Game Review: Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail (Story through 7.0)

[dorchadas]

Two huge reviews so soon after one another is a lot, but I wanted to get my full Endwalker review out before I started my Dawntrail review and the Endwalker review didn't count as my July game for my "one game a month" project because I wasn't playing Endwalker in July. The Dawntrail early access came out at the end of June so I spent July in Tural. After the end of the "ten year saga" with Endwalker and with the trailers they put out with a very summery vibe, like Thancred chatting with people in the market or Urianger literally drinking some kind of mixed drink out of a pineapple, people started talking about Dawntrail as the "beach episode" of FFXIV where the Warrior of Light would go to a new world and just have a good time. This despite that the very end of Endwalker that led up to Dawntrail telling us that we were going to participate in a succession contest and the trailer showing the Warrior of Light fighting a giant two-headed mamool ja and getting set on fire. When that didn't happen--because of course it didn't, literally the very last story had a similar "we're just going on a silly adventure" premise that immediately turned into a save the world plot--some people got annoyed. And then some people got annoyed in a different direction, that the early part of the game didn't immediately have world-ending stakes! You just can't please everyone.

I can tell you some things that would have pleased me if they had changed, though.

Better than a farcical aquatic ceremony at least.

Meet Wuk Lamat, the main character and protagonist of Dawntrail.

That line is like 95% of the complaints people have about the first half of the expansion. Wuk Lamat has something like half of all voiced lines spoken in Dawntrail release content, every single time you're put into a quest that involves the party splitting up and going to talk to different people the Warrior of Light is paired with Wuk Lamat, and there are literally quests in the game with objectives like:

• Speak with Wuk Lamat.
• Speak with Wuk Lamat again.
• Speak with Wuk Lamat yet again.

The premise is that the first ruler of a unified empire of the western continents of Tural, Dawnservant Gulool Ja Ja the two-headed Mamool Ja, is near the end of his life and wants to retire. Since he's the first ruler and there is no established rule for succession, he decides to hold a tournament to find the City of Gold, open to...well, you never really learn what the criteria are, but while three of the contestants are his children the fourth is totally unrelated to him, so it wasn't all in the family. Wuk Lamat is the third and youngest child, and since contestants are allowed to bring allies and assistants along with her, she goes to Sharlayan to seek aid and recruits the Warrior of Light of some of their friends.

I've seen a lot of people describe this as "helping Naruto become the next Hokage," and while I've never seen Naruto I know enough about it to know what they mean. Wuk Lamat is naive to a fault--relatively early on she talks about how she previously had only left the capital a few times and while she had met a lot of people in Tuliyollal, meeting people in the capital is not the same as going out among the people and meeting them in their own homelands--and scared of llamas, boats, airships, spicy food, and giant monsters. She gives a lot of speeches about how important it is to understand other people and how if we all work together, we can overcome our differences and make a brighter future. At one point she literally says "Your happiness is my happiness." This is a stock anime character type and how you feel about it depends on how you feel about anime. There were definitely more taken-from-anime character reactions and framing of scenes than there were in previous expansions, and while I was okay with it because I have anime antibodies, it was a major shift from previous expansions that were heavy on Garlean geopolitics. On the other hand, sashagee watches tons of anime, didn't like the Garlean plots, and had a great time traveling around Tural, so your mileage may vary.

Of the three other people participating in the contest, two are Wuk Lamat's siblings. The eldest is Zoraal Ja, the only natural-born son of Gulool Ja Ja--there's a fun scene where G'raha Tia asks Wuk Lamat how she's Gulool Ja Ja's daughter if she's a Hrothgar and he's a Mamool Ja and she's like, "I'm adopted you jerk, thanks for pointing it out"--and the leader of Tural's army; and the middle is Koana, a Miqo'te--or "Hhetsaro" in Turalian parlance--who studied in Sharlayan and has introduced a ton of foreign technology to Tural like airships and aetheryte transportation networks. The other contestant is Bakool Ja Ja, another two headed mamool ja who fulfills the "big dumb enthusiastic meathead" archetype. Together, they have to travel the length and breadth of Tural, fulfilling tasks similar to those Gulool Ja Ja originally performed to unite the content and become the Dawnservant.

I admit, I was not expecting an Iron Chef Tural segment.

