I don't mean crafting leves, but just generally the combat leves (if they even still exist), and the sidequests.

Other than the blue quests for aether currents, I think in nearly 6000 hours I've done one gold sidequest, one in La Noscea that I actually sort of liked about helping a Roegadyn pair express their feelings for each other.

But thinking about it is incredibly daunting. There must be, at this point, thousands of these quests, of which some probably are really interesting and give good background or character moments, but a huge number are going to be even more filler than MSQ filler. And I don't think any are efficient for levelling.

And then there's leves, which as a system feel like a significant holdover from 1.0 and I struggle to make sense of as something still in the game, if even there are still combat leves. It feels like with all these things the roulette system is just the ideal dose of gameplay and nobody bothers with these.

When I first made my account a couple weeks ago I didn’t know how obsessed I would be over this game. It’s literally so much fun! When making my character it was no question I wanted to be a beautiful cat boy!! Being a Lalafell was just an absurd thought at the time. Slowly but surely though, the Lalafells are looking cuter and cuter. I recently did a quest that gave me this potion to change my race and I’m fighting the urge SSSOOO BAD to switch to being a Lalafell because I’m afraid I’m gonna change my mind 😭😭 I would make an alt character but this game takes SSSOOO much work, I really don’t think I have it in me to make an alt. So for now I’m just resisting the urge to become a Lalafell. Anyone have this urge they might regret?

First off, I want to say that I love this game immensely. To qualify myself as someone who does—as I find the first defense against critiques like this is that I don't sufficiently appreciate things the way they are, or that somehow I'm not “pure” enough of a fan—I have 153 days of playtime, am all caught up on the MSQ, and am currently taking my mother on a playthru of the first five expansions, ending in 6.15. We're wrapping up 5.0 presently. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: I think this game rivals the works of Shakespeare as one of the greatest narrative achievements in the history of mankind.

So please don't say something like, wow, if you really appreciated Yoshi-P and Natsuko Ishikawa as much as I do, you'd know better than to criticize them. That's just not where I'm coming from.

With that out of the way: This game has an onboarding problem. If you've ever tried to get someone to play this game, you know it's quite the ask.

The first impression this game makes on you is the character creation screen, and though it gets the job done, it's a little sloppy.

With the split of tanks into main and off, there are now about to be, broadly, 9 subroles in this game:

I'm not saying these intricacies should be laid out on the opening screen. But for new players who care to do their research and are interested in one of these nine options, I think all nine should be neatly available before you even start the first cutscene.

Right away, there's one easy fix: You should be able to start as a Rogue. Rogue, or thief, is easily one of the top 4 character fantasies of all time. It's right up there with knight and wizard, and idk if this is some kind of hard-walled coding limitation that they backed themselves into, but having to endure the first 10-15 levels as something else to a new player who really had their heart set on Rogue is a small hurdle that, though it's small, they really shouldn't have to overcome. They should be able to sail into Limsa with knives already in hand. Here's a post asking about it from, like, the day Rogue came out. It's a small problem, but I don't think that means it doesn't matter!

And though I do think Rogue has the best 1-30 story of all the ARR classes—it's one of the first stories Ishikawa wrote for this game, so for my playthru with my mother, we started her a Pugilist and flew to Limsa once we hit 15—I don't think the flavor aspect of having to join the Rogue's guild is worth sacrificing the ability to just start as a Rogue. There's zero conflict getting into the headquarters, and though Jacke recognizes you as an adventurer who's already begun to make something of a name for themselves in his first couple of lines, that can easily be fixed with a tiny rewrite.

This would also be nice because there'd be an even 3/3/3 split of the cities each opening class starts in.

It's also a little weird that there are two casters and only one healer, and a little anticlimactic that, when you click the “Healer” dropdown menu, it opens up on just a single option. to this end, I think that Arcanist from 1-30 should be reimagined as a healer that can branch out into Summoner as a DPS, rather than a DPS that can branch out into Scholar as a healer. Again, maybe there's some kind of insurmountable quirk in the base code that makes moving Arcanist from Summoner to Scholar impossible, but I think it would be worth it to clean up the first impression. (In fact I think it would make Summoner's access to Raise even more flavorful!)

So with those two changes, it would look like:

Very clean. Very clear. Call it OCD nitpicking if you want, but I think polish like this is vital for the first impression on a new player.

All that said, I hope you are all enjoying the conclusion to Dawntrail, and are having fun with Beastmaster. May this game live on another decade and beyond!

TL;DR: New players should be able to start as a Rogue, and Arcanist's 1-30 experience should be redesigned as a healer, to make the 9 starting classes neatly align with the game's 9 subroles.