Pagos is worse than Anemos in multiple ways.

The map is harder to navigate, due to the geography and sleeping dragons. Unlike Anemos you can't always see where to go for some things just by looking at the map. The dragons will kill you unless you walk past, which makes it hard to get to NMs before an early pull. And you don't get your mount back until 35.

The relic requires building a ton of light, you get light from killing mobs sometimes, and according to Yoshi we still haven't figured out the right way to do it after a month of Pagos.

The lockboxes are worse then Anemos. You get less of them and the regular ones are all crap, only the rare "cold-warped" ones that randomly drop from certain mobs contain anything worthwhile, but even for those it's like 90% chance you just get materia.


With the one hotfix they did to EXP, leveling up isn't as terrible as it was when most of the angry Pagos threads started. The actual hard part will be finding a group around your level, and you might end up spending more time in party finder than in Pagos. You might be better off leveling up to 25 in Anemos, I'm not sure, but at 25 you can do the quest to start getting light in Pagos for the relic and you'll want as much light as you can get.