I can see why they set this up. It's the same reason why regardless of your starting city in A Realm Reborn, your character has to go to the other cities and do a few quests there so you get the lay of the land, and the trip around Tural serves as an introduction both to the contestants and to the lands of Tural. Wachunpelo, the lands of the Pelupelu traders and the Yok Huy giants modeled after the Andes, or Yak T'el with its cenotes and the lower forest, dense with blue foliage and looking a lot like Macalania Woods from Final Fantasy X, or the colorful trees of Kozama'uka where the Hanuhanu parrot people live. This part was interesting, though I won't necessarily say that it was fun. One of the big problems with FFXIV's presentation of its story is that the devs apparently expect people to play through all the side quests in every area they go to, since the side quests are where they put all of the combat, stealth, and other gameplay challenges. The main story is mostly "go here, talk to this person, talk to these three other people, speak with Wuk Lamat, watch a cutscene." There are a lot of cutscenes. I think you're four or five hours into the story before you use a single combat skill.

As you travel and learn about the Turali and also about Wuk Lamat, you get occasional cutscenes showing the progress of the other candidates. While Wuk Lamat has by far the most allies--seen as a downside mostly by the people, since she's a sheltered princess who apparently has no actual accomplishments to her name--Koana also went back to Sharlayan and hired Thancred and Urianger to help him. This was hugely played up in the before-expansion marketing and I was really hoping that there would be big consequences from this decision, a boss fight or harsh words or something. There was none of that. The only consequence of the rivalry at all is in the first dungeon where Thancred closes off the path you were going to take, but otherwise they're more helpful than hindering. Thancred even talks about how he was looking forward to some sparring and there is no actual sparring. A huge disappointment.

Zoraal Ja takes one person, another Mamool Ja named Sareel Ja, who is basically the stereotypical grand vizier, constantly scheming and saying that Zoraal Ja will attain ultimate power and perhaps he, his most obedient servant Sareel Ja, could have some small amount of that power when Zoraal Ja comes into his own. Only enough to help Zoraal Ja achieve his goals, of course, Sareel Ja is totally loyal and definitely doesn't have any ulterior motives. And Bakool Ja Ja has a squad of thugs.

So you watch cutscenes, the ancient horror Valigarmanda (Tritoch if you played the original release of Final Fantasy VI) is released and you all have to band together to stop it before it kills tens of thousands of people, you run into a bunch of Mamool Ja racists in Mamook, and in the end, Wuk Lamat wins the contest and is declared the new Dawnservant. Hooray! Mission accomplished, time to go on an actual vacation.

From here on out, there will be plot spoilers.

There ain't room enough in this town for the both of us.

The Warrior of Light goes north to Shaaloani, which is basically Texas + Arizona. There are gunslingers, there are railroads, there are cattle, and everyone has Hopi or Zuni names, though I did like the "and also there are dinosaurs" part that seemed underplayed. You follow Erenville around looking for news of his mother and eventually watch a train head out to Yyasulani, Erenville's original homeland--please ignore that he has a Golmorre Jungle Viera (Icelandic) accent and all of the "Shetona" you run into in Tural have American accents--and then the earth rumbles, the sky darkens, and a giant purple dome appears over Yyasulani followed by several Dominator-class aerial assault cruisers. During the media tour before the expansion came out, they showed us "Solution 9," which was basically Cyberpunk's Night City, full of glitz and neon. And this moment made me and everyone else I've heard talk about it think that showing it off was a huge mistake, because I spent the entire expansion wondering how we got from South American vibes to rain-slick cyberstreets. When the robots riding flying motorcycles showed up, I was like "Oh, now it's happening" and not "WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUU-" A real missed opportunity.

Anyway, you go back to Tuliyollal just in time to see cyber-Zoraal Ja attack Gulool Ja Ja in a duel and lose. And then his cybertech resurrects him and the Warrior of Light and scions just...stand around and do nothing while Zoraal Ja attacks again and kills his father. It's really egregious--at least in Endwalker with Ahewann, they show that you make an attempt to save him--and in an expansion that spends most of its early part by having you watch cutscenes it stands out even more than it otherwise would. Regardless, Zoraal Ja gives his villainous "face me in combat" threat and takes off, there's a brief sequence of making an armored train that's bafflingly set to Disney-esque gospel music, and you smash through the fortress guarding the Thunderdome (accompanied by the best track in the expansion, In Fulgur and Fire), and arrive in what once was Yyasulani and is now a land under eternal stormclouds with a giant tower glowing violet with lightning in the distance. And then you're met by Queen Sphene and she takes you to Solution Nine, which is...pretty different than previous hub cities.

