you are seeing ffxi with rose tinted glasses. the story telling in ffxi rank 1-6, and rize of the zilart was absolutely terrible. half of the ranks was fetch quest then it merged into the same for all nation, gets semi interesting with magicite mission, ends abruptly. continued in rise of the zilart but if you condense the story its extremely short and direct, those guys are bad, go get these shards, find sky and beat them.

CoP was decent, ToAU had nothing to do with anything already established, WoTG was finally starting to have some FF style cs of epic proportions. FFXIV has a much deeper world set out before in terms of presentation and story telling with a classic FF feel. But that's just my opinion..