Recent reviews by KayQ

FFXIV is a game that has often been praised as having a good story (for an MMO) to just straight up having a good story. But it's very often a case of the good parts being good enough to overshadow the bad parts and the tedium of FFXIV's "Go to place, talk to NPC, pick up item, give item to NPC, watch 5m long unvoiced cutscene, talk to next NPC" storytelling. It's a very fine line FFXIV has generally managed to stay on the good side of... until now

There's a lot to unpack here, too much for this review to not end up as an essay. I'll try keep it short. Wuk Lamat is a brand new character who has clearly ended up rubbing a lot of people the wrong way with how she is characterised in Dawntrail. The issue is the writers have gone all in on her, making her essentially the main character AND main focus of the story. Our story is meant to be 'low stakes' but this ends up as the level 90-96 story mostly consisting of performing menial chores for the sake of Wuk Lamat.
At least one could praise it for having the courage to be a low stakes story after Endwalker... except then the level 97-100 story happens. If anyone tells you Dawntrail is 'low stakes', you can safely assume they have not actually finished the story. Some people might prefer this leap back to high stakes - to me it's just the writers committing to a bit for 2/3 of the expansion then chickening out at the last moment because they don't have faith in themselves to write an ending that doesn't involve saving the world.

As admitted by the developers themselves, job design is not the focus on this expansion. If you have played Shadowbringers or Endwalker, you have essentially played the Dawntrail version of the jobs already.

So all we have left is the raiding. And after finishing both EX trials, I can safely say.... it's good? They both demonstrate a level of creativity that I found completely lacking in Endwalker's fight design. If the savage raid design is of the same quality as the EX design, I might be able to say "Dawntrail is a good expansion for raiders".

But raiders are still a minority of the players, and raiders will still have to go through the story. Is it worth paying full price to play through what I feel is by far the worst writing in FFXIV? No. Is it worth skipping through it to get to the endgame? Maybe if the raids are good enough. They're going to have to be good enough, because this time around "the story is good" is no longer something FFXIV can rely on.

Great game, only complaints would be a few specific attacks have a lot of visual clutter and some of the items are way better/worse than others

Pretty good.