Wake the fuck up, samurai.

I don't want to do a blow by blow of the plot so I'm going to talk about the overall themes. You learn that the Alexandrians are from another shard that suffered from a lightning-aspected Calamity that basically scoured the entire planet in lightning rain and killed everything. In the lead-up to the Calamity, the storm season grew longer and longer until half the year was near-constant thunderstorms, and then they discovered electrope, a mineral which could convert lightning-aspected aether into other elemental aspects. With this they could grow crops indoors (lightning->water, lightning->fire), heat food (lightning->fire), create flying vehicles (lightning->air), and preserve themselves against the storms, but there was never enough electrope to go around, and the wars over it eventually turned into a global conflict until the nation of Lindblum detonated a superweapon that destroyed the world. I love the other shard stuff, so this really pulled me in. And then they revealed the central conflict of the Alexandrians, which is that their society runs on souls.

Every Alexandrian wears a "Regulator," a device which monitors their memories in real time and stores excess soul energy. If an Alexandrian dies untimely and has a soul backup, that soul is processed by the regulator and resurrects them, though it cannot stop disease or old age. And then when they finally die, their memories are preserved and taken to a place called Living Memory, where they live on in recreated bodies and can experience the joys of life eternally, but the living will completely forget about the dead because in her benevolence, Queen Sphene of Alexandria has decreed that her citizens' happiness is her paramount concern and she does not want to see that happiness tarnished by grief.

There is a lot of debate about all of this online right now because we got information about the system but not the details. For example, when Alexandrians use souls are those souls prevented from being reincarnated, or is it just using their energy and then it all dispersed into the Lifestream (which would eventually happen anyway)? Are the recreations in Living Memory, explicitly based on the memories but not the soul of the original person, equivalent to the original person or are they very accurate simulacra? I tend to think the latter, since this explains some parts of the plot. Queen Sphene is also an Endless, it turns out, made from the memories of the original Queen Sphene and using a series of robot bodies to manifest outside of Living Memory. She is monomaniacally driven by the need to preserve her people (including the Endless) and to secure their happiness. But since the number of Endless will only get larger over time, they need ever-larger amounts of aether to preserve their existence, thus the invasion of Tuliyollal. It's the same conflict we had with Hades back in Shadowbringers, whether it's moral to afflict the living in order to benefit the dead, except here at least I think there's less room for argument because there's no realistic possibility of bringing the dead back. The Ascians had a plan to recreate their original world, and when it was done they'd have their original world back, but Alexandria is going to run out of aether.

There's a moment early on where Sphene brightly asks you if you'd like to become citizens of Alexandria, and I read this as her trying to subvert her behavioral constraints. She wants peace with the Turali, but the preservation of the Alexandrians is her single highest priority. However, if you become citizens, then you are also Alexandrians, your preservation is now part of her mission, and she can stop the war. She can't decide otherwise because she doesn't have Sphene's soul, just her memories, so her choices are always constrained in a more narrow fashion than those of an actual living person. You later turn off the computers keeping the Endless running and I've heard multiple people refer to this as genocide and I just don't see it. None of the Endless express a single fear or hesitation about being turned off because, again, they're not real people, they're simulacra created using the memories of the dead. In the real world you can argue about whether a clone of you with your exact same memories would make the same choices but this is Final Fantasy XIV, where souls objectively exist and you can see them with magic, and the Endless don't have them. They literally talk about people who die "going to the Cloud," the metaphor is not exactly subtle!

It does kind of lessen the moral weight of having to explicitly click the button to turn off the computer each time, but on the other hand, if the Endless were people you'd be monsters, so I think it's fine.

That's what delegating is for.

What's not fine is that after half the game traveling with Wuk Lamat and then a brief interlude with Erenville in Texas, when you go investigate the Thunderdome Wuk Lamat comes with you again. Some people virulently hate Wuk Lamat and nothing would have satisfied them except a World of Warcraft-style "they went crazy and we had to kill them" final boss, but I wasn't one of those people. She was a little grating sometimes but it was fine, but when she came with us to Yyasulani I rolled my eyes. sashagee pointed out the real problem later when she got to that part of the game, which is that Koana should have come to the dome.

