I don’t really hang out in gamer forums or subreddits. Nothing against them; I just find myself chafing against a lot of gamers’ opinions on things I also care about, and I’d rather not give myself a headache. So I don’t know what Final Fantasy XIV players were expecting with Dawntrail, the most recent expansion and the start of “a new chapter” in the game’s ongoing saga.
That said, I couldn’t keep completely in the dark about their Hot Takes regarding the new expac; I learned purely through osmosis that people have a problem with new character Wuk Lamat’s voice actor, Sena Bryer, and I know they think the character herself is annoying and pointless. I know that some actual critics didn’t like the mission structure or the sheer volume of missions they were compelled to complete; I know others who didn’t enjoy the story’s third act and it tanked their opinion of the expac entirely.
As I’ve been mulling over my approach to this review I’ve had to examine these externalities in tandem with my own views on the expansion. I found myself pleasantly surprised by most of what is contained inside Dawntrail, but was not immune to some of what I think are its weakest aspects, most of which lived in what I’m going to call the third act.
Here’s the briefest rundown of Dawntrail I can muster: after the events of Endwalker and its patch content have simmered down, our Warrior of Light is approached by a woman from across the ocean and asked to assist her in a rite of succession for another country’s throne. The woman is Wuk Lamat, the country is Tural, and the rite of succession is for the title of “Dawnservant,” a position currently held by Wuk Lamat’s adoptive father, Gulool Ja Ja.
We agree, make the return trip to Tural’s capital city, Tuliyollal, and promptly embark on the rite of succession in competition with three other claimants: Wuk Lamat’s adoptive brothers, Koana and Zoraal Ja, and the presumptive antagonist of the expansion, Bakool Ja Ja, a rude bully who uses his paired strength and skill at magic to intimidate people into following him. We learn that the rite of succession is a bit like the Electoral College of the United States without the popular vote; we have to travel with Wuk Lamat to each region of Tural and impress an elector to receive a gemstone marking our success. If she gets seven gemstones, she earns the seat of Dawnservant.
Wuk Lamat is the peace, love and understanding claimant, the Tank class with a heart of gold and a desire to really know the people she’s setting out to rule over. She starts off naive and a bit sheltered, but over the course of her journey – and with our assistance – she grows strong enough to stand on her own and claim the Dawnservant position fair and square.
Spoilers, I guess: Wuk Lamat wins. You know it from the moment you start the expansion. She’s got “battle anime protagonist” written all over her. Everyone else falls into similarly formulaic roles as well. Koana, for example, is the tsundere technophile who becomes a staunch ally; Zoraal Ja is the quiet brooding character whose kind of sinister goals don’t become apparent until later; Bakool Ja Ja is the spoiler, the chaos agent, a character who tries to lie, cheat and steal their way onto the throne, whose motivation has tragic and traumatizing roots. It’s a story you’ve seen a thousand times before, but its familiarity didn’t dull its effectiveness, for me.
I liked this bit of the expansion. I liked Wuk Lamat. She’s quickly climbed up the ranks of my “FFXIV characters I’d most like to go on a picnic with” list, almost – almost – dethroning G’raha Tia. There’s a bit that I genuinely haven’t been able to get out of my head for four weeks, where Wuk Lamat, visibly scared of heights and about to board a dirigible to another region, asks us to hold her hand. It’s a small, adorable moment. I enjoy games that bother to include small, adorable moments! So sue me.
It was after this aspect of our adventure in Tural was over, when we finished our obligations to Wuk Lamat, that things started to feel off.
Tural is broadly modeled after the Americas, which means that while it’s all just called “Tural” in marketing and by most of the characters, there’s a North (Xak) and a South (Yok) portion of the continent. Yok Tural is where most of the story that I liked takes place; Xak Tural is where things go off the rails a little bit.
After Wuk Lamat becomes Dawnservant (and serves up an only-slightly unexpected narrative twist as her first act), everyone goes their separate ways. Alphinaud and Alisaie stay in Tuliyollal with Krile to learn more about the famed City of Gold, while Thancred and Urianger – who had been helping Koana – prepare to go on a vacation tour of the continent.
We tag along with Erenville – a Viera gleaner who we met during Endwalker – as he travels to visit his mother in Shaaloani, an area of Xak Tural. We stop along the way to explore the extremely stereotypical Old West Mining Towns that pepper this southern region of Xak Tural, and get involved in some light Western (genre) shenanigans, before a vaguely-Final Fantasy IX-themed extra dimension is dropped on our heads. We rush back to Tuliyollal to find it under attack by futuristic automatons and a cyborg-ified Zoraal Ja, who has inexplicably become the King of Alexandria.
It is that Alexandria, by the way, but changed in the fashion that all of FFXIV‘s glimpses into the worlds and stories of other Final Fantasy games have changed them. Alexandria here has become a super-technologically-advanced society, full of functionally-immortal hypebeasts who live in luxury and hardly any want thanks to a soul storage technology that also functions as a feeding tube for the digital “living memories” of everyone in Alexandria who has ever died – or who ever will.
Instead of Princess Garnet (or Queen Brahne) we have Queen Sphene; instead of the rusty-armored Steiner or the sensitive homunculus Black Mage Vivi, we have Ser Owen, the valorous — and robotic — former Lord Captain of the Royal Knights. Instead of Zidane, we have… our Warrior of Light. Or maybe Wuk Lamat? There’s no 1:1 parallel with everyone from that prior game, of course, and it doesn’t really matter, because even though the setting is FFIX‘s Alexandria, the story doesn’t really have anything to do with FFIX in any interpretation.
Rather, we have to answer what I believe is the simplest trolley problem that has ever existed: do we let this dimensional intrusion, this Alexandria from another shard of Etheirys, kill everyone in the Source just to power a fundamentally unsustainable memory storage device? Or do we prevent them from harvesting everyone on the planet, killing off the memory device but leaving everyone else in the physical city of Alexandria alive?
I know these stories are often simplistic by design, but this particular beat had me hardcore rolling my eyes.
What’s worse is that this whole section of the game feels like a diversion from what I view as the whole point of the expansion, which was to reestablish my Warrior of Light’s bona fides as an adventurer, to give me somewhere new and neat to wander around in, and to let me help people carry crates down the road to my strange, strange heart’s content.
This is maybe where I differ the most from others who didn’t seem to enjoy this expansion: I am a big fan of doing a bunch of seemingly-pointless quests just to help people with daily life shit. I love that shit. I loved exploring Yok Tural with Wuk Lamat, traversing big rivers and climbing even bigger mountains to talk to folks with different perspectives and priorities, learning what they cared about, and doing them small kindnesses. I genuinely wish I could have done that more with Erenville in Xak Tural; I really hope we get to explore the northern half of the continent more in future updates.
Did Dawntrail need to be some moment of escalation, a further raising of the stakes after Endwalker? No. And I’m glad it wasn’t. I’m glad we got to take a backseat for once and let this story be someone else’s, for the most part. I think Wuk Lamat (and her voice actor, Sena Bryer) are fantastic additions to the game’s tapestry of characters. I’m glad we went back to our more humble (even if some might find it boring) roots and just spent most of the time being pathologically helpful. I only wish Dawntrail would have stuck to its guns in this regard.
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