Death Unto Dawn

I enjoyed playing through this, though despite the dramatic-feeling events I’m not sure there’s much that has actually changed in the end: perhaps the Leveilleur family drama is the biggest thing? The storytelling seemed to abandon the ‘difficult choices’ theme from last time, and although there are a couple of ‘summing up’ aspects, it read a lot more as a prologue to Endwalker than anything else.

Yet another meeting at the silly table, this time with a bunch of beast tribe leaders — good to see Frixio again. There’s a suspicious lack of moogles and some insight into the designers’ penchant for characterization through headgear. Reads a bit awkwardly that they have to stand while everyone else stays sat down.

We found the Grand Company of Eorzea, a formal alliance with the ‘beast tribes’ [ok we have to fix this language], a culmination of stories going all the way back – as Thancred says, we’re in sight of a land without primals, the threat that motivated the Garlean conquest (on paper anyway) and our activities since level one.

I wonder if we’re basically done here, story-wise, or if we’ll spend significant time on realistic ructions and developments within this grand alliance (no discussion of an actual structure or governance model for any of this, for example). For now at least it feels like a way to officially end this long-running theme.

Fourchenault, the twins’ father, shows up in response to Krile going to Sharlayan for help. It’s mostly all a big trope – jolly family catchup segueing into cold refusals into angry offspring-disowning and huffy exit, but the writing and performances are good. The disowning part was a surprise and annoyingly not addressed — what does it mean in reality, what does it mean to the twins?

He says some eyebrow-raising things like this conflict is […] between yourselves and Garlemald and if the Final Days were truly upon us then we would know. Krile dials in somehow, says she’s being ignored and expounds a 4D-chess theory about how Something Weird is going on and, despite any evidence at all, the Sharlayans actually are concerned about the Telophoroi.

It’s pretty unconvincing — set up for our trip to Sharlayan in Endwalker though. Will it be mystical mind control, politics, or coerced cooperation?

(This whole Sharlayan bit follows the wrapping things up theme: ARR’s inciting incident was Fourchenault’s father Louisoix and Bahamut – I suppose F is likely resentful of us and intervention in general because of how his dad died. The disowning part could be read as symbolic (in a super blunt way) of the twins maturing and becoming their own people, if that wasn’t pretty apparent from their heroics over the past decade.)

Quick scene with Arenvald in a wheelchair to gee up Alphinaud and get scolded by Fordola. Bit unsatisfactory given all the drama last time. We’ll either see him walking again or confined to G-Warrior, Barbara Gordon style. Hope he gets some character development out of this rather than it just being used as impetus for others.

Fandaniel and his legions are attacking Cartenau. This picture is amazing, I would buy a decent minifig of my character in a flash. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually turn into a hex-based tactics game, but this presentation is super, role-playing as Alisaie, Urianger, and G’raha — this interface has come on a huge way, great confidence in players with the number of buttons. Not at all challenging, but doesn’t last long enough to stop being interesting. I think Alisaie won the fight were I was RPing as G’raha with an RDM LB3, very funny given her Trust eagerness to use the LB gauge.

It turns out Cartenau is a ley line or something and if Fandaniel blows up some sigils here then it will be Bad. We foil his plan (though I only manage Lunar Ifrit because Estinien has superpowers). Fandaniel does an evil shrug and leaves – bit weird, half-read it as aha ’twas only a distraction but apparently not. The battle is shown as serious and large-scale, significant casualties to our alliance.

And that’s basically it – we all gaze at the moon for no reason…. Some epilogue wrap-up:

• Fandaniel confirms to Zenos that the Cartenau gambit was for real. They need aether to charge up ‘The Gateway of the Gods’ — and instead of Cartenau they’ll get it by having ‘the dreamer’ ‘dream more deeply’. Which is all a bit eldritch, if you take my drift.
• The towers around Eorzea are extracting aether from the land. I’m not sure why it was important to spend time on this besides it backing up what F + Z are up to.
• We meet a glowy force-ghost human-looking lady with an Amoratine mask by Silvertear Lake. She says something vague and vanishes.
• When Arenvald and Fordola messed with that tower it killed all of the people inside! Yikes. So, er, we’re not going to mess with the towers any more [oh is that what the aether thing was about – cut off their power supply instead?]
• Krile is busy arranging our passage to Sharlayan: it will take a while because we’re not welcome….

So – next stop Sharlayan, on the flimsiest of pretexts? The spread of locations we know about in Endwalker is pretty wild, so they could easily surprise us with a “but first” trip to somewhere else, but Sharlayan seems like the best bet.

I hope things quickly get more desparate: right now I’m not really feeling an ‘end of days’ vibe or any real urgency. Interesting comparing to last time, 4.55 – that actually felt like a worse situation because all my friends were comatose. It’s tough to generate similar levels of emotion from an ‘end of the world’ plot because, well, we know the world’s not going to end — whereas we have enough companions who’ve done enough things that at least one of them must have a weak spot in their plot armour. Looking at you, Thancred and Y’shtola.