After five years of being the worst mainline Final Fantasy game, Naoki Yoshida and his team at Creative Business Unit 3 have decided to innovate by making an expansion that isn’t terrible. What a novel concept!

To say I was cynical going into Dawntrail is somewhat of an understatement. Shadowbringers was terrible, I have a very unique loathing for it, and while I’m infinitely more sympathetic towards Endwalker for the burden it carried in ending a ten year plot, it too was terrible. So, as Dawntrail poked over the horizon, I declared the following: If DT is terrible, I will simply quit FFXIV for good and move on with my life despite ten years of frustration.

Truthfully, I did not account for the possibility that DT would be, you know… Good.

DT’s concept did not inspire an ounce of confidence in me. FFXIV is a game where any nation inspired by a real-world culture that isn’t European or East Asian tends to be misrepresented, whether it’s Ul’dah being filled to the brim with ~greedy merchants~, Ala Mhigo receiving no characterization beyond perpetual abuse and victimhood, or Thavnair being introduced after ten years of buildup only to be subjected to torture porn and little else, XIV’s track record sucks. Whether you love or hate Stormblood, you’ve probably clocked that Lyse being so white is odd, right? Even the lighter Ala Mhigans aren’t as white as she is.
But let’s talk about the most relevant example.
The Mamool Ja appear in late A Realm Reborn as lizard-like mooks with obvious South American influences. They speak in you-no-take-candle dialect and are an aggressive warlike species that aren't open to diplomacy, so you just slaughter them in droves. Much later, they appear as part of the Blue Mage questline which is just... ulcer-bustingly racist in how it depicts the setting's Native American analogues. The New World outfit is just the icing on the cake.

So anyway, the first Mamool Ja you meet in DT does the you-no-take-candle thing for all of one sentence before sighing and admitting that it was a joke they all played on the Eorzeans, and now that they're on the world stage they got tired of it. Every Mamool Ja speaks normally from here on out, and most of them are honestly better orators than Wuk Lamat.

I will admit that this alone made me sigh in upbeat defeat and open my mind to the expansion as a whole. It’s a good omen, and one that pays off. It is minor, very easy to gloss over dialogue yes, but it told me that someone on the writing crew was aware of the baggage carried by the game.

Before I continue, I’m going to spare myself the effort of organically weaving this through my review and just address it all here and now:

DT absolutely has a ton of flaws, but after having beat it I’m pretty confident in saying that it doesn’t have any flaws that are unique. It drags like crazy between the first and second halves, it often uses 5 entire quests to deliver exposition that any reasonable series would give to you in just one, the same 4-6 songs are overused to the point of comedy, outside of bosses dungeons are sleep-inducing, there are huge pace-breakers before each Big Moment that exist just to dole out XP and gear, the audio mixing is a mixed bag, 90% of the orchestral tracks are mediocre, etc etc.

These don’t bother me, though. They’re an unfortunate part of the FFXIV formula, present in every single expansion. I accepted they would be in DT before the expac was even announced and this acceptance allowed me to just laugh them off and press on. Sure, Machinations plays too much, fuck it dude I get to paint moogles for 1,100 potency.

Where DT shines is in the ways it bothers to spend its time.

Starting with Heavensward, every XIV expansion opens with some onboarding quests before splitting up into two branching paths that eventually converge before the first dungeon. There are dungeons at X1, X3, X5, X7, X9 and the expansion’s cap, with three trials dotted around the odd numbers. This is a formula that the developers seem to adore given their fanatical devotion to basing every expansion around it, and as early as Stormblood it already began to show cracks.
DT decides to innovate by sticking to the formula by actually using the allocated for something other than Alphinaud going “oh bother, we need to collect 6 twigs” and Alisaie calling him a knob. It has the branching paths, yes, but this time they bother to intertwine the worldbuilding slow-burn with character developments that pay dividends later.

Not that it needed to, right enough. The continent of Tural, previously known only as the “New World” and deeply neglected even compared to other off-screen places like Meracydia, is a character in its own right this time around. Taking a few cues from A Realm Reborn, the opening hours of Dawntrail are hellbent on making you care about the place. It’s about twice as large as Eorzea while also being 4x as diverse, in part because the developers gave up on their European Fantasy fetish, just this once. Naturally this requires a lot of exposition dumping, doubly so to repair the image given by the Blue Mage questlines.

And I have to say; despite my apprehensions born from both the game’s messy history with representation and general distrust of them being able to write a story without a looming omnicide, they’ve stuck the landing.

