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Final Fantasy 14. Diversity Isn’t the Problem
5 months ago
General
Okay crew, let’s cut the noise and get real about Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. The hot takes blaming DEI or “woke mandates” for the expansion’s flaws? They’re rubbish. That’s culture war clickbait hiding a simple truth: this disaster is about craft, not caste. It’s about structure, pacing, tone, and execution—and the online conversation backs it up, if you know where to look.
Sure, some players enjoy the new continent’s charm. The tropical setting and job updates landed for many fans. Some reviewers praised the worldbuilding, characters, and visual updates—but even they admit “main story pace occasionally drops off.” And that’s the problem—everything stalls. That “drastic change in pacing and tone” doesn’t land for most players.
Let’s be honest: splitting the expansion into rival halves—an easygoing rite-of-succession travelogue followed by a hypertech invasion and grief arc—was tone whiplash. It’s like two separate games duct-taped together. Gulool’s arc wraps mid-game while Zoraal persists to the end; that redundancy diffuses tension. A single, cohesive antagonist could’ve delivered thematic impact—but instead, we got a diluted version of both.
Wuk Lamat’s presence doesn’t help. She’s earnest, sure—reviewers say she’s a “good,” “endearing” character. But they also agree the writing “weighs her so heavily you get a little sick of her.” Too much focus on her squeezed out secondary character arcs and dragged down pacing. The overexposure isn’t just a matter of taste—it’s a structural flaw. Consider the Crystal Exarch in Shadowbringers, a fan favorite, who didn’t saturate the narrative like this.
Then there’s Sphere—the AI grief vanguard. This concept could have been massive, echoing Wuk’s emotional journey. But she arrives at the tail end of the game, without setup, without weight. The reveal lands like an afterthought rather than an emotional crescendo. It’s a usable metaphor hamstrung by bad timing. Sphere’s whole arc—trapping her people to avoid the pain of grief—could have been a mirror for Wuk’s struggle, but instead it just sits there, undercooked.
And here’s where tonal dissonance really screws you. You don’t always notice it while you’re playing. It’s not like bad dialogue or janky animations where you can point and say “ah yes, garbage.” Tonal problems are stealthy. They whisper rather than shout. You feel them in your bones when a scene falls flat and you can’t explain why. You finish a session with a weird emotional hangover, like you’re full but still hungry. It’s a subconscious ache that tells you something didn’t click, even if you can’t articulate what. That’s what Dawntrail does—it feeds you two different meals and expects you not to notice they’re fighting in your stomach.
Then we’ve got the zones—huge, beautiful, empty. Especially the back half. Once the king dies and things should tighten, the game sprawls instead. The western frontier zone? Gorgeous but narratively pointless. It exists just to be passed through. Then comes the invasion-borderland wasteland, which looks like it should matter emotionally, but functionally it's just another connector. Both serve the same purpose: slow the story to a crawl. It’s padding, and it shows.
Critics across the board have flagged this as a storytelling failure more than a political one. Some called Dawntrail “a great story with a ton of potential… but told so poorly it nearly ruins the whole thing.” Others described it as “the most complicated expansion so far in terms of how great and bad it is.” That is not a condemnation of “wokeness”—that is a masterclass in mismanaging narrative rhythm and theme.
There’s a bigger issue here too: scope and team structure. Quality control slipped. Execution faltered. Even Square Enix acknowledged in earnings reports that engagement was below expectations. That screams resource stretch, editorial confusion, perhaps hand-offs between writing teams.
Yet online discourse kept devolving into “DEI hurt the writing,” sidelining the real issues in favor of culture-war talking points. Meanwhile, the truly toxic behavior targeted voice actor Sena Bryer—transphobic harassment hijacked rational critique. And that’s shameful.
So here’s the brutal, non-negotiable truth: Dawntrail doesn’t fall apart because it's “diverse.” It fails because the bones of its story are crooked. The narrative’s broken in structure and tone, leaves pacing in shambles, buries its best themes, and makes overexposure a feature instead of a flaw. That’s a craft crisis—and until fandom learns to name these failures, we’ll keep blaming everything except the real issues.
