We’re all sick and tired of talking about Dawntrail at this point, but bear with me.
I hated Dawntrail. I finished it and immediately wrote 2,000 words detailing why I hated it, and even then it was still full of dismissiveness about things I thought were so bad they weren’t worth addressing at all. But, for my own purposes, I’d like to roll back the pithy comments and properly detail exactly what I think is wrong with Dawntrail (in short: everything).
And to be clear, even though I think it’s total shit, it’s not XIV has fallen billions must unsub. They made a shit expac; all MMOs do that eventually. It’s not the end of the world. It does mean I’m going to be bored out of my mind storywise for the next two and a half years though! So…
Dawntrail is very easily the worst XIV expansion.
It also doesn’t remotely have the worst writing in XIV. This is somewhat of a benefit, but is actually mostly a detriment.
The thing with the actively bad writing in XIV – Werlyt, a good chunk of Stormblood, parts of ARR if you want to be really mean – is that it’s still engaging in some capacity. In the real depths of hell like Werlyt, that engagement comes from shock at how they had the audacity to put something so bad to screen, and then deconstructing everything about it with others after. The same is true for the worst parts of Stormblood, but even Stormblood isn’t an unmitigated disaster. It has its high points! It has the Azim Steppe, and the villains are fun and engaging. ARR, too, for its monotony, has little hooks to keep you going, like the Garlean raid on the Scions, Haurchefant in general, etc. These little highs and very low lows make all these things still fun to talk about today.
Dawntrail has no shockingly bad lows, though the writing certainly takes a turn for the worse in the second half. It also has no highs, no little hooks, to speak of. It’s 40 hours of cardboard.
The wise man knows that XIV writing is mostly bad and Ishikawa has been hardcarrying its good reputation, of course. But it’s still disappointing.
The inclusion of the Scions at all is a massive weight that the entire expac strains under. I was anticipating an ARR-like – slower and lower stakes as we get to know the lore and residents of a new place – particularly since the team emphasised at great length that this was a new beginning and how they wanted this to be a place that new players could skip to without being lost (though it seems they ended up scrapping this idea). But the Scions being around prevents that from happening.
The Scions are all very complete characters. Their arcs are done – and were broadly quite affecting! You could theoretically go through some new development for them, but it would take a lot more effort than just introducing new characters and letting them loose. This means you get basically nothing engaging from the Scions at all – they’re just there. I love the twins, they are my beautiful baby children, I love to see them, and I love their dynamic playing off each other, but they don’t do that at all. The most you get is a few rote jokes – the gathering wood again? – that the other characters don’t even react to. Really, there’s practically nonexistent dynamics between every allied character because most conversations are about Wuk Lamat or how to complete the succession rites. They don’t talk to each other about each other. Even Krile, and she’s meant to be the Scion getting an arc this expac! I was expecting them to be bridging characters that get replaced as we go around and meet new party members, but they’re just there the whole time.
(Also, I know that the Scions being there wouldn’t just be the writers being unable to give up on them. XIV is SQEX’s cash cow, and they probably have execs telling them to keep the Scions for marketability. It still sucks.)
The lack of character writing between the Scions means it all falls to Wuk Lamat, who also isn’t interesting at all. Certainly there have been far worse-written characters in XIV’s history, but as I kind of alluded to above, being boring is worse than being bad. She goes through basically no meaningful development, as much as the game desperately tries to convince you otherwise. She experiences no real hardship during the succession rites. There is never a sense that she might truly fail, there is no real struggle, there isn’t even misunderstandings. Nothing shakes her beliefs. Everyone is immediately open to learning and sharing and nobody has misgivings or reacts in a slightly prejudiced way. There are multiple characters who are willing to give her an easy ride because they like her, though!
All of her writing is endless telling which we are supposed to accept as the true text, while showing something else that completely contradicts that. They attempt to establish her as dismissed by the populace at the very beginning with those few citizens gossiping outside the palace… and then completely drop it. The most pushback she gets from locals after that is that Pelupelu who won’t give her a trading discount, but even then, he’s just asking for the regular price. It’s not like he outright refuses to trade with her, citing the rules or whatever, and then all the other people you trade with sure seem to like getting scammed with unequal trades. It’s a pattern that repeats throughout Dawntrail: setting up the barest hint of conflict, and then going never mind! So even if they say Wuk Lamat is an irrelevant underdog that the citizens pay no mind to, what they show is that she’s universally adored even by people she’s just met.
