Recent reviews by Tugboat Dunga

While Dawntrail harbors some of FFXIV's best dungeons, bosses, and raids to date, its story is clumsy and inoffensive at its best, and actively destructive to the cast and player's character integrity at its worst, which is where it finds itself worryingly often.

While Dawntrail held interesting promise for the WoL and Scions to slip into a more leisurely mentor role, no meaningful mentorship winds up occuring, and instead those characters are relegated to powerless, ineffectual, nodding heads, nodding along to a strangely disorganized and incongruent plot that often forgets the very rules and premises it establishes mere quests - or sometimes even a few lines - prior. This is accompanied by ineffectual villains and plot-initiatives that seem to be leading towards some promise, only to fizzle and fray out into nonsense, that is if they are not outright forgotten about or go unacknowledged instead.

Instead of being harmlessly bland, Dawntrail becomes a frustrating slog that undermines both old and new cast, including the increasingly infamous Wuk Lamat who sadly suffers not because of the archetype of her character but at the hand of lousy writing and tiring overuse and imbalance by the time the expansion's second half unfurls.

This game is notorious for its turnarounds, and hopefully the team can acknowledge Dawntrail's missteps into something excellent for its next expansion, but unless that turnaround begins rearing its head in the post-expansion story update patches, Dawntrail would be better off skipped for now to save the $40 and subscription.

freedom :)