What makes a good story? Good characters are often cited as the most important aspect of a story. If you don’t care about the people involved and what they are doing then why bother following their journey? Final Fantasy XIV is an MMORPG with an expansive and well-written story, with some people claiming some of the expansions to even be the best stories in the Final Fantasy series. This writeup will talk about the newest expansion at the time of writing, Dawntrail. While Dawntrail has some enjoyable moments, it has a flawed story with some messy writing and uninteresting characters.
Final Fantasy XIV was initially released in 2010, marking its 1.0 release. To make a long story short, it was not good. It was universally panned for its bad gameplay, bad UI, and gave off the general impression of being unfinished. The servers were shut down in 2012 and a year later the 2.0 version of the game was released with the name A Realm Reborn. The re-release of the game marked the beginning of a 10 year journey culminating in the defeat of the Ascians and saving the universe (this is a JRPG after all).
Dawntrail is the first expansion after this 10 year story. It is supposed to set up the next 10 year saga. It initially follows Wuk Lamat and the other claimants in the Right of Succession, a contest held by the current Dawnservant, the ruler of Tural, to find their successor. The claimants, consisting of the current Dawnservant’s son, his two adopted children, Koana, and Wik Lamat, and a Mamool Ja representing Mamook, must collect several keystones from the proctors of the test and, hopefully in the process, meet the people of Tural and learn about their cultures and histories.
Overall I enjoyed the Right of Succession. It was able to instill a sense of adventure as we went all over the southern part of the continent visiting many locales and learning about the people’s culture and history. It also served as a natural way to introduce the player to this new place being the “new world” both in game and a new world for the player.
Unfortunately, I did have some issues with this section. The main issue was that I didn’t feel like Wuk Lamat had grown enough over the course of the Right to be able to beat Bakool Ja Ja, the main antagonist for this section. At the beginning, Bakool Ja Ja is shown to be very strong and Wuk Lamat struggles to even block a hit from him. It seems a bit unrealistic for her to not only be able to beat Bakool Ja Ja, but also some of his goons, along with some other Mamool Ja from Mamook who interfered with the fight. I jokingly referred to this moment as her invoking her “protagonist powers” and I feel like that sums up how this moment felt. She didn’t win because she grew, she won because she was the protagonist.
The other issue I had with this section was that it felt like the conclusion was obvious. Wuk Lamat was going to win not only because we were helping her, but because none of the other claimants were even possible contenders, due to their flaws. Actually, neither was Wuk Lamat for that matter. She only won because of her protagonist powers and because her flaws were the least egregious out of them all. The only other claimant who had a chance was Koana, which is where the second part of the obvious conclusion comes in. Koana exists to complement Wuk Lamat, but he does so too well. He is smart and level headed, but he lets that get in the way of understanding the people of Tural; Wuk Lamat’s strong point. It was obvious to me from the very beginning that they were going to become the new Dawnservants with how they complement each other’s weakness. It felt like the characters were created to serve the story instead of the other way around.
I have talked about Wuk Lamat a lot already but I feel like she is probably the most important part in understanding why this story has issues. After all, the intro did mention that characters are the most important aspect of a story.
Wuk Lamat is a better version of Lyse. Lyse was the companion character who traveled in your group during Stormblood and is almost universally panned due to how annoying she was. Both Wuk Lamat and Lyse were supposed to start out naïve and inexperienced and, over the course of the story, grow and learn to be good leaders. Most people would agree that Lyse never really grew into the leader she was supposed to become. Initially Lyse reveals that she has been playing the part of her sister, Yda, and decides that she will be her own person and not try to imitate her sister anymore. This was supposed to be her starting point; and from this point on, she should grow and work towards becoming a leader. Unfortunately, while she does grow somewhat, it is not nearly to the point that she needed to. The turning point for her character is supposed to, ironically, be when she puts on her sister’s dress after we finished with the Doma section of the story and had returned to Gyr Abania. Having seen leadership in action with Hien, she is supposed to have grown and learned from the experience but she ends up still being the same character she has been so far in the story.
