Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail has a bit of a script issue—several, in fact—and while there were certainly moments I enjoyed quite a lot, it marks an otherwise low point for the MMO’s otherwise sterling reputation for emotive and impactful storytelling. Well, except for that one questline before Titan back in A Realm Reborn, but we don’t talk about the Company of Heroes.
Among the complaints, one of which I share, is that Wuk Lamat is given way, way too much screentime. It’s not even an indictment of the character herself, I actually happen to like her, conceptually—and I was broadly charmed by her in the expansion’s first few hours—but the writing weighs her so heavily you get a little sick of her no matter how much of a cat person you are.
It’s been known that Wuk Lamat has the most lines in the expansion’s story by a long shot for a while—she has around 2,600, which is over 1,600 more lines than the next most verbose character in the script. But a recent additional analysis by story sleuth turn_a_blind_eye/Rise Narukami on the game’s subreddit has also revealed a new layer of overbearing.
See, they also went ahead and determined what the most-used phrases were for each character, omitting common words like “what”, “and”, and so on. Not only is Wuk Lamat the most talkative out of the expansion’s crew, she’s also the name that’s most often on the runner-up’s lips. Erenville, Dawntrail’s second-ranking yapper, mentions her name 41 times. While Krile, coming in at number three, mentions her 44 times over the course of the story.
What’s more, synonyms for Wuk Lamat—”Lamaty’i” and “Third Promise”—are also tremendously common. Further analysis sees that, in the entire script, these three synonyms are cumulatively spoken 468 times. Or, as user SilverStryfe maths out, an average of once every 2.7 minutes during Dawntrail’s 21 hours of cutscenes, if you spread them out.
In terms of raw words, Wuk Lamat spoke 35,019—compared to Erenville’s 14,135 and Krile’s 9,490. For context, a short novella is about 50,000 words, meaning that all of Wuk Lamat’s raw wordage could literally almost fill a book.
Still, I personally maintain that Wuk Lamat isn’t so much a bad character as she’s an easy target for the problems of Dawntrail’s writing—all of the critiques I could level at her are easily applicable to how other characters act within the story. Her being chained to the spotlight like this, though, means that most criticisms are going to reference her as much as its supporting cast did just because, well, she makes up the bulk of it. The inability of Dawntrail to prioritise its cast properly should’ve been caught early on in the editor’s room, and it’s certainly not worth abusing any voice actors over.
On a more positive note, Bakool Ja Ja’s most-spoken phrase is “Gehehehe”, which I think is lovely. Bakool babygirls stay winning.
There’s a joke from an old episode of Simpsons, where in a bid to keep the unpopular character Poochie on air (because he voices him), Homer suggests “Whenever Poochie’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, ‘where’s Poochie?'”
It’s sort of beyond satire that this is quite literally what’s happened in Dawntrail’s story. I can only hope that Square won’t make the same mistake in its next expansion, though Yoshi-P seemed to acknowledge that they’d screwed the pooch(ie) on Wuk Lamat when I talked to him back in August. We live in hope.