“Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail delivers an emotional gut punch, even if it takes some time to get there.”
- New zones are stunning
- Standout best battle content
- New jobs are welcome additions
- Powerful, unexpected story moments
- Pacing is up and down
- Both halves feel underexplored
When Final Fantasy XIV’s newest expansion, Dawntrail, was revealed, it was pitched as a summer vacation to the new continent of Tural. I was ready to kick up my feet, sip a tropical drink on the beach with my Warrior of Light player character, and take some much needed time off. The thing I forgot about summer vacation, though, is that it eventually ends. Everything you put on pause for a few months is still there to be dealt with when you return — much like the elementary school kid who throws their backpack off on the last day of school, only for it to collect dust until the following school year.
I went into Dawntrail expecting a Shonen-like tournament arc as my friends and I helped propel our new ally Wuk Lamat to power. Instead, I walked away with a new lesson on mortality, what it means to be remembered, and so much more. It’s a strong expansion for Square Enix’s excellent MMORPG, but it requires some patience to see why that is.
Vacation’s over
Whatever you think Dawntrail is in its first half is brought into question, challenged, and flipped on its head in the second act, but it takes time to show its hand. This largely works in its favor, although there are quite a few stumbles along the way to bridge these two ideas together.
Dawntrail positions itself in the early hours as a story of succession for the throne. The current leader, Gulool Ja Ja, known as the Dawnservant, has tasked his three children (Wuk Lamat, Koana, and Zoraal Ja) and tournament winner Bakool Ja Ja with performing the “Rite of Succession” a scavenger hunt that will lead them all over the Tural countryside in hopes of finding the fabled City of Gold. Think of it like a season of Survivor meets the HBO drama Succession.
While Dawntrail’s story has heart, it feels like the first half often lacks fangs …
Wuk Lamat, our newest ally, has asked us to accompany her on this Rite as she learns about the culture of her people outside of the city walls in search of the City of Gold. Surprisingly, our Warrior of Light takes a back seat during this expansion, and is no longer the front-and-center star on the screen. Instead, they give guidance and counsel to Wuk Lamat as she forges forward to learn about the people she one day hopes to rule.
Wuk Lamat hopes to be a ruler through peace, like her father before her. She approaches every conversation and conflict through this lens. The overly optimistic Shonen protagonist trope doesn’t always work for me when dealing with a story of putting people into political power.
Years of a failing political system have sanded and grounded me into paste. We’re in an election year and having the political message be “the power of friendship is unbeatable” feels like telling a bunch of people “to go out and vote” when they already have and are exhausted from running the capitalist treadmill we’ve been on since birth. It feels like it rings hollow, even in a fantasy world. Characters swiftly get on board with the idea, and while Dawntrail’s story has heart, it feels like the first half often lacks the fangs to challenge these understandings and sink into them.
I understand Wuk Lamat and the writers of this expansion’s optimistic sentiments, but it feels like a very surface-level approach to themes they have done better in previous expansions like Heavensward and Shadowbringers. However, where the early hours of Dawntrail shine are through the writing of Tural’s cultures, people, and cities. It takes the time to let each race breathe, while learning the trials and tribulations each area goes through just to get through the day.
A standout moment is when our crew is challenged to create Xibruq Pibil, a native dish that holds significant cultural value to the people of Yak Tel. Ask any chef or world traveler and they will tell you the best way to understand a culture is through its food. This moment takes the party on a journey of discovery, one filled with pain and scars, both emotional and physical, as they learn how this dish came form two cultures at war with one another. It suddenly paints the landscape in a new light, and the burned-down forest and desolate wounds come into focus.
While the quest structure is reminiscent of previous expansions, Dawntrail relies heavily in its first half on worldbuilding, setting up the dominoes in place to be challenged later. That’s necessary to set up an entire new continent, people, and culture. It’s a lot of reading, watching cutscenes, and learning about an entirely new world to both the player and their Warrior of Light. While it feels like the conclusion to each zone are just variations on the same theme, it tees up the second half to test these ideologies quite nicely.
Lasting legacies
Of course, there are dungeons and battle content dispersed throughout these moments to keep players in the action. Dawntrail’s battles are some of the MMO’s strongest yet. They don’t just iterate on previous mechanics, but bring new ideas to the table to keep even the most seasoned Warrior of Light on their toes. Up until the very end of each fight, I was hitting buttons in a panic and hoping my healer could keep me alive as I took hit after hit to the face.
