Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Review - An Inconsistent Vacation

From its its initial reveal, the latest Final Fantasy XIV expansion Dawntrail has had some lofty expectations to live up to. It’s the follow-up to a decade-long story arc, which ended strong with Endwalker (despite some issues post-launch.)

And, going into Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, I knew that this would be a more subdued expansion — one that sets things up for the decade to come rather than a bombastic finale. However, even with my lowered expectations Dawntrail still manages to stumble in a number of unfortunate ways.

Heading West

Dawntrail sees the Warrior of Light heading west to the continent of Tural. Here, they must help Wuk Lamat — a character introduced at the tail end of Endwalker’s patch content — become the next leader of Tuliyollal, otherwise known as the Dawnservant.

This objective is the main focus of Dawntrail’s early story, with the player accompanying Wuk Lamat across the various zones of Tural as she competes in the Dawnservant competition. Her rivals in the race to the throne are her brothers Koana and Zoraal Ja, along with the loudmouthed two-headed Bakool Ja Ja.

It’s a far cry from the world-ending stakes that often accompany the Warrior of Light’s journey, with only a hint of danger along the way. This was something I was more than fine with since it almost mirrors the calmer beginning of A Realm Reborn. While you have lots of achievements under your belt, you’re relatively unknown in this new region

Wuk Lamat is absolutely the main focus of this expansion, making her presence known during most of your time in Tural. The Warrior of Light ends up taking a backseat, acting as more of a mentor figure but still getting their time to shine on occasion.

While I can absolutely see why this setup would annoy some people — we have been saving the world for over 10 years now — I was personally on board with this different style of story.

However, there are a few things that I think Dawntrail gets wrong that squander this narrative’s potential.

For starters, Wuk Lamat is meant to be treated as someone that means well, yet doesn’t have that much life experience. But at times she often comes across as a little too ignorant, basically not knowing things that the Warrior of Light learns within a few hours of arriving in each area.

The process of becoming a Dawnservant also ends up being a little uninteresting. Each part of the challenge is designed to have the participants learn more about Tural, such as working with the locals to tame an alpaca or cook a regional dish. I get the idea behind it — it’s an easy way to give the player more info on a new region.

My issue with it is that you often learn things that should have been basic knowledge to someone in Wuk Lamat’s position. If she was so dead set on becoming the next Dawnservant and following in her father’s footsteps, then naturally you’d also want to learn more about the place you’d like to rule ahead of time.

Again, her lack of knowledge is not something that’s completely ignored by the story. The problem is that, with how quickly she learns things during Dawntrail, the fact that she basically knew nothing beforehand comes across as strange.

Another issue that also pertains to Wuk Lamat is that, frankly, she’s present for far too much of the story. Sure, she’s essentially the main character of the expansion, yet it takes away screen time from basically everyone else.

This is most felt with both Erenville and Krile. For Erenville, this expansion could have been a good way for the game to give more time to a character that was only briefly present in Endwalker. For Krile, you’re led to believe that she’ll end up being an important character that ties into upcoming events.

In reality, neither really gets the time they need for their respective arcs. Erenville at least has some time to shine, though he’s mostly relegated to commenting on Wuk Lamat’s troublemaking — ironically, you get to spend the most time with Erenville during the one section where Wuk Lamat is barely present.

Meanwhile, Krile’s whole plotline is seemingly ignored for 90% of the main story. Her goal of finding out the truth behind her grandfather’s journeys in Tural is pushed to the side outside of the occasional mention. And when it does become the focus, it’s all resolved without that much fanfare.

Without going into spoiler territory, Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail’s main plot also ends up falling into Stormblood’s familiar pitfall: it tries to tell multiple stories without having enough time to deal with each. Conflicts are started and resolved within a few levels, because that’s all the story structure has time for.

The Dawnservant section comes across as an abridged version of a previous draft due to ending partway through the expansion. In fact, this might be why the competition plotline is used at al,l since it had to be crammed into half an expansion.

From there, what comes after is also not quite given the time it needs. This partially plays into the problems I mentioned earlier with Erenville and Krile — the former does get a section of their own, but it’s tied to a zone that almost feels like filler at the same time.

In the end, I did like seeing some of the new zones and characters across Tural, even if the actual plot didn’t do much for me. Even Wuk Lamat wasn’t that bad, despite the overexposure and some questionable voice direction for the English dub. However, it’s definitely one of the weaker aspects of Dawntrail for me, and I don’t think the patches will improve things.

Better Battle Content, Despite Some Strange Job Design

On the more positive side of things, dungeon content is better than it’s ever been.

For a while now, it’s felt like dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV have been playing it a little too safe. Not just in terms of their layouts (dungeons are still essentially just one long line), but in mechanics. Many bosses in Endwalker would throw out a few different mechanics, and then just loop the same thing again.