Tural is vastly more interesting than anywhere else in XIV. I’ve often felt XIV was shackled to the real world cultures and fantasy archetypes it draws from, and any regions that could be interesting (Thavnair, Yanxia, Ala Mhigo, Sharlayan, Garlemald) are throttled by the fact they only appear when they’re in crisis with most of the meaningful info on them coming from either the Encylopedia Eorzea or random blurbs in the sightseeing log.
With Tural, the developers have went deep in both the mythological influences of real life South/Central America and also the very concept of a fantasy setting derived from it. At first glance it’s less… gags “””advanced””” than Aldenard or Ilsabard, but as time goes on it becomes apparent that this is just a mirage: Tural is a well-established and industrious nation that’s managed to stay that way without destroying their territory with machinery, greed, or warfare.
For once, I think CBU3’s crippling addiction to scale has paid off, because Tural and the maps comprising it are so large. I’m averse to big maps in XIV and always have been since the Heavensward maps, which means my love of Tural’s design is high praise indeed. Tuliyollal, this expansion’s primary city, is huge, but as opposed to being horizontally huge like the worst of XIV’s maps, it opts to be vertical instead. The same goes for Urqopaca, Kozama’uka and Yak T’el. The three flatter maps have very good reason for being as such.

I’m gassing all of this up because I was so deeply worried that Tural would just be another nation where literally nothing good happens until you, the player, show up, but no. Tural is its own place with its own mythos and its own history. As the opening hours continue, it’s even clear that their current leader - the endlessly charismatic Gulool Ja Ja - was the Turali equivalent to you. I don’t know his pronouns for certain, but he’s definitely Him.
‘Lived in’ is an annoying phrase that pops up in games critique, often used to refer to a feeling someone got when they saw a horse by them in RDR2 after an hour of eventless travel, but I think it applies here. I know that, once the spoiler embargo breaks, discourse is going to center around the slowness of the opening hours as a flaw (ignoring that every expansion has a banal, slow intro) but honestly this is the first time I’ve felt it’s any good.

Anyway enough of this twee high school discursive essay bullshit. You know that I know that you know neither of us give a shit about overviews here. Let’s get into spoiler territory, into feelings, and into potshots at Shadowbringers.

What struck me about DT early on and continues to strike me long after the credits rolled is how fucking haunting this expansion is in its sincerity. XIV, regardless of which language you play in (for they’re all written differently), has long had problems trying to actually say anything. There are ostensible motifs and themes to be found in most of the main story, but the writers clam up whenever the stage lights turn on and in a panic they make you do 6-7 quests of nothing before an NPC says, in too many words, “oh, I was evil, but I am so very sad”. The messiness of this writing - which they do once per expansion, to my chagrin - is so bad that the average XIV player probably isn’t aware that Nidhogg and Ilberd are meant to be narrative parallels and for once I can’t blame the fanbase-wide illiteracy.

DT is corny, I’m sure everyone can agree on this. The early moments are hamfisted in delivering their morals, with either Wuk Lamat or Alphinaud frequently turning to the player and telling you what it actually meant. Wuk Lamat herself is a shonen protagonist in every sense of the word, with her character development coming from getting her ass beat, realizing how much she loves food, and being empowered by how much she fucking adores her friends. If you’ve read or seen One Piece, you’ll probably struggle not to think of Luffy.
And you know what? XIV has always been kind of shonen. Despite ShB’s endless pretensions and Natsuko Ishikawa’s delusions that she’s capable of tackling deeper themes than “the bad guy has feelings too”, it’s still just a shonen plot where you kill a big bad wizard - who uses darkness - alongside your friends. Endwalker comes at the end of a ten year plot that tried to imply Light wasn’t inherently good and Dark wasn’t inherently evil and it ends with you using the power of light to kill the… What, fifth? Sixth? Ontologically evil Dark boss fight.

Dawntrail leans into the Shonen aspects but for the better. While I don’t like acknowledging other reviews when I write my own, I’ve seen a not insignificant amount of people call the expansion “childish”.

And you know what? They’re right. They are absolutely right.

Thing is, I consider this to be a boon, because XIV has always been kind of childish in its main scenario quest, Stormblood aside, with most of the storylines being Disney plots that the writers try to pretend otherwise. Leaning into it helps DT stick the landing where other expansions fucked up massively.

