I did not play much FF-like games. I guess the only ones were Agarest and Last Remnant. You can count parts of Evoland, too. I liked both Agarest (although at some point combat became too much of a pain even on auto-battle) and Last Remnant. I hoped this one to be close to Last Remnant. It was not.
Battle seems confused with itself: like, should I be automatic, or should I make user push buttons? Should I be real-time or turn-based? The idea of a time limit on your actions is a good one, since it can help keeping the pace and provide a real challenge, but when it's not something like a slo-mo, but rather than, practically, real-time it becomes a pain. You need too much concertation and too good a reaction time to be able to keep-up. And inability to do some actions, because the gauge has not filled in does not help. And the fact that you can't dodge anything (in real-time battle!) a big part of the battle becomes luck-based, rather than skill-based.
But screw the combat: maybe story and characters are ok? Well... I was not able to sympathize with any of them. They seem to be too cliched, too presumptuous... Like they're a lacking an actual soul. I mean really good characters just grab you by the throat from beginning of a story. These ones were not able to do that for me in an hour. Hell, Talion from Shadow of Mordor or Altair from Assassin's Creed seemed to have more behind them then Lightning or Snow or whatever. If it was a low-budget anime for 10-13 episodes that could have been ok, but in a supposedly AAA project - not so much. And why the hell some characters keep their mouths open after they stopped talking?.. Can't they breath through nose like most other people do?
Graphically game is good. At least cinematics are. Even though they are 720p they look very detailed in fullHD monitor. And the game in general has some style, but... On PC you forget that when you get into actual gameplay and see lots of muddy textures. Dunno how it was on consoles, but it seemed like it looked better somehow. On PC... More like PS1 game, rather than PS3.
So, in the end-- meh. Gonna stick with FFXIV, I guess.
