FF14 director Yoshi-P is 'kind of glad and relieved' that Dawntrail's story is over, because players will have 'the fate of the world on their shoulders' again—but that was never the expansion's problem

Final Fantasy 14's going to be moving on from Dawntrail… uh, eventually, given the MMO's recent troubles with patch cadence. But still, having played through 7.3, I'm genuinely quite hopeful for the game's storyline to kick up again. I had an uncomplicated good time pushing Calyx's stupid mug in, and it feels like Square's slowly getting back to narrative form.

A recent Gamescom interview with director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) by our friends over at GamesRadar+, however, has me scratching my head a tad—to be clear, when Yoshi-P speaks to English journalists, it's often live-translated by an interpreter, as was the case with me last year. As such, Yoshi-P's statements simply could be coloured by language barriers. Spoilers for Dawntrail to follow.

Yoshi-P explains much of what we already knew: "When we looked at the story of Final Fantasy 14 and the sense of tension that you had at the end of Endwalker, I didn't want us to see a scenario where we just simply inflate the enemy or the bosses that the players encounter. So with that in mind, when it came to the story of Dawntrail, we looked at the hero, our player characters, which are the Warriors of Light, and we positioned them as a sort of mentor of sorts for a younger generation."

All sensible stuff. I'm not sure Square Enix succeeded in that regard, but it wasn't a bad idea at all to tamp things down a bit after we punched a cosmic nihilism bird in the face and had a totally-platonic slugfest with a murderhobo at the end of reality. It was just lacking in the execution. I won't beat the dead chocobo again here, especially since my full thoughts are up on this website. But then Yoshi-P says the following:

"And now, when we look at the Warriors of Light, we want them to take that step again as someone who has the fate of the world on their shoulders, and go forward on that adventure again."

But Dawntrail never stopped doing that, really. It began as a holiday, and then took a hard swerve into a resurrected robot queen from another dimension who had an inter-reality key that she was going to use to threaten all of existence. The fate of the world kinda never left our shoulders to begin with. If anything, "world" became "worlds", plural.

I think raising those stakes again is fine, to be fair. It's clear Square struggles a tad with slowing its roll (see the interdimensional queen thing) and if I'm honest with myself, FF14 is often at its best when it's melodramatic, regardless of its story's scale. I'm just not sure Yoshi-P's words follow reality.

"On the one hand," he continues, "I'm kind of glad and relieved that that part of the story has finished. But at the same time, I'm also excited about what is to come. So, although patch 7.3 has just been released, me and the rest of the development team are hard at work on the future of Final Fantasy 14, and we're just really excited about what's to come."

Despite all my griping, me too. I think patch 7.4 is showing decent signs that Square is finally getting a wrangle on its difficulty problem. Better late than never.

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