There's no way to avoid visual novelization when you're dealing with this amount of story- but we probably should be trimming down the amount of "story" in FFXIV to begin with. I know- insane take but Dawntrail really was like, I dunno. A lot of MSQ hours for fuck all. I would've liked it more if it was a shorter MSQ but packed with an extra dungeon, trial or hell- even solo duties. Would've been perfect for a "low stakes" expansion. Less story bloat, more dungeon kill kill. That's what adventurers want and do, after all.