When Wuk Lamat ascends the throne, under the logic that Gulool Ja Ja had two heads she asks Koana to be her co-ruler, the Reason to her Resolve. Koana is a Sharlayaboo, the classic kid exposed to another culture who decides that culture is just much better than the one he was born in. He wears Sharlayan clothes, talks about how advanced Sharlayan ways are, and when you see him during the tournament he's always like "Sharlayan technology could solve this." One part involves Wuk Lamat figuring our the original purpose of a ceremony to bring life to the crops and helping the locals perform it to rejuvenate the fields, and then Koana strolls up, upends a bottle into the water, and as the crops all perk up talks about how great Sharlayan alchemy is. Koana is the Vow of Reason, his speciality is technology, it makes sense to bring him to the mysteriously-advanced civilization that's suddenly appeared because he would probably have greater insight into what's going on there. Wuk Lamat is the Vow of Resolve, so she should have stayed behind to defend the city.

And in addition, Koana in Alexandria would have been a perfect finish to his character arc. During the tournament, he learned to appreciate the customs of his homeland and that maybe they didn't need to throw everything away and convert their society over to a copy of Sharlayan. Show him Alexandria, show him a society that embraced technology and completely abandoned all of its own traditions to the point that they literally cannot even remember their dead. Show him their marketplace of souls and how people living inside the arcology still don't feel safe unless they have a soul or two spare. Show him the eternal stormclouds they live under and the ruins of old Alexandria and then ask him about the dangers of technology and where the line of no return was. That would have been great!

And it would have prevented Wuk Lamat from jumping in and trying to upstage us during the final battle against robo-Sphene, which was eye-rollingly awful.

Zoraal Ja seeks to learn the Riddle of Steel.

aaron.hosek characterized it as "this expansion needs 20% less Wuk Lamat" and I'd say 33%, because she took up a bunch of screen time that could have been used on others' characterizations. I already mentioned Koana above, but it's true for Zoraal Ja too. I would have liked to spend a bit more time with him, because it's obvious that he cracked under the pressure but we get no access to his inner life. The only natural-born child of a two-headed Mamool Ja ever, Zoraal Ja was the leader of Tural's armies and known as the one who always got the job done and led his troops to victory every time but he was always haunted by his father's legacy. Gulool Ja Ja, the uniter of Tural. Gulool Ja Ja, the ruler of Tural for eighty years. Even winning the contest and ruling Tural wouldn't have been enough, because that wouldn't have been surpassing his father. It wouldn't even have been matching him--Gulool Ja Ja ruled an empire he united by his own hand. Zoraal Ja would have ruled an empire that was handed to him.

There's one moment when Zoraal Ja wryly says "So much for the Resilient Son" and you know he said that at least two hundred times in his head for every time he says it out loud.

Because of that, we never learn how Zoraal Ja's stated motivation--conquer the world to make everyone hate violence so much that they will renounce war--lives up to his actual motivation to surpass his father, we're just left to infer it. It's not clear how much Sareel Ja contributes to Zoraal Ja's descent into villainry, because Zoraal Ja kills Sareel Ja before the latter can complete the betrayal that we the audience have been expecting. Wuk Lamat and Koana have no insight because they say that Zoraal Ja was always distant with them and never revealed what he was thinking. There's room in the patches to explore this, since journeying into Alexandria reveals that Zoraal Ja has a son, but as of the time of this writing, it's a big blank space.

We get more time with Bakool Ja Ja, but not that much more, and it's compressed into the first half pre-Alexandria so that his development seems like a light switch flipping. Bakool Ja Ja releases Valigarmanda, a continental threat that has killed tens of thousands of people in every one of its previous rampages, and the only reason it doesn't do that again is that all of the other tournament contestants band together to stop it. When you arrive in Mamook, the homeland of the Mamool Ja, you get the full story and it's that Bakool Ja Ja also had too much pressure put on him by his father. Two-headed Mamool Ja, it turns out, have immense personal power but are extremely rare--99 out of a 100 are stillborn--and the Mamool Ja have kept trying to create more of them to increase their prominence following the example of Gulool Ja Ja. The Dawnservant tried to create an empire where all are equal, where the various Turali warring tribes could all live in harmony, but the lesson the Mamool Ja took from a two-headed Mamool Ja being the first one to successfully conquer the continents is that their ancient beliefs are right: that the Mamool Ja are the master race and two-headed Mamool Ja are the greatest of the Mamool Ja. This is also never mentioned or dealt with, you have to read between the lines to even realize why the people in Mamook are such racist jerks.

