i think i'm gonna do it over multiple plurks, divided by zone/plot arc in chronological order as if i were doing it live

this plurk will be covering the intro and kozama'uka/urqopacha part 1, so turn away if you don't want early dawntrail spoilers

one of the first things i noticed was, having just recently cleared eureka, there was a new addition to the walls of the baldesion annex main hall

this gave me warm fuzzies

i had to grab a screenshot of this full-screen version of the world map the moment i saw it

man plurk is absolutely KILLING the resolution of my chonky reshade screenshots

i think i'd have gotten better results with vanilla screenshots lmfao

it's ok they look beautiful on my machine and my machine only

one thing about me is i never screenshot dialogue but i take EVERY fucking opportunity to screenshot my wol when he is framed in a pretty way

The Crew in tuliyollal

i can't get used to the music in tuliyollal. it's objectively good music but it is NOT my vibe at all unfortunately

i never got a screenshot of it but i am SUCH a big fan of how good the new material shaders are for the aetherytes

also hello?? why??? do tural quests give nightworld coins?????

the coins which otherwise only come from quests in norvrandt????

also i'm noticing i have a MASSIVE gap in screenshots between the first hour or two of dawntrail and like. the latter half of it. so maybe not all of these plurks will have screenshots.

i love koana but unfortunately his mint green machinist coat is so fucking ugly

i hit the palace and got post-graphical-update rain for the first time so i REALLY started to appreciate the reflectiveness of the floor textures at about this time

also the gold. you can see it in wuk lamat's tiara/wrist cuffs and also the dawnservant's throne. it's like. not even in the same ZIP CODE as how metals used to look in this game

i wish i were more proactive about screenshotting stuff, it would make this sort of thing a lot easier to talk about

you can kind of notice the handoff in writers/writing approach between 6.55 and 7.0 because erenville suddenly drops the term "Third Promise" during conversation in sharlayan with no explanation, when that term had NEVER been used prior to that point, in all the time talking to/about wuk lamat during 6.55

i assume the term either hadn't been established yet or wasn't included in the reference documents used by whoever wrote 6.55

and it's not until you land in tuliyollal and talk to people who recognize wuk lamat that you can start to intuit what the term even means

i super enjoy how food is like, immediately centered in the narrative. it will come to be a big theme in the story as a whole, and you can start to see it as early as the introduction to tuliyollal, and there are even echoes of it in 6.55

i wonder how the hanu hanu eat reeds. i'm sure that's a reference to some kind of real-world cuisine/culinary tradition, but i am not familiar with it and i am left to wonder what reeds are like to eat.

considering they also use the same reeds as a building material, that left me REALLY curious

YEAH I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THAT

game: references how the hanu hanu's harvest god idol bears a striking resemblance to "an entity in akademeia anyder". me: thinking about how quetzalcoatl is one of axzem's canonical summons.

I think they probably eat some young shoots and the panicles of mature reeds, and possibly also some rhizomes

also damn, they gave you specifically a lil present

YEAH it will be a while yet before i can see my quetz summon in-game again but it is still there in my heart

ax would have to think REAL careful about summoning it anywhere in view of the hanu hano though

*hanu, thanks keyboard

i was quite charmed by the little trading sequence with the pelu pelu

i wonder if the whole recurring "one pel.... in the millions column" bit is a thing imported from the FFX-verse or if that's just a thing turali pelu pelu do

i am waiting with baited breath for the day we get access to a golden alpaca mount

i happen to already have foreknowledge of how the regular alpaca mount comes into play so i am quite satisfied about that at least

i wondered while doing the quests if it was actually possible to guess incorrectly about which person was tobli, since i happened to guess correctly but didn't feel like i had sufficient information. however, i learned from watching a streamer do the same scene that you can TOTALLY get it wrong and i in fact just got lucky

they really wanted you to know that mablu is a girl pelu pelu, so they dyed her clothes cherry pink. i think this was perhaps slightly unnecessary.

i was quite impressed by the scale of the mountain in the distance in urqopacha. they REALLY sell it

later experimentation with flying in urqopacha leads me to suspect the mountain is actually a part of the skybox. it does not seem to get closer or further away regardless of how much you move

on the ground at the entrance from tuliyollal (the furthest possible point from the mountain) vs. max altitude at the southwest corner of the map (as close as you can possibly get to the mountain)

you can see the clouds in the distance moving down and getting larger as you go higher and get closer, but the mountain remains totally static

which sounds like a critique but i actually think it REALLY effectively sells the massive size and distance of the thing

oh i was totally wrong

ktisis just updated so i thought i'd try boundary breaking to see how it works. and. the mountain is real.

it's just. Quite Large and Quite Far Away.

like, further than the entire length and breadth of the playable area of urqopacha as far as i can tell

it's not as large or as far as it's probably meant to be in-universe, so there's some SLIGHT forced perspective happening, but not nearly as much as i would have expected

and i cant stress enough that it is still Quite Large

holy SHIT i would also have assumed it was part of the skybox but no?????