So... I took a fresh alt character to EW in under 4 days worth of time

[Avoidy]

There was a post about 2 months ago with video footage showing actual speedruns of the MSQ.
It was [...] just over 6 days with cutscenes.

People just really over exaggerate how long the MSQ is, And its just an excuse that people want to skip the MSQ so they can play more alts.

I like how your argument for why the MSQ's length is exaggerated, is that a seasoned speedrunner who knew exactly what he was doing and was going as quickly as possible on purpose was able to do it in "only" 144 hours. I'm taking the unskipped CS metric because my main issue with the MSQ is that first timers, who are obviously not skipping the cutscenes, tend to quit the game before they finish the msq, in large part because they get burned out on the msq. Saying this as someone who used to run a CWLS for helping new players and watched like 85% of them just give up and quit around post-ARR or HW.

Even without talking about the length though, the actual nature of the gameplay is just unventful. It's a walking simulator. Me personally, I'd rather pay 20 dollars and just skip than deal with that again. Others can do what they like, of course. Nothing against the people who love the MSQ. But holy god damn, 144 hours is a pretty hefty time investment for most people, and that's like the optimal best case scenario. A first timer trying to just get to the part of the game where he can do fun content with his friends is looking at a much longer time, and we lose a lot of people on the way there. I don't see the point in discounting that just because some cracked out speedrunner did it in a timeframe that's still pretty damn long.

[RyuDragnier]

There was a post about 2 months ago with video footage showing actual speedruns of the MSQ.
It was around 2 days and 19 hours to complete the story start to finish skipping cutscenes and just over 6 days with cutscenes.

People just really over exaggerate how long the MSQ is, And its just an excuse that people want to skip the MSQ so they can play more alts.

It's just the cutscenes that make the game long. Skip all the talking and sidequests in any RPG and you can likely beat it pretty fast. Hell, there's a reason why there's a trophy for clearing FF9 in under 12 hours. There's even a guide to GET every missable item and still reach the end of the game in under 12 hours.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

It's just the cutscenes that make the game long. Skip all the talking and sidequests in any RPG and you can likely beat it pretty fast. Hell, there's a reason why there's a trophy for clearing FF9 in under 12 hours. There's even a guide to GET every missable item and still reach the end of the game in under 12 hours.

Probably why many of them have mostly unskippable conversations instead of cutscenes (that also might be unskippable) in such games. Replay value takes a crippling hit, though.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Someone else mentioned rushing a character through the game, so thought I'd put this out there.

In-game time totaled to 3 days, 10 hours, but maybe 6-8 of that was time spent afk. I spent about a month playing on the character though, but I would hope you wouldn't assume that I just casually ran through the MSQ like that in 3 and a half days straight. The hours are a bit uneven over the month since there'd be times like today where I spent 8 hours on the character(unhealthy I know, but I just finished my last final for this semester this morning and I was in a really good mood).

The character was made on Dynamis for the road to 80 buff. I started CNJ, grabbed SAM at 50, DNC at 60, RPR/SGE at 70. Played as WHM through HW(did all job quests up until that point), and around that point I hit level 70 so I grabbed SGE. Did all the SGE job quests for Panhaima which took about an hour too. I probably didn't need it, but I didn't want to be that person(that's a lie, I needed it for SoS and literally every level 80 dungeon because my teams kept running through every resource I had). You can create keybinds for each class, and I'd usually have one for my healing class and one for my DPS class or one Healer along with one for RPR + one for DNC(for Pelo).

I only did 4-5 levelling roulettes and around the same for MSQ. The gear from SGE/RPR overgears your left side for SB and below. I probably should have checked the MB for cheap upgrades but I didn't bother until level 80.

Generally I tried to use trials from HW on and as check points. I queued for everything as a healer, and I never had a dungeon queue over minutes. I never had a trial queue over 10 minutes, but I believe that's because I did my best to do my msq trials either around reset time or in the evening.

Oh and for solo instances, if you can die at the beginning really quickly you can use that to get access to "very easy" mode to maybe speed up the quest. If you can't or if you know the instance is tied to a story line then it's not worth it.

The character ended with around 1,500,000 raw gil from progressing through the story line. 100,000 of it was spent on cheap level 80 upgrades.

You could probably do this way better than what I did.

I actually had a plan with this in mind but it's just way too tedious. The only reason I really finished this character(or at least finished getting it to the goal) was mostly because I started it. Obviously don't do this as a regular player, and probably don't do this on an alt either unless you're really curious.

Interesting info, thanks for sharing your experience! This could be useful for anyone contemplating buying a level skip and didn't care about the story.

And of course those who speedrun as a hobby as a personal challenge (like in Resident Evil).

[Kaurhz]

Honestly, the problem I find, at least with a few friends that have tried and played is not necessarily that the story is too long, or takes too long to do, but simply that largely there is not much to do (MMO-wise) on the journey to max outside of that e.g., raids and trials at Ex and above players just blitz through on unsync, so it's overall not the greatest experience.

There are deep dungeons, but for the most part, this is about it.