Overall I enjoyed the game and thought the story was one of the best executed of any final fantasy. So now that that is out of the way I have a few bones to pick. There are a few things that frustrated me a lot about this game and areas where I felt that the normal final fantasy depth was not present.

Frustrations

• The ultimate weapon and armor are not clearly attainable, however their existence is clearly marked on the license board making their unattainable status much more annoying. This punishes the player who doesn’t use the walk-through or cheats. This size of game should not require multiple plays to get the best gear.
• Example 1: Zodiac spear can only be obtained in a specific chest when you do not open any chests for the first part of the game. Impossible to know without reading a walk through.
• Example 2: Genji armor can only be obtained by ‘stealing’ from Gilgamesh. I spent almost an hour defeating him and did not know this simple fact.

• Weapons and armor are not upgrade-able, the whole equipment system felt very flat.
• The bazaar system is unintuitive. You sell a few hundred items and some rare stuff randomly pops up in the bazaar. It just feels like a very cheap out because they didn’t have time to implement a crafting/synthing system. Dragon Quest 8 by contrast had a great item synthing system with recipes you would discover by exploring the world.
• Character specialization came down to what buffs you wanted to keep up and what equipment you use for a specific character otherwise all characters were interchangable. Eventually one of my front-line warriors became my primary healer. There is no skill tree or individual development to be had here. By level 50 or 60 all characters are basically equal.
• The game was very easy. They stuck to tried FF status effects and spells. The only way that bosses were made more difficult in this system was by having lots of HP and cheap attacks like disease or mega-status effect. No new statuses or strategies were introduced with the move to a more real-time battle system.
• Elemental effects are under-rated compared to other FF games. Rarely was there a need to optimize elemental defense or attack to defeat enemies in a particular area.
• The quickenings and summons are very under-powered weak sauce. You’re better off just using melee attacks and standard spells. This was very annoying. Past FF games had amazingly powerful summons and limit breaks, there actually was a point to traveling around and finding them.
• Music was meh. Only a few tracks stood out.

 The opening pre-render is amazing, great use of cameras and really introduces you to the scope and feeling of the game. The character design is very good, similar in nature to FF11 and FFX/X-2, very real characters perfect animations with the hair and facial animations really standing out. The texture artists at square really know their stuff, they add a lot of depth and detail to the environments and characters with the use of very careful usage of textures.

Overall there is a very large political scope to the story which should not be suprising if you know the story behind Final Fantasy Tactics or Vagrant Story. The original Producer/Director of the game (he left part way through for health reasons apparently) worked on those landmark games. The architecture has a very eastern european feeling to it, the bazaars come alive with dozens of interactive and non-interactive NPCs filling the streets at every corner.

 The voice acting is amazing, tons of different accents, english, australian and american are all mixed and matched to the character perfectly. The writing is excellent, and I found myself captivated by the in-engine cut scenes.

The battle system is very free form much like FF11 with the ability to stop battle and queue commands. This system is very similar to Knights of the Old Republic but the sense of exploration is much better. There are enemies spread around the levels and you are given bonuses when you hunt a specific monster in ‘chains’. Named monsters quests can be picked up from various NPCs after reading a post in a pub. I spent some time off the main quest to do a few of these. They were all very challenging and healthy diversion for the experienced player. There is a hunting clan that you join as part of this where you get extra rewards, rare monster ‘marks’ and a special merchant.

Character leveling is free-form and you are free to create specialized or generalized character types based on your preferences. Much superior to static job leveling or static class-type leveling. You uncover adjecent skills on a large chess board that allows you to expand multiple areas of skills in multiple dimensions. Ace

So probably won’t be doing too much homebrew dev. stuff for awhile, I am really excited to see where this game goes and what new gameplay elements are introduced.