Stormblood has my favorite quest turn in music, which now reminds me of Deltarune.

Have you been doing any of the heavensward raids? Alexander has awesome music and a pretty good story, and the more of the normal/alliance raids you do the more complete a story of the game you get, except the Neir raides in ShB, and admittedly the Ivalice (Stormblood alliance) story is VERY padded and boring if you aren't a Tactics fan, but it gives you some important info about Auracites and Ultima and is required if you want to unlock Bozja after ShB. Plus the more of them you've done, the more the story increasingly calls back to and acknowledges it.

No, only did the required core game raids for the MSQ progression. I don't like raiding much and been enjoying more leveling and doing the MSQ. This is mainly because Raids are a bigger commitment of time on my part (tho I appreciate that the ones I've seen are significantly shorter than the ones in WoW). I enjoy being able to stop whenever, which I can't really do if I'm in a group (which is also why I love support duties and would love if those were available to everything).

Looking forward to the Green Mage, always loved my casters and supports. Watched a vid on Viper as well while I was at the gym doing cardio, pretty dope they made a class based off of Zidane!

And yeah I played so SO much FF Tactics on the GBA. I really loved that era. GBA was prolly my favorite handheld, games had such charm. Warioware and Minish Cap are still my favs as well as all the Castlevanias.

It cheesed me off mightily when they made those raids mandatory for the story. I don't even like dungeons much, and loathe raids. "But but but story!!!" No, you don't need those raids for story. You can skip all the cutscenes and the rest of the game makes as much sense as it does having watched them.

Blah.

*shake fist!*

You... HAVE finished even just base Shadowbringers, yes? Because I genuinely don't know how entire characters, concepts and things you have to have done as the WOL make any sense if you could have skipped them.

I finished Endwalker. You don't really need to know who 'that guy' is, and there's enough random magical mumbo jumbo around that the exposition in Shadowbringers itself is plenty of context.

And frankly, had you done those raids when they first came out the odds of -remembering- those plot points years later are slim, I think. :D