As another example of saying one thing and showing another, after the first dungeon, she talks about how she’ll open up and ask for help and not do things alone anymore. But she was already doing that! She travelled across the ocean to find you to get you to help her! She already wore her heart on her sleeve! Nothing changed.
Talking of that section of the game, the entire kidnapping plot is thuddingly bad writing. It requires literally every person involved to be unfathomably stupid, from Wuk Lamat leaving alone (she otherwise never travels without the party), to everyone else waiting around for ages (even though the village is still within sight and they would have noticed her never arriving), to the kidnapper then not recognising you during Koana’s plan (even if you don’t have your WoL clout here, you’re a fairly distinct foreigner that he just saw like half an hour ago). It also, again, immediately defuses tension.
The mastermind is deduced quickly (as if it could be anyone else), and the cut chains on your boat are replaced immediately so you can give chase. You find Bakool Ja Ja and his cronies at the first dungeon, which isn’t particularly far away, making this entire plot take place over of a matter of a couple of hours. Within a single day, at most, if you want to be generous about their portrayals of time and distance (this is always difficult and not a problem with Dawntrail in particular; I don’t really hold it against XIV writing). Because Bakool Ja Ja retreats, you rescue Wuk Lamat quickly and without injury. Nobody learns anything from this, no struggle against convictions… just that Bakool Ja Ja is a dumb shithead. It felt like padding for time just to keep you in the zone, rather than anything that actually mattered for any development.
Wuk Lamat being boring is intertwined with Tural being a boring setting. I mean, visually, the southern island is great (I think the northern island locations are awful, which I will get to later), but I think the XIV team took criticism about their writing of other cultures too close to heart, and have pulled back to such an extreme degree that they don’t write any kind of tension. With their history I don’t want or expect them to write about outright racism, but they’ve made a setting where everyone has been living in harmony for 80 years and Wuk Lamat wants to preserve that harmony. It’s a story about how the status quo is good and should be maintained and nothing needs to change. Why on earth would I care about that?
There’s no bubbling tension between groups (they could have done this in Yak T’el, but again defused it basically immediately), no immediate risk of the peace being destabilised that Wuk Lamat would have to work through if she wins. Zoraal Ja’s (nonsensical) warmonger ambitions would only become relevant if he wins, which is why Wuk Lamat has to win and maintain the status quo and everyone can be nice forever. We don’t even get the basic tension of working to restore a former peace.
As an aside, the party intuiting the real meaning of the harvest festival stuff when the Hanuhanu forgot felt a bit off. This is hardly the most egregious racism in XIV ever, but in a expac where you’re trying to improve your image about how you write other cultures… should you be including that?
For the setting and Wuk Lamat intertwining, I also think that the rite of succession only taking up half the expac means the plot feels both glacial and too fast and we also don’t learn anything meaningful about other cultures. I get that Wuk Lamat is meant to be slightly out of touch and learning the hard way, but it seems bizarre to be royalty and not understand even the very basics of the country you apparently love and want to preserve. The stuff in Yak T’el in particular seems like the kind of thing that every kid would learn about in school. The cultural things we learn are basic things you’d see in a did you know tourism pamphlet. And we go through locations very quickly! There isn’t any actually time to know and love these people like Wuk Lamat keeps going on about. But at the same time, having half the expansion be low stakes and slice of life-esque is really egregiously bad pacing. It feels like very extended sidequests. Because that’s where this details of the setting and daily life stuff usually goes – in sidequests!
I’m kind of jumping around a bit in addressing the villains and the first half plot, so forgive me on that. There isn’t much to say about the Tural Vidraal beyond they again defused the tension way too quickly. They present those red Yok Huy as unreasonably standing in the way of saving people, but they recognise some strength or whatever in Wuk Lamat and back down, etc etc. It’s also completely bizarre Bakool Ja Ja wasn’t disqualified at this point – Zoraal Ja gets kicked for attacking one of the testers but Bakool Ja Ja unleashes an ancient evil and is fine?!
Returning to Yak T’el, this could have been a great point for some level of tension and difficulty in the fairly low-stakes cooking challenge by pairing Wuk Lamat with either Zoraal Ja or Bakool Ja Ja. We’d get a chance to learn a bit more about either of them, and since clearly neither cared about the challenge at all, there’d be some interpersonal conflict in trying to get them to care, or there’d be the difficulty of trying to do it all alone if you couldn’t get through to them. Instead she’s paired with Koana and you immediately know they’re going to win, since the two guys who don’t give a shit immediately wander off. And, what a shocker, through the friendship and unity Wuk Lamat and Koana already have, they’re able to cook properly. And Krile does the “guys the Echo is telling me Zoraal Ja is an evil freak who must be stopped” thing again, since having to show him doing anything that would suggest that is too hard.
