Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail has had some time to simmer in the minds of its fanbase—and while I've had a blast with everything outside of it, the main scenario quest line has left me a little less enthusiastic than usual.
The issues it has, though, are complex ones. Dawntrail's story is one of those pesky mixed bags that gets stuck in my craw. It's full of great ideas with some really fun moments, but its plot beats and dialogue are both executed in ways so messy they nearly spoil the whole exercise. Ultimately, Dawntrail suffers from a bumpy script and an inability to properly prioritise its cast, which is a shame.
I recently went to Gamescom and got to speak with the game's director, Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), in person. I asked how he felt about the fanbase's response (in slightly more diplomatic terms) and he seemed quite reflective of the story's successes and failings. As is typically the case with these interviews, Yoshi-P's responses were translated on the spot by an interpreter.
"This being a game, it's a form of entertainment, and you'll always see some form of mixed response to entertainment," Yoshi-P begins, "A second factor is that with Endwalker, we reached a big climax to a long-standing, spanning story. To a certain extent I had already predicted that we would have some sort of mixed response this time.
"So If the question is whether I was shocked in a big way, the answer is no, not really."
It's interesting to hear that Yoshi-P was expecting some kind of conflicted response—and entirely fair, considering the sheer weight of expectation that all-timers like Shadowbringers and Endwalker had placed upon its shoulders. The way Yoshi-P tells it, however, the main bugbear through Dawntrail's development appears to have been pacing.
"The concept was journeying to a new land—we would be going to a new continent where we'd be seeing new cultures, new races, and characters … because of that, both in the development team and also from my side, we had this concept in mind in terms of cleanly and very attentively introducing these new aspects to the player."
However, Yoshi-P notes that while there were plenty of people who enjoyed the new horizon, others found the pacing to be less than optimal: "There were some people who thought that some of the tempo in the main scenario was slow. And they wanted to get through to more thrilling parts of the plot at a faster pace."
He then goes on to admit that there were some story beats that the team "could have diverted to the side quests—so if anyone was interested in learning more about [them], then they could just play the side quests at their own time and enjoy it at their own pace.
"We did see feedback from people who wanted to tackle the battle content faster. So because we saw that type of feedback we will take that on board as a learning process and experience."
Yoshi-P also commented on the mixed feedback regarding Wuk Lamat. While she's become a scapegoat for everything wrong with Dawntrail's story in the eyes of fans, my general opinion is that she's fine, but a walking bag of symptoms for its other shortcomings—she's a representation of the difficulty Dawntrail has prioritising its characters, in that she takes the centre stage while other characters like Krile, Erenville, and the scions suffer.
For Yoshi-P, one of the issues he's observed from the community was the character's initial difficulties in fulfilling the role of prospective Dawnservant—which typically manifested in bouts of seasickness and a spotty knowledge of her people's culture outside her home city of Tural:
"We depicted Wuk Lamat as someone who had a bit of a complex towards her parents and also towards her siblings, and because of that lack of confidence, I think that also contributed to the slow pace and the feeling of frustration.
"If we had maybe portrayed her as more of a confident character, maybe we would not have encountered that kind of situation. So in that regard, I feel that we did something quite bad for Wuk Lamat as a character. And taking on this experience, it made me realise that it's important to consider those things when it comes to showcasing the character to the players."
Ultimately, I think I'm in agreement with PC Gamer contributor Daniella Lucas when she says that Dawntrail's endgame outshines its story—I'm very much enjoying the wrestling kayfabe of the Arcadion, and I'm downright salivating at the chance to get back into an exploration zone, something I felt was really missing from Endwalker's patch cadence. While the story is deeply important to FF14, it's nowhere near everything—and the actual game I'm going to be playing for the next couple of years is downright solid.
