear to have her be alive. and when she does get to show up she's that horrendous ashy colour that makes dark skin tolerable to racists. all my hopes for the first black woman in this game gone. all the character development i thought erenville was going to get, all the subtle comments about his mother that they dropped throughout the expansion for god-alone-knows-why reasons now, just pushed aside to make space for terribly developed fictional europe for the millionth time. for the millionth insurrectionist plot. they don't even bother to give a reason for how she died. it's never discussed. who cares. erenville just has to suffer through these very strange emotional torments, losing his home, losing his only family, because this game must torment its dark-skinned characters. i suppose it's the perfect excuse to stop having to write his dialogue on the map. he's so distraught now he can just keep saying "..." when you talk to him. so that they can devote more energy to writing... the twins? no, they're still too busy recounting every single thing that just happened moments after it happens. how about krile? will she finally do something other than ask if anyone knows anything about the golden city?

i was going to avoid talking about solution nine because i wanted to avoid being mean about how it looks, but there actually are some things i can say about it that will hopefully be more productive than just ragging on about how much i dislike anachronisms. in a way, the aesthetic choices for the place are perfect for what solution nine is like, and what i've been kind of loosely saying about technological "advancements" that are solely appearance and lack substance. consumerism, for one thing, i find really strange to introduce to the larger world of ffxiv. the way the turali citizens could accept their new home because it offered them unnecessary material comforts, entertainment as distraction etc. and then i realised that aside from mirroring consumerism in real life, what solution nine was reminding me of was gentrification. the very specific look of sleek stores selling neatly packaged products with trendy labels in glass cases and all the empty space; this focus on products and convenience. and of course that an area had to be displaced for solution nine to exist in tural, and the whole culture of yyasulani being dissolved into this gamer snowglobe.... how are we still falling into the trap that tall buildings and large sweeping spaces are the ideal cityscape? if we're going to go the unabashed futuristic route i at least wish they had been more unique with the designs rather than just recreating tron with squid game symbols on the faces. i personally thought even the train in garlemald was too reminiscent of real life, so s9 was just too much for me. and it's not that i think living in huts and small villages are solely an aesthetic rooted in the past and thus lend to some idyllic pastoral fantasy, more like i just think the aesthetic they chose for solution nine was too specifically something else to feel like a natural part of ffxiv. they could have leaned more into the aesthetics of the skydeep cenote. solution nine feels like an alien's pastiche of an internet subculture that it vaguely understands to be popular. the citizens of alexandria live in a place where the only foliage is palm trees and the only thing on offer at home is energy drinks. a grieving mother is dressed in the same manner as the flirty nightclub bartender. it feels like there's no meaning. it's just uncanny and silly in a bad way. it doesn't feel lived in. and amongst it all sphene is still wearing her xenoblade princess dress and saying "look over yonder" as she points to a neon motorcycle.

the tour sphene gives you here is even funnier to me than the one in heritage found because the game tried to dedicate a few cutscenes this time to showing you just how benevolent sphene is. even when she's still barely doing anything. levin sickness is a throwaway concept that has very little weight this late into the story, so i'm not sure why a boy suffering from it is the angle they chose other than this game's reliance on cheap emotional tropes. still, it's not like i'm asking sphene to miraculously cure him using her own lifeblood to prove to me she's a good ruler. i'm really just at a loss as to why the game is so bent on telling me she is one? why her being a sympathetic colonial ruler is so fucking important? i do not think this game needs to put a large blinking sign that says "colonialism is bad!" for her character to be interesting. it's more like all we get of her so far is the same flatness that i had an issue with in the first half, where the writing is so unable to complicate its characters it can only make the same point repeatedly. the difference though, is that wuk lamat at least proves herself. sphene is just so ineffectual as a ruler compared to what people say about her it is actually jarring to me. when she's showing you the residential district she says she's so proud of it... because her people worked so hard to build it. she can't answer wuk lamat's question about what her favourite foods are without being like "sorry i find i get too stuck thinking on those who labour to make us the food to really pick a favourite"…like i'm fucking sorry????????

