#yak tel

[i-am-spark]

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail - Lower Yak T'el

[sightseeinglog]

[risartblog]

#miqomarch day 14 :: Favorite Zone

It's gotta be Yak T'el, and the Ja Tiika Heartland in particular! I'm a sucker for blue glowy forests, and so is Noa.

[khajiitclaws]

MiqoMarch Day 14 — Favorite Zone

No location in Tural quite captivates the imagination like the lower jungles of Yak T’el. The azure flora emit a unique luminescence, providing an air of mystery.

[parthenosvenus]

*walks into new ffxiv zone* god this music is so good

[aethercurrentsshaaloani]

FFXIV Aether Currents: Yak-Tel Guide

Guide to locating Aether Currents in Yak-Tel. Visit: https://www.mithrie.com/ffxiv/aether-currents/yak-tel.php

[uldahstreetrat]

I just think it would be cute if Ophianne brought back some flowers from Yak Tel to wear in her hair for a bit ♡＾▽＾♡

[akiraizumi]

Yak Tel

[nagunkgunk]

look at this tiny beast

rank 4 yak tel fate kityyyyyy

[mirandra]

- Yak Tel -

[yuri-cocaine]

trucking along on msq

-bakool ja ja i owe you an apology. i wasn't familiar with your game.

-i ran into some fuckass weirdo who held up the whole run of skydeep cenote to complain about how much they hate msq. holy shit ive never seen anyone do this even for arr and sb. i tried vote kicking but it didnt work :/ block v'runja raqu on balmung to save yourself a big headache

-every zone is gorjus but my fav zone so far is urqopacha, fav zone music is kozama'uka, and fav towns are in yak tel. theres something really cozy about hroth town and mamook is a beautiful stonework city in a blue magical forest. mamook reminds me of lost city of amdapor but Blue. ive headcanoned yuma's hometown of camoa village to be something similar so maybe i can gpose in mamook instead of queueing into amdapor

-zoraal ja is my failhusband. all he does is scowl and want everyone to die in a big war. talking to everyone in the landsguard hq is kinda funny bc they're all like uhhhhh when's commander zoraal ja coming back. is he even coming back or...???

-awwww im glad wuk lamat made koana co-dawnservant ;w; now they can build infrastructure

-gulool ja ja's "oh right" when he tried looked at his brother's head and stopped casting his big fireball is rly sad now bc his brother isn't asleep, he's dead :( imagine living with your brother's dead head grafted onto your body for three years. what if it....starts to smell bad......

-as much as i like wuk lamat, i really didnt enjoy the feats so im really excited to travel xak tural with erenville. shaaloani's desert landscape is also gorjus with the graphics update bc before all that sand would just be a badly textured lump (sagolii desert...)

-the fact that ppl in shaaloani have american accents is taking me out LMFAO

-my theory for why erenville has such a strong icelandic accent is bc in addition to taking an eastern viera name, he also copied the eastern viera accent. as for why vieras living in othard have icelandic accents, uh...other than it being a carry over from ff12, maybe viera language is just. icelandic. but in dalmasca.

-ive always thought sharlayan is the scandinavia of etheirys but they're also greek-ish so who even knows at this point.

-in elpis, there's a sidequest where an ancient has a yellowish cactuar called notos 626 and he couldn't think of a suitable name for it. in urqopacha, the same kind of cactuar is all over the place and they're called notocactuar!!! so in the end, i guess he never named it :0

-why are the nopalitenders so fucked up.......estinien likes eating them tho

-i bet my cowboy boots that the sheriff in town is corrupt and it's up to a rootin' tootin' by god be shootin' young upstart to challenge him and restore peace to the wild west

-and by that, i mean the wol. wol will restore peace. i love that erenville just does not fight at all, so when those mad max from shein lookin ass bandits threatened to hang erenville up by the ears i got so protective of him LMFAO eat the full force of my level 100 burst bitch

-im not fucking bakool ja ja

[i-am-spark]

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail - The Skydeep Cenote

[nianeyna]

I kept a bullet-pointed liveblog in a notes document as I played the new ffxiv expansion. now I have finally finished the story so I can share with the class without fear of someone responding to me with spoilers. speaking of which everything below is dawntrail spoilers, for the entire expansion, in case that wasn't clear.