I’m particularly fond of how the expansion uses food as a motif. It pops up really early on, seemingly as filler, only to balloon in importance - never quite eclipsing the main subject matter, but eternally in the background.
Food in Tural is both a social matter and a cultural matter. Most of the cultures living within Tural have their own dietary rituals, customs and habits. You’re told several times in plain writing that the sharing of these dietary eccentricities built the foundation that Gulool Ja Ja erected Tuliyollal as a nation state from. The sharing of a meal is a sacred rite, to the point where anyone who wants to succeed Gulool Ja Ja himself has to learn how to cook good food from a village he once went to.
Just to inject a bit of personality into an otherwise dry bit: I love this. I love it so much. I know people who use the internet too much hate small talk, but I love it since it’s the only real part of human interaction you can flowchart. My personal flowchat inevitably ends in me bringing up what I want to eat later as a way to bridge a gap between myself and a near-stranger. Finding out what people prefer to eat, or if they even enjoy eating, is a really great cheat for getting to know people. I recommend trying it out if you’re socially awkward, unless you have hangups with food in which case uhhhhhh try the weather.
Wuk Lamat herself does this. Compared to the endless strength of Zoraal Ja or vast intellect of Koana, she’s seemingly the runt of her father’s litter, but her most obvious strength is her ability to bridge gaps. She shares food, she stops to listen to people, and she respects what they consider important even if she herself doesn’t get it.

There are two moments near the end of the game that chilled me to my core. The first, played for laughs, occurs in Solution Nine. Given a tour by the resident monarch, you’re treated to some of their culinary delights and they’re all haunting. Hyper-processed food consumed not for leisure but for purpose; the act of consuming food has become both a process used to minimize the amount of eating actually done and also something done by oneself, as a distraction from endless labour and ~leisure~. This scene occurs as part of Wuk Lamat’s attempts to bridge a gap between her people and those of the parasitic nation of Alexandria - a destructive, self-centered, insane cult of personality that is this setting’s equivalent to the United States of America.

The second, and the ultimate climax of food as a motif, occurs in the final zone, where food can only be tasted by its inhabitants. Outsiders taste nothing; they can eat the food, but it provides nothing to either their bodies or their senses, which I really appreciate as the first videogame representation of what it’s like to watch Marvel movies.
XIV often does the “ooooh the bad guy truly can’t be talked down!” thing but this is the only time I’ve genuinely been floored by it. There is no bridge to build with Alexandria, no meals to share, no common ground to be found. Their existence is self-perpetuating, their queen’s ideal future Alexandrian and any dissenters given only the option to become Alexandrian or cease to be.

It is phenomenally easy to dismiss the Xibruq Pibil scene early on as filler worldbuilding, but the narrative payoff is huge.

Speaking of Americans, let’s talk about killing children.

Of every character in Dawntrail- no, in Final Fantasy as a whole, the character I feel the most bad for is Bakool Ja Ja. At first he just seems like a typical battle Shonen meathead, XIV’s Raditz, but then he loses for the first time and… Jesus.
Despite DT having lower stakes than its predecessor, it still gets graphically and horrifically dark. Any astute player will probably notice that there’s very few two-headed Mamool Ja and quickly deduce that they’re a rarity, but what they don’t get keyed into is the cost.
Wuk Lamat loves tradition, contrasting her brother Koana, and surprisingly for XIV her morals are challenged outright with the reveal of what the cost to make a Blessed Sibling is. Namely, hundreds and hundreds of dead babies. For every one that’s born, hundreds die in their shells and are ‘buried’ in a pit at the bottom of a dark hole so nobody has to look at the shame.

Bakool Ja Ja is just... fuck, dude, what do you even say to that? How do you even respond to that? I don't know.

Bakool Ja Ja doesn't get to have friends or goals or wants because he is not a person. He’s either an idol, a saviour, or a tool. His very existence and continued survival strips him of personhood, because he got to exist. He gets to keep living, and his siblings didn’t. It doesn’t matter what he wants to do or feels, because the thousand people who could’ve died alone, screaming, trapped in an egg, barely even alive long enough to conceptualise being anything at all. When he fails, he’s not just failing himself, but the thousands of Mamool Ja that have their hopes riding on him and the thousands that didn’t make it.

Anyway, enough about being a trans woman.

I don’t know what Dawntrail Discourse will look like, because there’s a lot here that will be contentious, though I do expect people with Emet-Selch icons to hypocritically bash Sphene. What I do know is that a not-insignificant number of people are going to deride the Blessed Sibling thing as “one-off for shock value”, and I couldn’t disagree more.

Because The Blessed Siblings are Alexandrians.

This revelation did admittedly take some time to dawn on me - sorry - and it came to the forefront while I was writing the last few paragraphs, but it helps square the first half of the story with the second half.

