Quote Originally Posted by ReynTime View Post
I love the hipocrisy of people who insist players MUST go through MSQ or else, but same people dismiss the increasingly undertuned experience of past duties as "good because it's not relevant content anymore".
How would you feel if all duties were just as hard as they were for you in Day 1, and when you complained you just wanted to go through the story their suggestion for you was to pay 25+ USD to auto-clear all duties pre Lv80?
I began this game day 1 of ARR. I would vastly prefer if earlier fights/dungeons at least had some level of fun to them as opposed to how completely fallen apart the state of ARR combat has become. I cannot think of any fight until level 50 that lasts for more than 2 minutes. I would not subject myself to hours on end of that level of gameplay while being forced to tolerate being Minfilia's errand-boy, nor do I recommend for anyone to start at that point anymore.

When I recommend this game to people, I straight up tell them to start at Heavensward because the first 50 levels of this game are so horrifically boring. People will tolerate story-weak games with great gameplay, and games with great story but maybe not the best gameplay. However you cannot expect for people to sit through a game whose initial story takes forever to get good, along with the present state of ARR gameplay. I've played nearly every Final Fantasy game and similar rpgs out there-I would not be able to put up with ARR in its current form and would subsequently quit if not for the option to buy a skip.

The new additions to the Trust system will hopefully make those early dungeons more fun, and will hopefully serve to make going through the "basic" ARR story more tolerable. In the case of Season 2 however, it remains unclear how much this initial adventure story will build upon Season 1's foundations. It wouldn't take more than a cutscene to give some fundamental exposition, "The Empire fell and now here you are with your best friends in a new land (assuming we retain some/all of the Scions)..." and they would be well-prepared to start their journeys. You shouldn't need to play through 8+ years of content to start Season 2 at what is otherwise a clean slate.