⬇️ SPOILERS. FINAL FANTASY XIV DAWNTRAIL SPOILERS BELOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED ⬇️

Dawntrail Liveblog

- ok so the mean claimants are obviously not going to win, but catboy promise is a dark horse. also not ruling out "nobody wins"

- Urqopacha is super cute

- CAMPFIRE SCENE!

- Erenville's deal continues to be very mysterious no matter how much he contrives to appear to be telling us about it

- lol Erenville dialog: "I spoke too much" YOU BARELY SAID ANYTHING BABE

- Kozama-uka is sooooo pretty

- I like how the entire first dungeon was totally unnecessary since we would have got there FASTER if we'd just stuck around and helped Alisaie and Erenville repair the boat lmao. but that's not how the WoL does things!!

- CAMPFIRE SCENE!

- erenville lurking in the background... siddown boy lmao

- unknown dude: hey you uh... forgot something. yeah back there. come with me and get it this is definitely not a trap

- oh no it was a trap! who could possibly have predicted this??

- awwww, Koana. wasn't sure about him at first but he's just a cute little muffin isn't he

- wuk lamat getting all excited about eating the xibruq pibil was so cute omg. she just likes food!!! I appreciate that in a woman

- oh shiiiiit wuk lamat origin story?! dun dun dun...

- aaaaaand solo duty... ulp

- haha get wrekt

- CAMPFIRE SCENE!

- the mamool ja should look into tourism... this place is pretty as hell

- ok koana shooting the tablet was a pretty cool move

- have my doubts about the golden city being in yak tel... like if it was there why'd they go to xak tural then

- ok, I guess it... was there? or... the *entrance* was there... according to gulool ja ja, anyway...

- road trip alone with erenville be still my heart!

- out of context erenville quotes: "this is your first time, so let's take it slow"

- no need to apologize erenville... you can drag me into anything you want

- oh wow this is really fucking sad. wow. I wasn't expecting that!

- the ridiculous train plan is cheering me up a bit thank god (editor's note: it didn't last)

- sigh... there always has to be at least one zone per expansion that's all dark and gross-looking. did they sign a contract to that effect or something??

- I can't believe how mean this plotline is to erenville

- this is fucked up... this is so fucked up

- npc: "sorry to darken the mood" NO THAT'S FINE I DON'T THINK THE MOOD CAN GET ANY WORSE!!

- I want to rip Spene's crown off and push her off a cliff. her little I'm so cute and innocent and helpless act makes me want to puke.

- CAMPFIRE SCENE!

- if any more parents die in this story I am really truly gonna lose it

- YES finally we get to fight these horrible people. machine army. whatever.

- I hope the next trial is sphene... I want to kick sphene's ass SO bad

- well there goes otis which brings the fucking dead parent toll to at least 4

- finallyyyyyy made it out of heritage found... *collapses onto the floor of tuliyollal like a shipwrecked sailor reaching land*

- (ok obviously I've technically been back to tuliyollal while I've been doing these godforsaken quests but THIS IS DIFFERENT!)

- we didn't fight sphene but the prospects are looking really good for me getting to punch her in the face soon. probably not literally like we got to do with zenos, but I guess you can't have everything :(

- wow sphene really BELIEVES she's just a helpless little girl. fucking incredible.

- next expansion let's have a final zone NOT populated entirely by ghosts. change it up a little

- so should I count namikka and cahciua's deaths twice on the parent death toll scoreboard or what

- you know what I still don't get. is why the yok huy went to xak tural to look for the golden city. *why did they think it was there*? I mean heritage found is there *now* but it definitely wasn't hundreds of years ago!

- that face on the tower looks more like meteion than sphene tbh

- two more dead parents!

- I can't. believe. sphene erased herself before I could beat her ass. this is the most unfair thing that has happened in this expansion, and it is up against some STRONG contenders

- it's just not satisfying to pummel a weird robot that has none of her memories!

- oh sphene's SORRY? *loudest fart noise ever*

- it's a good thing wuk lamat is here to be nice cause if I had to do it I'd throw up

- "their lives remain unchanged"? uh.... we shut off the afterlife. which was a real physical place you could go to. I feel like that changes things a bit!