a citizen comes up to her and quite literally says sphene i need help, the king has closed the arena and i can't make a living to get souls anymore, which understandably makes me really anxious about my life in this society devoted to getting souls. and sphene says there's nothing i can do for you because the arenas are closed for zoraal ja's war that i'm abetting, but as you are one of "my people" please remember that i love you all and if you ever need to vent about how anxious you are because of my actions as a ruler, i'm here to listen. and some random character is getting mad at him because he was being insubordinate to their most beloved queen of queens, and the citizen is like okay thank you queen sphene i feel better now. like???? WHAT DID SHE DO? what did she actually do?????? in the solo duty when zoraal ja starts having the citizens of alexandria massacred, a civilian literally says about sphene:

but unless i have forgotten...she didn't fight? she moved parts of the terrain around, sure, but i don't think she did anything within the sphere of personally fighting to protect her people that requires this? why is this game so focused on playing up her actions? why does it wait until the final act to show her doing anything at all? like i don't deny she loves her people, but all of this farce before she or anyone finally does more than just say it? really?

i don't remember what comes next so i'm just going to skip to the next heinous writing decision i can think of. gulool ja? i really want to know if the post-stormblood writer is in charge of this part of the expansion or something, because of the similar trashy drama plotlines it chooses to rely on to try to develop the characters, rather than just devloping the characters. what is zoraal ja having a son supposed to do? they could've just had zoraal ja voice his insecurities out loud to himself in a room (or to sareel ja, since ultimately that amounts to the same thing considering what sareel ja's narrative importance ended up being) and it would have been a better shot at understanding zoraal ja's feelings towards his father and his siblings than whatever him having a son he doesn't even acknowledge is supposed to mean. why did they try to speedrun all of zoraal ja's character development in the same trial where we are removing him from the story? it wasn't even anything so complex that we couldn't have just learned it earlier on in the game. instead they just redo the yotsuyu trial where he fights the shades of his family....? and then for him to call wuk lamat her pet name all of a sudden at the very end before he dies? what the fuck? that was all just so rushed

i just don't even know what to say about otis. i'm sorry... i don't care. i like otis, actually, and i think it's cool that the robot he's trapped inside of looks like a mamool ja, and i also liked the really eerie tone that scene where he introduces the endless takes on by the end, while he just laughs like he's telling a funny joke. that was fun. but it's hard for me to really want to reckon with the latter half of dawntrail as if i believe any of it is the direction the story should've taken, so i just won't.... i like otis but i just don't........really have any attachment to anything that happens in the second half of the expansion. it's like my problems with endwalker...where because it loses focus so much they have to just keep introducing more bullshit into the story to try and make sense of the earlier bullshit and i don't end up caring about any of it because it's all just a lot of bullshit. preservation is a half-assed attempt at intrigue that feels clunky and undercooked, its influence on the story just one of the many things the writers would rather say in passing than demonstrate. the time displacement between tural and alexandria is laziness. introduced to avoid writing the actual consequences of dropping an entire kingdom on top of xak tural because everyone has had the time to get over it, as well as being the source of one of the many cheap shots at more emotional moments. and gulool ja exists so that solution nine can have a ruler when we ultimately kill sphene, i guess? but that wouldn't be necessary if alexandria didn't exist in this expansion, which i don't think it needs to, so all of it just feels like nonsense to me. didn't we just spend the entire first half of the expansion trying to cultivate a new ruler for tural? but gulool ja just....gets to be the new ruler of alexandria bc he's zoraal ja's son? okay. let's just continue before i hurt myself thinking about this. living memory is next.

