Quote Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus View Post
I have seen this over and over as an answer. But let's not forget XI didn't lock everything behind the base game and all expacs and it was still a FF game, with a very good story to boot.
Did you have to do any of the expansions to do most of what XI allowed you to do? No, but if you want to upgrade like any of the JSE you had to go and do at least CoP. Heck you want to do anything in Rhapsody it makes you go through all the other story lines. Even the three mini dlc make you have to have access to certain zones that you can only access if you've gotten to certain points in those expansions. So while XI doesn't do as much gating that XIV does you can't tell me it doesn't or at least didn't do any form of gating specially if you want some bis parts for certain sets.