Sometimes you play an event, and you love both the story and gameplay in that event. Sometimes you may love the story, but hate the gameplay. For me, a prime example of this was the summer 3 event. I loved the story with ServantFes, and the jokes about cons, doujins, etc. However, the gameplay was soooo tedious. 
So, what do you all think? Was there an event like this for you?
Besides summer 3 (I had boat load of gacha CEs, but I can see it being very grindy for someone who doesn’t), my pick would be semiramis valentine. Th e point ladder was just excessively long.
Yeah, point ladder events are almost never fun, in terms of gameplay. I would guess they are some of the most hated events.
I can see mission events being frustrating as well. Fortunately the gamepress walkthroughs are available
the fate/zero event. missions AND an absurd number of currencies. no thanks. one of the best event stories though
I didn’t find the summer 3 ladders particularly tedious myself…but maybe because I managed to time the shop and ladders clear almost perfectly.
I really liked the semi chocolate factory event, but that ladder was pure drudgery to get to the top and only the promise of that lore kept me eating apples. It really annoyed me that the shop CE’s only indirectly increased ladder points, but then it had a hard cap. Then you got to continue uselessly farming the booster that no longer did anything while also farming the ladder, and then no CE’s or servant could further boost, just apples, long after being complete with the shop.
I don’t have problems with the gameplay in any events unless they are super time-consuming. Namely, double stamina gauges for raid events (like Onigashima) or tower climbs (Setsubun). The Beni-enma event was kinda confusing in that I had to constantly switch teams for optimal drops depending on the node – and I definitely mis-swapped at least a few times – but otherwise pretty relaxing simply because of 40 AP. By my own definition, 40 AP nodes can never be grindy outside of lottos due to the high cost.
I guess the closest for me that would fit the OP’s case is CCC – I rather dislike mission-based events where you have to stick religiously to a walkthrough for optimization and keep extensive track of “how many of enemy X were killed over Y quest repetitions” from beginning to end. Pretty good story though!
Hey remember the original run of the Summer 1 Event where all the Servant were just randomly assigned their bonus. Remember during the second half of the event where the best cement node was full of Assassins yet the only Caster who had a bonus to cement drops was Hans.
Journey to the west event. That event soured me so much, I didn’t do the rerun. It was a fun story but I couldn’t handle the gameplay. But yeah, getting X amount of this item just to get through the story is what I don’t like.
I think my brain repressed that for a reason
God that was a nightmare, I was still a newbie so I didn’t have any good servants to clear the nodes so I struggled with servant team comps and I think I didn’t clear the event until the rerun came around. What was DW thinking at the time?
I’m trying to remember if Prisma Illya was a tough one to clear 
In general the Summer events for me. They’re almost always so long (Summer 1 and 2 having separate shops, basically two events pushed together; then Summer 3 having the rotating days so you might not have had enough and need to go all the way around again to get to the next story.) But I like the Summer event stories.
Saber Wars 1 was just bad at both though 
CCC event. The story and characters were interesting but other than beating up BB with martha the farming was too much
oh yeah summer 1 was the worst . Not only we had 6 different drops but also that was my first event and 40 ap nodes wiped me few times due to trying to get the max drops AND i couldnt defeat the final boar to get sca assassin.
Summer 1 was the most tedious and the story wasn’t that good either, i still don’t know how i managed to clear it completely on 2 accounts.
Also i guess the first Valentine event when we had to farm the currencies based on classes to exchange for their CEs, it was an hassle.
I didn’t see the problem with Summer 3. There were 3 ladders, but it was balanced around that fact. It wasn’t like I had to burn more apples than average to complete.
The event that annoyed me was Sanzang’s event. I don’t mind multiple currencies, but farming a currency to then spend to farm some more was tedious and difficult to judge how many apples were needed to complete.
The fact that Enma-tei event didn’t have a pure currency node without any lumber sort of qualify it for me for a bad gameplay decision. Especially since I’m in a reverse QP hell and literally don’t need any extra QP from converting lumber, yet the hamster part of me wants to TRADE IT, TRADE IT ALL! 
There were barely any events where I liked the story, but disliked the gameplay. In most cases I either like the mechanics or the story or both.
Though one outstanding example where I just said “feck it, can’t be bothered anymore” was Saber wars 1 re-run. The story barely had any memorable or redeeming features and the point ladder was an outright broken tedium I couldn’t be bothered completing past the bare minimum. Considering it was made “more tolerable” in the re-run, I dread to imagine what a mess it was in the original run.
Journey to the west came close, but at least the story was entertaining, even if the mechanics were silly.
The only one on top of my head is the Guda 5 recently in JP. Sad story with the siblings waiting for each other, but the gameplay is like this Enmatei event.
What story? I just press skip on everything and auto pilot through every event, trying to balance all my responsibilities. The only part of the story I bothered reading was the prologue when the game launched in NA years ago because I didn’t really understand anything when I played in Japan and had no idea what the setting of the game even was… I have never read a single chat box since. Am I the only one?