i actually forgot the scions were all here with us now because of how little they are contributing to the story at this point. of course y'shtola was there for a few moments to explain things like she always does, and once she does that they switch to giving us g'raha for the second half of the story while the twins are otherwise occupied or something. i'm fine with the scions not having large roles, but just sprinkling them in feels silly. apparently i'm not the only person who thinks so, and i really was not surprised to see yoshi-p say they took a half-assed approach to the scions because it was very obvious while playing it. alphinaud and alisaie felt like puppets, and once g'raha comes along he adds very little. honestly i think this expansion had some of the least interesting writing in between the cutscenes ever. i have a similar problem with other media and just have to wonder if it really is a recent video game thing. where instead of having anything fun to say characters just repeat banal things like what it is they have to do or how they have to make things right or bring whoever and so and so to justice. or they just repeat cliche phrases. or they repeat what was just learned. nothing interesting, and it makes me miss the writing from the earlier expansions. like during the second bout of fighting in tuliyollal there was a scene where it cuts to like..thancred and urianger cutting down some of the machine soldiers before delivering some pretty typical lines...just so that we remember the scions are there and are participating all in the few seconds the game is willing to spare them. it's like...this game balances so much and does it so poorly when it really should be cutting things down and focusing on developing a few things well....

like i thought endwalker was bad at balancing things introducing elpis so late into the expansion, but elpis at least just adds on to things we already know from previous expansions. an entirely new kingdom in the second half of dawntrail, which is already separating itself from prior knowledge as a totally new continent, is too much. the expansion suffers so much from being rushed. one of the most egregious consequences is how they handled krile. she's barely a distinctive character in this story and she's one of the main characters!! when we're all back at the skydeep cenote to finally head into the golden city, the earring krile is constantly asking about because they can't think of anything else for her to do finally has some importance, and she's about to use it for the largest moment in the story that holds relevance for her personally, the pinnacle of her personal quest....and it doesn't even open when she tries. it opens for gulool ja instead. like i really couldn't believe it. they really contrived this scenario to make gulool ja, who they only bring into the story because they didn't want to give zoraal ja even two more lines, more important than krile who has been striving towards being an actually fleshed out character since heavensward? what is the fucking point!!!!!

when we finally get to living memory i just felt all my annoyance compound. i don't know why i was shocked that my first thought was that it looked like amaurot. i mean this game is just so bent on recreating shadowbringers. sphene is trying to sacrifice the current living population to maintain a population that is virtually already dead. where have i heard that before. cahciua asking us to shut down living memory was actually really interesting, but that leading to her dying.....i was just so over it. she barely got a chance to be a character and interact with erenville in any meaningful way aside from calling him a pet name i'm now going to have the pleasure of seeing define their relationship forever, and then she's just going to die. how does erenville feel? still just saying "..."? okay great

i was going to say why do we waste so much time in living memory, but i suppose it's only a waste of time to me because as i said i don't think any of this should exist. for example, otis' play was fun but erenville's reaction was my own. thank god he still hated everything around him. i'm sorry, but his mother is going to die and we're wearing mascot costumes and acting in plays? and why is the only introspective moment for malms around a conversation about death in a gondola with G'RAHAAAAAAAAAA who wasn't even there the whole time? why would it not be with krile? why would it not be with erenville? they're the ones actually losing people from this excursion. they're the ones who have yet to develop at all from this entire expansion and in this entire game??? why on earth are we having the moment where a character finally gets to display some interiority with g'raha who literally gets the chance to do so whenever you cross his path? why must this game be so bent on pandering? why did they literally put all of krile’s development at the very end of the expansion and rush her to meet her parents? you don't even bear witness to her time with her parents because you're too busy running off to get the latest alexandrian panacean product that you have just got to try ice cream sweets and treats and all sorts of convenient delights that you must have because thats what they have waiting for you in alexandria! why is that how they choose to have the player spend their time? why would a little novelty like that matter more than a major character's arc finally resolving itself? all of krile's world building dissolved into a quiz show that barely lasts a few minutes because they don't even want to tell you let alone show you anymore, they just want to throw it out there because you're going to eat it up and expand on it through fanart and fanwork anyways if the game doesn't give you a choice otherwise. she should have been learning about where she's from throughout the entire expansion, but they care so little they just drop it on you all at once and then you never see it again. but hey, at least with her story you get that key to the other worlds. yup. krile you are so important

now that things are wrapping up erenville and cahciua need to have literally any time together at all their final moments. here's a cutscene where she continuously makes light of his very justified emotions towards what's happening, where he makes allusions to how this is what their relationship is like and how it's clearly been unresolved for him for a long time, kind of like how he's been implying this the entire expansion. are they going to take this in any kind of concrete direction?

