Let’s start this week’s Wisdom of Nym by clarifying something: If you ask me if Dawntrail is the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion, I will tell you that it is not. I’m still on the fence about whether I think Shadowbringers or Endwalker is the best expansion, but I definitely still think it’s one of those, even if we are just grading by launch content. (Which is the only way to grade fairly at this point.) But if you ask me about my personally favorite expansion? Then yeah, I think Dawntrail is quite possibly sitting in that spot.
It’s important to understand that these two statements are not synonyms. There’s a touch of subjectivity involved in any sort of critical analysis, obviously, but it is possible to acknowledge that something is better in a lot of important ways and therefore deserves the title of “best” without being what you enjoy most. I would never claim that Transformers: The Movie is a better film than The Godfather – that would be insane – but I know which of those films I find endlessly rewatchable and which one I have to be in a specific mood to see.
But why would I be willing to say that? Well… to talk about that, we’re going to have to talk about the last two expansions, what the game is to a lot of people, and a lot of other things. Strap in.
If someone asks you to say what FFXIV is, the answer is pretty easy. FFXIV is an MMORPG set on the world of Etheirys. It is also the fourteenth mainline installment in a long-running JRPG franchise. These are not debatable points; they’re right there in marketing material, every article or entry written about the game, and so forth. And it’s hardly a novel observation to be aware that FFXIV is kind of an interesting midpoint in that regard. It wants to be a JRPG and an MMORPG at the same time.
These two desires are not incompatible on a macro level, but they do result in certain compromises along the way. More often than not, this is brought up as part of the way that the MSQ gates your initial progress, but more important, for this column, is the way that the narrative needed for various areas and leaps of logic can get higher priority than, say, making a compelling set of zones with an understandable layout.
Our last two expansions have absolutely been JRPG expansions.
In both Shadowbringers and Endwalker, the focus was very explicitly on telling a big JRPG story complete with zones and dungeons tied to that. The First is an entire alternate world that most people cannot travel to, several of the dungeons are not so much locations as they are experiences that would at most happen once, and both expansions feature multiple zones that no one is actually visiting. Elpis, for all that it’s a gorgeous zone, is a zone in no small part because you need to spend so much time and narrative there, but it requires some narrative kludges for you to ever go back.
And yes, at least three or four of the zones in Endwalker are absolutely places many people will go, but they’re also all disconnected. Sharlayan and Radz-at-Han are incredibly far apart and linked by nothing beyond narrative necessity. It’s a reasonable decision for an expansion that wants to make sure we see these places long discussed and never seen, but also one that isn’t really geographically contiguous.
Moreover, both of these expansions are about the Warrior of Light, which was novel when it happened in Shadowbringers compared to the prior expansions. You know, the expansion that saw a huge influx of people to the game for the first time. That’s not to say that the WoL was irrelevant previously, just that the player was not usually the focal character as in those two expansions.
When I call those two the best of breed to this point, I mean it. For a lot of players, a whirlwind story that plops you right in the center of the narrative is going to be a heady mix, helped a lot by the fact that both stories were well-written and featured a lot of great stuff. The bright-light horror of Shadowbringers is still amazingly compelling; the narratives about faith in the faith of despair throughout Endwalker really resonate. And all the while, the stakes feel sky-high, as if we’re balancing on the knife’s edge of our continued existence.
But there’s a thing about living in that kind of high-intensity environment: It doesn’t just age you, it hurts you. You cannot keep it up. Either you need the tension to back off or you wind up just collapsing from it. Heck, my biggest criticism of the Endwalker patch storyline was about the way that it pushed up the tension of the scenario even as we, the players, knew that the worst outcomes weren’t going to happen because they simply couldn’t. It’s a good story, but it keeps struggling to convince you that Golbez is a real threat to the Source when you just know he isn’t.
Dawntrail does not want to be these expansions.
It’s not that the expansion lacks stakes, just that the stakes are more realistic. We are dealing with the fate of Tuliyollal for the first half of the story, and the second half expands that to have implications for the world and beyond but it remains a pretty contained thing. As the ultimate resolution of Zoraal Ja’s attack forces makes clear, he was never actually going to be a conquering warlord who swept over the whole of the planet, even with Alexandria at his beck and call. That was a fantasy, and his initial attack was so destructive because it was wholly unexpected.
And by extension, the WoL is not the focal character. We’re still important, we still have moments and reasons to reflect, but our role is much closer to being akin to Watson in a Holmes story. We are the point of view and a character shaped by the journey, but not the one instigating. And in exchange…
We get a continent. We get an entire set of zones and towns that for the most part people would actually live in and explore, not totally disconnected locations. (Yes, most of them don’t have easy zonelines for dramatic necessity, but they still feel contiguous.) We get a place and a region that we can explore, full of adventures we can undertake or not without make you feel as if you left something on the table.
I touched on this a little when discussing the role quests, even. In Endwalker there was a pervasive feeling that if you left a major blasphemy alone, it could be a threat to the whole world, so shouldn’t someone be taking care of that? In Dawntrail it’s all right if, say, you never do the magical DPS role quests. The fate of the world isn’t at stake. Some bad things will happen, sure, but it won’t result in collapse.
Those of you who have followed my work for years should know that I love JRPGs. I love a good world-spanning journey that ends in uniquely weird places, and I have ever since I fired up Dragon Quest on the NES. (Yes, I know it was Dragon Warrior over here, step off.) But I also do love MMORPGs. I love having a world to just exist in, someplace that feels like a place with real people, regions that are there to live in instead of to be the backdrop for a fireworks festival.
Do I begrudge the fact that for the past two expansions, FFXIV has swung much more in the direction it has? Not at all. Those are great expansions that are full of loads of happy memories for me. But in an MMO my preference is always going to be for places that exist outside of the one specific moment. I have my preferences, and those preferences mean that eating tacos in Yak T’el feels more fitting to me than helping to open a multi-species bar in Ultima Thule.
So while I don’t think that Dawntrail is the best of breed in a macro sense, it’s given me a continent I can exist in. It’s given me a new job I’ve wanted for years. It’s restored a calmer set of stakes. It feels, in other words, like an expansion style we haven’t had for a while. That obviously doesn’t mean I cannot see any flaws to it, but for my money, it’s quite possibly my favorite expansion in years. And I’m really looking forward to seeing how it feels over the next year and change.
Also, as a postscript that is small but worth adding here: the amount of harassment that Wuk Lamat’s voice actress, Sena Bryer, has received is insane and shameful. But what’s equally shameful is the number of people who feel the need to modulate their criticism of that harassment with “now, I hate Wuk Lamat, but I don’t think this should happen.” You’re allowed to dislike a character, but if you need to restate that before saying that said character’s voice actor shouldn’t be harassed, you sound like you’re mostly upset that the harassment crossed a line. And if you don’t like being lumped in with people who are super cool with harassing a trans woman, maybe it’s time to sort your own house out.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. I didn’t really expect this to be a whole thing, but it turned into one, so now I’m going to be happy to move on and talk about something else: What sort of allied societies would make sense to see in Dawntrail moving forward?
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
