I wish I liked this game more. It has the best combat in the series and has a super cool premise for its plot, but it just falls flat. The debt cripples the pacing pretty damn well, but even without that, the first half of the game feels super dry as it takes longer than necessary to give you your old party members back and nothing interesting happens while it does that. The alternate universes premise is super interesting, as is the fact that you're wiping them out, but the game doesn't do nearly enough with this as a moral quandary or as a storytelling device. I can think of a ton of AUs that they could've written in that would've been more interesting than some of the ones they kept. The villain was incredibly lame unlike in the last game. Though I will say that the bad ending was peak fiction.
I see why people love this game, but I can't bring myself to do it.