The whole thing with Wuk Lamat’s bio dad feels like it didn’t need to be there. It doesn’t add any texture to Bakool Ja Ja threatening his life – Wuk Lamat is already rightfully pissed off about it when she thinks he’s just a random villager – and the story itself is…? When he talks about finding his young daughter at the bottom of a cenote the immediate reaction is “oh my god, she died?” which, like, ooh, these zealots killing a tiny child over old grudges, that’d be something, but she was, uh, fine. And she was in danger and too visible, so he… sent her to the palace to become royalty…? What was the point of any of this? Why did anyone do any of that? What does it add to the overall narrative?
(I like that you can see the WoL standing off to the side during the instanced fight, though.)
Speaking of Bakool Ja Ja, his face turn is so dumb. The Mamool Ja having a two-headed breeding program that resulted in mass infant deaths could have been interesting and made sense with their zealotry… but everyone admits that it’s so bad that they did it and they’re weally weally sorry the second they get any kind of pushback from the party. They’re also immediately willing to accept help with cultivating new food, so if they were already open to it, why not reach out to locals earlier, or send a message to the palace asking for help, or something, instead of immediately being like we HAVE to have a bunch of dead babies. If they were unrepentant zealots then not reaching out would make sense, but as is it’s just bizarre. It’s also pretty poorly established as a post-hoc justification for Bakool Ja Ja’s stupid, erratic behaviour. Maybe having some scenes of him getting chewed out by his dad before he unleashes the Tural Vidraal would have helped, I don’t know.
Even if Wuk Lamat says that his pain doesn’t justify his actions, everyone seems pretty on board with Bakool Ja Ja being around immediately. Did you forget about the ancient monster he unleashed literally a single zone ago?! There isn’t any redemption arc or working to make people think he changed. He just says sorry and it’s chill now.
Zoraal Ja is blatantly written out at this point for convenience’s sake, also. It really should have been Bakool Ja Ja getting disqualified.
I’m trying to stick to addressing the text itself, but I must mention the common defence of Dawntrail’s simplified plot and characters with “it’s like a shounen anime” – it isn’t! This defence has to come from a thirdhand knowledge of One Piece, I think. But even then, the fun with battle-aligned shounen – even speaking as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy it – is characters overcoming seemingly impossible odds and discovering new strengths. Even if there is some vague gesture to Wuk Lamat getting physically stronger over the course of the story, as mentioned above, there are no stakes, especially in the first half. The odds are very possible the entire time. Wuk Lamat is not a shounen protagonist winning over cunning, powerful enemies and rescuing people with strength and kindness – she’s a coddled child having the throne handed to her on a silver platter, occasionally facing weak, brief pushback from the biggest morons alive.
She wins the rite of succession, names Koana as co-ruler, everything is happy and niceys. And we still have about half of the expac to go.
Before we get to the northern island, the situation with it lore-wise is baffling to me. The succession rites were meant to be mimicking Gulool Ja Ja uniting the country 80 years ago, but they only cover the southern island, and the north is still part of the same country. What did he do there? Did he do anything? And I know they need some kind of justification why you can’t go there right off the bat, but saying you can only go north at all with permission from the palace is quite a strict restriction for travelling within the same country! Is there some kind of internal embargo? Like, the ceruleum mining – are they a pseudo-autonomous region being punished for exporting to Garlemald? What is going on? Why are they cut off like that? It’s all just skimmed over, but it bugs me a lot, and shows they didn’t actually think that hard about the details and culture of the setting, even if they made a big show of doing exactly that.
The second half is where something resembling a plot happens, but in a way it feels harder to write about – I suppose because it’s so rushed it’s harder to grab on to things to pick them apart and address them. The local cultures in Shaaloani feel even more skimmed over – we spend all of two seconds at Mehwahhetsoan – and then the fusion with Alexandria happens. I can’t even call the subsequent plot beats playing the hits, because it makes no serious attempt to actually play them, only vaguely gesturing. And, you know what, I do remember those better expacs that I could be NG+ing instead. Maybe I will replay Shadowbringers so I can remember what a good ensemble cast with robust arcs and engaging villains feel like.
