Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail (2024)

The Primals really encapsulated that summer vacation feeling with Dawntrail's theme. This single includes two versions of it. The first is an edited version of Open Sky and the second is the trailer music featuring Amanda Achen. While this isn't my favorite FFXIV theme (it's hard to beat Shadowbringers), it still fires me up.

The gorgeous cover art for the vinyl makes it very tempting to add to my collection.

Finally got to the 2nd part of this treacherous DLC. Welcome back Emet-Selch and plot-points we left behind in Endwalker, I'm glad you turned into a generic midlander with a cutesy voice, less interesting and less complicated than you ever were.

The mechanics of dungeons and trials are the same weird "react or die" with changed markers that are more aimed at making you wipe at least once to learn the fight correctly that have plagued Endwalker for the better half of its release. They aren't even visually interesting like Pandaemonium was.

I am almost done but I can't wait to be treated as a secondary NPC - because that's what you are to Dawntrail: you are nothing but an accessory to whatever Wuk Lamat goes on to do, you are barely spoken to or have any agency to be taken seriously (everything you can say that could be considered as you taking pause for whatever inane plan Wuk Lamat and her brother have in store is weirdly reduced to "but you do like adventuring, right? Yes you do, you little fuzzball!" by everyone) and the only times you are needed are to kill something for Wuk Lamat, do something for Wuk Lamat or cheer for Wuk Lamat.

I just want this mess to be done.

I've never felt more tired after playing for a couple of hours: the vast nothingness of the zones and of the starter quests is a vague reminder that FFXIV has gotten to a point where there's nothing more interesting to do for the 4-times World Savior than go do the job this one random girl asks them to do.

Love that when I told G'raha about not really caring for politics of a place I know nothing about I got told "yeah but if you go you'll start caring about Wuk Lamat's goals".

I have been systematically skipping every cutscene to try and get to any measure of content but even after skipping for three days, I just got to the second dungeon and it was just... uninteresting.

Had fun playing this over the weekend. Despite my grievances with the direction the game continues to head, I always find myself alarm clocking each expansion alongside a few other friends (thank you three-day weekends). This time around I decided to play Pictomancer as I've never touched caster in this game as I've always been tank/melee. It's refreshing and quite fun. The class is fun and shockingly flexible considering how class design has been lately. While the rotation is simple enough, having to think about when to hard cast your motifs during a fight rather than it being baked into your rotation so you never mess it up or have to think about it, on top of none of your combos being true combos, makes it quite fun to play. Who would have thought huh? Just like with Reaper in the previous expansion though, this class is almost comically overtuned. Won't be surprised to see other classes being buffed to make up for it or even a straight up nerf to some of the class' potencies.

The story is... fine. It's just difficult to come from a climactic conclusion being built up over several expansions to what basically amounts to a beach episode/prologue to a new adventure. Yeah, the story does get intense towards the latter half but I found it difficult to care much save for a few moments. Soken kills it with the music once more though. I likely won't be raiding this time around and will play casually instead or become a pf warrior. I'm enjoying pictomancer and playing caster in general that the game feels more fun than it used to.

Really enjoying Dawntrail so far, but the biggest surprise right now for me is just how smoothly this launch is going! After how Endwalker's launch panned out, I was preparing for another round of long queues, but... after the initial wave when the servers came online... I haven't had any lengthy queues!

CBUIII (or Creative Studio 3 now, I guess) really did pull out all the stops to ensure this launch would go much more smoothly!