The full trailer for Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail has finally been released, bringing the game's first Hrothgar lady into the spotlight. As revealed in a tweet yesterday, it turns out that her English voice actress has also been playing the game for years.

"Keeping quiet about this has been the hardest thing I've ever done in my life," Sena Bryer wrote in a follow-up tweet. She continued, "I've been playing FFXIV since launch 1.0 and FFXI since launch on NA PC. This game means more to me than any other game in my gaming life. It is a great honor to be a part of it."

The initial release of FF14 (1.0 according to Bryer) is almost unrecognizable to most players today. It was riddled with glitches, weighed down by an archaic user interface and combat system, and ludicrously unoptimized.

Current director Naoki Yoshida (Yosi-P) was brought in to reboot the game, leading to 2.0 (A Realm Reborn). This made the buyer literally the OG of FF14.

I decided to contact Byer about her history with the game and she linked me to a thread she set up in 2021, long before she received that role.

In it, Bryer wrote about how impactful Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker was for her: "[The game] means so much to me that I can barely put it into words. Final Fantasy XIV and its predecessor, Final Fantasy XI, literally saved my life." She elaborates on her journey, saying that through FF11 (another Final Fantasy MMORPG), she gained both community and an appropriate way to express her gender identity.

"Two years later, I was in the deepest depression of my life. When Final Fantasy 14 came out, I decided to put it all behind me and move on to that game instead."

Unfortunately, she "walked away" from the game, as did many other players, but returned just a few patches before the game's apocalyptic events ended 1.0 and revamped A Realm Reborn into a three-year wait. Since then she has been on and off the game for years.

One tweet in the 2021 thread reads: "I interviewed with Square Enix in 2016 to be a community representative for Final Fantasy XIV! But Square Enix, if you still need someone, let's chat." It even says. Given that she is voicing a major character in the new expansion, the chat went well. [And given that Square Enix has brought back a number of new characters for subsequent expansions, we're likely to hear more of Briar in the coming years; Dawntrail is scheduled to launch in summer 2024, but no specific release date has been set yet.