Sphene is the queen of Alexandria, a “kingdom” that is in fact a computer server filled with digital recreations of people who’ve died in her care. Like any real computer server running complex simulations, Alexandria requires an inordinate amount of processing power that grows exponentially alongside the population. In this universe, fuel is Aether, and Aether is also the lifeblood of the planet. So, like the Mamool Ja, Sphene is okay with killing endless amounts of people to keep a sweet precious few alive.

Really, DT’s biggest strength is that the first and second halves feel like the same story rather than two separate expacs that were gutted and shoved into the one. The sudden appearance of sci-fi tech, Halo armor and Neomuna from Destiny 2: Lightfall might seem like a tone changer, but really they’re the logical conclusion of the themes set up by part 1.

Early DT says that traditions should be respected and their continuation or abolishment should be at the behest of those they belong to, late DT asks what should be done if the continuation of a tradition results in the misery of people outside the culture, or if it’s actively destructive.
Early DT highlights food as a means of building a bridge between cultures, late DT highlights the inhumanity of its big bad by having them refuse that bridge.
Early DT talks about the power of communal memory as a means to keep people immortal even long after death, with the Yok Huy’s belief system centering around acknowledging the inevitability of death while venerating the fleeting beauty of life. Late DT is driven by a grief-stricken homonculus of a woman who cannot reconcile these.
Early DT has Wuk Lamat admit that ‘peace’ isn’t just the absence of war but the presence of joy, late DT has you enter a kingdom that ardently refuses to even have suffering to the point of erasing memories of a deceased soul to prevent grief.

I could go on forever. I said it a lot in my personal server, but “wow, imagine having themes that matter!” is my ultimate consensus on the story because HOLY SHIT has XIV never used themes this well.

The true tragedy of Sphene is that she is ultimately a machine, unable to break from her code, which makes her Wuk Lamat’s perfect narrative mirror. They’re both loving queens who dote on their subjects, view their respective culture as a big family, and are willing to sacrifice their own needs for the greater good… But Sphene is a machine. She cannot experience true empathy for people outwith her own culture because she is not programmed to. The people of Tural cannot build a bridge with her over food or joy because she is a machine that does not need to eat or subject herself to recreation. Her ‘traditions’ are simply the preservation of a ghoulish mausoleum and she has no say in the matter even if she hates it with what little sentience she has.
XIV likes to use tragedy a lot, the Grecian influences aren’t for show, but I find Wuk Lamat’s endless and unceasing desire to build a bridge with Sphene to be the deepest tragedy. She tries everything, approaches Alexandria with an open mind and an earnest desire to bridge the gap, but it’s just not possible. It’s even reflected in their cities: Tuliyollal is a home for everyone in Tural, no matter where they come from. Alexandria is for the Alexandrians.

What struck me in the expansion’s last moments are how Wuk Lamat’s optimism, kindhearted nature and sincere desire to understand the world she lives in aren’t portrayed as flaws. Alphinaud and Alisaie showed them early on and they got humbled for five consecutive storylines because of it, but here Wuk Lamat maintains these traits even as she grows into a fine leader, with the closing hours of the story highlighting how tragic a being like her truly is. Even still, her final lesson is the story’s final lesson: Suffering and finality aren’t the antithesis of happiness and life, but partners instead.

Sidenote after typing out “Wuk Lamat” for 3400~ words: I love how zealous this expac is with using Turali names for everything. Sorry, cracker, you’re not getting “Miqo’te” as a copout. You’ll learn how to say Hhetsarro and what it means or you’ll die. We don’t care that Urqopacha, Waqumeqimeqi and Yyasulani scare you, you’re going to fucking pronounce them. It’s great, I love it.
While I’m gushing, I do love how well the South/Central American influences are used. I have a good number of friends, mutuals and friends-of-friends who’re either from there or have lived there and it’s been euphoric seeing just how happy they get over the smallest things. It’s great, I love being human and sharing a world with other people.

