A few weeks have passed since the highly anticipated release of Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion “Dawntrail,” and many players have already had the time to complete and digest the story.
Yet you should keep in mind that this article includes spoilers, so if you have not played yet and want to go in blind, you may want to bookmark it and come back when you’re done with the main story quest.
First of all, let me get one thing out of the way: I enjoyed Dawntrail and as a veteran who has played FFXIV without interruption since the alpha of 1.0 in 2010, it certainly felt worthy of what has become known as the story-driven MMORPG.
That being said, my appreciation for the expansion doesn’t blind me to the fact that Square Enix took a risky gamble with its main narrative element, the new (or “new-ish,” since we met her a few months before the launch of the expansion) character Wuk Lamat.
Wuk Lamat is the first princess (or “third promise” in the English localization) of the Kingdom of Tuliyollal in the brand-new America-inspired continent of Tural, and she’s basically the fulcrum around which most of the storytelling of Dawntrail orbits.
Understandably, the writers decided to give her a lot of attention. Not only is Wuk Lamat our point of connection with the “new world” that we’re going to explore, but she’s also the “poster girl” of the new female hrothgar racial option that became playable with the expansion.
Yet, they went so far in placing her at the front and center of the stage that she has become one of the primary catalysts of the reception of the whole expansion.
Personally, I enjoyed Wuk Lamat. Her optimism and naivety clicked with me, and I found her coming-of-age story interesting and engaging, which certainly played a relevant role in my enjoyment of Dawntrail, meaning that I didn’t mind spending so much time in the company of our peace-loving lion girl. Yet, I can certainly understand that many don’t feel the same way, simply because no character, no matter how well written or interesting, is universal.
By giving Wuk Lamat so much relevance and making her basically the main protagonist of the story, the writers at Square Enix’s Creative Studio III gambled much of the expansion’s reception on whether players liked Wuk Lamat or not, and this is a risky gamble indeed.
There are several factors at play: likely the most important one is that Final Fantasy XIV players are used to choral stories centered around their own character, the Warrior of Light.
While there are many characters by our side, usually none of them has been given a semi-exclusive spotlight for too long before Dawntrail, and they all contribute to creating the great and balanced cast that we know and love.
If a player doesn’t like one or more of the characters (I have a few I’m not too fond of myself), they will appreciate the rest, and ultimately most of the storytelling orbits around our own character, which makes everything easier to enjoy. After all, our “Warrior of Light” is a character of our own creation, reflecting our taste in looks if not in behavior, infused with the headcanon that we have built over years of play.
There was actually one time in which this was not the case, but most of today’s Final Fantasy XIV players have not experienced it. In the original story of 1.0, our character was mostly a silent bystander who did the fighting but stood on the sidelines of cutscenes and storytelling. This was actually a highly criticized aspect during the original launch of the game in 2010 and led to refocusing the story on the Warrior of Light, which is what most players are familiar with and love.
In Dawntrail, our Warrior of Light is a veteran of a thousand world-saving battles, and we’re finally taking a well-deserved vacation and setting out to a new continent as a simple adventurer with the task of supporting one of the claimants to the throne. This evolves into a mentorship role, but besides combat (and not even in every battle) we’re not given back the mantle of the protagonist, which remains firmly on Wuk Lamat’s shoulders for the vast majority of the expansion.
The risk of this gamble lies in the fact that a number of players will naturally not like Wuk Lamat, for a variety of reasons. The simplest is that not everyone enjoys cheerful, bubbly, go-getter, super-optimistic characters, which is the same reason why not everyone enjoys many shonen manga out there.
If you like Wuk Lamat, it will go a long way in helping you enjoy the story even if your own character is sidelined a bit and has to occasionally sit on the bench. If you don’t like Wuk Lamat, you’ll likely have a harder time finding aspects of the story and other characters that will boost your enjoyment of Dawntrail. This is pretty much inevitable.
Arguably, some may find Wuk Lamat harder to connect with also due to an English localization that feels a bit strange, at times overengineered (like the Promises and Vows mentioned above instead of princes and kings, and similar flights of fancy) and at times oversimplified. I don’t pretend to understand why the team opted to stray so far from the Japanese script with the English one (and I’m sure they had their reasons), but some of these choices are indeed challenging to understand for me as someone who used to work in Anime localization industry for several years.
I can’t judge the voice acting dedicated to Western audiences as I have played in Japanese, and Wuk Lamat’s voice Ayaka Shimoyamada did a fantastic job despite being a relative rookie new to protagonist roles.
I also expect the Japanese audience to connect with the story a bit better than part of the Western player base, as it’s permeated by many concepts near and dear to Japanese culture.
