How many hours, Rman?
Doing marks is a fun time waster, and some of the hunts are actually legitimately challenging, which is refreshing considering the rest of the game. It also feels good to be teased (ie. see a treasure chest across a lake but can't reach it? Keep playing to find out how!) so that tells me that the developers didn't forget how to make an rpg. Speaking of treasure, it's great that the treasures are rewarding now. Now I can get my loot on. It only took 27 hours. Furthermore, I like how you can redo missions if you choose as well. FF12 should have had that feature.
If there's one thing I dislike about this marks sidequest so far though, it's that it doesn't really explicitly tell you where the mark is. You have to travel across a huge ass plane on foot, and it takes minutes to get from one place to another. Like many other aspects of the game, that's unnecessary tedium.
Glad to see the developers realized that variety in a 40+ hour game is good. If the game had mini areas scattered throughout with the game with these mark sidequests placed in between the linear areas the game would really benefit, not only from a variety stand point (it gets boring after 10 hours doing bland corridor dungeons) but also in terms of pacing for the same exact reason. But then, that game wouldn't be FF13, it'd be a whole different game in general.