i mean i wouldn't be complaining if the answer to that was yes. to me it's so obvious that she is focusing on her own emotions rather than what he's saying. all of this on a flying capybara ride? i will never understand why this game chooses to throw novelties at you like ice cream or flying capybara when it could be using its time to have its characters actually talk to each other. i have said that so much this entire post but they just do it so often it makes me angry. all of these complicated emotions erenville seems to have in his relationship with his mother just tossed out because all she needs to do is tell him he needs to do what she couldn't do...go out and explore the world...being a gleaner wasn'mt enough erenville you need to follow my dreams...and okay he's fine now! he's fine. all that sadness totally gone. forget her abandoning him as a child to the point that the reason he knows what his name means is because some other villager told him, and not his own mother, because she wasn't there. why did they make a black mother neglectful. this game is so fucking insufferable. it sucks because i actually really liked that each location we passed through in living memory we permanently altered. that has to be the most interesting decision the game has made at this point, permanent consequences for a kingdom that struggles to reconcile the permanence of death. i like when video games tie the interactive functions to the story. but i just couldn't enjoy it because of how much i hated everything else.

ultimately my problem with dawntrail is that it stops focusing on tural to introduce a narrative i just don't give a single fuck about. and i don't give a single fuck about it because i'm sick of these poorly handled colonialism plotlines! and i'm sick of the cheap writing and overused plotpoints because the writers are more focused on appealing to an audience than they are just writing an interesting story. if you like the stuff to do with alexandria i'm happy for you--i don't. i think it sucks. i think it's reflective of everything i whinge about on twitter whenever there's some livestream showing the latest string of uninspired triple a spiritually bankrupt video games. and i don't mean that in the sense of some moral highground, like i don't think i'm better than anyone because i'm some critical freak on the internet. i only mean that i'd love to just play a game and not feel such intense declines in writing quality. at this point i just don't know what to think about ffxiv anymore. there's too much wrong with this game. heavensward and shadowbringers genuinely just feel like outliers to me now, and i just have no hopes anymore for what the post-expansion will bring at all.

alternate dawntrail:

the final part of my criticisms of dawntrail i'm doing by expressing what i would've liked the expansion to have expanded on. thus i'm removing alexandria entirely. i've actually waited to discuss the bit about souls because strangely enough it's kind of where i was hoping the golden city would go ideologically. spoiler, i don't think what the story does with alexandria/solution nine is an effective critique/commentary on capitalism. i don't think dawntrail is an effective comentary on anything. but whatever. let me just get started.

one thing i was initially thinking dawntrail might use as a major theme was nature. there were a lot of natural threats this time around, which i thought was really interesting. even remembering the isle of haam solo duty made me think that they might introduce ecological terrors as the conflict. the fight in that solo duty was an overgrown bird that was killing other species on the island which i thought was really cool. another big example was the storm on the way to tural. i originally thought it was just to shake things up at the start, so i was really intrigued when the consequences of the storm continued throughout the expansion and interfered with the lives of the people in tural. i really liked how it altered the tural you would've learned about, like different groups on the continent recovering from it, the routes you had to take to get to different areas being altered by it (like the stairs in many fires), and that parts of the rite centred on helping them with that recovery, etc. while it's not particularly fantastical or epic or w/e i guess, i thought it was interesting and made sense to me as something a ruler of an area would have to know how to help people with, so i thought it was a cool recurring thing. alexandria's problem was literally an overabundance of lightning aether, so it just doesn't seem all that farfetched to make the recurring storm turn into more of the usual esoteric final fantasy threat either. i think it would've been really cool/creative to have a storm as a conflict.

