Quote Originally Posted by Kansene View Post
A thousand times this.
While I agree that the story needs to be experienced to fully appreciate what's going on, it's just too dang much and keeps compounding.

A new player who wants to join their friends has to run through 7 whole games' worth of story, hundreds of hours, and when they "binge" the content like that they also open their eyes to how absolutely dire 90% of the quests are.

"Talk to 3 randoms."
"Talk to 4 randoms."
"Go to a location and wait."
"Defeat 3 monsters."
"Go to a location and wait, then defeat a monster. 3 times."
"Watch 400 cutscenes with 99% recycled animations, especially the grab-chin-thinking and I-am-angry-and-clench-one-fist-and-the-camera-zooms-in-on-it ones."

One of my friends got to 5.0 and he was just done at that point. He was so dog tired of the MSQ that he didn't even care or know who this Emet guy was or why he fought him so he did the trial and quit the game.
He NEVER got the chance to do current content with me.
This game's playerbase would rather the game die than ever allow new players to skip F-tier ARR