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Notes -
If you're still playing through, I'll be somewhat vague to avoid spoilers.
The stakes are low, and the time pressure lower. Most expansions have started with some rising threat well before the expansion dropped -- Heavensward most famously with the WoL being chased to Ishgard after being framed as a regicidal maniac while Ascians were behind the Ishgardian popehat, Stormblood with the giant Shinryu hamster ball and (for better or worse) Zenos, Shadowbringers everybody being kidnapped to the First and a threat of a whole Umbral Calamity, and Endwalker the Garlean Empire getting desperate enough to start summoning weird primals and throwing out those towers. Here, there's only really the Turiyolal succession, its worst-case scenario is a Bad Brother Winning mumble mumble, until nearly level 95.
Said brother's motivations aren't that interesting or deep. That's not new: one of the big fandom critiques of Zenos was the extent he seemed just bounce around being evil at his uncle's behest and out of Shonen Anime Antagonist-dom, and while there were character notes under that, they only really started to flower with more time post-suicide. In Dawntrail, Zoraal Ja's claimed motivations sound like a less charismatic and coherent version of the Senator Armstrong speech with a sprinkling of For Peace thrown in, and all we get from other characters about him is a talk about Ambition and loneliness. I don't think every villain needs to be or should be a misunderstood woobie, but he comes across as just jumbled. There's a way to read him that's coherent and I think it's the intended read, but a lot of people don't get that from the writing, and even with that read he feels more rabid dog than dire threat. ((We do get an idea for the actual final boss, and it's more interesting, but it comes really late.))
Wuk Lamat feels a bit much like Lyse v2, where she's the main character for this story and we're here to escort and/or cheerlead her. There's always a bit of this going on, since the WoL's almost-mute nature means you need a couple characters for the story cutscenes to work at all, but where previous expansions have had your retinue helping you, or at worst the Scions operating as a group with you as a vital part. Here,
The emotional notes aren't that strong. There's some really high bars to pass, here, by video game standards: .
The Role and new Job quests are also fairly uninspiring. The role quests are often funny, if sometimes in dark ways, but just don't really have the emotional weight for what they're going for. The role quests are more serious, but they're seldom that memorable. Nothing's so bad as the 3.x PLD quest line, but it's never really going above average. There's not even much in the way of good lore about the world; you mostly learn about This One Weird Artifact per. ((I'd actually say that the crafter role quests do a better job, writing-wise: while they're just text they feel more about doing the actual role in the actual place with the actual people, where especially the Sharlayan ones were more having random chores attached to a disconnected story. Uh, excepting FSH 7.0, which goes BLU.))
I don't agree with all the critiques -- in particular, I think the lower stakes is a good thing even if the pacing problems aren't -- but I can understand the complaints.
Much of that tracks with how I feel so far. I don't mind it being a lower-stakes expansion, and indeed I think that's a good thing. For comparison, the last few Elder Scrolls Online expansion stories - Blackwood, High Isle, Necrom - went from a demon lord seeking to destroy the world to a fun vacation and peace conference on a resort island to a demon lord who might accidentally destroy the world, and the most fun expansion was the low-stakes one at the resort. FFXIV in particular seems badly in need of lowering the stakes somewhat and just exploring an interesting corner of Hydaelyn.
My negative feeling on Dawntrail at the moment is mainly just that it's, well, boring. Tural and Tuliyollal are noticeably bland and uninspiring places compared to the last places we've been, the villains are tight-lipped and boring, and the heroic characters we meet are likewise very paint-by-numbers. I don't hate Wuk Lamat, but I'd tend to agree that she is badly over-exposed, particularly because there's just not a lot there, in terms of personality? She'd be fine as a supporting character, I think, but she's being asked to hold up the entire plot, and that's too much for her.
