Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail review – "A slow, insubstantial start with promising gameplay"

With snow-capped mountains, lush jungles, sprawling cities, Final Fantasy 14 set the stage for its new expansion, whisking us away from Eorzea to the vibrant and culturally rich content of Tural. Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail offered a promise of new beginnings – a new narrative to explore, new characters to meet, and new Jobs to allow for even greater specialization. And while the new classes are both exciting additions that are sure to add flavor to upcoming Extreme and Savage content, the story is far from interesting, plagued with one-dimensional characters and narrative that feels, at best, like filler.

Every Final Fantasy 14 expansion brings with it a new region to explore, and oftentimes new Job Classes or even races; Dawntrail is no exception. The long-awaited female Hrothgar are finally playable, though they do have some limitations much like their male counterparts when it comes to complete customization, and instead of a new country we are exploring a new continent. 

Tural, a place heavily inspired by Latin America – with little drops of Southeast Asia sprinkled throughout in the form of select bits of architecture – feels vast through the incorporation of more than a handful of different biomes. And for those less interested in the new narrative thread Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail attempts to weave, the two new Job Classes – Viper and Pictomancer – give high-end raiders something to chew on while waiting for new content to release.

Combat flow

Viper and Pictomancer are a welcome addition to the already burgeoning number of classes available in Final Fantasy 14, allowing for more Jobs to dabble in as Square Enix's MMORPG enters its next era. While I generally opt to dedicate myself to the role of either a Tank or a Healer when an expansion freshly drops, I eagerly swapped out my staff and gunblade for the dual blades sported by the swift and dexterous Viper. This was the first time since Stormblood that I was interested in picking up another DPS class outside of Summoner and my now-neglected Samurai. Sometimes the rule of cool just wins out, and Viper is nothing if not cool.

This new Melee DPS class feels not too dissimilar to the Reaper in the way that it relies on players to keep up debuffs to fully realize the potential of the Job Class, and has a similar way of building up its combos and meter. The Viper is defined by combos that lean into building up a meter to allow you to perform flashier, more devastating attacks that combine your dual blades into a polearm. 

You have your standard AoE and single-target attacks, but those single-target attacks branch out into a couple of different combos that doll out debuffs or hasten your own abilities. This makes the Job a lot more engaging, since you will need to weave applying haste to your own attacks while keeping debuffs up on top of making sure to strike at enemies from specific angles to do the most amount of damage possible. There's a lot to juggle there, especially if you're a newcomer to Final Fantasy 14 (ir have played less complex classes like Summoner in the past) but overall it feels great once you get the hang of it.

Pictomancer, the new Magic DPS class, is similar to the Viper in that it's easy to pick up but difficult to master as it provides utility in the form of damage-increase buffs for party members, which means you will want to time your burst windows around when the Pictomancer's Starry Muse is available. Starry Muse ups the damage of your party by a flat percent, making it an invaluable and powerful addition to the available Extreme Trials.

I was hoping that Final Fantasy 14 would do away with the flow of combat being driven by burst windows, but Dawntrail seems to embrace it instead as effectively all utility skills, even for classes like White Mage, now have a secondary attack attached to it. Casting Presence of Mind now transforms into Glare IV, which means I now need to weave in it into my rotation, blowing a skill that I previously saved for resurrecting fallen party members when Swiftcast was on cooldown since it increases your overall cast speed for a short period of time. And while Pictomancer does manage to shake things up a bit in terms of just how broad its rotation can actually be, other Jobs have more or less been simplified for greater ease of access at the cost of their mechanical and visual identity.

Gunbreaker, Dark Knight, Paladin, and Warrior have had their gap closer changed into a generic dash that propels you towards your target. Previously, Gunbreaker had Rough Divide, a skill ripped right out of Final Fantasy 8, that had my character spinning towards the enemy in a flash of gunpowder and steel. Dark Knight had a literal plunge which was cool, given the dichotomy of this agile leap when paired with the heavy plate armor adorned by this class.

Homogenization has accompanied every new expansion, with the unique aspect of individual Jobs sanded away until they've just become skins for a Role for you to fill in the Duty Finder. Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is no exception in this regard, with changes to Viper already in the works to make adjustments to how complex its combos are. Seeing changes made to make a class less interesting or less mechanically challenging to play, especially one that has only been part of the game for less than a month, doesn't leave me confident in the direction further adjustments will go. This is especially true since some of the best content in Dawntrail is in its Trials and dungeons – which require you to engage with your Job Class to its fullest extent.

