Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Kicking off a brand new story arc in a brand new location, Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail opens with you joining Wuk Lamat in her quest to complete the Rite of Succession, a grand quest to decide the next to ascend to the throne of Tuliyollal as Dawnservant. It’s an adventure of great discovery for players, as you’ll follow the various exploits and successes of the current Dawnservant, Gulool Ja Ja, journey across the continent of Tural and learn about its many peoples, while also striving to discover the legendary golden city.

What Dawntrail focuses on is putting the Warrior of Light (that’s you, by the way) into a mentor role, allowing other characters in the story to become the focal point of the narrative. It doesn’t mean that you are pushed aside, as everyone you meet clocks you immediately as someone to not mess with, but you often work to help others reach their potential as others like Louisoix, Minfillia, or Hauchefant (sorry fanbase) did for you.

The result is that new characters like Wuk Lamat, Koana and others from Tural are really given the space to breathe in this story that rightfully belongs to them. Not only this, but characters that have deserved further development are explored further over the course of the story, such as Erenville and Krile.

This doesn’t mean that everything is breezy and chilled for the whole time, of course, with Dawntrail having all the classic Final Fantasy trappings of twists, betrayals, and suddenly raising stakes to keep you on your toes. The story introduces certain elements that hark back to previous Final Fantasy games which are handled wonderfully in Dawntrail, but that might be due to my sheer bias towards the specific game that it draws from. Also, the implications that are laid out for the future of the story of FFXIV are both interesting and successfully build upon what we already know in a satisfying fashion.

Dawntrail doesn’t fix what isn’t broken, so the fundamental gameplay of this decade old MMORPG is much the