I’ve also come to appreciate Zoraal Ja as a character. In broad strokes he can be seen as an attempt to do Zenos but without keeping his characterization out of the player’s field of view and with markedly better writing. Zoraal Ja is the perfect child of Gulool Ja, a literal miracle (as most Blessed Siblings do not conceive nor are able to) in every way, and… He’s a raging hypocrite obsessed with perfection who constantly moves goalposts and buys into his own hype too much.
In an ensemble cast filled with people who have reasons for why they do what they do and goals they want to achieve, Zoraal Ja stands out because he doesn’t really have any. Most of his excuses are just that, and the one time he reveals the burden he faces as a Perfect Son it’s long after he’s revealed that he chose to pursue it and could’ve simply not.
He also sticks out like a sore thumb because he’s an Ishikawa character in a story where those do not fit, and I mean this positively. Shadowbringers and Endwalker are grotesque, slimy stories about near-perfect Übermensches defying despair while the imperfect people around them turn into monsters, rife with Great Man bullshit and all kinds of despicable tripe that betray just how the writers feel about Imperial Japan.
Zoraal Ja, then, would fit in perfectly. He is perfect, being a martial legend with incredible intellect and grand enough charisma to rally people to his side, and he’s an asshole for it. He’s a Great Man and is the one character nearly everyone agrees has to die because his attempt to live up to his own hype ruins everything around him. His 2nd phase has a space for a Head of Reason that’s reduced to nothing more than a stump.
Early on, he insists that the people of Tural have grown soft and need to “know war” to truly advance, but he fails to make some Xibruq Pibil. To properly make it, he himself would’ve had to know of war and its effects because the secret to its flavour comes from a tradition started after a brutal war. The ingredient itself comes from the Mamool Ja; the perfect son doesn’t know his own people.

As I draw to a close, I think DT’s ultimate strength is that it’s not shackled to a ten year storyline that had too many writers in the room and had ambitions too lofty for the people writing it. There are no attempts to tackle the consequences of imperialism or the nasty ways fascist propaganda ruins a person or whether the oppressed are complicit in their suffering or any of the other myriad themes FFXIV has fucked up in the past. It’s simple, concise, and to the point.

I keep thinking about the last area, Living Memory. It’s just Amaurot again but actually good because it’s utterly, utterly horrifying.
It is a perfect home for the Endless, filled with everything they could ever want. Unending entertainment, gorgeous food, amenities and attractions and peace and joy and family and everything.
And they’re not even real people. They are digital recreations of a person’s soul, shaped when they were at their happiest and spat out into an unending Disneyland bitcoin miner. It’s heaven for them, but hell to anyone else. What’s worse is that they know this. They know they’re just a nightmarish homonculus kept sentient by a broken machine that doesn’t want to let go, they know everything is existential kayfabe and that they’re just a server somewhere in Texas, they know that all the chance meetings and family get-togethers are orchestrated by the machine, and they know that their existence is only made possible because Alexandria is a parasite that drains everything around it.

And they ask you to kill them, and you do. You walk around, get to know them, gaze upon their perfect world, and then you unplug them. They smile at you, continue their lives for a brief moment, and fade into nothingness.
I don’t cry a lot at games, the most I get is a single dramatic tear down my cheek before I move on. Living Memory had me crying on and off between every zone, and by the time the credits rolled I was bawling so hard my nose started bleeding.

It’s the understandable patheticness of it all. I think, if given omnipotence for a day, most people would debate creating a paradise like this for their loved ones. I know I’d definitely consider it. Wouldn’t you? Imagine, living in a world where kids don’t get bombed in their homes and nobody dies of preventable illness and everyone can eat and nobody sleeps on the street. Paradise is such an easy thing to conceptualize, but unfortunately Dawntrail’s core motif is the reasons why it just wouldn’t work. Suffering is awful, miserable and cruel, but it’s even crueller to never experience it or deny the possibility of experiencing it. The beauty of it all and the shittiness of it all aren’t at odds with one another, they’re part of the grand ouroboros. It keeps us humble, and is a collar wrapped around our necks that stops us from becoming Emet-Selchs - don’t tell the Selchwives I said that.

Dawntrail isn’t perfect, but as far as FFXIV goes this is the best it’ll ever be. The only thing holding it back is the fact that this is an MMO live service game on a strict content schedule, something that’ll likely never change. Really, the only unique flaw DT has so far is that the voice mixing this expac has been a huge mixed bag in the English voice track, with characters like Y’shtola and Thancred sounding particularly awful. The Turali cast are fine, but the returners have audio quality that’d be unacceptable in a fan film let alone a multi-million dollar mainline FF MMO.

I am so, so, so glad that I took a long break before Dawntrail. But more than that, I looked inside myself and realized something: I played this game for ten years. There are thoughts, opinions and ideas about XIV in there from like 4-5 different Mimis. Prior to DT, I ran my arm along the table and wiped it clean, accepting that whatever happens, it is what it is.
I say this because I’m seeing a lot of responses to DT that aren’t based in actual critique or racism or misogyny or whatever, they’re based in what’s obviously severe burnout. It happens, even if you’re enjoying the game. Sure, ten years is a long time, but if FFXIV has been a fixture in your life since ShB that’s still five years, and if EW that’s three. Anyone can get tired, you lose nothing by taking a long break.

Tural gu bràth.