2021
Very good as a quick time-waster, and extremely addicting. Not much staying power and pretty shallow in terms of strategy, but that's fine for what it is.
2021
A lot of people said when this game was announced: "Who the hell asked for this?" The answer is me. I literally asked for this.
I got to Masters within a month of release and haven't touched it since. It's a completely average MOBA with an overly-forgiving ranked system and a large population of players who don't know how MOBAs work. Much better than it could've ended up, not as good as it had the potential to be.
I got to Masters within a month of release and haven't touched it since. It's a completely average MOBA with an overly-forgiving ranked system and a large population of players who don't know how MOBAs work. Much better than it could've ended up, not as good as it had the potential to be.
2020
A surprisingly good open-world action-RPG tied to a godawful gacha system and live-service time-gating.
It's entirely possible (and not even difficult) to ignore the gacha element completely and just enjoy Genshin as a single-player action-RPG. Playing the gacha doesn't really get you anything except for waifus and bragging rights - there's no PvP and nothing is difficulty-gated behind overpowered paid equipment.
Personally, I play this game as if it was a single-player RPG, and only roll on the gacha when I've amassed a wealth of free rolls and I'm particularly interested in a given character (which is rare). I'm perfectly happy to play through the entire length of this game with the handful of 4-stars I got randomly with my first few rolls.
Are there problems with the game? Absolutely. The gacha, if you choose to engage with it, is laughably unforgiving. It's absurdly expensive to guarantee you get what you want - and even worse if you care about Constellations. The only saving grace of the gacha system is that it's completely unnecessary to enjoy the game.
Also, because it's a live-service game there is only so much content available at a given time. Events are limited-time and extremely missable, and if you get to the end of the story you'll likely be waiting several months to see more. The latter issue is easily mitigated by taking breaks during content droughts, but it's definitely a point against the game as a cohesive story.
The grind in this game is brutal as well. Getting enough materials to level your characters is excruciating sometimes, and if you want to optimize any of them then you're up against the quintuple-layered RNG hellscape that is artifact grinding. Combined with a mobile-game energy system, it can take literal months to get good artifacts for even one character.
All that said, it might seem strange that I've given the game an 8/10. Put simply, the game allows me to ignore almost everything about it that I don't like. I can comfortably play through the story without ever rolling the gacha, taking breaks when I run out of story and only grinding out the bare minimum to level up one team and give them sub-optimal gear. When played in this way, I think Genshin is a genuinely fun game with a surprisingly compelling story, endless lore, and absolutely gorgeous visuals and music. It would be better as a $60 completed single-player game with no gacha element, but it wouldn't have made billions of dollars in that format.
It's entirely possible (and not even difficult) to ignore the gacha element completely and just enjoy Genshin as a single-player action-RPG. Playing the gacha doesn't really get you anything except for waifus and bragging rights - there's no PvP and nothing is difficulty-gated behind overpowered paid equipment.
Personally, I play this game as if it was a single-player RPG, and only roll on the gacha when I've amassed a wealth of free rolls and I'm particularly interested in a given character (which is rare). I'm perfectly happy to play through the entire length of this game with the handful of 4-stars I got randomly with my first few rolls.
Are there problems with the game? Absolutely. The gacha, if you choose to engage with it, is laughably unforgiving. It's absurdly expensive to guarantee you get what you want - and even worse if you care about Constellations. The only saving grace of the gacha system is that it's completely unnecessary to enjoy the game.
Also, because it's a live-service game there is only so much content available at a given time. Events are limited-time and extremely missable, and if you get to the end of the story you'll likely be waiting several months to see more. The latter issue is easily mitigated by taking breaks during content droughts, but it's definitely a point against the game as a cohesive story.
The grind in this game is brutal as well. Getting enough materials to level your characters is excruciating sometimes, and if you want to optimize any of them then you're up against the quintuple-layered RNG hellscape that is artifact grinding. Combined with a mobile-game energy system, it can take literal months to get good artifacts for even one character.
