Exploring adoulin is such a chore

[Olor]

So I decided to give adoulin a try recently and it's such a pain to get around. As soon as you leave the city, it starts hurling key item requirements at you, want to travel ceizak? Too bad you need logging! Want to get to yorcia wield? Not without climbing you don't! Want to do the main story? Guess what you need!

It's just such a turn off, I can't get immersed in this area when I'm trying to explore or enjoy the story when it throws these stupid key item blockades at me constantly. I want to get into adoulin but I don't want to go through this constant key item grind just to get around. Maybe if it was naturally intertwined with the story then sure, but it's not, the story gets abruptly halted cause you need a bunch of key items that you have to side track to go and get. And to get those key items, you need other key items to get to the places to get those key items and it's just this horrible web of wiki pages that I can't be assed to follow...

I totally agree with you, it's bad design.

Nearly every area is available without doing any missions. How many missions are required to get to Al'Taieu? Ru'Aun gardens?

Two things:

a) Different era, different MMO expectations, different FFXI populations

b) At least those restrictions naturally were lifted *while* doing the missions. Adoulin you're trying to do the missions and you have to backtrack to get KIs