Alright, finished it with doing all the content.
Kinda shit game, peaks at Titan and then it's all downhill since the story sucks once they explain things. Some fun optional bosses in the S rank hunts, final part of the final boss is solid.
But basically story sucks, way too many cutscenes/wordy dialogue, cast is not as actively dislikeable as FFXIII's cast (outside Sazh) but they're the most boring set of rpg characters you can get. The best character in the game
spoiler (click to show/hide)
gets written out a quarter in. Seriously, it's fine to kill Aerith, no one's ever said Aerith was the best character in the game, but don't make the character you kill off early on be the best character in the game. That's just dumb even if it makes plot sense.
The worldlore is the stupidest shit ever with the bearers thing. Like how that got past the first draft is beyond me. It's like a slavery story written by 5 year olds. This game has a worse world story/plot than Tales games.
The amount of quests and cutscenes in the last chunk before the final dungeon is disgusting. I literally got angry with how long and boring ass some of these sidequests were at that point. It's like "I don't care", I just want it to be over so I can go do the final dungeon. They should have spread out the side character sidequests to be one character between each major story section to spread them out instead of dumping them all together at the end.
Combat is decent but shallow. It's fun enough for a shorter game, but doesn't really keep it fun for 50+ hours. Just too repetitive. Non-combat gameplay is jack and shit because there's absolutely fuck nothing to do in the game except run over the same few maps a million times with slow ass chocobos that can't even fly because that would actually make the game pacing a bit spiffier.
Probably with the sidequests the worst paced game in a while. Very reminiscent of A Realm Reborn and it's awful pacing.
Also pretty reminiscent of ARR in that ARR is plain and boring and it wasn't until the expansions that built off that, that we actually got something good. So maybe if they build off this they'll make a good game next time.
In the end I'm going to put FF13 over this and call this the worst game in the series. I'll take FF13's combat and music and color over this even if it's almost equally as boring and the story is almost equally as bad/nonsense and the cast in 13 is even worse.