All that said, it might seem strange that I've given the game an 8/10. Put simply, the game allows me to ignore almost everything about it that I don't like. I can comfortably play through the story without ever rolling the gacha, taking breaks when I run out of story and only grinding out the bare minimum to level up one team and give them sub-optimal gear. When played in this way, I think Genshin is a genuinely fun game with a surprisingly compelling story, endless lore, and absolutely gorgeous visuals and music. It would be better as a $60 completed single-player game with no gacha element, but it wouldn't have made billions of dollars in that format.
1994
Very, very good old-school JRPG. Held back somewhat by the limitations and standards of the time (most notably a lot of vague directions and unclear ability descriptions) and the story isn't groundbreaking or anything, but it's fun and engaging all the way through - and most surprisingly to me, it's pretty funny as well. One of the best Final Fantasy games.
2020
One of the best digital CCGs on the market. Extremely free-to-play friendly, relatively well-balanced, and very fun.
This game (and its sequel) almost single-handedly changed my taste in music into what it is today. I bought this because it contained TTFAF and I was obsessed with Dragonforce at the time. I came away listening to Muse, Rise Against, AFI, and Senses Fail. Those bands led me to some of my all-time favorites. The game itself is pretty good, but what really stuck with me is the influence it had on my tastes.
2009
Pretty good party game that's easy to just throw on when you're in a group and don't know what else to do together.
This review contains spoilers
TL;DR: I really liked this game for the first ~90% of its runtime, but the cracks in the combat system and sheer amount of filler really started to show near the end. On top of that, the story really felt like it drove off of a cliff at the very end. Full spoilers ahead, and I want to say up-front that I HAVE NOT PLAYED THE ORIGINAL GAME, and so will largely not be comparing the two.
I'll start with the issues I had with the combat. Although for most of the game it was pretty enjoyable, as the game progressed and tried to increase the challenge it started to feel increasingly frustrating and unfair. This is an Action RPG unlike the original game. In my opinion as a fan of action games such as Kingdom Hearts, Bloodborne, and various MetroidVania games, in a good action game it should be possible to get through an entire fight without taking any damage, at least in boss fights. It certainly doesn't need to be easy, but having virtually every instance of damage be preventable is a big factor in making difficult action combat feel "fair". FF7R does not appear to feel the same way. There are tons of bosses with unavoidable or near-unavoidable moves which you are expected to block, and the dodge roll is near-useless in most scenarios since it seems to have no i-frames whatsoever.
Now, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. The game wants to encourage blocking more than dodging - fine. It's a remake of a turn-based RPG where taking damage in each battle is unavoidable. The real problem with this design philosophy is that blocking is also a bad idea a lot of the time. Late-game bosses tend to be loaded with unblockable moves, which you can't really dodge either due to your lack of i-frames and their enormous hitboxes. On top of this many late-game bosses almost never stagger at all when they're hit, so you can't interrupt these moves, and your attacks have so much start-up and end-lag that it's impossible to block in time when you see them start to wind up a move while you're attacking. This latter issue is most pronounced against the Whisper bosses at the very end. So you can't dodge effectively, you can't block effectively, you can't stagger them by staying on offense... there's not a whole lot it feels like you can do to effectively mitigate damage. This isn't helped by how easy it is to get knocked out of your healing animation, taking more damage while also wasting resources.
Theoretically, I figure the intended way to open up enemies for damage is to Stagger them. While this sounds good on paper, you need to put enemies into a "pressured" state in order to stagger them most of the time, and it seemed almost random when this would happen for many late-game fights. Sometimes a certain move would cause it, sometimes not. Without any way to know how to cause this state, I felt like I was simply waiting for the game to decide I was allowed to stagger bosses. At least once they're staggered I can get good damage in, right? Well...
Another problem with bosses in this game is how often they pull you out of combat to watch a mini-cutscene. Each boss seems to have a ton of mini-phases tied to their health percentage; in theory this is a great way to spice up long fights, but because each new "phase" immediately takes them out of Stagger and forces you to watch a 10-second cinematic, it actually just prevents you from doing more than a relatively miniscule amount of damage during the boss's damage phases. Not only does this completely invalidate any kind of DPS-maximizing strategy, it also breaks any sense of flow you might've had by resetting the battlefield and taking away control for a bit. Another thing that I think action games should be trying to achieve is a "flow state", where the player can get immersed in the combat and go "into the zone" so to speak. I was never able to accomplish that in this game due to the constant interruptions.