That being said, in my opinion, there are aspects of the expansion that you can find enjoyable even if our new protagonist isn’t much to your liking. The parts of the story focusing on Erenville and Krile are really amazing, the new areas are beautiful and spectacular, the cultures and histories of their inhabitants are rich, colorful, and interesting, and I’m not even mentioning where the story goes after the first half, because that would be too much of a spoiler, but I think it’s downright awesome, even more so if you loved Final Fantasy IX.
The question is, will that be enough? That depends entirely on you.
I’ve spent a lot of time pondering why the writers decided to shift the spotlight away from our Warrior of Light and to a new protagonist, at least temporarily. They probably did a lot of thinking and soul-searching about how many more stories they could write on our quiet player character who has saved his world and multiple additional dimensions on top of it before the formula becomes stale or they simply run out of dimensions to save. You can’t up the stakes forever and Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida has promised at least another decade of Final Fantasy XIV.
I believe this was an intentional experiment to see how the players would receive a shift in protagonist to keep things fresh. We actually had a less extreme (and as such likely better received) prelude with Zero during the 6.X update cycle. It was pretty much a gamble to help decide a future direction.
Yet, I believe this big gamble could have been made less risky by betting fewer chips on Wuk Lamat and more on other relevant characters. For example, the “protagonist” role could have been shared evenly between her and her brother, Koana. If you play the story to a certain point, you’ll immediately understand why.
Koana appears to have enjoyed a very positive reception, and with his rational, stoic, and realistic attitude, he’s basically the perfect counterpart for Wuk Lamat. By having the second prince and the first princess of Tuliyollal share the limelight, many more players would have liked at least one of them, greatly boosting their enjoyment of the story.
On top of that, many would have enjoyed both, with a further beneficial effect. The fact that Wuk Lamat wouldn’t be so “in your face” all the time would have likely helped her click even with many of those who did not like her simply because she’s too ubiquitous.
Of course, there would have also been players who enjoyed neither of them, but they’d be much fewer compared to those who don’t enjoy the story’s nearly-sole protagonist as she is now.
More spotlight could also have been given to the rest of the Scions who accompanied us on many adventures and are generally liked. Unfortunately, the narrative acrobatics made to find excuses to exclude relevant members of the team from this or that event (someone always seems to have something else to do, for some reason) are pretty obvious. Maybe a bit too obvious.
Ultimately, I think it’d be better if our player character was not sidelined at all. The “silent bystander” is a very difficult type of character to pull in a compelling way, and while our Warrior of Light will likely be silent forever so that we can fill in the blanks of their personality with our own headcanon, making them also more of a bystander unnecessarily brings the story into risky territory.
I understand that the writing team may be worried about having to put the weight of the world (actually WorldS, plural) on the Warrior of Light’s shoulders all the time, which objectively makes upping the ante of the story indefinitely quite challenging, but considering the excellent cast of characters they have at their disposal to support us, I believe in their ability to create more compelling stories focused on our player characters instead of needing to shift that focus away for too long.
Don’t get me wrong: I think introducing more characters in co-protagonist roles is a great idea, and it can certainly be effective in keeping the storytelling fresh, but it doesn’t need to be at the expense of our own character’s role and of the relevance of characters we already know and love, and it surely doesn’t need to involve so much focus on a single character that can be hit and miss for a sizable part of the player base. Sharing is caring.
Ultimately, while Wuk Lamat’s ubiquity and the Warrior of Light’s less prevalent role may be somewhat polarizing, Dawntrail remains a high-quality expansion with great production values, shiny new visuals, great dungeons, a raid series that started with a big bang, and a beautiful, rich setting that has a lot of promise for future exploration.
While Square Enix did take a risky gamble with such a big change in direction, it’s challenging to gauge whether it has been a successful one or not. Negative voices on the internet tend to be the loudest and then most boosted by the gaming press, and I’m sure that many who loved Dawntrail are simply content to play it instead of taking to social media to praise it.
We do know that the expansion generated the highest number of concurrent players for Final Fantasy XIV since the release of A Realm Reborn in 2013, but a MMORPG is a marathon, not a sprint. The true measure of Dawntrail‘s success will likely be evident to the developers as they analyze subscriber trends over the next few months. At that point, they’ll likely have a good idea about whether they need to correct course and by how much.
Personally, I believe the ending of the expansion leaves us in a place with a lot of room for interesting stories and plot lines. Tural has been fully introduced and we’re now familiar with its people. There are plenty of interesting loose ends that can be tied (and we already got a small but meaningful tease), and perhaps Wuk Lamat may be a bit too busy to steal the show as much as she did during Dawntrail‘s main story.
Final Fantasy XIV has provided me with over 13 years of entertainment, happy moments, sad moments, and everything in between. I’m confident that its development team led by Naoki Yoshida will do a good job in analyzing what was well received and taking the (constructive) criticism on board to continue to deliver great and engaging storytelling in the months and years to come. I’m definitely looking forward to what they have in store for the 7.X cycle.