the hanuhanu as well really made me consider the theme of environmental threats and connections to the environement, considering their feat was all about how important reeds are to them not just as a source of food but as a religious item, and helping them rediscover their own festival i thought was a good example of this. the first dungeon as well with that overgrown insect that is again just killing a lot of animals in the area and gorging on them for reasons beyond survival like making itself stronger during the fight (although i guess that could be considered survival lmfao since we are trying to kill it)... etc. there are just so many moments where the characters either have to face an ecological threat as opposed to a manmade one, or are learning to connect to the world around them. when you go help erenville catch the punutiy, the existence of vidraals, helping the people of mamook learn to live in an environment that is so hostile to them its affected their social lives and culture to the point they've oriented their lives around the creation of blessed siblings. even the existence of the train in shalaaoni, where the residents of mehwahhetsoan mention they don't like it because it upsets the roneek that are so connected to their lives, and also areas in shaaloani being completely transformed after the discovery of cereleum? they could have easily made the part about shaaloani about the train, right? and not just a montage on getting it to work again?

in my mind there's just so much having to do with the natural environment just scattered around this expansion that they just don't take anywhere conclusive. it flavours the story for sure, but in an expansion that should've only been about tural it would've made so much more sense to me to tell tural's story in a way other than being assaulted by foreign invaders. everywhere has problems, wouldn't it be fine for those problems to come from tural and be dealt with by the people of tural utilising all the rich cultures of tural they took the time to introduce and develop??????? the rite of succession involved learning about the people around you, and the people of tural are obviously connected to the lands they live in in different ways. i mean erenville, one of the main characters of the expansion, is a gleaner for fuck's sake. he specifically specialises in handling and procuring rare species. and he had lofty expectations to live up to, why not intertwine his personal conflicts with these types of themes???? why couldn't they have just forsaken the imperial violence JUST THIS ONE TIME to focus on all of these really fresh and interesting things theyyyyy fucking introduced!! i didn't have to come up with any of this shit it's all just in the game being left hanging in the fucking wind!!!! in my mind the story could have been laid out so easily just from focusing on those common threads like this:

firstly, the three siblings and bakool ja ja competing is a fun concept. i like that at the start the game makes it seem like the contestant who can't win no matter what is bakool ja ja who stepped on wuk lamat's taco and just seems like an asshole, when it's actually her brother zoraal ja who has dreams of conquest. i think they really missed out on elaborating on the relationships between the three siblings and their father. time that was spent wasted on repetitive scenes and so on could have gone a long way to developing them as characters beyond what we got. for example, we could have learned more about koana, who mentioned how little he appreciated his life back in mehwahhetsoan because he found it unstable, disliking how they moved with the roneek and thus don't typically stay in one place. i think they could have easily expounded on that to say maybe that's why he left to sharlayan to pursue foreign technologies as a path to improve the lives of people in turali, so that when his character arc culminates in learning why that's not necessarily the best path, because he's failed to consider the ways of life of other people, it's not just because we've heard wuk lamat say he's super smart and that's it. like iirc koana talks about how family is really important to him, so it would make sense to me that if he found his life unstable or whatever and loneliness is a big problem for him (when he got left behind as a child), the themes of community and working together that dawntrail is so focused on would not have been hard to tie into a relationship with the environment theme and the specific difficulties that he seemed to have with that growing up.

zoraal ja they really could have done more with how he was apparently pressured by the expectations of being a blessed son, and this need to outdo his father to prove himself. this barely ever comes up. it comes up more in a conversation with the wandering minstrel getting the EX version of his trial than it does in the entire game. his attempt at growing a second head in the trial was more character development than what he got in the entire game. that's what i mean by showing and not just telling btw. and you think him so easily besting someone who actually has two heads like bakool ja ja in that one cutscene could've been used to mean something, but no, just a throwaway scene to show how strong zoraal ja is, i guess? no thoughts on how he really views his siblings, or how his inadequacy led him to think that unrestrained violence is the only answer. i think the yok huy being ultimately failed conquerors, them dying out from sickness (wow another ecological threat) and realising they had to reckon with what they had (so the world around them, ok) rather than continuously trying to conquer out of fear for their own safety...would have made a lot of sense to apply to zoraal ja's character that's largely built on insecurity while again tying into what i said about this overarching theme of the environment. environment could even be also read as place in the world, since we're all connected/the overarching lesson is learning to help each one another. zoraal ja's departure from that would have made sense with him as the villain

bakool ja ja too i think could have gotten more development, as a child an entire village treats with reverence? because that village is slowly dying from the environment around it? how would that affect him? and i don't understand why they wouldn't measure his character against zoraal ja's more considering who they both are but this game literally does not think so what more can i say.