The game also seems to think that the best way to increase difficulty is to just give bosses more health and more obnoxious mechanics. Late-game bosses are absolute sponges on anything higher than Easy mode, and they're loaded with long-duration hard-to-avoid stuns and full-screen unavoidable attacks.
The final straw for me was Whisper Bahamut, one of the final fights in the game. After dealing a little bit of damage to him, he ripped me out of combat and into a cutscene, where he used MegaFlare. This MegaFlare (which was PART OF A CUTSCENE) instantly killed one of my three party members, and brought the others within inches of death. Immediately after I regained control he sent an undodgeable attack at one of the remaining ones, and launched unavoidable missiles at the last party member, who died through Block. This death sent me back to the very beginning of the entire Whisper fight, since the whole 20-minute affair is considered a single fight. This also means the numerous cutscenes during the encounter are unskippable. This was the moment I turned the game off, and when I came back I set the difficulty to Easy. On Easy mode these fights are trivial.
Wow, I haven't even talked about the story yet. I guess it's time to get into that.
For most of the game, the story is very enjoyable. It's a fun RPG story about saving the planet by taking down an evil corporation that's exploiting it for money and influence. Obviously there's more to it than that, but that's the crux of the story in this game (which is only part one of several). Every once in a while Sephiroth and some spooky ghosts ("Whispers") will appear and do something mysterious, but these occurrences are rarely and not explained. It was clear to me from the beginning that the Whispers were trying to force the main characters to follow a particular path (presumably the same one the original game follows), so I expected some kind of meta-commentary about the nature of art or whatever to develop from them later down the line. Sephiroth is kinda just being vaguely spooky, but I figured this was mostly setup for the later installments of this Remake. This is all fine. There are a few chapters that feel like filler, such as the haunted train station, but none of it was that bothersome.
Where things go off the rails is in the Shinra headquarters. Once you get to the Jenova area, Sephiroth shows up and fucks with your party, separating you. This seems like it would lead to a climax, but instead you spend the next couple of hours going in circles, fighting a smorgasbord of forgettable robots and genetic experiments while Hojo laughs maniacally at you. This entire segment felt like a complete waste of my time, especially since I could tell I was nearing the end of the game. Your conflict with Hojo is never resolved, and none of the enemies you fight in this section matter at all to the story. This was the first time I felt myself getting annoyed by the story.
After this, you reach the office of President Shinra and can finally confront him. This scene proceeds predictably but without much issue. Suddenly, Sephiroth appears and kills Shinra, then throws you into a dream world of sorts to fight an eldritch monstrosity. Okay... Not sure what this has to do with anything, but fine. JRPGs are no stranger to non-sequitur boss fights, though this one feels particularly strangely-placed. After this Shinra's son appears with no build-up whatsoever, attempts to kill Cloud, and then just kind of leaves. This felt kind of tacked-on, but assuming that the son is relevant going forward I suppose it's not the worst way to introduce him.
Because Cloud is an anime protagonist and wants to fight alone for no reason, the party gets split again. Barret and Aerith end up back on the bottom floor and are surrounded. Then they are saved by Cloud and Tifa... who burst into the scene on a motorcycle and a goofy three-wheeled pickup truck. Cloud then proceeds to do some of the most absurd bollywood-esque action moves I've ever seen, and chases the Shinra guards off by force of sheer comedy. This scene felt COMPLETELY out of place to me, like I had suddenly started playing a different game. While Final Fantasy is no stranger to goofiness, this particular installment had been mostly serious up to this point, and this particular moment felt like it was supposed to be a climactic scene and a character moment for Barret and/or Aerith. Instead they get deus-ex-machina'd by absolute nonsense. This is followed by an overly-long dumbass chase scene where you fight yet another forgettable giant robot.
At the end of this chase scene, you basically crash into Sephiroth, who is literally standing on the highway in your way so that he can take over the plot. He says a bunch of vague nonsense and opens a portal, and then Aerith looks directly at the camera and says "Hey actually Sephiroth is the real big bad of this video game and he's going to try to destroy the world later. Remember Final Fantasy 7? Remember Meteor? This is the plot now, fuck you." Once you go through the portal, you're transported to a Hell dimension where you have to kill god.
