by the hundredth blow

Dawntrail, generously, gets a 6.5/10 from me. I could have almost justified a 7/10 but the last dungeon being so close to the last two expacs final dungeons and the ending feeling really silly knocks that half point off…

In terms of personal expac ranking, purely based on my own preference and experience after replaying most of them, it goes: 1) heavensward 2) endwalker 3) stormblood 4) dawntrail 5) shadowbringers 6) a realm reborn

i’m not going to elaborate on this too much, but i feel like calling out the placement of stormblood and shadowbringers respectively is important. shadowbringers ranks that low for me because it has very little replay value. without the mystery, initial suspense, and tension, the lulls in the narrative drag significantly harder. it’s not just the trolley section that feels like a total slog! I STRUGGLED getting a second character through base shb, to say nothing of the patch sections that are similarly rough.

stormblood, meanwhile, was significantly more fun on a second playthrough where i wasn’t going as fast as possible and spent some extra time each zone doing aether current quests. not to mention it has my second favorite overall ost after endwalker’s! stormblood is an important reference point here especially as the other female-led expac, but i also want to note similar criticisms to dawntrail in its split narrative and disconnected focus. while i still feel those things are true, you as a player can choose to linger and make your experience more full and meaningful.

Knowing those criticisms in advance, I approached my dawntrail playthrough the same way i approached my stormblood replay: slow and steady, with attention to detail and extra quests in each area. I feel like on a replay I would feel largely the same way about it I do now, for better AND worse! Which is to say that the slow and steady approach makes everything through Yak T’el cowboy time really fun!

I had a great time in the rite of succession. Koana is my favorite of the main cast, followed by Bakool Ja Ja (my favorite msq section is the Mamook one, no contest. As I said to friends, it has two of my favorite things: nuance and lizards), and after that the placement gets harder because I think Erenville and Wuk Lamat are both great characters in different directions. This is an extremely predictable list to those who know me. (😔)

I loved the classic Western plot with a hot old catboy sheriff. I kick my feet and giggle every time Estinien is on screen. Everything after that… i did not particularly enjoy.

Another personal note is that i love sci-fantasy! I’m a xenoblade fan! Big computer cities as the second half of a fantasy game are nothing new to me. I think my main problems boil down to the clumsiness of the themes executed by the main actors of dawntrail’s back half and the abrupt tonal shift that felt honestly kind of unearned. This isn’t ARR’s bloody banquet, with its delicious slow cooker of tension. This is a hard cut to “these people perversely exploit the souls of others to live carefree lives.”

I will not speak on Zoraal Ja when many others have explained the issues with his execution ad infinitum. Too little, too late, didn’t work for me. Gulool Ja is a perfect little baby boy and I found Otis charming enough to work him into my OC lore (for those who know I am pretty locked in on him being Biscotte’s shard).

Here’s what I think Dawntrail’s second half was trying to do—present the dark side to Tural’s practices vis-a-vis benevolent rulership and no-questions-asked compassion. I think these are worthwhile questions to ask and consider. But it is handled with such jarring clumsiness that every hamfisted attempt at thematic resonance actively detracts from the good parts of the expansion’s other half. Sorry, yuri lovers, but I found Sphene’s part in this particularly egregious. That’s a whole separate post.

I find Solution 9 and the soul economy pretty gross and irredeemable, especially as a contrast to Endwalker’s really emotional moments that revolved so heavily around a soul’s retention of memory. I thought that shit was really cool and tragic and juicy! The characters say outright they don’t like the prevention of souls from returning to the aetherial sea but it is the memory scrubbing that bothers me most of all and I feel like that actually didn’t get lingered on long enough.

Here’s where I’ll switch sides a bit, though: I didn’t feel like Living Memory was Amaurot 2 and I agree those who call it that are wrong. There were parts of that section I thought were handled interestingly and well, and I also agree that people who complain about how “ugly” it looks after the terminals are turned off are missing the point. The eeriness of the black metal bones hits!

HOWEVER. I actually think it’s quite frightening that the “system” engineers reunions between those who knew one another in life to help them find closure. There is a poetry in those people most likely being made of each other’s memories, yes, but I found it more creepy than heartwarming, and my impression is by that point that we’re supposed to be feeling compassion and understanding toward Sphene rather than that lingering unease.

I think the sequence with Erenville and Cahciua works well and hits its intended emotional beats. I think the part with Krile and her parents is very, very awkwardly executed but nonetheless fairly sweet.

I have talked about this elsewhere but a lot of my problems with this expac can be encapsulated by the train section, which is itself an extended callback to many players’ least favorite part of Shadowbringers. Here’s the twist, though: our Magnus character this time is a good natured guy with an ALIVE wife who makes it through all the tense action totally unscathed. It misses the one really lovely and thematically sound piece of that section before Thancred v Ran’jit, which is the message from Magnus’ wife to him when she knows she will not survive but wants to leave this one last quest item to him.

The lead writer for dawntrail’s other credits include the Pandaemonium quests, which I did enjoy, and the Sorrow of Werlyt trial series, which I think is some of the worst content in the entire game. His flaws, by my estimation, are… unresolved issues with his father and/or the nature of fatherhood, and missing the mark on those moments of real heartstring-tugging emotion when a cut-and-dry solution will do instead. Also, leaving crazy and sometimes upsetting threads just dangling out there loose style.

Without really, well, getting into one of my most unpopular XIV opinions, I will wrap this up on one broader note which is that I found the inclusion of the Scions rather extraneous. Playing it up as a more significant schism in the previews aside, I feel like without the restrictions of the trust system we didn’t really need them for anything except that one part. I’m even saying this as someone who always loves it when Estinien shows up out of fuckass nowhere, and who really enjoyed whatever the hell honeymoon vacation Thancred and Urianger were on.

This got a little meaner than I intended, oops. My last note: I had fun. And if you somehow read this far and gathered that I’m dawntrail critical for bigoted, transphobic reasons: fuck off.