Having finished 7.3 yesterday and had time to digest everything, I wanted to post a more comprehensive summary of how it all felt now that the primary story arc of DT has come to a close.
tldr: pretty good but a lot of the cracks in XIV's format and type of storytelling are showing and I hope SE works on that
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tldr: pretty good but a lot of the cracks in XIV's format and type of storytelling are showing and I hope SE works on that
- Overall, Dawntrail is one of my favorite expansions. The new characters and locations were great, I enjoyed the story and themes, I thought the pacing was good, and the patch quests worked to wrap up a lot of what we saw in base 7.0. Wuk Lamat remains one of my all time favorite characters. Real Sphene really grew on me in the patches and I'm really impressed by the writers putting in the work for her in such a comparatively short amount of time, leveraging Queen Eternal's screentime to work as a great contrast.
- I love me some cyberpunk nonsense. S9 was tailor made to appeal to me specifically. The themes of conquering death vs letting it occur naturally are a great place to go with that. Culture clash is always fun to explore and I'm glad we finally got the chance to work with the S9 citizens to reshape their city and society in a way that gives them a fuller experience of existence.
- I wish we'd gotten more time in Tural. This expansion was promised as a Tural expansion and while we did get a majority of the new zones there, when the story pivoted away from Tural into S9 focus at level 97, it pivoted hard and we rarely went back to Tural. While it didn't bother me as much as others, it still feels rough to spend such a large time away from the place that we began and that we were promised as our locale for the expansion. This is only exacerbated by the patch quests being set almost entirely in S9 - while if we take the story as a whole and see that it's roughly 50/50 for Tural vs S9 focus, the real-world time of over a year spent nearly exclusively in S9 makes it feel like we abandoned Tural early on.
- Some promises were made about cultural consultants and while their presence was evident, I hope SE keeps them around for longer or maybe gets them to look at the overall story for future expansions that delve into topics like culture clash, colonization, and meeting new (to us) societies, especially ones based on real-world indigenous cultures. The cultures themselves were presented (as i understand) accurately and respectfully, but the S9 portions generally sidestepping the colonization issue and things like Koana's backstory bringing up a common and harmful trope regarding native american children make it feel like the story as a whole was not seen by cultural consultants or sensitivity readers.
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