New exciting trials and dungeons await

All of the new Trials in Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail kept me on my toes as a White Mage, with the final run reminiscent of some of my favorite moments in the near decade I've spent in the MMORPG. Healing this encounter was exciting, forcing me to use all of the skills at my disposal, even ones that I had otherwise felt unnecessary for the Extreme Trials in previous expansions Shadowbringers and Endwalker. The new Dawntrail dungeons are also a blast with most boss fights equipped with their own gimmicks, like needing to keep an eye on where a boss tosses bombs into color coordinated pipes or swapping between a corporeal and incorporeal form through panels on the ground to break tethers to enemies. This makes the battles a lot more engaging, even if getting to those encounters is just burning down groups of enemies on the way there.

One of my favorite boss fights in Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is in one of the post-Main Scenario Quest dungeons, which is a haunted teapot in a neon-lit amusement park inhabited by the deceased. Every dungeon has a unique theme associated with it, whether it be the verdant jungles of Tural or a futuristic facility full of soul-infused beasts and possessed suits of high-tech armor. That's in addition to being tied to a region of Tural, which gives the world a little bit of extra texture as a result. All of these regions are given a purpose and specific theme regional, as most are tied directly into the narrative in some shape or form in terms of visual design to reflect what area we are currently traipsing through; such as the aforementioned jungles and soul-harvesting facilities.

Much like the dungeons, each new zone has its own distinct flair. Tural is meant to be massive in scale, and the variety between these zones helps illustrate this. You travel from the tops of mountains, through lush jungles lit with fluorescent blue flowers, to barren, lightning-plagued wastes, and various cities with a distinct sense of architecture – all meant to give Tural a broad sense of culture as it samples from more than a handful of Latin American and Southeast Asian nations instead of just one.

Unfortunately, outside of these areas being visually impressive – the result of a long-overdue graphics update which has breathed new life into this aging MMORPG – the push towards a broader scale leaves Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail feeling confused. Cities clearly inspired by the Aztec civilization are within close proximity to pioneer towns, oil rigs and all, that could be ripped right out of the 19th or early 20th century. It feels like a vague pastiche of the various cultures they are attempting to represent, blended together without much consideration by comparison to Stormblood's Doma, which is directly analogous to Japan. 

As a result, Dawntrail fails to build a cohesive standard due to its mixed mishmash of inspirations, which feels like the path forward has immediately gotten off on the wrong foot. This also extends to the narrative in some respect, as a stronger focus on one region or even theme would have done the expansion some good in terms of general character development (especially with its new cast) and overall themes.

The narrative drags

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is a simple, meandering story about the Warrior of Light traveling to the continent of Tural to support Wuk Lamat in her quest to become Dawnservant. Frankly, I'm still scratching my head at Square Enix's deliberate marketing decision to paint our involvement in instating a new leader in a foreign country as a vacation. The Scions of the Seventh Dawn, your companions through previous expansions, are there as well but to little effect. They show up during key story moments, but do little else other than make appearances.

The new cast of characters, including Wuk Lamat, feel underbaked and like cardboard cutouts of various archetypes – with Wuk Lamat being the naive, inexperienced leader that relies on us for support until she has her "power of friendship" moment which doesn't feel particularly earned because she doesn't undergo any sort of meaningful character development. One of my favorite characters of his expansion ended up being a Mamool Ja child, and another Mamool Ja character that has a heel-turn about halfway through the story.

The plot moves between a contest to determine who will become the next Dawnservant and a near world-ending threat in order to set up what I assume is going to allow us to travel freely to other "reflections," which is just shorthand for other worlds that are deeply inspired by other Final Fantasy games. This pulls on previous narrative threads that otherwise felt closed, and re-opening them seems like a clear lack of confidence in moving away from the conclusion of Final Fantasy 14's first major narrative arc. We were promised something new, but we're close to retreading old ground in a way that doesn't leave me especially confident in this "new" direction when it feels more or less like a U-turn.

And when it comes to Final Fantasy 14 mashing up bits and pieces of other games into its DNA, I've always had an issue with this, but I find it most egregious in Dawntrail as Final Fantasy 14 moves further and further away from being its own thing and more and more into becoming a proverbial theme park of other, better Final Fantasy games. The antagonists have very simple motivations, which I wouldn't take issue with if they were better written — but this can apply to most of the expansion's narrative. It's an underwhelming start to what should be something invigorating for the now decade-old MMORPG. Instead I'm seeing Dawntrail tread the same ground as Stormblood, and with the prospect of once again visiting another fragmented world, I'm not all that excited.

With an MMORPG so singularly focused on its story, and having received such high praise for its previous expansions, Dawntrail is a slow, uninteresting start to the next chapter of Final Fantasy 14. While the content is certainly engaging, the narrative just isn't up to par, which left me wanting for something more substantial. But if I do decide to keep playing Final Fantasy 14 once the new content patches roll out, I certainly won't be doing it for the story.