@Fiona-Respha Ah I see, I thought it was weird that it let me progress with the story without doing the quests first since thats how it was all this time until episode 5, but when I saw that it was an 8 player quest I started to think that maybe it was intended to be able to progress without doing the buster quests, but by then I had already posted this, lol. Thank you for confirming it for me though!

For some reason while doing Episode 5 Story Mode, while I was clearing all the dailog only quests, I ended up completing chapters without needing to do the buster/combat quests, to the point I now have 3 buster quests and 1 combat quest listed at once.