another thing i think they could've utilised more was the vidraal. the way they introduced the concept of the vidraal felt more consequential to my understanding of tural than it ended up being, which is a shame because i thought it was really interesting. i know the concept of them is already similar to primals as well as the auspices in that stormblood sidequest, but this is final fantasy so i personally would not have minded if pseudo-primals were more of the main fights in dawntrail.

so having said all of this, i would have conceived of a dawntrail without alexandria as somewhat like this:

you have the rite play out as normal, except developing the four main contestants more as characters this time. taking the time to focus on wuk lamat's relationship with her siblings, for example. then around the time the story reaches mamook, the plot should develop beyond the rite. like helping mamook with its problems and having people turn around on years worth of resentment and isolation that fast was way too rushed. they could have slowed the story to focus more on mamook, and rather than having mamook doing these extreme and unexplained baby experiments and then us hightailing it out of there, maybe they could've been doing something that's more plot relevant on a whole. for eg, while i like the lack of explanation as to how vidraal are really born, i think maybe the people of mamook or something could have been exploring the creation of a second, pseudo-vidraal instead. or even as an accident as a result of their experiments. idk a weak idea all things considered but at least it would make sense to me, if the expansion was interested in absurdities in nature (like the large isle of haam bird or bug final boss in the first dungeon) and trying to redress those balances/seeing "absurdities" not necessarily as a bad thing (i mean bakool ja ja/gulool ja ja and even zoraal ja are also "absurdities"), then idk it just doesn't seem that farfetched to me. and then that way a vidraal could be the second trial and zoraal ja could be the final one, like i think he should've been. if dawntrail really was meant to be like a new a realm reborn arc, fighting two primals for the first two trials is not an issue to me. like how hvw is ravana and then bismarck, or how sb is susanoo and then sri lakshmi. i think it would've fit pretty well to have turali versions of primals as a kind of introduction to tural considering this is final fantasy. the only reason i'd hestitate with this idea is that we've moved past the idea of "beast" people summoning gods, but i think this could be averted just because the game is now doing a lot (apparently) to move past its former conceptions of the non-human races and primals, so i don't think it's impossible to realise this in a way that isn't old-fashioned. and the people of mamook are quite literally doing eugenics crimes to create augmented creatures anyways, so. well. creation of new vidraal is what disrupts the rite. and you don't have to fight it right away either. in my mind it's like:

ok'hanu/wachunpelo -> earthenshire that doesn't take two seconds -> the yok huy with valigarmanda -> y'ak tel -> mamook -> and while the vidraal is currently a threat they have to follow and not one they have to put down immediately, shaaloani, where you can learn more about koana/his char gets developed/he has yet to relinquish his claimant position and works with you to put down a serious threat to tural once more -> yyasulani

thus the second half of dawntrail could take you to xak tural. rather than waiting on getting a permit to explore the second half, it makes more sense to me to go to xak tural out of necessity if that's where the vidraal has gone, or something. and yyasulani is the village that apparently had has some of the best hunters around blah blah, so going there to learn how to deal with it would be cool. turali people dealing with a turali threat. also the perfect place for erenville and his mother to develop as characters. cahciua could even be an npc you bring along for the trial since we're currently living in my impossible dream world. then you kill the vidraal and then yayy now you can focus on the golden city for real! whooo!

