FFXIV is such a magical paradox where everyone says you absolutely have to see that story and at this point I have to agree. And also 90% of the story in there sucks, it's awful.

It's delivered in a terrible way where you run from a place to the next and click annoying dialog boxes. Most of the dialog is TRASH, truly awful.

Since everything is story gated if you try to catch up to your friends who play this game you will spend about a week in 2.X doing barely anything that isn't reading mostly dogshit story.

That plot arc fits in like 5-10 pages of a book but takes up days upon days of playing this game where your character is level 50 and only has access to it's most boring moves, you get one dungeon or trial per patch and they're not even good.

At this point all your friend who play this game are telling you "hw is coming this where it gets good" and they're kinda right hw has some insane story beats but all your friends are wearing rose tinted glasses because most of hw is still running around and reading exposition.

It is insane to me that so many years later they have barely progressed towards a better way to tell that story. They've added more story duties and made them better but you're mostly still running somewhere and clicking a million dialog bubbles.

The worst part is that with the amount of cutscene and dialog time, like half or more of the strongest story moments happen in duties and the overworld, not in cutscenes.

I just wish I could recommend this game to people without the caveat that they have to play weeks upon weeks of boring filler. By play I mean read.

If it were actually about playing it for weeks I'd be made up with that but you spend all that time not playing the game. The immense majority of the story is spent not playing the game.