Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail has a little bit of a script situation—a number of, in actual fact—and whereas there have been definitely moments I loved quite a bit, it marks an in any other case low level for the MMO’s in any other case sterling status for emotive and impactful storytelling. Well, aside from that one questline earlier than Titan again in A Realm Reborn, however we do not discuss concerning the Company of Heroes.
Among the complaints, one in all which I share, is that Wuk Lamat is given approach, approach an excessive amount of screentime. It’s not even an indictment of the character herself, I truly occur to love her, conceptually—and I used to be broadly charmed by her within the growth’s first few hours—however the writing weighs her so closely you get a little bit sick of her regardless of how a lot of a cat particular person you might be.
It’s been identified that Wuk Lamat has essentially the most strains within the growth’s story by a protracted shot for some time—she has round 2,600, which is over 1,600 extra strains than the following most verbose character within the script. But a latest further evaluation by story sleuth turn_a_blind_eye/Rise Narukami on the sport’s subreddit has additionally revealed a brand new layer of overbearing.
See, additionally they went forward and decided what the most-used phrases had been for every character, omitting widespread phrases like “what”, “and”, and so forth. Not solely is Wuk Lamat essentially the most talkative out of the growth’s crew, she’s additionally the identify that is most frequently on the runner-up’s lips. Erenville, Dawntrail’s second-ranking yapper, mentions her identify 41 instances. While Krile, coming in at quantity three, mentions her 44 instances over the course of the story.
I Analyzed All the Dialogue for 7.0 Dawntrail from r/ffxiv
What’s extra, synonyms for Wuk Lamat—”Lamaty’i” and “Third Promise”—are additionally tremendously widespread. Further evaluation sees that, in your complete script, these three synonyms are cumulatively spoken 468 instances. Or, as person SilverStryfe maths out, a median of as soon as each 2.7 minutes throughout Dawntrail’s 21 hours of cutscenes, for those who unfold them out.
In phrases of uncooked phrases, Wuk Lamat spoke 35,019—in comparison with Erenville’s 14,135 and Krile’s 9,490. For context, a brief novella is about 50,000 phrases, which means that each one of Wuk Lamat’s uncooked wordage may actually nearly fill a ebook.
Still, I personally keep that Wuk Lamat is not a lot a foul character as she’s a simple goal for the issues of Dawntrail’s writing—all the critiques I may stage at her are simply relevant to how different characters act inside the story. Her being chained to the highlight like this, although, implies that most criticisms are going to reference her as a lot as its supporting forged did simply because, effectively, she makes up the majority of it. The incapability of Dawntrail to prioritise its forged correctly ought to’ve been caught early on within the editor’s room, and it is definitely not price abusing any voice actors over.
On a extra constructive word, Bakool Ja Ja’s most-spoken phrase is “Gehehehe”, which I believe is beautiful. Bakool babygirls keep profitable.
There’s a joke from an outdated episode of Simpsons, the place in a bid to maintain the unpopular character Poochie on air (as a result of he voices him), Homer suggests “Whenever Poochie’s not on display, all the opposite characters needs to be asking, ‘the place’s Poochie?'”
It’s type of past satire that that is fairly actually what’s occurred in Dawntrail’s story. I can solely hope that Square will not make the identical mistake in its subsequent growth, although Yoshi-P appeared to acknowledge that they’d screwed the pooch(ie) on Wuk Lamat after I talked to him again in August. We stay in hope.