Part of me wonders if it's just that I've played too much FFXIV and I'm tired of it. After all, Norvrandt was also pretty uninspiring for most of the setting (Eulmore excepted; it was delightfully macabre). We're coming off several expansions with Zenos playing a major role, and Zenos was awful. However, I can't help but think that something is wrong, because I am really struggling to find the motivation to play Dawntrail. I just don't care about this place or about any of these people. Where I cared about Ishgard's fate, or about Ala Mhigo's struggle for freedom, here I just do not care who becomes Dawnservant.
Anyway, I asked because I wondered if there was a 'culture war' angle? If Dawntrail is just a mediocre and boring expansion, then that's fine - I've played a lot of MMORPGs and they all spin their wheels sometimes. But is there anything else inflaming fan feeling? You mention a 'Trans Superstar' perception, for instance. I vaguely heard something negative about Wuk Lamat's voice actor, but I can't immediately find any evidence of anything controversial connected to Sena Bryer (edit, googled, apparently Bryer is trans, but... meh, you can't tell that from anything in-game), and the acting itself, in-game, is... fine? Not amazing, but fine. (Plus, well, remember ARR? FFXIV has had some very bad voice acting in the past, and Wuk Lamat's nowhere near ARR-Minfilia.) I also ran into criticisms of Dawntrail's story for being a very generic "yay for multiculturalism!" story, but then, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker all had major subplots or even central story arcs about uniting disparate communities or convincing old enemies to understand each other and make peace or some variant on it, so again I feel like the issue there isn't the premise, but rather the execution. It's not that understanding and seeking harmony between diverse local factions is bad, because we've been doing that in-game for a decade - it seems, at least to me, just that Tural is boring.
I admit I find the culture war angle with FFXIV a bit odd, because otherwise I would have thought that FFXIV is the most, for lack of a better term, 'conservative' of the major MMOs currently on the market.
Yeah. And the weird bit is that I don't think we're supposed to: Galool Ja Ja takes you aside around level 83 to specifically say that it doesn't matter who wins the whole keystone deal; regardless of the contest, he'll never approve a claimant that would be a clearly bad Dawnservant, specifically drawing out the two Mamook as failing to grow. The second half of the story kinda recovers by making a more interesting matter show up, but it does so by making clear that a lot of the threats in the first half never could have worked, even if Galool Ja Ja had made a bad mistake.
It's not awful -- when you're done, there's a pretty decent read of everything as a kind of slow-moving tragedy -- but it doesn't have that sorta drive To Find Out that the Dragonsong War, The First, or Elpis had, until nearly level 97.
I've seen a theoretical anti-woke force opposed to Bryer proposed as the cause behind some of the recent DDoS, given the lack of anyone claiming responsibility, but I'm pretty skeptical; both at the sense of such a group existing and caring enough, and in a right-leaning group like that being able to shut up about it.
There's some story motions that could be read about more generic culture war stuff, especially since everything north of the Bridge from Yok Tural is very specifically Fantasy North America, and there's ways you could kinda draw the whole thing as a 'Best and Worst of America', given how closely the spoiler faction looks like a dark mirror to the Turali. There's been some attempts to draw the spoiler faction as a metaphor for AI, or a parable about American Imperialism, or Capitalism, though these are... either strained or generic. The Whalaqee have been fantasy!NativeAmericans being chased by a combination of accidental disease transmission and overt manifest destiny for fantasy!oil since BLU was first added, and while they're backgrounded, the fantasy!oil pumps are not. Maybe the Shalooni msq bit as anti-police corruption in a modern sense? I think you have to read pretty aggressively into it for everything but the Whalaqee.
I think the steelman would be more about the negative space. It is relevant that the Turali are explicitly Central American, and that there's not really much critique of their society. There's a different portrayal of the same story where Galool Ja Ja is a reasonable but less perfect ruler that would still have worked and hit the same story notes -- he has his vices, like his capriciousness and taste for combat, they just are never flaws -- or where Tural is a seen as a hegemonizing force rather than Sharlayan via Koana, or where conflicts between various Turali factions were a lot less reasonable.
But that's still extremely limited compared to Western game politics.