I feel like I shouldn't have to explain what my issue with this is, but since no one I can find online seems to have a problem with it I guess I will. This entire ending section feels like it comes completely out of nowhere and has literally no connection to anything else that happened in the plot of the game. You literally go from a goofy chase scene running from Big Bad Corporation to "Let's Kill God" in the span of 5 minutes. I expected that the Whispers were some kinds of agents of Fate or something, but this was the worst possible way that this plot thread could've been properly introduced and dealt with. On top of that, the "explanation" of what the Whispers are and what they're trying to do reeks of Kingdom Hearts writing - it's steeped in so much vague cryptic language that it's impossible to follow what anyone's even talking about on a first pass. Far from the Undertale-esque meta-commentary I was hoping for, this is more like listening to Xemnas explain the Recusant's Sigil.
I should add that I am a fan of Kingdom Hearts. I can tolerate dumb anime bullshit stories that barely make sense and go out of their way to be hard to follow. But that isn't what this game was like at all until right at the end. What bothers me is the tone shift, and the fact that the ending of the game feels wholly unrelated to the entire rest of the game. Similarly I'm not opposed to games like this having comedic moments, but the motorcycle action scene felt poorly placed and without much precedent within FF7R. If a similar scene happened in a more comedic game like FF6, or in a more comedic section of 7R like Wall Market, then it would be fine.
In short, I felt like the story took a number of wild turns at the very end that did not fit with the tone or story that the rest of the game spent so long building up. I came away disappointed with the lack of conclusion the main plot thread got, and annoyed with the Kingdom Hearts-esque bullshit that plagued the ending.
I would've given this game an 8 or so if I was judging just the first ~30 hours, but with how much the ending soured the experience I can't give it anything higher than a 6 in good conscience.
I'll start with the issues I had with the combat. Although for most of the game it was pretty enjoyable, as the game progressed and tried to increase the challenge it started to feel increasingly frustrating and unfair. This is an Action RPG unlike the original game. In my opinion as a fan of action games such as Kingdom Hearts, Bloodborne, and various MetroidVania games, in a good action game it should be possible to get through an entire fight without taking any damage, at least in boss fights. It certainly doesn't need to be easy, but having virtually every instance of damage be preventable is a big factor in making difficult action combat feel "fair". FF7R does not appear to feel the same way. There are tons of bosses with unavoidable or near-unavoidable moves which you are expected to block, and the dodge roll is near-useless in most scenarios since it seems to have no i-frames whatsoever.
Now, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. The game wants to encourage blocking more than dodging - fine. It's a remake of a turn-based RPG where taking damage in each battle is unavoidable. The real problem with this design philosophy is that blocking is also a bad idea a lot of the time. Late-game bosses tend to be loaded with unblockable moves, which you can't really dodge either due to your lack of i-frames and their enormous hitboxes. On top of this many late-game bosses almost never stagger at all when they're hit, so you can't interrupt these moves, and your attacks have so much start-up and end-lag that it's impossible to block in time when you see them start to wind up a move while you're attacking. This latter issue is most pronounced against the Whisper bosses at the very end. So you can't dodge effectively, you can't block effectively, you can't stagger them by staying on offense... there's not a whole lot it feels like you can do to effectively mitigate damage. This isn't helped by how easy it is to get knocked out of your healing animation, taking more damage while also wasting resources.
Theoretically, I figure the intended way to open up enemies for damage is to Stagger them. While this sounds good on paper, you need to put enemies into a "pressured" state in order to stagger them most of the time, and it seemed almost random when this would happen for many late-game fights. Sometimes a certain move would cause it, sometimes not. Without any way to know how to cause this state, I felt like I was simply waiting for the game to decide I was allowed to stagger bosses. At least once they're staggered I can get good damage in, right? Well...
