Having played through the main story in Final Fantasy and consequently feeling a bit lost as what to do next since the story was the driving force keeping me engaged with the game, I decided to take a closer look at leveling the other jobs I was interested in and had already started on earlier, only to not really feel that feeling of purpose that kept me going. I still intend to level those jobs at some point, and have been doing so sporadically, but the thing that ended up really catching my focus in recent days was crafting and gathering, primarily because of some cosmetics I ended up wanting that were gated behind those activities.
I have to admit, despite having heard that the crafting and gathering in Final Fantasy XIV is supposed to be great, I was very skeptical since it isn't usually something that I find overly interesting in games; it has for the most part just felt like extra steps from having something simply be a drop from a mob or a quest reward, and despite having studied a bit of economics the market aspect of it hasn't really captured me either. Then again, I notice now, the problem might be that the implementations I had seen before were made either in a way that I find boring (i.e. Assassin's Creed) or simply poorly (i.e. World of Warcraft), where crafting is naught more than getting the ingredients and pressing a button.
Yet here, crafting and gathering both, are separate classes (or jobs, as the game tends to call classes), with a good 20+ skills. Sure, especially for gathering which I have done more of, there are a lot of skills that end up doing the same thing with different cost and efficacy, but it is still a degree of actual decision-making that I have yet to see from any such system before. In World of Warcraft, the biggest decision is simply where to gather, the rest is more or less running in a circle and hope something interesting happens to be on the way while dodging enemies and hoping not to get dismounted; in Final Fantasy, you have skills that point you to the nearest node and make you permanently stealthed to the local fauna meaning you can focus on the actual gathering of things instead of getting derailed by annoying things like combat with trivial mobs.
Sidenote: I'm one of those probably strange people that actually kind of enjoyed archeology in World of Warcraft—but I was also lucky enough never to be forced to do it to get any relevant power increases, due to not playing during a time when that was possible—with the only thing really annoying me about it was all of the trash mobs one tended to have to deal with while working on the digs. Sure, it was a lesser problem when one went back to do it in older content, but it was really annoying in current content.
The gathering itself is also a lot more engaging and involved, in that while the nodes are common what's on them might not be, and even if it is especially for the quests one tends to need to gather it in high quality meaning the different skills one has at one's disposal tend to come in very handy. Then come the decisions of when to use those skills, since while they do not have a cooldown you do have gathering points—mana, essentially—which regenerates somewhat slowly, so you can't just blast out all of the skills on every node, meaning you have to think how to achieve whatever goal you have in mind in the most efficient way possible. This then also extends to things like collectables, that have their own separate mini-game allowing you to try to make their collectability as high as possible, and while the primary skills there do not require any GP, boosting them does, and maximizing collectability without them is rather unlikely. Gear also helps all of this along, increasing chance for HQ items or GP or merely the chance to gather something in the first place, meaning there is some real actual depth to it all.
Now, I am still a very goal-oriented person and I don't think I would end up running around gathering things just for the fun of it, but I have to admit the time I have spent gathering has been going by surprisingly quickly and I find myself looking for reasons to keep going.
It really is a strange feeling, realizing that I didn't dislike some activity, but that I merely disliked it when it was implemented poorly and having only seen such implementations I couldn't really imagine what it would be like to do it when it was implemented well.