My New Year’s Wish: Slow Down, Final Fantasy XIV Plot Team!

As Final Fantasy XIV enters the new year, the game’s writing team has shown some progress in slowing the plot down. Keyword being “some.”

Before I give a rather detailed critique, I want to make one thing clear: I adore Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. From the dungeons to the raids, I find the content exceptional. The game balance allows for an interesting mix of classes (something we haven’t seen in a few expansions), and the increased difficulty strikes the right balance for players of all skill levels. Final Fantasy XIV’s gameplay division is doing a great job slowly incrementing the effort required to succeed in the game while keeping it accessible for people who don’t grind MMOs like it’s a side gig.

The story, however, is another matter. According to Metacritic, FFXIV Dawntrail is the lowest-reviewed expansion for the MMO, which I don’t feel is justified. (I’m a Stormblood hater, personally.) However, I also agree with many criticisms that Dawntrail suffers from a pacing issue.

Dawntrail has some of the best story moments in XIV right up to the midpoint. I enjoyed the lower stakes, watching the player character shift back into a mentor role as they explore a brand-new world with a plucky but naïve queen-to-be. The team at Creative Studio III lands a large number of the character beats, with slow but meticulous lead-ins that reward players who actually read the dialogue boxes and learn to enjoy each character in this new world. You can argue that there might be too many characters to really attach yourself to, but I had no trouble doing so and felt I could just relax and enjoy the story as the competition wound to a close with a narratively sufficient compromise.

And then I reached level 96.

Pace Yourself!

The second half of the expansion felt much weaker to me. A ton of new concepts get introduced as the player enters a new part of the continent and meets with three different, all-new communities. Then, two levels go by—not even a dungeon in the area for levels 96–97—and you enter another new area.

This final section, which lasts from level 97 to level 100, serves as the conflict of the DLC. The stakes rise to such a ridiculous degree that it almost feels designed to give whiplash, a huge departure from the resort-esque themes present up to level 96. And yet, the main protagonists feel… unfazed. They react nearly identically despite the sudden change of pace, which feels undeserved for both Wuk Lamat and the Warrior of Light.

There are some great characters in this third act. An antagonist in the first act grows to be the primary obstacle of the third act, so they have plenty of backstory behind them. However, you then have to meet another character who’s working with them, who is written to sow conflict and suspicion as you explore. And then you have to meet four new communities, all of which have more characters and a vastly new culture. All of this, rolled out across just three levels of a 10-level expansion.

While I don’t think the story of Dawntrail is as disastrous as some people on Metacritic think it is, I do agree with one major criticism: The story’s pacing falls apart. It feels like an omnipotent story guru flew above the heads of the writing team with a checklist, telling them to follow it closely. The writers began their story, got halfway through, and then remembered that the checklist existed. They then had to rapidly fire through about a dozen character and story moments in the remaining hours of the DLC, unable to give enough time to any one element to make the player feel close to the all-new community they’ve stumbled into. It’s such a shame, since the parts where the team did take their time were impactful and entertaining.

I really do like Dawntrail’s story, but as the end of it reared its head, I found myself looking back at the start of the expansion fondly. I wish Creative Studio III had more time to expand upon the rising stakes in the second half, or just kept the tensions low and made this expansion all about the 90–96 area.

But, all writers learn from their mistakes. With Patch 7.1, which was released in November 2024 with some fresh quests, the team had a chance to right the ship. Did they succeed?

Square Enix Giveth, Square Enix Taketh

Patch 7.1, to divulge as few plot details as possible, is about loss. There are three separate stories about stepping away from loss in this seven-quest storyline expansion. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but be warned that this’ll go into more detail than the preamble.

The first story pertains to the fallout from the events of Dawntrail. This one’s handled fine. It’s largely just a pathway to the next antagonist of the post-story, and the pieces make sense. We meet one new character, we get to see how the people of this strange, futuristic culture deal with grief for the first time in their memories… It’s a solid story thread, thanks to some focused cutscenes and the fact that we’ve spent a good amount of time with these characters before.

The second is based on a character who joins your party, a young one who is interested about someone important to their life who they never got to meet. This story is handled gorgeously, in my opinion. You start searching for information about this person during the main story, so the backing is there to give you an emotional connection to your young friend. You talk to locals and go through an entire dungeon with the character, hearing them talk to you the entire way. Then, there’s a cutscene afterward where the character finds the information they seek in a stored hard drive, forcing them to wait for a beat to learn about their relative.

When you get back to them after a few quests, it turns out that the relative was an incredibly desperate person who used their position in a selfish manner that ruined their potential for a future relationship with the young character in question. The young party member is a bit stunned by the development, and is forced to think about whether this was a good idea or not. They muse on their own loneliness, as they were abandoned almost immediately, but also ponder how each of their parents was lonely in an entirely different manner. It’s a legitimately touching moment, and it’s interesting to see how the child reacts to the misgivings of their own relatives.

The third event happens while waiting for the hard drive to download. You might be thinking, “So the entire event happens during the pause? That doesn’t seem like much time,” and you’d be correct. A major character in the story is given approximately one-and-a-half quests to reattune to the original culture of their people, fall in love with it, and then be willing to die for a tradition they scoffed at 10 minutes beforehand. They are then told their parents were heroes instead of negligent abandoners before the entire event resolves itself and you walk away to continue working with the child from event #2.

This third event was heartbreaking to witness. How the writers handled the kid’s parental moments felt so fascinating and enjoyable to watch. And then, in the middle of this development, another character gets thrown under the bus in what amounts to 15 minutes of content. Another box checked on that omnipresent checklist, and now we’ve missed the opportunity to explore yet another culture with an interesting character.

When You Wish Upon a Star…

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail is written by talented writers. They’ve proven—in this expansion and others—they can make heartfelt story moments with the right build-up to make them hit hard. They also know how to provide fun little bits of levity to keep the adventure from falling into a depression chasm, or exciting highs that let you cheer for your favorite character. But it’s also clear that, as talented as they are, the team is struggling to maintain the pace needed to make an MMO viable.

By introducing all of these concepts and giving them just a handful of quests to breathe, they’re extending the time required to reach the cool and amazing moments of their storytelling without giving us, the player, anything to grasp on to. Instead of a barrage of fascinating ideas that progress your understanding of the world around you, you get some high highs and some frustrating lows.

In the future, I hope the team stops looking for these “checkboxes.” These writers have made engaging content with these characters in the past and will no doubt continue to do so. I just want them to stop kneecapping the development of some characters so they can reach the required length for a patch. I want to stay engaged with every character I’m introduced to, rather than accept that some of these guys are just filler content while others deserve my attention.

I continue to love the content produced by Final Fantasy XIV, from the simple yet increasingly difficult dungeons, to the high-end raids that make the game so strategic and execution-heavy, to the storyline that has brought my grown friends to tears. I just know the writers can make it happen again.