Final Fantasy XIV will receive the new expansion Dawntrail in summer 2024. The endgame is well received, but the obligatory and once-celebrated story does not evoke cheers. Longtime Twitch streamer Zepla explains on her Youtube channel what has gone wrong in the MMORPG.
Who is Zepla? Zepla HQ is a longtime and mainly one of the larger streamers and Youtubers around Final Fantasy XIV. She switched from World of Warcraft to the Japanese MMORPG between 2015 and 2016 and says she was captivated by the game’s story through the Heavensward patch series starting from 3.2.
She started her Youtube channel eight years ago with tutorials, parodies, and satire. She is now one of the largest streamers around Final Fantasy XIV and even welcomed fellow streamer Asmongold when he tried the game in 2021 (via Youtube).
Like most other players of Final Fantasy XIV, Zepla dove into the new expansion Dawntrail in early July 2024. And like many other players, she is not impressed with the quality of the otherwise celebrated main story. In a nearly 74-minute long video (Youtube), she explains where she sees the problems.
Graphics? Great. Dungeons? Awesome!
Warning, Spoilers: Below are spoilers for the main story of Dawntrail.
What does she like about Dawntrail? At the beginning of the video, Zepla talks about what she appreciates in the new expansion:
- Dungeon bosses were creative and challenging.
- The single-player challenges within the main story were fun for her.
- The boss fights were appropriately challenging.
- The new areas are beautiful and benefit from the graphic update released with 7.0.
In addition, she praises individual characters encountered throughout the story. Among others, she values the knight Odys highly and enjoys the company of the collector Erenville.
What is Dawntrail about?
In the last expansion, the Warrior of Light, the player character, along with his friends from the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, saves the world and the universe from destruction by the Endsinger. Six in-game months later, the young Wuk Lamat asks the Warrior of Light for help with a less pressing matter:
She wishes to follow her father to the throne of her homeland Tural. The Warrior of Light is to help her pass the necessary trials and become a worthy successor. They are accompanied by a few old friends from the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, as well as Erenville, a collector from Sharlayan.
I would rate the MSQ at best 4/10
What does she criticize? For Zepla, there are two major issues in Dawntrail – the pacing of the story and shallow characters. Regarding the former, she says:
In Dawntrail, the good moments, as good as they were, were not frequent or consistent enough to outweigh the aspects I did not like. They were overwhelming and suffocating for me. Because those slow parts were often very, very long and often tedious and not enjoyable.
I would rate the MSQ at best a 4/10.
She compares many of the story beats to slamming on the brakes while driving. Whenever the story of Dawntrail hits the accelerator and she thought, now we are getting started
, she is immediately halted with a full stop. For instance, one is supposed to help repair a train to enter a new zone. Unfortunately, the train is already overcrowded with waiting passengers, and one must turn to more boring tasks.
The NPCs are the second point of criticism: they are mostly poorly written.
- Well-known characters feel like cardboard cutouts of themselves.
- The story arc intended for the NPC Krile is far too short.
- The companion Wuk Lamat is inconsistently written and in-game the player is often advised against supporting her.
And after it was originally said that Dawntrail would have a story with comparatively low stakes, at the end of the story, countless lives are once again at stake.
Shadowbringers had the perfect ending – is Square Enix now copying itself?
In conclusion, Zepla raises the question of whether Square Enix is trying to put together a kind of main story package. This would mean that the main story, like the dungeons, must follow a particular formula:
Dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV always have three bosses and a set number of smaller enemies in between. This fixed formula without variation has been criticized multiple times in the past.
Zepla references this dungeon package
and compares the last story thirds of the expansions Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and Dawntrail: The themes and contents of the final zones are similar, if not even partially identical. The last dungeon now includes the memories of the antagonist for the third time and is being narrated
by them.
In the last 3.5 minutes, Zepla summarizes:
In summary, I had no high hopes for the story of Dawntrail and tried to go into the game with an open mind. But I truly believe that the literary standard has fallen below what I would consider the absolute minimum for a story-based game – especially Final Fantasy XIV. It is not only boring but often also incoherent. […]
Logic makes a world believable, and simplified solutions undermine its credibility. Complex themes like war, slavery, and the burden of leadership have been treated with subtlety and nuance in the past in this game. We had entire expansions that dealt with these topics and with what can go wrong when idealism does not take into account the cold realities of the world. […]
For those who think I have been too critical of this story: I judge it only by the high bar set by [the game itself].
Similar to Zepla, the MeinMMO editors Sophia Weiß and Karsten Scholz felt the same way. While the expansion felt very lonely for Sophia and she is only now dragging through the last third by playing the game on mobile, Karsten criticizes the quest design.
Meanwhile, reviews for Dawntrail on Steam are also largely negative. However, Naoki Yoshida, the director and producer of the game, himself says he is not surprised by the negative feedback.
How do you feel? Are you enjoying Dawntrail’s story? Have you finished it or even quit? Are you looking forward to the further patches? Or do you just want to quickly celebrate the endgame? Let us know in the comments. MeinMMO editor Alexander Schürlein has also given a lot of thought to where he would place Dawntrail in his ranking: Final Fantasy XIV: All expansions in the power ranking – Which is the best?
