The scenes with the Scions the night before we board the ark are legit great. Drinking with Yshtola and Thancred, Alphinaud and Estinien having a bro moment (theyve come so far from HW ;-;)

Looking at some of what you are saying - I personally dont want to dog FF14s gameplay too hard. Its not like traditional jrpgs were ever the pinnacle of interactivity. And I generally stand by 14s combat (even if it doesnt click for me personally a lot of the time), because when you get 8 people going hard and working together on a tough boss, its awesome

And i think the story is great all around, but it was that 8 hour stretch of nonstop running from npc to npc just to watch cut scenes that killed me. So I looked it up, and EW only has like 8 dungeons in the entire game? Thats insanely low compared to some of the others. And that was my main problem here - not enough of a gameplay to story ratio. Especially considering this is a multiplayer game, the excessive storytelling just felt jarring. And about halfway through Elpis everything just started to feel like a tedious slog.

Luckily it seems like its picking back up now though so well see