My biggest gripe for the story itself is infact how lengthy and needlessly "wordy" it is, making it hard to follow (for me) because it's not very smooth and hasn't a very natural flow.
I've been playing several rpgs lately and if there's one thing that I noticed when I read the dialogue, is that they're short (3 sentences for each character per turn), pretty straightforward (there's no purple prose...google it) and that the language used is fairly simple yet elegant (there's no olde English and when there is, it's not overly abundant).

I mean, I played Trails of Cold steel recently and that game is filled with exposition and is very dialogue heavy, but I NEVER felt tired of reading and the dialogues were very enjoyable too. And that game also lacks a lot of Voice acting, which is already not great but far better than FFXIV. In FFXIV, however, I tried recently to see a cutscene where Cid and someone was talking - I don't even remember who it was - and here it pops a para-worthy bubble of text...and all of it was unnecessary! He could've explained his stuff in 2 lines but nope, has to be over 5-10 lines of dialogue to say something! And then he spoke the same length!

If people like it, by all means, I have nothing against them but I just can't stand tons and tons of needless dialogue when it could've been summed up in two or three lines..