Another problem with bosses in this game is how often they pull you out of combat to watch a mini-cutscene. Each boss seems to have a ton of mini-phases tied to their health percentage; in theory this is a great way to spice up long fights, but because each new "phase" immediately takes them out of Stagger and forces you to watch a 10-second cinematic, it actually just prevents you from doing more than a relatively miniscule amount of damage during the boss's damage phases. Not only does this completely invalidate any kind of DPS-maximizing strategy, it also breaks any sense of flow you might've had by resetting the battlefield and taking away control for a bit. Another thing that I think action games should be trying to achieve is a "flow state", where the player can get immersed in the combat and go "into the zone" so to speak. I was never able to accomplish that in this game due to the constant interruptions.
The game also seems to think that the best way to increase difficulty is to just give bosses more health and more obnoxious mechanics. Late-game bosses are absolute sponges on anything higher than Easy mode, and they're loaded with long-duration hard-to-avoid stuns and full-screen unavoidable attacks.
The final straw for me was Whisper Bahamut, one of the final fights in the game. After dealing a little bit of damage to him, he ripped me out of combat and into a cutscene, where he used MegaFlare. This MegaFlare (which was PART OF A CUTSCENE) instantly killed one of my three party members, and brought the others within inches of death. Immediately after I regained control he sent an undodgeable attack at one of the remaining ones, and launched unavoidable missiles at the last party member, who died through Block. This death sent me back to the very beginning of the entire Whisper fight, since the whole 20-minute affair is considered a single fight. This also means the numerous cutscenes during the encounter are unskippable. This was the moment I turned the game off, and when I came back I set the difficulty to Easy. On Easy mode these fights are trivial.
Wow, I haven't even talked about the story yet. I guess it's time to get into that.
For most of the game, the story is very enjoyable. It's a fun RPG story about saving the planet by taking down an evil corporation that's exploiting it for money and influence. Obviously there's more to it than that, but that's the crux of the story in this game (which is only part one of several). Every once in a while Sephiroth and some spooky ghosts ("Whispers") will appear and do something mysterious, but these occurrences are rarely and not explained. It was clear to me from the beginning that the Whispers were trying to force the main characters to follow a particular path (presumably the same one the original game follows), so I expected some kind of meta-commentary about the nature of art or whatever to develop from them later down the line. Sephiroth is kinda just being vaguely spooky, but I figured this was mostly setup for the later installments of this Remake. This is all fine. There are a few chapters that feel like filler, such as the haunted train station, but none of it was that bothersome.
Where things go off the rails is in the Shinra headquarters. Once you get to the Jenova area, Sephiroth shows up and fucks with your party, separating you. This seems like it would lead to a climax, but instead you spend the next couple of hours going in circles, fighting a smorgasbord of forgettable robots and genetic experiments while Hojo laughs maniacally at you. This entire segment felt like a complete waste of my time, especially since I could tell I was nearing the end of the game. Your conflict with Hojo is never resolved, and none of the enemies you fight in this section matter at all to the story. This was the first time I felt myself getting annoyed by the story.
After this, you reach the office of President Shinra and can finally confront him. This scene proceeds predictably but without much issue. Suddenly, Sephiroth appears and kills Shinra, then throws you into a dream world of sorts to fight an eldritch monstrosity. Okay... Not sure what this has to do with anything, but fine. JRPGs are no stranger to non-sequitur boss fights, though this one feels particularly strangely-placed. After this Shinra's son appears with no build-up whatsoever, attempts to kill Cloud, and then just kind of leaves. This felt kind of tacked-on, but assuming that the son is relevant going forward I suppose it's not the worst way to introduce him.
Because Cloud is an anime protagonist and wants to fight alone for no reason, the party gets split again. Barret and Aerith end up back on the bottom floor and are surrounded. Then they are saved by Cloud and Tifa... who burst into the scene on a motorcycle and a goofy three-wheeled pickup truck. Cloud then proceeds to do some of the most absurd bollywood-esque action moves I've ever seen, and chases the Shinra guards off by force of sheer comedy. This scene felt COMPLETELY out of place to me, like I had suddenly started playing a different game. While Final Fantasy is no stranger to goofiness, this particular installment had been mostly serious up to this point, and this particular moment felt like it was supposed to be a climactic scene and a character moment for Barret and/or Aerith. Instead they get deus-ex-machina'd by absolute nonsense. This is followed by an overly-long dumbass chase scene where you fight yet another forgettable giant robot.
