2/5 ★ – gocki's review of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail.

For me, this expansion is like a TV where the second season is really awesome, but the first season is pure boredom. Spoilers ahead! The second half of the game opens up a really interesting plot with many great topics and questions. A big part of the story is transhumanism. It questions whether it is OK to erase sad memories with technology to make your daily life seemingly happier. It questions whether destroying the environment and the lives of other people is justified to preserve the standard of living of your own people - even if it is clear that your way of living is not sustainable (a relevant question we have to face even today!). The story provides two opposing parties. Both having rational points of view. Both caring for their own people. Both liking each other, but ending up as enemies. This is the really exciting second season! But before that, you have to survive the painful first season. You take part in a ritual and have to complete some tasks, which feel arbitrary and boring to me, like: catching an alpaca; or making tacos. Those tasks are used to characterize some people. Also, it has the intention to tell you that you should try to understand other cultures and that you can still find common ground and cooperate with all kinds of people, even if everyone has different traditions and views of the world. But you are rushing through a bunch of different cultures in a short time, solving their biggest problems in five short quests or so. I felt more like a tourist, following a guide and visiting a tourist hotspot, and then saying "Ah! What a great culture this is!" - it feels ridiculous, even contradicting the intended lesson those quest should teach me. In this regard, this expansion feels like A Realm Reborn, where you have to rush through a dozen of beastmen. All with different ideologies they share, but no time to explore them in greater detail and without any focus to a single one of them. If the story of the first half is pretty bad, the only thing left is the gameplay. And to me, the gameplay is pretty boring. The game's best moments are the dungeons and trials you have to face. The bosses in there use fun unique mechanics. But most of the time, you are doing quests. And those are as usually a variety of "talk with X" or "kill Y". Even when there are game offers different answers in some dialogs, taking a different answer does not have any effect. There are no different routes or fail states, making the existence of different choices feel meaningless to me. Lastly, I want to add that this game looks gorgeous. The game proofs that you can create astonishing vistas without the need of ultra realistic graphics.