- I DID IT I'M OUT CREDITS ROLLED UP I'M DONE THANK GOD

First half I rate: 9/10

Second half I rate: 3/10

Overall I rate this expansion: 5/10 I guess

Up until the lightning dome appeared I was having a blast. after that the gameplay experience became one of gritting my teeth so I could get out and be done with it. all the alexandrian zones are dark and unpleasant to be in, which would have been bearable except the plot was literally nightmarish and any new characters I didn't hate either died or were already dead (except gulool ja, who's cute of course, but his story was still pretty upsetting in a different way). This is not to say the writing was bad, because I don't think it was. In the alternate universe where I was LOOKING for a tragic existential horror game I might have even really liked it. However I really really wasn't looking for that at all, so in the real world I feel pretty betrayed and upset. There's a line between "plot twist" and "false advertising" and I think they left it behind in the dust.

But hell, at least we got 4 campfire scenes.

[the-wardens-torch]

Jeez... This really got out of hand.

Does anyone else feel a little... exasperated by the direction DT is going in? It started off with this vibrant and fascinating new land based on cultures that are FAR underutilized in RPGs, and now we're ignoring it all so that we can be sad for data files? So that we can ponder ShB's philosophical quandary of whether its worth sacrificing the living for the dead... only its with a less interesting villain and a smaller world? So we can forego unique mountains, deserts, temples and rainforests in favor of copy + pasted identical dystopian landscapes we've already seen a hundred times in other games (and in this game) and more vague existential angst?

Cut to spare your dash from whining.

There's so much that can still be explored. The conflict between the Ix'Braal and the Mamool Ja in Yak Tel and the changing ecology of the region, the Yok Huy and their dwindling population/endangered way of life, the overall threat of conflict between native rural cultures and the world modernizing around them, the horrifying implications of the Skydeep Cenote (and relocating its dead,) how the Hanu felt about having to be reminded of their cultural identity by outsiders... etc. 

Not to mention the fact that so many of the characters, while likeable, are just so... murky? Wuk Lamat is a good girl and I love her as a character, but we've seen very little of her past, and her motivations and history have all been told and not shown. 

Koana?  He got some much-needed characterization this last patch, but wouldn't it have been more interesting if his parents hadn't been heroes? If he had to learn to appreciate his birth tribe despite their abandoning him? Learning to respect people you don't like is a VERY important skill for a leader to have.

Zoraal Ja? Such a nothingburger of an antagonist. The fanbase has had to do SO MUCH heavy lifting to flesh him out.  Yeah, gifted kid with too many expectations forced on him, but again, told not shown. We never see what his childhood was like (who even was his mother?) or any concrete reasons for him to be like he is.  What's his damage? What sort of education did he have that made him focus so much on war? Was he born a a single-minded sociopath? Was the otherwise pretty cool Gulool Ja Ja just a bad parent(s)? Did he always resent his siblings, or did he get along with them at some point? Was there an event that radicalized him? Also, he passed control of his assets to his son, which hints at some deeper emotion or purpose, but what? Why? Yes there's something to be said for enigmatic figures but he just comes off as incomplete to me in a way none of the previous expansions' villains did.

And his baby mama just... makes even less sense to me. She's said to be so gentle and kind and loving, yet she was working in a lab committing Umbrella corp level atrocities on a daily basis?  And why was ZJ so shocked that she had a baby?

Also I don't care about Sphene.  My reaction to seeing her come back was basically a weary sigh. She's an artificial person who is focused entirely on protecting her people. She has no other personality traits. Being impressed by her kindness and devotion is like being impressed by Facebook's ability to remember all of your cousins' birthdays. 

...Well, I guess I'm not WHOLLY uninterested in her - I'm fascinated by the implication that she left the Living Memory terminals unguarded because she secretly knew she was in the wrong and wanted to be shut down, but couldn't override her programming so she committed suicide by WoL. Although that appears to have been a meaningless fakeout, judging by her return.

Then I remember that this was brought to you by the same writers that gave us The Sorrow of Werlyt, which I hated for many of the same reasons I'm starting to dislike DT - specifically flat characters and murky motivations.

But the expansion is still young! I hope all of this is rendered moot!

[redtomcat]

My cool bro

Stronk black mage!

To be honest, after all changes I like black mage more than dragoon...

What does this pointing minion mean, Erenville?

How to deal with tall people, volume 2

Fluffy!

Blue forest, Yak Tel

[loftycrimes]

day four safe harbor

In the waters of Yak Tel