despite what most people have told me about it, I liked a lot of it, but there was a lot of pacing in between the great moments, the story was very vanilla but I personally liked it and I really loved the main cast
the transition from ARR to HW was really really great

a lot of the side content really saved it for me
-Coil of Bahamut
-Crystal tower
-all MSQ trials on extreme
the first two especially were really great, and completely outclassed 90% of the story for me, true spectacles and really interesting lore drops
honestly, most of ARR was just unmemorable fetch questing with unimportant small plots and imo extremely bad quest design, the only thing keeping me interested was the excitement for the next trial and my love for seeing how the characters/story develop