i don't think the golden city should be an open secret in the way it is because of how dangerous it is. i think it would've made more sense for them to get properly rebuffed every time krile asked about it, so that when zoraal ja gains access to it it's not in the fuckign silliest way possible bonking ketenramm over the head in his house with no fucking doors and just stealing the keys he somehow knew he had. i think the golden city would've had more mystery if they hadn't known it was real from the very start of the expansion and hadn't discovered it and then just turned around to go back to tuliyollal. both of those decisions just felt so arbitrary.

but i was really excited when i first learned that the golden city was a place where people lived forever because i really like stories that use that concept. i think there are a lot of stories that play with memory as the ultimate way of living forever (one of which i think alexandria just kept reminding me of it was so weird, but i don't want to spoil what it is), and i think that's always really interesting, so i will say that using that as a conflict is one of the better parts of alexandria, and was weirdly not too different from what i was hoping for ideologically. what i wanted was a utopian but eerie place where everyone leads blissfull and idyllic lives as a result of them not being able to die, so the "value" of life as a concept is now just totally lost on them. they become ignorant/unempathetic to pain and strife because they no longer experience it etc. it could even have been a sort of antithesis to how meteion looked at the world, life = endless strife vs life = endless bliss. and of course this is where the ideas the yok huy introduced of living forever in one's memory could be challenged/introduced/complicated/whatever. like if the golden city was actually being used as zoraal ja's lair by this point, seeing as he exits himself from the rite and then hides away in it, if the story had actually been keeping up with the yok huy as a like underlying myth for tural, then they could really have made their story on conquest as a fool's errands/living on in memory reach its narrative conclusion in this final stretch of the story. i was also thinking the golden city could be like a ghost town populated by the spirits/souls of people for centuries (not like amaurotine shades or anything, like i don't mean simulacrums), kind of like how the endless are not "real", so again i was surprised it was similar to what i had been thinking. i just really wish the golden city had been a place from tural, and not a totally different kingdom. every time i do a timeworn br'aaxskin map i feel genuine agony wishing they had just made the golden city look like all of those beautiful and mystical and still natural/turali rooms instead of living memory, which i just find hodgepodge and out of place with the rest of the game. its construction as a kind of forced paradise doesn't come out well to me i genuinely just think it looks poorly constructed and random. and if the golden city was in tural they could grapple with whether a soul is really a full human or not and actually keep it relevant to what we had already learned from the yok huy, rather than throwaway moments like this........:

and that's all that gets said on that! but lets just keep thinking pointing something out = analysis. anyways... even the fact that people's memories were being erased so that this false happiness could be preserved would've been good had they just done more with it. like forgetting someone as a kind of "death" could have been such a cool concept. this too:

this kind of manufactured happiness is what i was hoping the golden city would deliver when we got to it, but the latter half of the game is so distracted by gulool ja other things that you only really get these things through dialogue, and at the very end of the story, rather than feeling any of it in the city throughout. it's too busy establishing a whole other kingdom to focus on these sorts of themes that could have been complicating the first half. like, if the first half had actually been about connecting with the natural and living world around you, the second half being about disillusioned souls disconnecting themselves from natural truths to live in a false reality could have really expanded on that. like what does it mean to actually live a life that "balances" itself with the lives of others? you repeatedly learn that the history of tural was all the different groups being at war with each other. the tural you visit is a place where they're all learning to live together. the tural you visit is a place where people feel connected to/are deeply affected by their environment. why would an ff story about a rite to cultivate a new ruler in this type of place not want to expand on that history and those connections in an esoteric and fantastical way? can a place both have a train and not disturb the migrations of the roneek? ffxiv is really just not equipped to answer those kinds of questions LOL

the commodification of human life theme in the second half of dawntrail could've also been a really interesting contrast to the themes of nature in the first half, had it been written well. souls as currency, or to paraphrase the language of the game, "soul cells being delivered based upon one's work evaluation to encourage exemplary performance", is obviously a kind of "extreme" capitalism. it's a "fantasy" version of capitalism (though it's really not all that fantasy) sustained by the oxymoron of (i'm assuming anyways based on how little the process is explored) a fair meritocracy: the only thing we really own in an increasingly capitalist society, our literal lives, has now become a form of payment, paid out by some undefined and vague "work evaluation" that measures people based on the extremely impartial (sarcasm, if that's not clear) notion of what they are able to contribute. this kind of farcical system combined with an area that seems overly concerned with conveniences, treats, shallow entertainment and so on, in contrast to tural which is largely more focused on the natural world and connections with others, building community and helping each other... it's not like i can't see the makings of a commentary on what "really matters" in life or the consumerist society we currently live in... if the game actualyl cared about putting either halves of the expansion in conversation with each other...............

