I’d like to illustrate just how dire the situation is with this game’s story.
Refer to
this spreadsheet. There are
110 hours of cutscenes in this game. That’s not all dialogue,
just cutscenes. No gameplay. If this were a film series, it would be
by far the longest film series in history.
And that doesn’t even include the dozens of hours it takes for the rest of the dialogue, or moving from one NPC or the next. The amount of multiplayer gameplay in the MSQ is extraordinarily small compared to text and story. It is, for all intents and purposes, a visual novel with small and isolated gameplay segments. The cutscene-to-gameplay ratio in FFXIV is by far the worst in any Final Fantasy game or RPG ever measured, far exceeding the ratios in games like FF13 and MGS4. And for an MMO!