SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[Nalien]

were well punctuated via intelligent applications of seemingly simple but iconic fights, as should be expected in a RPG

What iconic fights would those be, exactly? I'm having a real hard time thinking of any except the main hitters like the Zilart brothers and Promathia... Treasures had it's fair share throughout I guess. Actually, Treasures was great in that regard, but then again it was its own independent story. Final Fantasy XI up to Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia was a beginning/middle/end sort of deal, as is the existing A Realm Reborn story, and I'd say what we've gotten in this game so far is much better than vanilla XIs "So this is your nations story OHNEVERMINDGOKILLTHESHADOWLORD where were we..." followed by "Lets retcon the ending to that Shadow Lord stuff" for Rise of the Zilart...

Yes Chains of Promathia was amazing, but it was the ending. It's meant to be amazing. The beginning is not, it's meant to establish the world and all it's players. I can honestly say I've enjoyed the Primal fights far more than I enjoyed Rank 2.3 or Rank 5.1 in XIs original story, both in terms of memorability (dem songs) and overall enjoyment, and while I find shit like "Go get Tataru her pickaxe" to be annoying, I find it orders of magnitude less annoying than that thrice damned Sacrarium mission, and all the other Chains missions like it (were they meant to build the world up? They made me hate it, that's all I can say), though that isn't a fair comparison, but I still prefer looking for Tataru more enjoyable than The Rescue Drill and other such awful missions in XI. Most of Chains of Promathia felt like I was trying to read a great book, but the author kept punching me in the face to be honest. Was it a great feeling to finally be done with such awful places as Sacrarium? Sure. I'm sure captives with Stockholm Syndrome also feel pleased when their captor praises them instead of beating them, too. Such places did not enhance the story, they ruined it as far as I'm concerned. I look back on the (handful of) amazing fights and finale with nostalgia, but I brush the rest of it away simply because of what a damn pain it was. Not once have I thought back to Sacrarium and smiled, if I wasn't a bored teenager I'd probably never have passed it, or any of the other such dull pieces of mission fluff XI had to offer.

Only issue I have with A Realm Reborns story is the small map means we end up treading the same places fairly often all the damn time, which sucks, but hey, they did rebuild the world in an astonishingly short amount of time, so I can forgive them for that.