Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail was a challenging expansion to review. It featured some of the best gameplay the MMO has had in years, but after the narrative payoff of Endwalker, the new story arc had some growing pains. Since the first three patches after an expansion have traditionally wrapped up lingering plot threads, I was keen to see how patch 7.1, Crossroads, would shape up. Ultimately, my takeaway is that it’s more of the same: great gameplay and quality-of-life updates, but the story is still a little hit or miss.
After shutting down Living Memory and saving not only Tural but possibly the universe — yet again — the Warrior of Light and their allies decide to help young Gulool Ja find out more about his parents. This search leads them to a disturbing research facility where they uncover a few new details about the late King Zoraal Ja and Gulool Ja’s mysterious mother. Crossroads also sees the group take a detour to Shaaloani, where Koana gets some much-needed closure regarding his own parents, making family revelations something of a theme for this patch.
Both of these threads provide some development for characters that were underserved by the main expansion, and on the one hand, that’s good. On the other hand, it feels like it’s a little late for some of these revelations, and others are handled awkwardly. There was one moment that actually had me groaning because it was so ridiculous, yet the game played it entirely straight. The one bright spot of Crossroads’ narrative is a pretty big plot twist at the end of the patch. I won’t spoil it, but it single-handedly got me excited for the next two patches, which is more than I can say for the end of the main expansion.
Thankfully, the gameplay in Crossroads is as strong as ever. Yuweyawata Field Station, the new dungeon, is pretty creepy, making it kind of a shame that the patch didn’t come out a few weeks earlier during spooky season. The dungeon bosses continue Dawntrail’s trend of presenting a decent challenge, and I was pleasantly surprised how the last one shook things up a little, both literally and figuratively. This patch also gives players a new Extreme trial to master, and as is tradition, it’s a harder version of the final boss from Dawntrail. This one can be quite tough, as there are several mechanics where one person’s mistake can wipe the party. But it’s also satisfying to learn and farm, which is what I usually care about the most when it comes to Extreme trials.
Crossroads also debuts the first leg of the new Final Fantasy XI-themed Alliance raid series, Echoes of Vana’diel. FFXI fans have been looking forward to this ever since it was announced at London Fan Fest, but the story is self-contained enough for newcomers to appreciate as well. As you might expect, it involves some characters and locations from Final Fantasy XI — primarily the base game and Rise of the Zilart expansion — mysteriously showing up in Tural. The zones in the raid, the baddies you fight, and the hub area you can explore afterward will all be familiar to FFXI players. Just like the Ivalice and NieR raids in Stormblood and Shadowbringers, you’ll probably get more out of it if you’ve played the source game, but I still enjoyed my time despite never setting foot in Vana’diel.
The raid itself is quite enjoyable and challenging as a first-time experience. There are plenty of mechanics that took me a few tries to master and party wipes happened more frequently than in some past raids, at least during the first week. The highlight for me is a certain group of black-clad warriors, because boss fights against multiple strong opponents are somewhat rare in FFXIV, and dealing with so many at once is pretty chaotic and fun. Mobs between bosses are also appreciably deadlier than usual, which helps the whole raid feel more interesting. Finally, there’s a nice selection of music from FFXI’s first two soundtracks, and you can now roll on tokens instead of individual orchestrion rolls at the end of the raid. You can exchange these tokens for orchestrion rolls of your choice, which is a much-appreciated change for music collectors.
Speaking of appreciated changes, there are several quality-of-life updates in Crossroads. Portraits, for instance, now automatically prompt you to update them — or skip the prompt entirely — when you update gear sets. This may sound like a minor thing, but it was extremely annoying to work hard on a cute portrait, and then see a generic stare from my character when I loaded into an instance because I changed one piece of gear and didn’t manually update my portrait after. Another neat change is that you can now store whole sets of gear in your glamour dresser as outfits. This requires you to add every piece from a set together, but the complete set only takes up one slot in the dresser when stored this way. Importantly, you can still use individual pieces from a set on glamour plates. As we all know, glamour is the true endgame, and while having more capacity in the dresser would be nice, this is a good workaround that should help players free up some space.
Every patch also sees the developers return to older content to make improvements. Crossroads starts the process of extending the graphical update initially limited to Dawntrail areas to older zones, specifically those from A Realm Reborn. Like the Dawntrail update itself, these aren’t massive changes, but the improvements to foliage, resolution, number of objects, and shadows help breathe a little new life into the oldest areas of the game. This patch also marks the start of adding the optional dungeons to Duty Support. First up is Halatali, and the rework gives three of the most basic bosses in the game a few actual mechanics to deal with, though it’s nothing really difficult, considering the dungeon’s level requirement.
Finally, let me briefly mention the first Allied Society questline added to Dawntrail: the Pelupelu. As expected, these first Society quests (formerly known as Tribal quests in Endwalker) are for battle classes and task you with helping the transactionally minded Pelupelu get a tourism agency off the ground in Kozama’uka. If you saw the fun, tourist-styled promotional website for Dawntrail, you’ll get a bit of a kick out of these quests, since it feels like you’re helping to create the company running that site in a way. The daily quests are fairly standard for this kind of content — some have you delivering items while others require you to slay monsters, for example. I appreciate how the characters comment on repeat quests with slightly different dialogue; it doesn’t change the monotony of the activities, but it’s nice to see the game acknowledge that you’ve already done these tasks before. And as always with this content, the healthy amount of EXP you earn is incredibly helpful for leveling jobs, even after you’ve finished the storyline.
Overall, Crossroads doesn’t move the needle much. It doesn’t do anything exceptionally worse than Dawntrail, but it also doesn’t make significant improvements outside of some quality-of-life adjustments. I’m still concerned about the main story, but thankfully the gameplay remains strong, and there’s more to come before this patch is officially over. By the time this review is posted, the new Ultimate raid, Futures Rewritten, will be out, and a month after that we’ll see an entirely new kind of content: a Chaotic Alliance Raid that looks to bring Savage-level difficulty to 24-player battles. There are also role quest capstones, a new custom deliveries client, and more Hildibrand shenanigans to look forward to, so Warriors of Light may find themselves quite busy over the holidays.