At the end of this chase scene, you basically crash into Sephiroth, who is literally standing on the highway in your way so that he can take over the plot. He says a bunch of vague nonsense and opens a portal, and then Aerith looks directly at the camera and says "Hey actually Sephiroth is the real big bad of this video game and he's going to try to destroy the world later. Remember Final Fantasy 7? Remember Meteor? This is the plot now, fuck you." Once you go through the portal, you're transported to a Hell dimension where you have to kill god.
I feel like I shouldn't have to explain what my issue with this is, but since no one I can find online seems to have a problem with it I guess I will. This entire ending section feels like it comes completely out of nowhere and has literally no connection to anything else that happened in the plot of the game. You literally go from a goofy chase scene running from Big Bad Corporation to "Let's Kill God" in the span of 5 minutes. I expected that the Whispers were some kinds of agents of Fate or something, but this was the worst possible way that this plot thread could've been properly introduced and dealt with. On top of that, the "explanation" of what the Whispers are and what they're trying to do reeks of Kingdom Hearts writing - it's steeped in so much vague cryptic language that it's impossible to follow what anyone's even talking about on a first pass. Far from the Undertale-esque meta-commentary I was hoping for, this is more like listening to Xemnas explain the Recusant's Sigil.
I should add that I am a fan of Kingdom Hearts. I can tolerate dumb anime bullshit stories that barely make sense and go out of their way to be hard to follow. But that isn't what this game was like at all until right at the end. What bothers me is the tone shift, and the fact that the ending of the game feels wholly unrelated to the entire rest of the game. Similarly I'm not opposed to games like this having comedic moments, but the motorcycle action scene felt poorly placed and without much precedent within FF7R. If a similar scene happened in a more comedic game like FF6, or in a more comedic section of 7R like Wall Market, then it would be fine.
In short, I felt like the story took a number of wild turns at the very end that did not fit with the tone or story that the rest of the game spent so long building up. I came away disappointed with the lack of conclusion the main plot thread got, and annoyed with the Kingdom Hearts-esque bullshit that plagued the ending.
I would've given this game an 8 or so if I was judging just the first ~30 hours, but with how much the ending soured the experience I can't give it anything higher than a 6 in good conscience.
Managed to spook me even when I thought I knew what I was getting into.
When I first played this game I dropped it after 20 minutes, because I had just finished a replay of FFX and was extremely put off by the drastic shift in tone and dramatic change in the returning characters' personalities. In 2021 I gave it another shot, approaching it as completely its own thing rather than comparing it too much to one of my favorite games of all time. And... I dropped it after 5 hours instead.
The change in tone is not inherently a problem, and it absolutely makes more sense for this game to be more light-hearted than its predecessor considering that the world has been freed from its spiral of death and misery. But the tone is not just "light-hearted", it's incredibly goofy, dumb, and absolutely loaded with cringe-worthy attempts at fanservice centered around Yuna and Rikku. A more light-hearted game set in a freed Spira is fine. Brother screaming in my ear about how he wants to see his cousin get half-naked and dance for his amusement is not fine.
The change in characters is also not inherently a problem. Yuna in particular has gone through a lot and it makes perfect sense for her to have grown and changed, and even become much more outgoing and confident. The big problem here is mostly that we did not actually see most of that change happen, only the catalyst and the endpoint. On top of that, with how fanservice-laden this game is, it's kind of hard to look at her personality shift entirely in a vacuum. How much of this was a logical progression for her character, and how much was a cynical excuse to put her in booty shorts and make her an idol?
Rikku on the other hand feels less like she evolved and more like she's been flanderized. She's always been the upbeat bubbly kind-of-annoying one, and even in FFX she had her moments of grating or cringey dialogue... but in this game it feels like all of her worst traits have been amplified at the expense of all the charm she had. I dreaded every line of her dialogue, and she has a LOT of dialogue. This was especially not helped by her "chemistry" and frequent exchanges with Brother, who was fine as a bit character in FFX but is insufferable as one of the main supporting cast in X-2.
