This story is really underwhelming - it's opened to mixed reviews.

[HighlanderClone]

Finished the MSQ. It picks up at the latter half Lv97 but seriously... that's not good writing when your story only gets interesting in the last 20%-ish.

Bizarrely the pacing is only decent in the fifth zone. The last zone is a slog in the first half....

This expansion should've only focused on Krile and Erenville imo. Wuk Lamat shouldn't have been the protag. It should've been Krile and Erenville.

You'll see why when you do the last half of the sixth zone.

[DarkMasamune]

Finished the MSQ. It picks up at the latter half Lv97 but seriously... that's not good writing when your story only gets interesting in the last 20%-ish.

Bizarrely the pacing is only decent in the fifth zone. The last zone is a slog in the first half....

This expansion should've only focused on Krile and Erenville imo. Wuk Lamat shouldn't have been the protag. It should've been Krile and Erenville.

You'll see why when you do the last half of the sixth zone.

I mean I hope it picks up later on, but if you come to me and say I gotta watch 10 episodes of a show to enjoy it afterwards, it's not very encouraging.

I'll be doing it nonetheless, because I enjoy the scenery, the music is nice and the dungeons/trials are enjoyable up to where I'm at. It's just a shame that the story itself is uninteresting for now.

[Loggos]

I like the idea of being some sort of mentor to Wuk Lamat.

BUT.

As I said, it feels like nothing happened to us. WoL went throught some pretty heavy stuff, lost friends, saved the world. And it really, really feels like nothing happened. Like we're just some pawn in Wuk Lamat's story. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Wuk Lamat, I think she's OK, but the fact that we're back to "being a good adventurer" in everyone's eyes is just plain absurd to me. It's like nothing we did had an impact.

I really agree.
It would be so cool if they actually wrote us to be a mentor.
I rather like Wuk Lamat as a character, at least in the Japanese version, but the way they utilise her as a narrative tool is really detrimental to the story.

Right now we are really just a minion that follows her around. At no point have we taken any initiative or have been the driving force in the story. We are literally just there to subtly emote in the background as a reaction when other characters do or say something. We are the "like" on their twitter post.

The story (up to the point where I am, which is after the first dungeon) is mostly driven my Wuk or ironically Alphinaud (and a little bit by Erenville but he is more of a commentator).

It would be so much more refreshing if Wuk Lamat actually relied on us as her mentor. We have all that knowledge. We have overcome battles, been in the middle of political turmoil more than once, we could clearly show her a lot.
We could also have some instanced sparring/training sessions like the one we had with Venat.

But the story makes absolutely no use of that.
No character approaches us with the intent to really ask for our expertise, we just tag along to fetch crystals and deliver stuff and nod encouragingly here and there.

Somebody else said it before but it's as if the last expansions haven't really happened. There is some alibi lip service in the form of "this is a great Eorzean hero" platitudes but they don't lead anywhere.

Perhaps it'll change later down the line, but right now the story feels like an observer mode on legs.

[Katt_Felista]

If i lean into my cynico-realist side, i would say that the whole expansion is an advertisement for a certain remake and the anime linked to it to release soon... x)

But at this point it's a bit like saying water is wet, ementhal cheese has holes, and balloons are spherical.

[Jonnycbad]

I mean, we saved the universe so now we are kind of a mentor to her. We peaked basically so like any good parent we are passing on our expertise and wisdom to her. Her inexperience is on purpose. I'm sure Venat felt the same way about Azem when we were bright eyed and bushy tailed

[AnimaJan]

Underwhelming is an understatement, I'd qualify as unbearable and a bad joke. I don't think I've ever been so disengaged with a game after No Mans' Sky release.

Sure, the scenarios look pretty and all of that but it's the same old content with a story so boring it got me playing videos on the background and this comes from someone who loves slice of life anime.

I think when they meant giving us some vacations, they meant giving themselves some vacations instead, the screenwriters must have enjoyed their caipirinhas in Cancún. I wish they stopped letting the interns write the main story for the patches.

The other content is gonna be the same as the last 15 years, so I hope at least the fights are fun even if the the jobs are all the same, so I don't lose my 40€ + sub money. But regardless, it looks I'll leave this game soon enough, it's disappointment after disappointment.

[sharknado]

The expansion is well executed although the story and the flow are in my opinion badly planned. YoshiP stated this is the base for the next 10 years, while it's just a templated expansion that doesn't solve anything the game should try to solve and improve.

- way too much text, and way too little voiceover. And it doesn't have to be human-made (WoW vanilla fan-made AI voiceover addon). It's 2024 not ARR.
- the storyline shifts a few times very rapidly (who is good/bad, what is the bigger goal) while previous expansions were more stable on the overall goal.
- way too many style shifts - yes the graphics team wants to flex, but do we really need suddenly a futuristic environment? This is FF but still unsure.
- the initial part is way too naive, idyll. It's good for a family theater but for a MMO we want badass moments, like the cutscene with flying things... Then we have rapid shifts, that become comic from how slapstick, expected they are.
- the is also a big pacing issue - from directly forwarding the current goal to going heavily into side stories, world-building (just to switch to another area that needs its own world-building)
- ilvl 666 should be the limit for this patch... missed opportunity.

