Dawntrail’s first Hrothgar lady has been playing since the game was revamped in 2013

Now that the full trailer for Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail has finally been released, the game’s first Hrothgar lady is in the spotlight. It turns out that her English voice actor has also been playing the game for years, it was revealed in a tweet yesterday.

“Keeping quiet about it was the hardest thing of my life,” writes Sena Bryer in a Follow Tweet. “I’ve been playing FFXIV since 1.0 released, and before that I’ve been playing FFXI since its North American PC release. This game means more to me than any other in my entire life as a gamer. To be such a part of it is an incredible honor.”

The initial release of FF14 (the 1.0 mentioned by Bryer) is almost unrecognizable to most players today. It was riddled with glitches, had an outdated UI and combat system, and was incredibly poorly optimized—a single barrel had more polygons than a player model for some unknown reason.

The game’s current director, Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), was tasked with rebooting the game, which led us to 2.0 – or A Realm Reborn as it’s now called. This makes Byrer an OG FF14 player in every sense of the word.

I decided to ask Bryer about her history with the game and she linked me to a thread she created in 2021long before she got the role.

In it, Byrer wrote about how much Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker impacted her: “(The game) means so much to me I can hardly put it into words. Final Fantasy XIV and its predecessor Final Fantasy XI literally saved my life.” She describes her journey through FF11 (another Final Fantasy MMORPG), which provided her with both a community and an appropriate outlet to express her gender identity.

“Two years later, I was in the deepest depression of my life,” she added, saying that “that game, where people saw me as myself, or at least an approximation of them,” pulled her out of a very dark period. When Final Fantasy 14 came out, “I put everything down and decided to move on to that game instead.”

Unfortunately, she “bounced” the game, as many other players did – but she returned just a few patches before the remaster, when an apocalyptic in-game event marked the discontinuation of 1.0 and the beginning of a three-year wait for A Realm Reborn. From then on, she played the game on and off for years.

A tweet from the 2021 thread even states, “I even got an interview at Square Enix in 2016 to be a community representative for Final Fantasy XIV! I messed up the interview (because I had just turned 30 and it was a pretty bad time for me), but hey SquareEnix, if you guys need anyone else, let’s chat, yeah?” Considering she’s voicing a main character in the new expansion, it looks like the chat went well.

It’s truly heartwarming to see a legacy player get into FF14 in a very real way – and considering how often Square Enix brings back new characters for subsequent expansions, we’ll likely be hearing a lot more of Bryer’s work in the years to come. Dawntrail is set to launch sometime in summer 2024, but there’s no concrete release date yet.