REVIEW: Final Fantasy XIV’s ‘Dawntrail’ Is All About Connection (PC)

The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, which offers a free trial until level 70, has become a pillar of its genre. With a player base that keeps growing and two wildly successful previous expansions that wrapped up a saga, Dawntrail has a lot to compete with. Dawntrail is the fifth expansion of the over-decade-old MMORPG, bringing players to a place they haven’t been before: West. Adapting Latin America and the American Southwest, the Dawntrail MSQ (Main Scenario Quests) opens up a new continent for players to explore and introduces new characters and cultures as well. 

The Dawntrail MSQ is fairly straightforward in the beginning. Set up at the end of the Endwalker Patch content. You board a ship to the New World of Tural. There, you accompany Wuk Lamat in her quest to become the Dawnservant, picking up her father’s crown and being a ruler who cherishes her people in all of their differences. To do so, you must complete a series of feats across the continent, learning about each distinct zone along the way.

Your competition are your brothers Koana, a researcher who has returned to Old Sharalyn to bring Tural into a new technological era, and Zoraal Ja, a brother who wants to expand Tural’s reach and take more land for his people. In addition to them, you must also compete against the Blessed Born Bakool Ja Ja, who is in it all for the glory of his people and to fulfill an antiquated idea of birthright.

In this story, the Warrior of Light takes a backseat. As you move through each feat with Wuk Lamat, you learn more about Tural, the people, and, more importantly, the relationships that Wuk Lamat has with her family and the legacy that her father Gulool Ja Ja will hand to the next Dawnservant.

While some have raised complaints about not being the center of the story like we were with Shadowbringers and Endwalker, Dawntrail’s switch in focus is important. Entering the New World of Tural isn’t treated like a vacation, no matter how it was marketed as one. You’re not just passing by new architecture and people waiting to return to Eorzea. Instead, you’re learning about the cultures of the new continent, how they connect to your home, and how they each can grow. Tural is a fully realized place with characters, food, architecture, and beauty all of its own.

By taking inspiration from Incan, Mayan, Aztec, and even indigenous cultures in the American Southwest, the Dawntrail MSQ has expanded the world with its own version that feels anything but hollow. The Latin American aesthetic and mythologies aren’t just a coat of paint slopped onto FF14. Instead, they’re richly woven into existing Final Fantasy mythos and begging you and your Warrior of Light to become a part of it.

The core focus of the expansion is to appreciate those around you, take care of who you can, and also honor them after death. It’s about coming together for something larger and doing so with others. Where Endwalker was about the Warrior of Light’s singular purpose to save the world, this one is about learning that communities and the relationships within them can also carry that weight. You are a part of the rich world around you, not exalted by it. That key difference allows Dawntrail’s story to resonate as something more grounded and ultimately connects the player to the story in the universal way that we have come to know from shonen stories for decades.

The first half of Dawntrail MSQ is set up like a traditional Shonen manga. Characters compete for something and learn more about themselves in the process, striving to reach their full potential and take on a legacy bigger than them. You explore new places, meet new people, and fight rivals who turn to friends.

Even Wuk Lamat’s constant optimism and focus on bringing joy to others and cherishing them is well established within shonen storytelling—from Goku to Deku and even Itadori that Pollyanna attitude has become the standard for protagonists. Smartly, she is balanced by the more logical and reserved Koana. Despite my frustration with the shonen protagonist mold that Wuk Lamat represents, she has been written with complexity that surfaces in how she interacts with other characters.

However, when this section of the MSQ ends, it transforms into a more typical Final Fantasy affair. While the sharp change was initially jarring, the developers never forgot the story they’d been telling for tens of hours prior. Instead, the Dawntrial MSQ reflects the story we just learned.

In the early parts of the MSQ, you meet the Yok Huy. They tell you and your party about their traditions around death and remembrance. It echoes the Indigenous practices in Latin America and can be preserved through religious synchronicity in celebrations like Dia de Muertos. It’s an emotional section of the story that you move out of and don’t really touch again. That is until you make it to Solution Nine and broader Alexandria. There, you meet the Endless and see a version of grief and remembrance that has been bastardized by selfishness and the refusal to let go.