The impression I have is that Tural is meant to be something like Eorzea, only a generation or two onwards. It's pretty clear there are deep tensions and divisions under the surface, and Tural is not as harmonious as it presents itself as. It's only tenuously unified out of a combination of love for and fear of Gulool Ja Ja, who is the Warrior of Light of his society. Much like Eorzea, it seems like Tural was a group of quarrelling tribes and city-states, and it was brought together out of crisis by a superlatively-capable warrior-adventurer. That sounds like, well, what you the player character did for Eorzea. But now it's fifty years later, Gulool isn't going to last forever, and what he accomplished may well fall apart.
Possibly I'll be disappointed later on, but right now I don't get the feeling that Tural is necessarily all that utopian. Before this FFXIV has generally been good at finding the balance with societies, I think. Even the sympathetic city-states (all six Eorzean states, Doma, Hingashi, Bozja, etc.) have skeletons in their closet and some unsympathetic traits, and likewise even the villainous nations (mostly Garlemald) have been shown to possess virtues, and be home to many likeable characters. I think the closest we get to purely utopian/dystopian societies is in Shadowbringers, with the Crystarium and Eulmore, and even then Eulmore's corruption is mostly due to Vauthry, and once he's removed you can appeal to the people and they start to make rapid improvements. That mostly leaves the Crystarium as the most one-note society in the game, and I'd happily say that the Crystarium is the blandest, least interesting civilisation in the game. I suppose there's the Ancients as well, but I think the Ancient society is pretty clearly depicted as horribly, dangerously flawed, and even perhaps dystopian in its own way, simultaneously naive and immensely, recklessly powerful. (I have run into people reading the world of the Ancients as uncomplicatedly utopian and good, but I question those people's reading comprehension.)
This is actually one of the reasons why I think FFXIV's overall portrayal of the world is pretty conservative-friendly, or even surprisingly anti-progressive - there are no utopias, and social improvement is only possible through slow, incremental work, which seems to always require renouncing simple binaries of good and bad, or oppressor and oppressed. This often requires tools that would be unsatisfying to a progressive mindset - I remember enjoying the way that both Ala Mhigan/Ul'dahn and Garlean/Thavnairian relations, for repairing those states, explicitly had to be built on capitalism and mutual advantage. Watching Nanamo gradually figure out how to make the Syndicate work for the common good, to wield the power of coin, of market and profit, for the good was very satisfying. Plus I think it's relevant that multiple sympathetic states (Gridania, Ishgard, Hingashi) are relatively anti-immigrant and isolationist, and this is not presented as something we need to change or fix. Gridania has every right to limit its borders to what it believes that its natives and the forest can support. The Hingans have a perfect right to not allow foreigners deeper into their country. This isn't a blandly progressive worldview.
If nothing else, the Ancients' major sin is hubris - they act like gods, fail to reckon with their own moral flaws or capacity for evil, and assume that they have an unlimited right to remake the world to suit their needs. The one good Ancient, Venat, is also the one who's a monotheist - the one who, in her key character moment, confesses to you that she perceives the presence of some kind of divinity beyond her. That seems a lot like a Judeo-Christian Fall narrative, up to the point where the Ancients' Babel collapses, and many nations - or parallel worlds - are spread out from the ruins. Venat's appearance as a kind of guardian angel with a flaming sword, guarding the way back to the Tree of Life, only fits that further. And it seems relevant that Endwalker's finale, the conclusion to the grand story they'd been building for years, echoes the conclusion to 1.0, in that the universe is saved by the power of prayer.
Certainly there are lots of fan readings out there that disagree with me, but I think there's a lot of room for reading FFXIV's story, at least from ARR through to Endwalker, as being quite conservative.
Yeah, that seems correct. I don't think you'll be disappointed with the rest of how Tural goes. There's definitely still warts-and-all for every one of the cultures you encounter; the Pelupelu, Moblins, and X'braal, just come across as a little minimized compared to others.
((And given how much Gridania's warts get minimized, even including the WHM class quests, that's saying something.))
That sounds fair, then. Perhaps when I finish it I'll talk about it in the regular fun thread or something. Thank you for the interesting diversion!
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