This thread is plagued with entitlement and drama-queen behavior. There are more diplomatic ways of stating that, but I'll favor bluntness if people are intent in taking everything to eleven during this discussion.

It's not my place to decide what kind of story or gameplay someone will or won't enjoy, but I can share my opinion and also point out the obvious: FFXIV is a story based MMO. As long as you choose to participate in it then you're coming along for the ride, wherever that story takes us, along with everyone else.

Some of you seem incredibly offended over losing control of your character's body. From Ascian body-jacking, to Primal tempering, to echo memories and visits to chat in the aetherial sea, to combat debuffs like confusion and seduction.. loss of control over our character's body or mind is nothing new in this game and all of those methods have been around since the very beginning. To pretend the build-up to this moment only occurred within this quest is a bit disingenuous, and it was naive to assume it could never happen on this level to the player character. Ultimately it was simply the shell that is your character's body which was temporarily stripped away from you - you retained control of your character's mind and soul for the entire duty, and in the end that's all you needed to save the day.

If anything, I was a bit disappointed this twist wasn't taken further and longer, as Zenos could have done some real damage with our reputations. But as the rest of the game outside the MSQ always remains at our disposal, it's obvious why this situation needed to be restricted to a single duty.

As for the gameplay, I understand that some people dislike temporarily playing as someone other than their character, whether it be a member of the Scions or a helpless frog. But this mechanic has been a part of the game for a long while now, and it will likely continue to show up from time to time in the future. Personally, I enjoy the temporary shift in gameplay and I've had no issues with it. The implementation has, I feel, vastly improved over time and I thoroughly enjoyed the latest incarnations thus far in Endwalker.

Bearing in mind that there is likely a significant difference in how fast the duty will be completed on subsequent playthroughs versus an initial attempt, I think it could have benefited from a longer timer to accommodate more types of players, but I do understand that pushing the duty much beyond 30 minutes starts to make little sense story-wise. However, I didn't mind the lack of direction some are complaining about. Our goal is to escape the dangers of the city and reach our camp before Zenos does. We start the duty with no idea of exactly how we're going to accomplish any of that, and that is obviously by design. Listing out a detailed plan as a task list to check off from the start and revealing what comes later (health kits, repairing the magitek armor, teaming up with other survivors, etc.) would have gone against the feelings the scenario was attempting to evoke. We were meant to be overwhelmed and improvising a plan on the go.

As for difficulty, someone mentioned that the easier options should be available from the start (rather than having to fail the duty first). I think that's a bad idea, and that you risk selling yourselves short, as you may surprise yourselves and beat the scenario on the default difficulty - but you won't know unless you try. Unlike difficulty options in other games which are available from the start and will impact you for the entire game, this duty is only asking you to commit up to 30 minutes of your time in an attempt to beat it as intended. That's reasonable.