Anwyway, Bakool Ja Ja is a sad kid and after you learn he's driven by guilt for the 99 babies who died to allow him to be born, and after Wuk Lamat somehow defeats him in single combat despite not undergoing any kind of training or personal growth that would allow her to do so--it's the power of friendship, of course--he turns over a new leaf. Does he suffer any kind of consequences from unleashing a civilizational threat? Of course not. Friendship means no consequences for anyone and no one ever bears a grudge. That's just how the world works in a Sunday morning shōnen anime for elementary schoolers.

She's basically Kal-El.

My opinion on most of Dawntrail is that it was fine--not great, not awful, just fine--but one thing I'm legitimately annoyed about is that Krile was done dirty. She's been a background character basically since she showed up and then in Endwalker we were told that she was going to get a more prominent role, but that basically turned into "being a radio receiver for Hydaelyn." In Dawntrail, after feeling like she couldn't fully contribute for years, Krile finally went out and learned how to fight, becoming the poster girl for the Pictomancer job (basically what Relm in FFVI does). She comes with you to Tural because she knows that her grandfather Galuf went there twenty-odd years ago, around the time of her birth, and she's still chasing information about her past. However, even though she travels with you for the entire expansion, the massive focus on Wuk Lamat took almost all the time that would have been allocated for Krile, so she gets a couple cutscenes and then all of her story arc is crammed into Living Memory over the course of three or four quests. She meets her parents as a footnote.

The same problem occurs with Erenville. My favorite part of the expansion was in Shaaloani. People complained it was pointless because it doesn't contribute to the main plot, and I wonder if they're the same people who complained about Garlemald during Endwalker, because it was a nice respite for me, just traveling around looking for Erenville's mother. But she's in Living Memory because she was in Yyasulani when the Thunderdome appeared, so all of Erenville's grief and interactions with his mother occur over the course of maybe an hour. He's like "How am I supposed to accept this??" and then he...does. Good thing for our heroes, I guess, and even more evidence for my opinion that the Endless aren't people, but it's unsatisfying.

Hilarious how Erenville runs away whenever there's a battle, though.

Alphinaud and Alisaie exist, but they're clearly there just to fill out the list of people for duty support so you can do dungeons with NPCs. Really, the best Scion in Dawntrail is Estinien. You get a cutscene of him boarding a ship, saying, "I've already been east, how about west?" and then he occasionally shows up having the time of his life. He's having a friendly sparring match with Gulool Ja Ja, he's fending off Alexandrian androids when they attack, he's just traveling around Tural and getting into scraps and finding adventure. You know, the kind of thing we should have been doing.

The real City of Gold was the friends we made along the way.

Dawntrail was fine.

It doesn't bother me as much because I really didn't like Endwalker, but for all the people who cried buckets of tears at Endwalker's plot, Dawntrail is a betrayal. They're used to emotional peaks and valleys and Dawntrail simply doesn't give you that. I was surprised at all the people who said they sobbed at the end of Endwalker because it seemed like cheap manipulation to me, but I was really surprised at the people who said they cried at the end of Dawntrail. When I turn off a movie it doesn't mean the characters die, and no one else had a strong reaction to the Endless including the Endless themselves so I'm not sure why I should either. And the vociferous complaints about Wuk Lamat's voice acting didn't resonate with me because voice acting ruined RPGs, I read the dialogue and then skip to the next box like any 90s PC RPG gamer. It was an average expansion coming on the heels of two extremely well-regarded expansions, and the contrast makes it seem like the worst thing in the world.

This is a story review so I didn't touch on the gameplay, but here at the end I can say the gameplay is what gives me hope. The fights were a lot of fun--they actually seemed to remember that this is a game and some challenge to overcome is fun! Fights that are too easy make me ask why I even had to fight, fights where I have to think a bit and play the game are interesting. Stormblood is looked down as a low moment in the story but people remember it for the Omega raids, Eureka, the extra dungeons, the Ivalice raids, and all the fun gameplay changes. Hopefully Dawntrail will be remembered the same way, and while it's outside the scope of this review, the Arcadion raid (released two weeks after the expansion came out) makes me think we're on that path. And what did that stinger shot of Sphene's crown mean, anyway?

But until then, I hope you like Wuk Lamat.

Edit: Ahahahaha Wuk Lamat didn't even come in the top ten in the Japanese character popularity poll in the expansion where more than half the voiced lines were hers.