Dungeons seem to require more healing and more attention to mechanics, but it also may be a result of leveling gear. The second trial has IMHO similar problems to Golbez trial where you really want to disable all particle effects to see what's going on and then try to resolve mechanics by looking all around you (ultrawide displays anyone? ). The base MSQ is extreme snoozefest while dungeons and especially trials explicitly try to raise the bar higher than previous expansion/s. I'm unsure, the mechanics are very "mathematic" where you have to see how they execute to then understand how to solve them - so they are surprising and hard on the first try but may drop off the cliff when everyone gets the Mizteq guide and stronger gear.

Side quests still are useless to level up anything, have fun leveling DPS jobs through long queues, and what not. Fates weren't touched either. This expansion could have been fun vacations with mini-game-like fates that actually matter and actually are fun to do, yet they had to add Sith Empire from the future and do nothing with the game systems.

I'm really exhausted/annoyed by the MSQ, I can't see why I would now work on my DoH/DoL, do the quests for them, do the level 100 dungeons, get tome gear, and start doing class quests... My omnicrafting will be useless anyway as I don't do 24/7 omnicrafting endgame/day-1 crafting for savage/whatever. I know it will be an obnoxious grind as exactly the same content was in Endwalker or Shadowbringers. The difference was the emotional value of pushing to see more, to know more, and to experience more - I did EX2 in Endwalker ASAP just because of Hydaelyn. Not sure how Dawntrail will prepare the game for the next 10 years... Same feeling as in WoW Shadowlands at the tipping point. Feeling like waiting for 7.5 for the final gear and content if at all to avoid all temporary and quickly obsoleted grinds.

[Larom]

I've never seen the MSQ THIS bad before. Nowhere close. I'm honestly thinking about dropping the game till 8.0. I can't take 6 patches of Dawntrail if it has the same characters.

[KadenLag]

If this was an isolated first time story and not a next step in the mmo I'd say it was pretty good overall, however I have a lot of issues with it as the next instalment.
I didn't go into this with expectations of it doing better or equalling shadowbringer or endwalker, I thought, chill kinda new adventure with new things.
new things we didn't get.

• The beginning was painfully slow and drawn out, first expansion I took more breaks and was less interested in the excitement of pushing forward.
  
• Wuk Lamat I actually disliked so much and by the end she was ok or tolerable
  
• A huge amount of quests on "my DawnTrail holiday/break" adventure was spent doing boring fetch quests for way to long, where was the big hunt and feast from the trailer? I thought this would be a quest somewhere but no.
  
• Zones way to big, too few aetherytes
  
• Cities consisted of super long corridors and windy stairs which was boring, painful and tedious to traverse
  
• Repeated story mechanics, I will avoid spoilers but it felt like a lot of shadowbringers/endwalker was literally copy pasted over this with new characters.
  I knw the previous story was popular, but reusing it feels so safe that its boring, I was expecting something new.
  
• Lots of left unanswered parts throughout the story that should have been if even lightly answered. I know somethings wont be answered so they can be built up later.
  
• Characters are what you spend most of your time interacting with throughout the game, your skills, combat etc and it feels like absolutely no thought went into this, especially on my run with summoner, lux bahutmut makes no sense in any capacity, it didnt even tie into the story and its skills are basically bahutmut but we get a heal, why as a dps role am i given a heal? searing flash, a upsale of my dmg buff on a 120s cd. nectrotize, upgrade potency of just the single target stack skill and naming makes it feel closer to old summoner which they wanted to move away from, all in all, it makes no sense, it wasnt fun and for something you spending a lot of time on I would love to see more innovation or effort spent on this front. Unimaginably disappointed in character development.
  
• Graphics (max setting) still feels flat. Noticeable on some things like armor close up but when running around zones, levels look super dated. Also I think because ffxiv uses low variance, washed out aesthetic, zones alike, nothing feels unique. We get forest A,B,C, Desert A, B, C. I feel like im burning out on zone design, nothing has a wow factor, new or unique anymore. Dawntrail has the most boring zone and level design.

Overall story ok, it wasnt bad, wasnt great. I'm left hoping the team can internally make better decisions and take more creative risks, feels too safe and directionless atm

[koko-on-da-forumz]

Finished the MSQ. It picks up at the latter half Lv97 but seriously... that's not good writing when your story only gets interesting in the last 20%-ish.

Even the last 20% isn't good writing. It's just copy-pasting old characters and events AGAIN, mixed in with tons of filler, incoherent motivations, characters you barely know or care about, and an expansion theme that could be identified by an elementary school child identifying their first main idea in a text. How did this pass through any level of QA?