Naoki Yoshida's Japan Expo Attendance (07/06/2012)

[Mirage]

That sounds horrible. In every Final Fantasy the way to level up was with battles. I am fine if content is just an alternative but "not going to work" is not going to work for me. I am too tired of FF14 doing the same borring content over and over again. Things like this is the reason why Square Enix fails imo.
They had their success recipe once and then they decided to change things to be more like other games and innovative. Let me level with fighting as I did til now, if I want to.

Haha, sorry, what?

In most Final Fantasy games you got more or less all the levels you needed to beat the game from progressing the story and the few random encounters you would bump into on your way from one "quest" to another.

If you needed to stop and spend hours just grinding in order to progress the main story in earlier final fantasy games, you either sucked at RPGs or were playing FF1-3 on the NES.

If anything, FF14 (and FF11 for that matter) are different from other FFs because they required you to stop progressing the story for a significant amount of time just in order to level up.

What would be a reasonable combination of both of these would be to let the main story give you the majority of the exp needed to get to lv50 for one job, then you could leave the grinding for additional jobs if you wanted to level them.