The game overall feels like it's trying to be an ecchi comedy anime, which is not exactly a genre I'm fond of. From the new skimpy outfits, to the combat system relying on the main girls changing into different clothes, to the multiple idol dance sequences, to the constant awful attempts at humor, not a single thing that happened in this game endeared me to it.
As far as the actual gameplay... it's fine I guess. I've seen some people online sing it's praises as the "best ATB combat in the franchise", but as someone who's never been a huge fan of the ATB style in the first place I found it simultaneously way harder AND way more boring than the slower turn-based style of FFX. I'll try to explain why.
As for why it's harder: The fast pace of battle and ability for enemies to attack while you're in the middle of an action makes it extremely easy to lose control of a fight. Combined with the seemingly high damage that early-game monsters can dish out, unless you spend a while on early-game grinding it's really easy for opponents to down one or more of your party in a couple of moves. Items and healing magic are also substantially worse in this game compared to X because of the "charge time" they take, which effectively makes them cost 2 actions (and makes the caster incredibly vulnerable to being killed while trying to heal).
As for why it's more boring: because magic and most special moves take way longer to use than basic attacks (on top of costing mana), it rarely feels worth it to use them. I very quickly fell into a loop of simply basic attacking with two of my party members and healing with the third, every single round until the battle was over. This probably isn't actually the most optimal strategy for most fights, but it gets the job done well enough that I didn't see much reason to change it up. The fast pace of ATB battles discourages me from changing it up, because every second spent thinking about what would be better is lost DPS and increased incoming damage. There is a "pause" mode which is supposed to pause the ATB timer during menu selection, but it only pauses during the sub-menus which means you're still losing time if you need to go in and out of multiple menus to look at your options and think.
This is all exacerbated by the "dressphere" class and leveling system, which replaces the Sphere Grid from X. Leveling is a completely linear set of vague stat increases (not even communicated upon leveling up), and instead of having a large party with many specialists you instead have only 3 party members who can switch classes at will. Because switching classes takes an entire turn (as opposed to party switching being free in X) it doesn't make sense to switch frequently, and this in turn leads to less variety in strategy. On top of that, since all the classes level separately, if you at some point realize you need (or could really use) a class that you haven't been using, then you'll need to grind it up to a reasonable level before it's worthwhile. Even in my short time playing, this discouraged me from switching classes even further; I didn't want to spend time on tedious grinding, but I also didn't want to divide my XP between more than a few classes since this would hamper my progression. All in all, I found the progression system much less interesting and engaging than the Sphere Grid system.
From what I've read online, the "proper" way to play this game is to go everywhere and talk to everyone EXCEPT the stuff that will progress the story forward, including revisiting every single area in Spira during every single chapter, and completing dozens of barely-relevant minigames and side objectives. While I'm generally a fan of games with tons of optional content, apparently the "good" endings of the game are locked behind full completion, and based on the combat and progression systems I got the impression I was expected to do a lot of that extra content in order to decently level my classes and get good enough stats to win consistently against tough opponents. I really don't like the idea of tying the "good" ending of a game to MISSABLE side-quests - especially not early-game side-quests - and I think if that is the "intended" way to play the game then it should really be communicated somehow in-game. The few times I ventured off the path of the main story I was met with road blocks telling me to come back later, so I eventually just powered through Chapter 1 without going to most of the areas on the map. Learning afterwards that I was now locked out of the true ending was what made me put down the game for good.
As for the story... I can't comment on much since I dropped the game shortly after it seemed like the "real" story might be starting, but what I got was boring and felt completely pointless. And the music is fine, but it's a real step down from X in my opinion.
TL;DR: I really did not enjoy this game. I found the characters and tone insufferably dumb and annoying, I found the core combat and progression systems boring and unengaging, I found the story/mission structure unclear and frustrating, and I found myself annoyed by a world I normally love. I'm glad that some people love it, and I have no ill will towards those people, but I thought this was a terrible game, and I have no desire to play any more of it.
