Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail 7.0 MSQ (PC)
Played: Jun 28 - Jul 04 2024
Spoilers Below
There's been a lot of discourse about Dawntrail since its release and while I certainly had some issues with the latest expansion story, I feel far too many people have lost the ability to process what they're experiencing and relay on others to tell them what conclusions or observations they should have had.
But I digress, to me, more than ever FF14 is a victim of its own systems. For an expansion being described as a chance to experiment after wrapping up the decade old previous story, it felt chained to having certain story beats happen at certain points to match the nuts and bolts of the game (Dungeons and Trials have to be on certain levels because everything in previous expansions follow that).
This was really felt in the first half of the story, where Valigarmanda is supposed to be a looming-then-real threat capable of mass destruction, but the foe is dispatched at Level 93, a third of the way through.
Speaking of the first half, the story of establishing Wuk Lamat as the new leader of Tural actually felt appropriate, even if it's hard to believe that someone of her station would be so sheltered from her own culture by her own volition. The themes of parental relations and personal growth through strife had some good moments at times with both Wuk Lamat and her brother Koana, but also fell flat in once crossing the bridge into the north and into the 2nd half.
The story in Shaaloani was the lowest point for me, it felt like a side romp that was just wasting time and frustratingly, the later part of the zone's story with the Hhetsarro hinted at a far more interesting plot involving Koana, his past and his relationship with the nomadic clans. While this plot line is picked up in the 7.1 patch, I feel it would have been far more interesting in the main story.
When the story takes a hard turn to establish stakes, it still takes a long time to truly get interesting, even with the train building sequence that really felt like they were taking the piss.
Sphene and Alexandria were fascinating to introduce, even if like a lot of this section it takes far too long to establish what's going on, and the threat they represent. Unfortunately it takes until Living Memory before Krile gets to really expand on her past and who she is, who as someone we have with us the entire expansion is just tragic.
The final confrontation, while the fight itself was fun, the story resolution of it was also a disappointment, which felt tacked on. I'm hopeful that the implications and hints of the larger plot that it gave pay out.
In the end, I felt this expansion was a lot of the same from previous ones where there are some great individual moments but there are disparate moments that stretch too far but have to fill out the full 10 levels of game that gamers have to game.