As the Dawntrial MSQ diverts from where it began, it embraces characters by exploring their experiences with loss. Whether it’s processing old losses or coming to turns with ones that have yet to come. The story embraces death in a way that I was taught to. People live on your memories, but to do that, you have to accept they’re gone. It’s a beautiful note about letting go of the past, but more importantly, it shows how memories warp when grasped too tightly.

It’s salient and beautiful in the exact way that has made the Final Fantasy XIV narrative so beloved. Only now, you’re given bridges of empathy to cross. You’re asked to care about others and explore their loss with them. You’re invited to be a part of their grief and see yourself in them, too. Emotionally, Dawntrail is an epic portrayal of a deeply intimate process.

That said, there are some hiccups. Where the Dawnservant promises Wuk Lamat, Bakool Ja Ja, Koana, and even Zoraal Ja are developed with depth, Erenville is one note. He is present in the story just to leave, and given the strength of his character design and closing moments in the Dawntrail MSQ, I want to see him feel more, do more, and just be more than present. But that is really where my qualms with the Dawntrail MSQ ends.

Even outside the MSQ, Dawntrail offers players more complex Duty content than we previously received in Endwalker. While job homogenization remains an issue, the new dungeons and trials added to the game are kinetic in every sense. Even with tips scrolling across the screen, the mechanics don’t allow you to disconnect from the fight. Tanks move, DPS move, and Healers move. This ups the complexity for almost every class that got accustomed to staying still at the top of a stage-wide hitbox in Endwalker.

That said, I’m careful not to say that the difficulty of the duties has increased, just the complexity. The distinction here is important because the mechanics themselves are absolutely brutal walking into a dungeon or trial cold. However, once you understand the bosses’ rotation, they become easier to navigate. The complexity is key to keeping you engaged even when you understand what’s coming next.

The promise of making more robust content specifically for multiplayer audiences after focusing so single-mindedly on single-player experiences in Endwalker has yet to be fully realized. That said, single players do have the option to complete Trials with Trusts. While I don’t run Duties with Duty Support, expanding the Trust system to eight-man trials isn’t done outside the narrative either. For the first time, I actually contemplated running a Duty or two with NPCs to explore more of the story. What happens in Patch content will indicate whether the game is truly pointing its attention to those of us who play the MMORPG for the MMO part of it and not just the MSQ. At the very least, though, there is an incentive to use the Duty Support even if you have a Free Company and aren’t opposed to queuing.

The only other issue with Dawntrail is that at least two gearsets are color swaps of older sets. The most frustrating of these comes from Solution Nine, which puts you closest to the level cap. It’s a small element, but it stands out against the immense worldbuilding that has been done across each one of the zones in the expansion. While Solution Nine sticks out like a sore thumb—because of its cyberpunk aesthetic and the reuse of existing PVP universal gear for its citizens—it’s the lack of unique gearsets given to players via the Dawntrail MSQ that throws a wrench in the otherwise extensive and well-executed development of Tural.

That said, the crafting gear and unique items throughout the world stand out as a concerted effort to make something unique while still using elements of the existing lore. One Hunt is a Chupacabra; one quest includes making Pibil, while other recipes pretty much set you up to open a taqueria, and even the Sabetenders get an update to Nopalitenders—a name that comments on the Spanish word nopales for cacti.

Following up a world-shattering saga is hard for any story, but with Dawntrail, Yoshida and his team have hit a reset button. In doing so, you need to build a new world, weave in new characters to fall in love with, and start the next chapter of what they want FF14 to be. That is a lot of weight to carry, and it’s nearly perfect. The Dawntrail MSQ offers levity and depth. The duties push players without leaving them entirely behind because of difficulty. Ultimately, the game faithfully adapts to a very real part of the world in a way we haven’t seen in a game of this size before.

For all of those reasons, Dawntrail is superb. It has its hiccups, and the future will determine its staying power, but in the end, it’s an expansion that opens Final Fantasy XIV up into something larger and leaves the Warrior of Light with a vast new future to explore. I play MMOs to connect to others and invest in my communities—whether that’s running dailies, farming materials for subs, or raiding. I play FFXIV to be a part of an experience that is larger than just me and a television screen. Dawntrail captures that, and that’s truly what matters.

Final Fantasy XIV: Danwntrail is available now.