i think this is where this expansion fails as a critique/commentary. it points things out, sure, but it doesn't really comment on them. i mean it can barely connect its plot points together. its more like it points things out and won't make up its mind on how it truly feels. the citizens of tural lose their culture and their memories/identities, the residents of alexandria experience an "extreme" consumerism that devalues human life--but this is all ultimately framed as okay because heritage found/solution nine continue to exist as places for players to experience recreationally. neither of these places feel primed to change. while the writing isn't totally neutral, that doesn't make it an effective critique. honestly the game only seems to make solid statements when something is evil in a way a child could understand. otherwise, all anyone really seems to say is they know why the souls thing seems weird, but it's just a matter of cultural difference. the writing justifies this extractory lifestyle by making it a necessity for the people who live there, because of the overabundance of lightning, or bc of the dangerous beasts they need to hunt or whatever. and never mind that in the arcadion they use souls for entertainment that wol willingly particiaptes in. they don't write it to be a bad thing inherently, its only a problem now because the souls are doing bad things to people. same with alexandria, which stops being a problem of colonialism because everyone is okay with being colonised actually and also more importantly sphene is using the souls for Evil, which is Bad. the expansion spends a lot of time trying to valorise the way of life in alexandria/s9 anyways despite all of this. they want you to try to understand and accept the culture of s9. that's why you go on tours and get to try foods and get to dress your wol in trendy techwear and you hear how good of a person the queen in charge is at all times. the constant incongruencies with how it treats the endless feel like the perfect example for how little this game ever wants to take a stance. cahciua is literally telling you to "kill" everyone in living memory, which is okay because they're all just memories. but you treat them like people, that's why you're giving them a sentimental light show before you do it. the momentary spectacle makes it okay that erenville's mother is going to "die" because shallow treats like that are all we really need, apparently, anymore. both the characters and the players. flying capybaras. and she's not really going to die because she's not actually alive. but she's going to die.

a big thing for me is that alexandrian comfort subsisting on the lives of others just feels too morbid considering the world we live in right now this very moment minute second. how the imperial core is propped up by the labour of the global south. dawntrail is informed by colonialism in history sure but colonialism is a modern day problem. like is that what's being mirrored by sphene wanting to keep her modern day paradise of products running forever by killing everyone in tural?? and even if the game was drawing this parallel....why? to say what? to simply say "it's bad"? i do not think ffxiv has the range or care to comment on topics like this! a commentary on capitalism or colonialism from square enix is not something i would find valuable, but games like ffxiv are hellbent on talking about the latter. i know it's an aesthetic at this point, an easy way to create a dramatic conflict they can pretend they have nuanced feelings about despite barely being able to say "colonialism is bad". whatever keeps the ubiquitous good vs evil plots people who play video games like this are subjected to going. i genuinely think this game was doing a better job of being a critique when it was just solely about turali people working together to live their lives and move on from their history of bloodshed. this game could not let tural be tural without drastically modernising it/assimilating the place into eorzea's larger military project/introducing bullshit technological conveniences it doesn't hesitate to frame as desirable. that this is the type of story they chose to write about a culture that isn't white just makes me glad to finally put this part of ffxiv behind me and never think about it again.

#ffxiv spoilers #dawntrail spoilers #what's really getting me is i would've finished this earlier but accidentally backspaced and lost all of my edits i had made for like 2 hrs #that was god telling me to stay my hand #but i'm finally free #i'm finalllyyyyyyyy freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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