Wuk Lamat starts off in a similar way. Initially she is inexperienced but tries to hide it with a mask of confidence. In Lyse’s case it was a literal mask she wore while playing her sister. We see Wuk Lamat’s mask in the section in 6.55 when we return to the Isle of Haam and we see her freeze up when faced with the final boss of the instance. We also see this when her hands were shaking from fear after the fight. In addition to this, we also see the naïve curiosity and enthusiasm as she explores Sharlayan which, at the time, comes off as more endearing than annoying. I recall people being very excited seeing her in 6.55 and looking forward to seeing more of her during Dawntrail.
During the main story, her enthusiasm did get a little annoying but it was how much they highlighted that she was dumb which was far more annoying. It didn’t bother me that much in the Right of Succession section, but I felt like it hurt the story a bit in the latter half. Besides being annoying, I did feel like there were some parts where her being dumb actually made the other characters seem dumb. In Part 46 of my playthrough on YouTube, I actually said “They make Wuk Lamat look smarter by making everyone else dumber”. Instead of having her grow and learn, it seemed like sometimes they just made the other characters not notice obvious things. Again, this was mostly in the second half which I will talk about later.
The final claimant, who I haven’t mentioned yet, is Zoraal Ja. The reason I haven’t mentioned him yet is because he doesn’t do anything and serves almost no purpose in this part of the story. It seems like he exists only to set him up to be one of the antagonists in the second half of the story. His inclusion in the story feels like they didn’t actually have him as a claimant in the beginning of writing and needed to shoehorn him in in order to have something for the second half. It really felt poorly done in my opinion.
Once the Right of Succession has completed and Wuk Lamat and Koana have been crowned as the new Dawnservants, we enter a brief interlude without a clear direction for the story. Since we have explored the southern half of the continent we end up joining Erenville, one of our companions for this story, as he heads north to visit his hometown. In order to reach his hometown, we need to pass through Shaaloani, a region based on the U.S. western frontier. As you would expect, there are cowboys and outlaws who need to be brought to justice!
I didn’t have too much issue with this section. It was a fun adventure which led us into the next part of the story. I’m not the biggest fan of westerns so it didn’t really connect with me but I can see the appeal. It was also fun seeing the trolley people from the First’s shards. That was hilarious 😂.
The cutscenes leading into the next section were a little confusing. When we see Zoraal Ja attacking Ketenramm and apparently killing him and then opening up the portal, it gave me two fake outs. First, I thought that Ketenramm was dead and him showing up again confused me. Didn’t we literally see him get killed? Second, since the portal was in the southern part of the continent, it threw me off when the dome appeared in the northern part? I think this was because that is where the portal from using interdimensional fusion put them but it does seem a little convenient that it appears in the area which we haven’t explored yet.
The appearance of the dome and the attack on Tuliyollal mark the beginning of the second part of the story, which is by far the messiest part of the story. I can see what it was going for, but due to the number of times I crashed out at the writing while I was playing through, it made it very difficult to notice. There were a couple times where, after stream, I would think about the story and think “oh, that’s what they were going for”. The main reason for my crash outs, as I figured out later, was that I could see a good story in the mess but it just never came to fruition which frustrated me.
One of the issues I had was that at some points, it felt like it was treating the characters and the player like they were blind and stupid. One example is how the characters kept saying things like, “how could Zoraal Ja do this!” as if they somehow never noticed he was crazy despite him clearly hating and wanting to kill everyone from the very beginning of the story. There was even a scene toward the beginning where Krile felt his emotions with her echo and commented about how much he wanted to kill Wuk Lamat and Koana. Another case was how they took a long detour to show how the regulators worked and tried to have a big reveal that “oh so that’s how Zoraal Ja came back to life” even though it was basically already explained with the camera work and the very obvious zoom ins on the regulators anytime they lit up.
The more egregious issue with this section are the antagonists. I felt like neither Zoraal Ja nor Sphene had good motivations for their actions, which made them poor antagonists.