Even then, once you get into Alexandria, the story still spends a huge amount of time on slice-of-life and “cultural exchange”, once again grinding the pacing to a frustrating halt. And this goes from fine if a little trite to egregiously bad given the change in setting.
“Well, I won’t dismiss it out of hand, I’m sure practices like this develop for a reason” is fine for nomads or alternative beliefs about death and things like that. It comes off as outright lobotomised in a dystopia where people can earn extra souls with money to extend their lives and where those who die for real are immediately erased from everyone’s memories. Pulling back from potential criticism so far that you can’t even condemn a standard scifi dystopia is ridiculous.
Alexandria’s existence also feels kind of nonsensical. Being future sci-fi is meant to establish a feeling of ‘this is a very old civilisation from a time beyond yours’, but I can only ask: why is any of it like that? If they have very limited space in a largely destroyed world, why the sprawling neon cities, even if they are inside a tower? Why not more practical, resource-saving layouts? How did they get this technologically advanced and stay there with such limited resources? Why grow food outside at all, especially when you need technology to manage it anyway and they explicitly say that the constant rain didn’t help? Surely you can set up some indoor hydroponics. They clearly have something resembling artificial UV lights. The outside is clearly meant to establish a lower-class or ghettos or whatever, but it’s still like… why the impractical allocation of resources just to establish this to us?
It’s also the least effective futuristic society. The Allagans still have magical fantasy-ish imagery on some of their stuff which helps it feel congruous with the setting, and more importantly, they’re ruins. Futuristic ruins is like some woah… the cyclical nature of civilisation… kind of thing. It’s establishing a theme! Garlemald being 1920s-ish (maybe not decade-exact, I’m not that familiar with architecture, and they use WW1 imagery at the Ghimlyt Dark) to the rest of Eorzea’s vaguely Middle Ages fantasy is establishing them as a more “modernised” society, but still in the past to us, player. It reads as powerful and modern, while not being developed like us or beyond us, so it maintains a fantasy flavour. Alexandria is just PSO2. Why is this even in XIV’s setting? It feels like it was just put here as a gpose background for people who keep modding their WoLs into techwear.
(Solution Nine is also terrible as a map with tons of wasted space. I’m partially mad because I’m a crafting shithead, and both Eulmore and Radz-at-Han treated me really good on the collectables and exchanges front.)
Sphene and Zoraal Ja… are so hard to talk about. I might actually skip talking about Zoraal Ja altogether to link this post I saw going around in early August, since it’s written by someone who was trying very hard to be invested in him to begin with and is a better explainer than I could ever do because of that. Anything I wrote about him in detail would just be cribbing off of posts similar to these, since at the time I only really described him as “a very bad Sentai villain” and “ARR Gaius without the charisma” and I still stand by that. But in short he is wildly underdeveloped, has completely nonsensical motivations, and the writers try to last-second tell you a bunch of shit they never even attempted to show.
Sphene is a bit easier to dissect, since she’s such a blatant ripoff of everyone’s favourite cunty grandma Emet. We covered “Would you have done the same? Would you have found a way forward without pain and sacrifice and damning others to save yourself?” with the Ascians for quite some time already, and it was great! They were very compelling, sympathetic villains in the end, even if they wanted omnicide. But it’s a settled question. Don’t do it again but worse, especially when you can’t properly condemn it this time.
For the worse part, Emet had a fairly concrete plan – killing everyone and rejoining all the shards would restore everything he lost (even if Endsinger would have probably just come to get his ass again, though he didn’t know this at the time). Sphene has the somewhat vaguer goal of enabling the Endless to keep going forever by harvesting the souls of the living, but… the Endless aren’t people in the same way as the ones Emet is trying to get back. The Endless are recordings, imitations, chatbots trained on somebody’s messages – and the Endless themselves know this! She’s not trying to grant immortality to living people, she’s trying to pay for hosting for her bot server. I mean, Emet made a recreation of Amaurot to mope in, so it’s not the “being comforted by an imitation” that’s the issue, it’s the “these cheap imitations are the most important thing ever, over preserving real people”.
With not properly condemning it, they keep having Wuk Lamat reach out to Sphene like, “In another life we could be friends. You’re willing to do anything for your people, so that’s why I know you’re a good person deep down!” It was very specifically Emet’s willingness to do anything for his people that made him a bad person! Why knock him off so blatantly and then walk back this defining trait? It makes Wuk Lamat come off as incredibly stupid, and the Scions as well for not pointing out, “Hey we like just dealt with a guy who would do anything for his people and he was evil as fuck, so you might have the wrong idea”.
