This is one of the most underrated games of the generation that is plagued by bias but has turned out quite well
Quick Time Events (QTEs) basically let you input a button or a sequence of buttons to affect the cinematics during a battle sequence or a cut scene and sometimes gives you a buff or set of buffs. Also QTEs affect another new ability Feral Links.
Feral links are abilities that your monster partner (more on that later) uses that are very similar to limit breaks from Final Fantasy 7. They generally fall into categories Eg. Ravagers usually unleash a large number of attacks to fill the stagger gauge faster while Synergists tend to buff the entire party with every buff and minorly heal everyone. This is not always followed as i had a ravager with the buff ability.
Thirdly monsters now replace your third slot for battle and can be customized to a certain extent. They all come with one of the six roles and as stated above usually have a Feral Link respective of their role. The monsters level through a system similar to that of the weapon upgrade system in 13 (which is gone alas he was so young) where you collect monster materials that you can either buy or find as drops from a mob. Every material has a property. Power to increase strength, potent to increase all stats at a low rate, mana to increase magic, vitality to increase life. As your monster moves up their grid they gain abilities much like you would but the difference is that you can infuse the monster into a stronger one and give some passive abilities to the new monster for example if you level a pulse work knight you get hp + 25% which can be infused on behemoth for the extra hp. So all in all the monster system was really cool. Gathering the best feral link passive abilities etc was very fun and it was not challenging to create monsters that severely overpowered your team. I would have enjoyed a breeding system though.
Lastly the game was incredibly easy until you reached the final boss who was absurdly hard and literally glitched my game at one point because he overloaded the amount of buffs possible :o
Pros: This is an incredible battle system and is my favorite in the ff franchise as there is so much going on and how the different abilities affect the surrounding area and they employed wounding attacks that reduce your hp for the remainder of the battle which required more strategy.
Cons: So the problem with all of this is that the game severely lacks in some of the abilities you know and love ( haste bravery faith) and unless you had the monster with these (haste is impossible to get) then you were screwed as you can only have 3 monsters on your team and the synergist/saboteurs really sucked compared to commandos and ravagers meaning they were worthless as they would die in a hit. I was rather disappointed in that aspect. Also the auto battle was rather annoying at times it should be removed but then again who wouldn't spam fire to fill the chain gauge? 9.5/10
Story: The story revolved around Serah who was trapped in crystal in the first game and noel a boy/teen/man from the future who is the last person alive in his time and their quest to find Lightning as she has disappeared into a paradox. Quickly the story instead starts to focus on the quest to correct the timeline and prevent Noels future where everyone dies from happening.
Summary: It was a decent story but after a while it started to lose focus and started to deteriorate and wasn't as serious as 13 which i did not like at all 8/10
Freedom: Actually considering the flop in exploration last year this surprised me, the game isn't linear at all! You had the freedom to explore the timeline as you unlock new eras and areas. However one annoying factor was the wild artefacts ( that is how you spell it) there are 10 of them and there are 10 wild gates so you can unlock them in any order you so desire but finding the wild artefacts was much harder than anything else in the game and is only really recommended if going for the platinum. Another slightly annoying problem that was nagging in the back of my mind was that none of the areas were connected and i felt disjointed from the rest of the world whenever i went certain places.
All in All: This game is great i adore the battle system i liked it in 13 and it has only been improved even the exploration was greatly improved. I feel Square Enix did a great job listening to their fans and i am thoroughly impressed by this game. The only realistic reason this game has gotten these reviews is because of the people holding bias about the original 13 and being prejudiced because of it. For fans i have a rant about not hating the game for no reason on my blog if you want even further details about the game feel free to read it :)