Sphene was the queen of Alexandria, a nation on one of the other shards. Her goal was to create a world without suffering where her people could live in peace. A worthwhile motivation, but the actions she takes to create this world as well as the logic she uses to justify it are inherently flawed. It actually is similar to what the Asicans/Ancients wanted and it seems like the writers were trying to reuse the themes which had worked so well in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Unfortunately, the flaws in her motivation are so bad that, to me, it killed my interest in her character and made the themes which had worked well in the previous expansions not work. I wanted to like her and I think her goals are worthwhile but I almost laugh with how flawed the logic is.
In order to achieve her goal of peace, Alexandrian scientists created a way to extract and separate a person’s memories from their souls. By doing this, they could preserve a person’s memories and effectively recreate that person to allow them to live for eternity. The flaw in this plan is that, in order to maintain the artificial bodies and world for the memories, a supply of aether is required. Normally this would come from the cycle of death and rebirth in the Aetherial Sea but since that cycle is broken, aether must be acquired in other ways. Sphene decides to take aether from others and use interdimensional fusion to travel to other shards to help sustain her people. Are you kidding me? What stupid and flawed logic. I literally need to write that and break from my usual prose because just writing that portion annoyed me. It’s so stupid.
On a more positive note, there are some good parts with her character which I do want to point out. I did find it interesting to see the parallels between her and Wuk Lamat loving their people and saying that they will do anything to protect them. In Sphene’s case, literally willing to kill everyone else in order to keep them alive. The issue I had was that I didn’t see this initially because I was blinded by the poor writing at the time of her introduction and her awful motivation. It was also interesting seeing the contrast between her approach to rule and Zoraal Ja’s. Sphene loved her people and made a point about interacting with them and being seen. Zoraal Ja was rarely seen by the people and literally ordered their execution without batting an eye. Sphene’s approach reminds me about the ideas of a leader presented in the second Mistborn book where one of the ideas was to be seen by your men. Sphene embodies this idea far better than Zoraal Ja.
Zoraal Ja is the other antagonist for this section. His bad motivation problems are just as bad as Sphene’s. He is driven by his inferiority complex and his desire to surpass his father, Gulool Ja Ja, the former Dawnservant. All his life he felt that he was spurned by his father in favor of his adopted siblings, Wuk Lamat and Koana. This inferiority complex manifests in his desire to basically kill anyone? He cares for literally no one except himself and honestly just comes off as crazy. I mentioned before how I felt the other characters are somehow blindsided by his bloodlust. It is difficult to take him seriously when he comes off as a lunatic. It should have been better but just came off as silly. Additionally, despite him wanting to surpass his father both in strength and in leadership, Sphene actually displays more characteristics of a good leader. This might have been an intentional choice in order to even better showcase how far Zoraal Ja was from his goal. Not sure on this though. This was an afterthought I had while writing this.
Along with this poor motivation, I don’t feel like the writing for his inferiority complex was done well in general. While I was playing I kept saying that Zoraal Ja had an inferiority complex but also that he was crazy due to it. It didn’t feel like that was the impression I was supposed to have? Maybe the inferiority complex part but it really just acted as motivation for his insanity. It also didn’t help that, as I mentioned, no one seemed to notice neither the complex nor the insanity.
Finally when they showed Zoraal Ja’s final moments and had him confess his motivations and desires, it didn’t hit. The emotions from the scene were not as much because of his death, but from the fact that his son was there and the speech was to his son and about how he had nothing to leave him. He felt that he had been left nothing by his father and now he was doing the same. Writing this now, I think I see where the emotion is supposed to come from, but it is not because of Zoraal Ja, but instead because of his son. I guess that isn’t as bad as I had initially thought but, like I said before, it didn’t land at the time.