Let’s stop losing the plot to culture-war noise. Because when your voice gets drowned out in the reflexive writ of “it’s woke that ruins art,” that’s when we truly lose the ability to talk about storytelling. And yeah, that’s way sadder than any AI who forgot how to feel.
Sure, some players enjoy the new continent’s charm. The tropical setting and job updates landed for many fans. Some reviewers praised the worldbuilding, characters, and visual updates—but even they admit “main story pace occasionally drops off.” And that’s the problem—everything stalls. That “drastic change in pacing and tone” doesn’t land for most players.
Let’s be honest: splitting the expansion into rival halves—an easygoing rite-of-succession travelogue followed by a hypertech invasion and grief arc—was tone whiplash. It’s like two separate games duct-taped together. Gulool’s arc wraps mid-game while Zoraal persists to the end; that redundancy diffuses tension. A single, cohesive antagonist could’ve delivered thematic impact—but instead, we got a diluted version of both.
Wuk Lamat’s presence doesn’t help. She’s earnest, sure—reviewers say she’s a “good,” “endearing” character. But they also agree the writing “weighs her so heavily you get a little sick of her.” Too much focus on her squeezed out secondary character arcs and dragged down pacing. The overexposure isn’t just a matter of taste—it’s a structural flaw. Consider the Crystal Exarch in Shadowbringers, a fan favorite, who didn’t saturate the narrative like this.
Then there’s Sphere—the AI grief vanguard. This concept could have been massive, echoing Wuk’s emotional journey. But she arrives at the tail end of the game, without setup, without weight. The reveal lands like an afterthought rather than an emotional crescendo. It’s a usable metaphor hamstrung by bad timing. Sphere’s whole arc—trapping her people to avoid the pain of grief—could have been a mirror for Wuk’s struggle, but instead it just sits there, undercooked.
And here’s where tonal dissonance really screws you. You don’t always notice it while you’re playing. It’s not like bad dialogue or janky animations where you can point and say “ah yes, garbage.” Tonal problems are stealthy. They whisper rather than shout. You feel them in your bones when a scene falls flat and you can’t explain why. You finish a session with a weird emotional hangover, like you’re full but still hungry. It’s a subconscious ache that tells you something didn’t click, even if you can’t articulate what. That’s what Dawntrail does—it feeds you two different meals and expects you not to notice they’re fighting in your stomach.
Then we’ve got the zones—huge, beautiful, empty. Especially the back half. Once the king dies and things should tighten, the game sprawls instead. The western frontier zone? Gorgeous but narratively pointless. It exists just to be passed through. Then comes the invasion-borderland wasteland, which looks like it should matter emotionally, but functionally it's just another connector. Both serve the same purpose: slow the story to a crawl. It’s padding, and it shows.
Critics across the board have flagged this as a storytelling failure more than a political one. Some called Dawntrail “a great story with a ton of potential… but told so poorly it nearly ruins the whole thing.” Others described it as “the most complicated expansion so far in terms of how great and bad it is.” That is not a condemnation of “wokeness”—that is a masterclass in mismanaging narrative rhythm and theme.
There’s a bigger issue here too: scope and team structure. Quality control slipped. Execution faltered. Even Square Enix acknowledged in earnings reports that engagement was below expectations. That screams resource stretch, editorial confusion, perhaps hand-offs between writing teams.
Yet online discourse kept devolving into “DEI hurt the writing,” sidelining the real issues in favor of culture-war talking points. Meanwhile, the truly toxic behavior targeted voice actor Sena Bryer—transphobic harassment hijacked rational critique. And that’s shameful.
So here’s the brutal, non-negotiable truth: Dawntrail doesn’t fall apart because it's “diverse.” It fails because the bones of its story are crooked. The narrative’s broken in structure and tone, leaves pacing in shambles, buries its best themes, and makes overexposure a feature instead of a flaw. That’s a craft crisis—and until fandom learns to name these failures, we’ll keep blaming everything except the real issues.
Let’s stop losing the plot to culture-war noise. Because when your voice gets drowned out in the reflexive writ of “it’s woke that ruins art,” that’s when we truly lose the ability to talk about storytelling. And yeah, that’s way sadder than any AI who forgot how to feel.
I agree that the story feeds you two separate things and semi feels like it expects you to fill int he blanks to make it feel better. In a decent amount of the story I felt that emotional emptiness.