'This game means more to me than any other': The voice of Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's first hrothgar lady has been playing since before the game's 2013 revamp
Now that Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's full trailer has finally released, the game's first on-screen hrothgar lady has stepped into the spotlight. It turns out that her English voice actor has also been playing the game for years, as revealed in a tweet yesterday.
«Keeping quiet about this has been the hardest thing of my life,» Sena Bryer writes in a follow-up tweet. «I've been playing FFXIV since 1.0 launch, and before that FFXI since its NA PC launch. This game means more to me than any other in all my life of gaming. To be such a part of it is such a tremendous honour.»
FF14's initial release (the 1.0 Bryer mentions) is almost unrecognisable to most players nowadays. It was flooded with glitches, weighed down by an archaic user interface and combat system, and hilariously poorly optimised—infamously, one single barrel had more polygons than a player model for some ungodly reason.
The game's current director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) was brought in to give the game a reboot, leading us to 2.0—or A Realm Reborn, as it's now known. This makes Byrer an OG FF14 player in the literal sense of the word.
I decided to reach out to Bryer about her history with the game, and she linked me to a thread she made back in 2021, long before she received the role.
In it, Byrer wrote about how impactful Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker was to her: "[The game] means so much to me that I can barely put it into words. Final Fantasy XIV and its predecessor Final Fantasy XI literally saved my life." She details her journey through FF11 (another Final Fantasy MMORPG) which gave her both a community and a proper way to express her gender identity.
«Fast forward 2 years though and I was in the deepest depression of my life,» she added, saying that
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