There was one thing I liked in this section. I did like seeing Wuk Lamat actually behaving more like a leader. She was noticeably more confident in this section than during the Right of Succession. Maybe this change happened earlier after she faced off against Bakool Ja Ja but it also might have been prompted by the attack on Tulliyolal and Gulool Ja Ja’s death. That would make sense and I feel like that is the more likely case. It also could have been because this portion of the story feels completely different than the first half. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that this was similar to Stormblood where they had two different writers or some other issue with the writing of the story. Maybe since it was written in two distinct parts they had issues keeping her character consistent. I like the idea that she actually grew in the face of adversity though so I will stick with that.
The last portion of the story takes place in the sanctuary of the Endless, the people who had been given eternal life by Sphene. Overall I enjoyed this section, and it was able to salvage some of the story for me and leave me with a positive feeling as I finished the story. It didn’t make up for the parts I didn’t like and did by no means fix the story or the characters, but it did help with my overall feeling of the story.
The general idea which was explored with this section is something along the lines of “what does it mean to be alive” and makes us confront our mortality. Generally that is supposed to be the idea for the Heritage Found section with the regulators too but I feel that it was executed much better in this section. The general flow of this section has us going around to several sections of Living Memory talking with the Endless and learning about them as they were and as they are now. We learn that they seem happy and some are able to have a new lease on life by being given a second chance. This is supposed to make us connect with these people before we pull the plug on the Endless and they disappear.
The part which was the most interesting for me was meeting several people we had either met throughout the story or head about at some point. Meeting Namika and seeing her and Wuk Lamat get to talk one last time, seeing Otis and his devotion to Sphene, meeting Krile’s parents and seeing her accomplish her goal for this journey, and finally, Cachiua and Erenville with Erenville showing his mother how he has grown and how he will continue to explore like she taught him.
The part which I had the most issue with was how they tried to salvage Sphene’s character. At the beginning of the section, they tried to rationalize her irrational decision making and obsession with saving her people by saying that she was “programmed” this way. That, when she was uploaded, the feelings she had for her people were preserved and manifested as the obsession we see. It felt a bit cheap and poorly written, like they were struggling to create a good motivation for her character after they had an idea of what they wanted to do. This is in contrast to the antagonists in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. This expansion continues with the themes introduced in the previous expansion, but their antagonists had much better motivations. You cared about them and possibly sympathized with them to some degree. I can’t really sympathize with someone who was “programmed”.
Despite this issue, I do think that they did a decent job at salvaging Sphene’s character, or at least making me feel something for her, in the final fight and cutscene. In the final cutscene, it seemed like she finally realized the hypocrisy of what she was doing and that she deeply regretted her actions. How can she justify saving her people if it requires slaughtering someone else’s? They also mention that this version of her is not the “real” Sphene since it is the version which was uploaded to Living Memory. I have seen that there is another version of her NPC in 7.2 which I have heard is a completely different person? I am interested in seeing what that ends up being about.
That concludes the initial story of Dawntrail, or I guess two stories? It really does feel like two completely different stories mashed together; especially after looking at the story as a whole. Perhaps that is why I want to compare it to Stormblood? There are the similarities to Lyse and Wuk Lamat but I feel like it is also the story structure and the messy writing. Like with Stormblood, I did generally enjoy the story but both still have their issues. Dawntrail suffered from weak characters and the already mentioned messy writing which hurt my overall enjoyment of the story especially during the Heritage Found section.
This story should have been better. It has some interesting ideas and, when I think about it more, I start to see what they were attempting to do with the story and the characters. It is unfortunate that it turned out the way it did; but, from what I have heard, the story does improve in 7.2 so I look forward to seeing what that has to offer. I just have to get through more of the same in 7.1…
Another write up done. There were actually two of three write ups I tried to do since the last one but all of them ended up getting scrapped. With this one, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted to say which made it much easier to write. The other ones were a lot more vague and I didn’t really have a clear idea that I wanted to talk about. Actually, the last one I scrapped was a write up on Warbreaker where I wanted to talk about the two sister’s journeys. The two issues were that; first, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to say and second, there was a lot of stuff to go through and the scope was getting too big. Hopefully the next write up wont take three months to write 😅.
JohnB_Live 
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