DAWNTRAIL SPOILERS IN THIS POST. Major zone 6 spoilers. You have been warned. I'm going to type a bunch of extraneous stuff so that no spoilers will show up in the preview window. I like how Koana's a machinist. I feel like I've seen more machinists in duties ever since Dawntrail came out and I like to think it's because Koana popularized the class. When discussing strats for breaking the dome I was like "let's have Koana give everyone guns" and they had to be like "Achaius...not everyone knows how to use guns..." I think this should be enough text now.
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okay so, the real title of this entry:
Dawntrail was a massive letdown after Shadowbringers (an absolute powerhouse of a plot) and Endwalker (fanservicey but fun). I’d rate it a 2.5/10 overall.
Breaking it down by zone:
I cannot overemphasize the enormity of what we did in Zone 6. Like, holy shit. We murdered the entire population of Living Memory. It was basically Spec Ops: The Line. The only way to win is not to play.
To be clear, I could potentially get behind a villain/antihero arc, or honest pragmatism and ruthlessness. “These people can only survive off the energy of living beings dying. As long as they’re around, they will be a threat to us, so we will beat them to the punch and wipe them out first.” There’s a kind of poetic parallelism to it: One chapter after Zoraal Ja’s troops march on Solution Nine to massacre the inhabitants, his sister marches on Living Memory to do the same. The tragedy of Alexandria is writ manifold.
That’s not how it was portrayed. Instead, the narrative tried to justify the party’s actions in two ways: (1) Death is “natural” and good, and, therefore, defying death is “unnatural” and bad. (2) These people aren’t real anyway, so we aren’t really killing them.
Both justifications are transparently ridiculous. The first is deathist propaganda. Why should we care about the “natural” order in a world where human innovations can improve the quality and quantity of life? Should we also eschew modern medicine (healing magic) because it’s “unnatural”? Nonsense. The second is possibly the most disingenuous reasoning I’ve seen in a work of fiction, and is not even consistently applied, because we treat these people as real at all times except when we are deleting them. For instance, we’re touched by the tale of lovers reunited after death. We put on a grand fountain show to entertain the residents. We grant Cahciua’s last wish of a tour around the gardens. None of that would matter if the people weren’t real.
It's also disingenuous that every person we meet who is aware of our plans is either completely chill about dying, or actively wants to die. Not a single individual is like “I was enjoying my afterlife. Fuck you for taking it from me.” Instead we get a constant stream of copium fed to us by the developers. It makes for a very boring final zone, because there’s no opposition or conflict, just us strolling through neighborhoods watching happy people live peaceful existences until we wipe them all out.
The final zone sours me on Wuk Lamat, who I liked quite a bit up until that point. As the main character, she ends up being the main mouthpiece for the devs’ deathist propaganda. Can’t really like her after that. Also, her trying to reconcile with Sphene at the end after personally wiping out most of Sphene’s subjects is absurd.
To reiterate, I’m fine with fictional characters doing utterly monstrous things, as long as they’re honest about it. Survivor mentality (“It’s us or them”) is fine. Villain protag is fine. But not this false light where we pretend our atrocities aren’t atrocities for reasons that do not hold up under even the slightest scrutiny.
Erenville is the most relatable character here, because he’s upset over the prospect of killing his mother. Then the entire party is like ?? what’s wrong? Why are you being such a wet blanket bro? and pretty much gaslights and bullies him until he agrees that killing his mother is okay.
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