The entire final zone is padding for time too. Just blatantly Ultima Thule but worse, and even if I liked Ultima Thule overall and was crying by the end, even that strained credibility at times (Y’shtola’s part was nonsensical). Once again, they could create tension or a sense of urgency, and then they’re immediately like nope Sphene will be a while don’t worry about it. Being trite little curated fairground zones meant it didn’t have the same weight of the hollow, dead civilisations of Ultima Thule either. We’re trying to stop Sphene! Why am I getting sidetracked putting on a play? It also made her wanting to preserve all this feel empty. Not even detailed imitations of what was lost – curated, polished, the same saccharine perfection over and over. Happy memories only, nothing of the hardship that makes up a full existence. Boring ass final fight – Endsinger but worse, narratively speaking (the phase 1 mechanics were a little fun blind) – and we’re back to peace and niceys except Alexandria is also just here now.
They also show an end-of-story cutscene reassuring the Alexandrians that their lives will go on as normal. How? Why? They no longer have access to spare souls to extend their lives doing the dangerous work that’s part of maintaining Alexandria! How is this not immediately on the brink of collapse?!
To address some other little narrative things that I couldn’t really work into going over the story in order, please write G’raha out already. He’s barely in Dawntrail, thank god, but they still get gratuitous with his fanservice by the end. And to be clear I am quite fond of the little red cat. He was brilliant and deep and compelling in Shadowbringers, and I love the angsty relationship he has with my WoL. I love putting them in the pear wiggler. I loved his contradicting motivations, his inability to face how far down the road to hell his good intentions had taken him. He was wonderful. Taking a more sidelined fanservicey role in Endwalker base game was understandable. Everyone was fanservicey in Endwalker – it was the fanservice expac, celebrating everything XIV had been to that point! And he’d had his arc, so hanging out as your little cheerleader was just fine. No complaints there.
Now if he gives me another speech about heroism I’m reporting him to HR.
It was pretty strained in the later Endwalker patches right before you head off to Tural – playing the hits in a place where they didn’t really fit – but it’s so, so bad in the final zone, where he accompanies you and gives you an Exarch classic romantically charged talking about the WoL without naming the WoL speech while you’re on a gondola ride. It’s just trotting him out for the shippers at the point. Enough. Please. I truly won as a WoLZenos shipper, because he died for good and I don’t have to see a bastardised version of him get paraded around for expac sales.
You may also have noticed that I said that Krile was the Scion getting an arc this expac and then said nothing about her in relation to the story. That’s because she didn’t actually have one. She spent the first half having Echo visions about Zoraal Ja and going “oh boy I hope we find the golden city”, and then in the second half she gets a backstory reveal but it kind of just all happens around her. She has no agency in it. A decent chunk of detail is only in optional dialogue from NPCs you click mid-quest, too.
In short, the mysterious earring she got from her grandfather is actually a gate to the golden city, which is Alexandria, and so therefore a gate to another shard. The gate was invented by her parents, and they got her out of Alexandria through that gate as a baby and that’s why she’s on the Source now. This is all basically a footnote and doesn’t really mean anything. It’s fun fact-tier stuff. She meets Endless versions of her parents in the final zone and they have an awkward conversation and a tearful goodbye. Krile already barely mattered before this, and she’ll surely get shoved back to the sidelines, so what was the point of any of this? If it had let her do something, fair enough, throw a bone to the Krile fans, but this is all just infodumped at her. Like they remembered they should probably give her something a bit more detailed than “G’raha’s friend from university” and farted out something in five minutes.
As for the WoL’s position in all this… again, despite me trying to strictly address the text itself here, I must address the common defence of this writing choice as being “you’re like a mentor this time”. Being a mentor would have been sick as hell! I wish I was one!
I don’t care about the WoL being an ultra badass that does everything and everyone adores. The WoL taking a backseat narratively would have been great for me, really, since I decided to make my original WoL retire and have a successor go and do the Dawntrail plot, who wouldn’t have the same reputation or experience. But the WoL doesn’t just take a diminished role – they take no role at all. They don’t even really mentor Wuk Lamat. They’re just a camera pointed at her. This was a complaint about parts of Stormblood, too – being a camera pointed at Lyse – but at least even then you’d still occasionally do something, like being the only person who could stand up to Zenos. For all of Dawntrail, the WoL didn’t need to be there at all and it would have played out the exact same. I don’t think it makes me an unreasonably self-centred dudebro to want to feel like my presence matters even a little bit.
