Good
- incredible looking game. Top notch visuals. Top notch character movements. Top notch combat animations. Top notch cinematics and cutscenes.
- amazing sound track and voice acting.
- some really interesting characters
- story is great for the most part
Bad
- [spoilers ahead] they killed off too many well developed and interesting characters, too soon. After the first half of the game, all that were left were the more bland and serious characters. Cid was snarky and kept things interesting. The story between him and Benedikta was interesting and I thought would be dived deeper into. But they were both killed off so fast. Titan was a ball of rage and a good villain. Also died too soon. Clive's mom was the best villain. She did so many things to make you hate her. Only cared about Joshua but didn't give a damn about Clive. Even left him to die. She was very hate-able. But they took her out in the most anti-climatic way. Ultima is an ok villain, but nothing special. Just your typical evil god villain that gets overpowered through the power of friendship.
- the side quests were terribly repetitive, and mundane. After doing a handful, I didn't want to touch anymore. Plus the icons will stay on screen until you finished it, with no way to turn them off, which was very annoying.
- even though I love parry reflex attack gameplay, the combat loop got extremely repetitive. The random battles became a slog. As epic as the boss fights were, I got bored of it eventually. It just got way to repetitive. And there was no real challenge, cause every retry will put you at a checkpoint in the battle with all your items refilled. This gave me no incentive to learn the timing of the battles, as I can just bulldoze through a phase, die and respawn new phase, with all my healing items
- ability tree and equipment system is extremely basic. Very uncharacteristic of a FF game. I'm not into deep customization, but even I thought it was a bit too shallow. There was almost no point in having the system there, as every time I went to the shop or blacksmith it was just mash buy and equip to see if anything new.
- the game is so easy, there's no point in trying to find materials for upgrades.
- Overall, this was more focused as a cinematic experience than a gaming experience.