While this does help break up some of the longer stretches of story, it still feels like Dawntrail has a pacing problem. The first half of the expansion feels slow and sometimes too drawn out. The back half feels like it’s trying to densely pack another story into the mix. Dawntrail is an expansion of two ideas that foil one another, with neither getting the room it needs to fully blossom.
Eventually, Dawntrail takes a turn and trades in its Mesoamerican inspirations for a neon-filled and sci-fi aesthetic. For story reasons that I won’t get into, it swiftly switches gear to test Wuk Lamat’s ideas and leadership strategy in more ways than one.
While the first half of Dawntrail brings up the idea of legacy and mortality, it’s the back half of the expansion that really brings those ideas to the forefront. How do you handle a civilization that deals with these ideas so differently than your own understanding, and how do you find middle ground to move forward?
At some point in all of our lives, we take stock of what’s important to us, and eventually have to have the uncomfortable conversations about what happens when a loved one passes. It’s like having to put our lives and memories into a box like trinkets being sold at a garage sale, only to have those we leave behind rummage through the box and experience myriad feelings ranging across the spectrum. Is our legacy carried by those we leave behind, or is it in the small fleeting moments like a funny joke or a loving embrace?
It made me think back to how I remember the loved ones I’ve lost in my own life as I fidget with a silver ballpoint pen left to me from my late grandfather that I used to take notes about this review. We’ve all lost someone in this life, and will continue to do so, because all life ends eventually. That’s part of what makes it beautiful, this idea that our time is limited. And while we choose how we spend it, we don’t get to choose how we’re remembered. We only hope that what we chose to do in this world will be carried on by those around us.
Dawntrail kicks into high gear at this point, and drives these concepts home in some outstanding ways by throwing everything you’ve learned back at you. When I spoke to director and producer Noaki Yoshida earlier this year, he mentioned that this would be an expansion of conflicting values and how characters deal with opposing viewpoints. The second half pulls that out in full force, giving you an opposition that will not shake its way of life, or how it strives to get there.
It left me in shambles …
Most FFXIV expansions have made me well up with tears at my computer, and Dawntrail’s second half does this in spades. The last zone, in particular, is the perfect idea of blending together storytelling with player agency. It left me in shambles as I knew I had to progress to see it to the end, but what the game asked me to do was oftentimes so emotionally taxing that I had to step back from my computer from time to time.
When designing an MMO, a new zone is built for repeatable content and is often made to not feel stale or lifeless. However, the team decided to use the last zone of Dawntrail for something else, a powerful story section that flies in the face of most normal design techniques. It’s not only an impressive subversion of expectations — it’s the emotional core of what Dawntrail was building. It’s one of those moments you hear FFXIV players talking about from the outside.
Composer Masayoshi Soken and his team have provided a score that punctuates every moment of the expansion. From high-energy bursts of jazz and strings to crunchy breakdowns and lo-fi beats. Yet again, FFXIV’s music isn’t just there to be background noise, but to elevate the emotional highs of each and every scene. While the lyrical tracks this time around air on the side of a Disney musical, everything else flourishes.
New visuals, new jobs
A FFXIV expansion isn’t all just about story. Alongside what we know as 7.0, we also got a major graphical overhaul to the zones, character models, and just about every other facet. It looks great and provides a much-needed refresh to the nearly 14-year-old MMO. New lighting processes fall more naturally, characters are more defined, and some of those terrible textures finally look a tad better.
It feels like the team finally has a wide horizon ahead of them.
The expansion brings two new Jobs to the fold as well, and they’re both welcome additions. The Pictomancer’s colorful casting makes it a vibrant and exciting addition to the ranged magic DPS suite. And the Viper’s twinblades feel like a natural addition to an already stacked roster of Melee DPS Jobs.
Pictomancer is the clear standout, being the most silly class the team has brought into the game. It uses spells to weave together combos, unleashing different scenic landscapes, creatures, and even giant hammers onto the field. Its animations not only showcase the graphical update nicely, but are such a far departure from the normal red and blue hues we’ve seen from casters previously.
Dawntrail still has a long way to go. The next few years of patch content will touch on unanswered threads and point us in the direction of where we go from here. It’s hard to tell how things like the previously announced, but still mysterious “Cosmic Exploration” endgame activity will shake out. We’ll also have to wait to see the limited Beastmaster job in action — it’s supposed to come late in the Dawntrail patch.
Dawntrail sets the stage for what’s next, and it feels like the team finally has a wide horizon ahead of them. Its stumbles still help provide the building blocks for the next 10 years of the MMO, and my Warrior of Light is ready for whatever adventure awaits them next.
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail was tested on PC.