Also, while I’ve mostly dissected plot things that I feel don’t make sense, the writing style itself is very lacking. Characters re-explain things we covered just half an hour ago, references are pointed out and explained thoroughly instead of letting us realise it for ourselves… etc. It’s very simplified writing for young children.
I came in with my expectations very, very tempered, and I was still… disappointed honestly sounds too intense. For all I’ve written in this post, because Dawntrail is boring it’s not actually very fun to complain about. It’s not frequently in my mind, just like how I don’t think about the Endwalker patches, which were similarly bland. I was expecting a few nothing expacs until they could build up the momentum to start reaching for the Shadowbringers highs again, but man…
Well, that concludes the plot complaints at least. What, you thought I was done?
Dawntrail is bad not just narratively, but structurally. To its core, it’s wrong.
Dawntrail is fundamentally half-assed. It’s an expansion where nobody tried at all. The half-baked first-draft narrative, of course, but everything else too. This will also get a bit more into fan reactions, since addressing it feels inevitable.
I just spent thousands of words complaining about the writing, and I’m going to continue to do so for this, but from a slightly different angle: the writing is so bad because they didn’t drop everything to get Ishikawa a successor. Even before she headed the Shadowbringers-Endwalker combo, pretty much everything that got wide praise in XIV was hers. She did the character concepts for Haurchefant, Ysayle and Zenos, she did the Dark Knight quests, she did the Omega raids. People don’t do the crafter stories as much so they aren’t talked about widely in general, but the fan favourite, ARR Alchemist? That was Ishikawa too. There’s been some side things by writers that aren’t her that are liked as well, but the really big stuff? Ishikawa.
Promoting her out of the writers’ room and into a supervisory position makes sense after years of giving XIV such a brilliant reputation. It should also have been done with the knowledge that she was doing all the heavy lifting and they needed someone who could succeed her, thematically, stylistically, any way at all. They did not do this even remotely. Dawntrail isn’t even their epic centrist nuance that they keep desperately pretending is compelling when they do political plots – it’s bad on a basic structural level. It’s written like it’s for children.
I don’t expect principled leftism out of XIV, nor Game of Thrones politics and edge or whatever. But I expect the game I pay $200 a year to play to be written by someone who at least has decent fundamentals. Shockingly, not many people seem to be able to say the same.
The voice acting is a bit of an elephant at the room at this point because of the vicious harassment that Wuk Lamat’s voice actress has received, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is bad. I am English FFXIV’s strongest soldier – the post-ARR recasting was the starting point of them becoming one of the best dubs in gaming history. English Shadowbringers in particular is the apex of it, with Endwalker not far behind. The VAs are brilliant and talented and passionate, the casting is second to none. It’s incredible. This is the height of, you know, the reinterpretation of a text through translation. Everyone involved – the writers, the directors, the VAs – gave 200% to deliver a performance for the ages. It completely outclasses the Japanese performances.
Dawntrail might as well be ARR again, in comparison. And it’s not just Wuk Lamat – it’s everyone. So many characters, from Wuk Lamat herself to bit-part NPCs, have stiff deliveries in weird emotional tones – maybe from trying to hold an accent too hard? I don’t know. The extremely forced American accents in Shaaloani were funny for a second, but were just grating after that. It felt so low-quality, an ultra-budget dub from the 90s. The Scions themselves all sound listless and like they just rolled out of bed. This isn’t just a case of awkward performances from a few inexperienced VAs, or a few bad takes making it in – it’s pretty clear the director was completely checked out. Didn’t care enough to provide instruction for good performances, didn’t care enough to try for better takes…
And that’s all leaving aside the absolutely huge amount of unvoiced cutscenes. There’s never been that many proportionately, surely?
I don’t think this is a case of the dub has fallen either, since we had Shadowbringers not that long ago, and I believe they can hit those highs again, but holy shit we should not be hitting these lows to begin with this far into the game’s lifecycle.
And aside from the voice acting quality, while the multicultural casting is a step in the right direction after years of white Brits doing bad accents, I need them to not hire these kind of VAs again – the kind that get bit parts in gacha instead of doing TV and radio dramas like the previous ones. We’ve already had incidents with them being inappropriate with fans on Twitter, and these kind of scandals have led to VA replacements in other games. Anyone can be an exploitative shithead, of course, but having this very online presence isn’t helping, especially when XIV fans are already wildly inappropriate with the VAs when they can establish contact (the trend of getting VAs to voice act your WoL/NPC fanfic on Cameo…).
