[Coda]

If you think BF was fair then I would definitely assert that FFBE is extremely fair. As I said, the game appears to be balanced around the non-IAP playstyle.

The idea of collecting characters is almost entirely cosmetic. My party started with Rain and Lasswell, the core characters you always get, and then I got Biggs, Wedge, and Magitek Armor Terra from the new-player promotion, then normal gameplay got me enough Lapis to roll a few rare summons and I got Krile and Rydia (who replaced Biggs and Wedge) and that's been my party ever since. I've rolled a couple more times just from daily bonus summon tickets so I got Golbez (one of the top-tier summons) but I haven't used him, and I've been rolling the friend-point summons pretty heavily because the points roll in fairly quickly and some of the stuff that drops there is good enough for gameplay but not fantastic.

The Japanese version of the game is a few months ahead of the global version and it seems that the grindy stuff is only going to be necessary if you want to compete in the PvP colosseum where every benefit you can get counts. And that's completely optional.