After the first 15 hours of this game I was really ready for it to take a decisive spot as one of my favorites, but the whole late-game sequence kinda dragged and I felt like I needed to drag myself through the final dungeon to finally finish. I devoured the first three-quarters of the game in like a week or two, and then let it sit around unfinished for over a month because I lost excitement.
The main party is extremely strong, with Freya, Eiko, and Vivi being particular stand-outs. Nearly every character has a clear identity and their own story/motivation/character arc, although some get way more focus than others. This is obviously a major strength of the game and something that instantly puts it in a high tier among RPGs IMO, but it also becomes somewhat of a weakness as the game progresses. By the time you get to the "end game" - i.e. the second half of Disc 3 and on - most of the party has either finished their arc (e.g. Vivi and Steiner) or fades into the background as the main plot takes over all the screen time (e.g. Freya and Amarant). The last 8 hours or so of the game becomes The Zidane Show almost exclusively, so if he's not your favorite character in the party you might start to lose interest... or at least I did.
Speaking of the late game, I started to feel increasingly pigeonholed into continuing to use the same party of 4 as I progressed. XP and AP are not given to party members on the bench, even when the story prevents you from using them, and there is no easy way to switch party members for basically the entire game. By the time I was in the final dungeon a few of my neglected party members were 20-30 levels behind my main group, and similarly far behind in terms of learning abilities. Even if I brought them along to difficult fights to quickly get XP they would still end up way behind in AP without some serious grinding, which I was not willing to do. This isn't a huge deal in terms of beating the game since practically any configuration of 4 will do fine if they're appropriately leveled, but it was disappointing and felt somewhat incongruous with the story to leave half of the party in the dust like that. Compare to FFX which heavily encourages using every party member equally and allows switching freely even mid-battle, FFVI which forces you to use more than one full party at several points and gives free levels to characters that get locked out of your party for story reasons, and FFXIII which simply gives equal XP to benched characters.
I avoided doing most of the optional content in the game, largely because when I looked up what there was to do it all seemed extremely tedious. Much of the best gear is locked behind various chocobo treasure hunt minigames which were barely acknowledged or explained in-game, and which I was way behind on by the time I looked into sidequests on Disc 4. Beyond that there's a few quests with missable steps, a few quests based on getting specific random encounters, Blue Magic collection which is even more of a pain in this game than it usually is, a bunch of synthesis gear that requires specific drops and an insane amount of gil, and a superboss that expects you to be Level 99 with all abilities unlocked and best-in-slot gear. I know this kind of content exists to appeal to people who want to play the game for as long as possible, but a lot of it just sounded particularly time-wasting and not fun, especially with how slow the combat moves.
Despite all of my issues with the endgame though, my first ~30 hours were thoroughly enjoyable and worth playing through. I fell in love with many of the characters and loved seeing all their interactions. I loved how the party would split up in each town and have their own little adventures on the side. I loved the whole Black Mage plot thread. I loved the more cartoonish artstyle and light-hearted tone. And the combat was very enjoyable too despite how much it got slowed down by animations - it was fairly easy and easily broken but that seems to be the norm for FF games. Overall this was an incredibly solid game, and one I would recommend to any fan of the series.
The main party is extremely strong, with Freya, Eiko, and Vivi being particular stand-outs. Nearly every character has a clear identity and their own story/motivation/character arc, although some get way more focus than others. This is obviously a major strength of the game and something that instantly puts it in a high tier among RPGs IMO, but it also becomes somewhat of a weakness as the game progresses. By the time you get to the "end game" - i.e. the second half of Disc 3 and on - most of the party has either finished their arc (e.g. Vivi and Steiner) or fades into the background as the main plot takes over all the screen time (e.g. Freya and Amarant). The last 8 hours or so of the game becomes The Zidane Show almost exclusively, so if he's not your favorite character in the party you might start to lose interest... or at least I did.
Speaking of the late game, I started to feel increasingly pigeonholed into continuing to use the same party of 4 as I progressed. XP and AP are not given to party members on the bench, even when the story prevents you from using them, and there is no easy way to switch party members for basically the entire game. By the time I was in the final dungeon a few of my neglected party members were 20-30 levels behind my main group, and similarly far behind in terms of learning abilities. Even if I brought them along to difficult fights to quickly get XP they would still end up way behind in AP without some serious grinding, which I was not willing to do. This isn't a huge deal in terms of beating the game since practically any configuration of 4 will do fine if they're appropriately leveled, but it was disappointing and felt somewhat incongruous with the story to leave half of the party in the dust like that. Compare to FFX which heavily encourages using every party member equally and allows switching freely even mid-battle, FFVI which forces you to use more than one full party at several points and gives free levels to characters that get locked out of your party for story reasons, and FFXIII which simply gives equal XP to benched characters.
I avoided doing most of the optional content in the game, largely because when I looked up what there was to do it all seemed extremely tedious. Much of the best gear is locked behind various chocobo treasure hunt minigames which were barely acknowledged or explained in-game, and which I was way behind on by the time I looked into sidequests on Disc 4. Beyond that there's a few quests with missable steps, a few quests based on getting specific random encounters, Blue Magic collection which is even more of a pain in this game than it usually is, a bunch of synthesis gear that requires specific drops and an insane amount of gil, and a superboss that expects you to be Level 99 with all abilities unlocked and best-in-slot gear. I know this kind of content exists to appeal to people who want to play the game for as long as possible, but a lot of it just sounded particularly time-wasting and not fun, especially with how slow the combat moves.
Despite all of my issues with the endgame though, my first ~30 hours were thoroughly enjoyable and worth playing through. I fell in love with many of the characters and loved seeing all their interactions. I loved how the party would split up in each town and have their own little adventures on the side. I loved the whole Black Mage plot thread. I loved the more cartoonish artstyle and light-hearted tone. And the combat was very enjoyable too despite how much it got slowed down by animations - it was fairly easy and easily broken but that seems to be the norm for FF games. Overall this was an incredibly solid game, and one I would recommend to any fan of the series.