People criticising this have been accused of jealousy, but I can promise you it’s absolutely not jealousy on my part. I believe in very strong boundaries between fans and creators, and if the VA of one of my favs flirted with me I’d probably stop being their fan at all. This belief was only reinforced by my time in pro-wrestling fandom, where people will just show wrestlers porn they’ve drawn or written of them basically unprompted. Interacting with fans on a level more personal than just “cool fanart (:” to a regular picture, especially if you’re involved in a massive production like XIV, is inappropriate. It also just contributes to a general noxious atmosphere – can you imagine how bad the fandom would be if Zagger was on Twitter replying to Emet thirst posts? Exactly.
(That’s focused on the actions of creators, but the actions of fans deserve criticism too. Don’t show them your porn! Don’t ask them to voice act your fanfiction! They’re people, not abstract content dispensers that represent your favs!)
Well, that got a little sidetracked. Returning to the structural half-assedness of Dawntrail, this probably seems like a minor complaint, but none of the Scions getting new outfits stands out to me. They don’t all get a new one every expac – the twins’ outfits were new for Endwalker, so I don’t expect those to change – but just… nothing? You really think Thancred is running around Tural in that big coat he’s been wearing since Shadowbringers? Even Krile’s “new outfit” was just pants…
The music as well. Not every song can win ’em all, and I haven’t unconditionally loved the entire OST of any previous expac, but Dawntrail has a way higher rate of total stinkers to the point I suspect Soken is phoning it in too. I mostly like the overworld themes – I love the Kozama’uka day theme and Tulliyolal day theme in particular – but all the boss fight music has been terrible. Not just the MSQ ones, but the Arcadion music. M1’s theme is too low-key given it’s meant to be for an exciting stadium fight with the audience cheering in the song, Bee My Honey sounds like an attempt at Jpop from someone who has heard a single Jpop song, and M3 and M4 are entirely forgettable. I thought Pandaemonium’s music was kind of middling too – I only really like Athena, the Tireless One and White Stone Black – but that was all middling, not bad, and Endwalker had good MSQ trial music. In general, I think Alexandria and anything associated with it being generic neon scifi gives an out to make way more generic music, instead of at least trying to keep it fantasy feeling, even if only lyrically.
We come to the maps themselves – which I mentioned way up above I would be getting to. I said I hated all the northern island zones, but Shaaloani is fine, if nothing special. You can only do so much with a desert, I think, and it’s not like Amh Araeng back in Shadowbringers was a standout either (though Sands of Amber was such a good overworld theme). It’s Heritage Found and the Unlost World that are the problem.
I do not like zones of perpetual darkness. They’re slightly better now that the lighting engine has been tweaked, but XIV has always struggled in low light, so I don’t know why they keep making them. I also keep my monitor brightness fairly low since having a desk job and computer-based hobbies mean I spend a lot of time looking at screens, and it helps with eye strain. Navigating Ultima Thule was genuinely nightmarish in parts because it was just an endless black mass, but at least it had a really pretty skybox. What do the Dawntrail maps have?
Heritage Found is generic desert map #2, but oh fuck we put a few bits of neon in it, and it’s perpetually dark and cloudy, so you can’t even see the sky. There’s just enough ambient light that navigating it isn’t torture, but there’s absolutely nothing interesting to look at. And sure, a zone in a dystopian future, I get it… but seriously, nothing better than desert on a cloudy night?
The Unlost World is saccharine and nothing special when the terminals are active, but when you turn them off and the projections fade it’s just a hideous wall of grey. Why are the final two zones just monotonous dark colours? I like to actually hang out in the world, shockingly, so I’d like something to look at while I gather, instead of bumbling through functionally identical parts of the map. Did they just give up on designing and use low light as a cheat code?
And, again, in a vacuum – sure, they made a shitty expac. Not that big a deal. It’s an inevitable part of a long-running MMO. But on the whole, I think this is a fork in the road for XIV’s future, and any decisions that are made now will irreversibly shape the game’s future. Some prior decisions weigh it heading in one direction over another, and I’m pretty wary of the game heading down that path.