In Dawntrail, most of the bosses have more going for them. Mechanics will be remixed for the second half of a boss encounter, and many of them require you to think much faster than before.

You’re obviously not getting anything too extreme (regular dungeon content is designed to be cleared by most skill levels) though I’m happy to have some more engaging content even while leveling.

This extends to the 8-player trials as well, or at least the latter two. Rather than just having a couple of mechanics that don’t evolve, you’re required to keep an eye on how things change later in the fights. It definitely seems like the design team for battle content is trying to challenge players a little more, even if it took five expansions to get to that point.

I’m especially looking forward to Dawntrail raid series The Arcadion, which has the potential to be some of the game’s best battle content if handled right. Hopefully, it lives up to the improvements seen across battle content in the base version of the expansion.

On the other hand, job design is in a strange spot. For some like Summoner, they basically stayed exactly the same (I have no idea what the idea was behind Solar Bahamaut.) Others got some noticeable changes. For Astrologian, the card changes bring it a little closer to the original Heavensward design (with less RNG).

In the case of Black Mage, changes to rotations and MP regeneration have put the job in a strange spot. So much so that changes are already planned for an upcoming patch, which also includes tweaks to Monk and tank enmity generation.

The overall design choice behind jobs in Dawntrail is mostly just to add extra skills that don’t require any extra buttons on your hotbars. Most just transform existing moves into new ones, adding the end of existing combos or buff skills.

In general, I think most existing jobs aren’t much better or worse than in Endwalker. It’s surprising to see that moves with positional damage bonuses are still in the game — for a time, it seemed like these would go away entirely — and I do like some of the additions yo jobs like White Mage and Warrior received.

When it comes to the two new jobs, Pictomancer and Viper, it’s a mixed bag. Pictomancer has ended up becoming one of my new favorite jobs to play. The painting mechanic gives it an identity without being overly complicated to understand, with lots of big damage attacks to make up for downtime.

Inversely, Viper is somewhat underwhelming (though still strong.) Its combos are unique in the sense that you change back and forth between two buttons that transform after each hit. You also have speedy attacks in a similar vein to Monk and Ninja, with many buttons to hit during your burst phases.

But outside of animations — including some cool combined dual-blade attacks — I mostly feel that the transforming combos don’t add that much new to the table.

A Realm Reborn, Again

Another key aspect of Dawntrail that applies to all players is the visual changes that have started with the expansion’s launch. Character models have received noticeable touch-ups, the new zones have more detail than before, gear sets are more detailed, and you can even dye (certain) equipment between two dye channels.

This is still a work in progress, as most earlier content is still yet to receive these changes. It can be a little jarring seeing the new character models combined with older gear — in fact, even some of the new characters are using gear with pixelated textures. But for the most part, the team has done a good job of touching up a decade-old game for newer audiences.

While it might still be a few years before everything is improved, and it obviously won't match the visuals of modern-day non-MMO titles, I like what I’ve seen so far.

Oddly, while the game improved visually across the board, the audio seems to have suffered a little bit. Not in terms of music, as Dawntrail’s OST is consistently excellent and keeps up the quality shown throughout each expansion. Instead, it’s the English voice acting that I have some gripes with.

Early Final Fantasy XIV was a little weird with English voice acting, some were great but mostly a bit inconsistent. This has improved over the years, with only the occasional outlier bringing it down. With Dawntrail, we seem to have gone back to the inconsistency seen from the early days of XIV.

That’s not to say there isn’t some excellent voice acting, especially when it comes to characters from the non-playable races. Mamool Ja like Bakool Ja Ja and Zoraal Ja are excellently voiced, and many side characters get some quality voiced scenes.

But as mentioned earlier, Wuk Lamat has some weird direction in the English dub. Normal voiced lines are generally quite good, but when it comes to shouts and emotional scenes, she just falls flat. For other characters, there’s occasional strange dialect choice, mispronunciation of terms, or even poor audio quality.

Naturally, a lot of this might not apply to the other languages (Japanese presumably being the most consistent as the source material.) It’s just a shame to see the English voice acting regress in some ways, when other areas continue to improve.

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Review | Final Thoughts

Endwalker was always going to be a tough act to follow, and I’d say that Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail falls short in the story department. Though with the main conflicts wrapped up, it does at least mean that the patch content could bring something different to the table.

At the very least, battle content seems to finally be trying to challenge players, even ones that aren’t attempting the Extreme-tier encounters and beyond. I’m looking forward to seeing more dungeons and trails in the following years, along with some of the teased side content that is set to release in later patches.

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the Developer over the course of 70 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.