People have long complained about toxic positivity/casuals when it comes to the actual gameplay – you don’t pay my sub as a defence for being near-griefing bad etc – but it’s clearly been brewing in the online fandomy-er spaces for a while and come to a head because of this. I mean, it’s not just an XIV thing – “whimsy” being the new cross-fandom defensive buzzword has quickly become an instant rage button for me. But with Dawntrail we’re beyond just let people enjoy things. It’s like… I don’t know. You have to enjoy it too. If you don’t enjoy it you’re a bad person. And because I enjoy it, that makes me a good person.
Dawntrail’s focus on multiculturalism and one of the main characters being voiced by a trans woman has undoubtedly brought bigots out of the woodwork, and certainly some negative reviews of Dawntrail, especially on launch day when nobody could have done anything substantial, have been borne from that. I’m not going to downplay it and say it’s akshually only 5-follower losers who think that – they’ve been vocal and relentless since Dawntrail was first announced. But there’s not really much further I can say about that beyond they should be rightfully outed as the bigots they are and made to fuck off. I can also say that CBU3 have done an absolutely shit job of protecting Wuk Lamat’s VA. Yoshi-P only finally said something about it a few weeks ago, but the harassment started back when she was first announced for Dawntrail. Did the English production team not warn the JP side? Or were the JP side warned and didn’t care? Either way, completely piss-poor showing from CBU3, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes marginalised VAs reconsider working for them in the future.
On reflection, starting to write this, I realise CBU3 barely pays attention to the English fanbase no matter what they say, so that much is a relief from a corporate decisions perspective. Though on that front, we still come to Dawntrail feeling fundamentally half-assed while having their highest preorders yet. Will they listen to criticism of the story and structure from the Japanese fanbase and change tack, or learn that they can put out whatever slop and we’ll all just eat it up off the floor regardless? One terrible half-assed expac is nothing, but if we get a second one…
But on the fanbase side, what started as completely justified defence of a woman facing bigoted harassment has morphed into Dawntrail representing a fundamental moral purity test. I’ve never been particularly active in the XIV fandom to begin with, especially with my retreat from social media, but I’m still concerned. I don’t like Dawntrail at all but I truly don’t care if someone is like “I liked it I had a lot of fun”. There’s something for everyone. If only that was all Dawntrail’s defenders were saying, though.
It started pretty overt – “If you don’t like Dawntrail, it’s because you don’t like the cultural aspects and you’re racist/you don’t like Wuk Lamat because you’re transphobic/etc”. That got enough pushback eventually, and turned into “If you don’t like Dawntrail, consider that X in it is based on Y cultural thing, and think about why you don’t like it (:”. And if you think about it, the obvious conclusion you’re meant to draw is that people don’t like Dawntrail because they’re racist.
And then, you know, “Oh, I get it, people don’t like Dawntrail because they lack empathy” (or otherwise have something fundamentally wrong with them). It’s so exhausting. There’s been more standard “can’t read” accusations too, which don’t bother me as much as suggesting I’m a fundamentally bad person, but they always seem to be deployed against people who have a pretty sound understanding of the text.
I’m not above making personal accusations at people with opinions I don’t like, but I do it bitching in my group chat. I’m not making viral posts about it. I’m not making repeated posts about it for weeks, making any public space related to my interests hostile to anyone who doesn’t share my opinions.
The fact that Dawntrail has to be defended like this, through endless guilt tripping and personal accusations, instead of defending its merits as a story… it just makes me think wow, Dawntrail must be even worse than I initially assessed it, if even its fans can’t consistently bring up anything they like about it. Even outside bigotry accusations, there’s a lot of “well, a simple story is fine, it’s a new beginning” defending the poor structure, etc. Are we at a point where you have to vocally love everything about XIV and can’t criticise the output ever without being shouted out? Speaking of Twitter and other, I guess, “online queer fandom spaces” here, of course – I know the forums have swung pretty hard in the opposite direction, and the mods have been lacklustre about removing unvarnished bigotry in criticisms there.
I don’t know. It’s hard to defend myself as a Dawntrail disliker, because there are relentless bigots, it is a problem, and CBU3 aren’t doing enough about it. But I also resent being painted as a fundamentally bad person just because I’m unhappy with the expac of a game I love and have the gall to expect better. This site represents another step in my move away from social media, so it isn’t really a problem for me, but it’s a problem for other people.
tl;dr just scroll back to Dawntrail release day on elfwifecity and read everything going forward in time, I have the same criticisms of the story and fan reactions anyway.