The change in tone is not inherently a problem, and it absolutely makes more sense for this game to be more light-hearted than its predecessor considering that the world has been freed from its spiral of death and misery. But the tone is not just "light-hearted", it's incredibly goofy, dumb, and absolutely loaded with cringe-worthy attempts at fanservice centered around Yuna and Rikku. A more light-hearted game set in a freed Spira is fine. Brother screaming in my ear about how he wants to see his cousin get half-naked and dance for his amusement is not fine.
The change in characters is also not inherently a problem. Yuna in particular has gone through a lot and it makes perfect sense for her to have grown and changed, and even become much more outgoing and confident. The big problem here is mostly that we did not actually see most of that change happen, only the catalyst and the endpoint. On top of that, with how fanservice-laden this game is, it's kind of hard to look at her personality shift entirely in a vacuum. How much of this was a logical progression for her character, and how much was a cynical excuse to put her in booty shorts and make her an idol?
Rikku on the other hand feels less like she evolved and more like she's been flanderized. She's always been the upbeat bubbly kind-of-annoying one, and even in FFX she had her moments of grating or cringey dialogue... but in this game it feels like all of her worst traits have been amplified at the expense of all the charm she had. I dreaded every line of her dialogue, and she has a LOT of dialogue. This was especially not helped by her "chemistry" and frequent exchanges with Brother, who was fine as a bit character in FFX but is insufferable as one of the main supporting cast in X-2.
The game overall feels like it's trying to be an ecchi comedy anime, which is not exactly a genre I'm fond of. From the new skimpy outfits, to the combat system relying on the main girls changing into different clothes, to the multiple idol dance sequences, to the constant awful attempts at humor, not a single thing that happened in this game endeared me to it.
As far as the actual gameplay... it's fine I guess. I've seen some people online sing it's praises as the "best ATB combat in the franchise", but as someone who's never been a huge fan of the ATB style in the first place I found it simultaneously way harder AND way more boring than the slower turn-based style of FFX. I'll try to explain why.
As for why it's harder: The fast pace of battle and ability for enemies to attack while you're in the middle of an action makes it extremely easy to lose control of a fight. Combined with the seemingly high damage that early-game monsters can dish out, unless you spend a while on early-game grinding it's really easy for opponents to down one or more of your party in a couple of moves. Items and healing magic are also substantially worse in this game compared to X because of the "charge time" they take, which effectively makes them cost 2 actions (and makes the caster incredibly vulnerable to being killed while trying to heal).
As for why it's more boring: because magic and most special moves take way longer to use than basic attacks (on top of costing mana), it rarely feels worth it to use them. I very quickly fell into a loop of simply basic attacking with two of my party members and healing with the third, every single round until the battle was over. This probably isn't actually the most optimal strategy for most fights, but it gets the job done well enough that I didn't see much reason to change it up. The fast pace of ATB battles discourages me from changing it up, because every second spent thinking about what would be better is lost DPS and increased incoming damage. There is a "pause" mode which is supposed to pause the ATB timer during menu selection, but it only pauses during the sub-menus which means you're still losing time if you need to go in and out of multiple menus to look at your options and think.
This is all exacerbated by the "dressphere" class and leveling system, which replaces the Sphere Grid from X. Leveling is a completely linear set of vague stat increases (not even communicated upon leveling up), and instead of having a large party with many specialists you instead have only 3 party members who can switch classes at will. Because switching classes takes an entire turn (as opposed to party switching being free in X) it doesn't make sense to switch frequently, and this in turn leads to less variety in strategy. On top of that, since all the classes level separately, if you at some point realize you need (or could really use) a class that you haven't been using, then you'll need to grind it up to a reasonable level before it's worthwhile. Even in my short time playing, this discouraged me from switching classes even further; I didn't want to spend time on tedious grinding, but I also didn't want to divide my XP between more than a few classes since this would hamper my progression. All in all, I found the progression system much less interesting and engaging than the Sphere Grid system.
From what I've read online, the "proper" way to play this game is to go everywhere and talk to everyone EXCEPT the stuff that will progress the story forward, including revisiting every single area in Spira during every single chapter, and completing dozens of barely-relevant minigames and side objectives. While I'm generally a fan of games with tons of optional content, apparently the "good" endings of the game are locked behind full completion, and based on the combat and progression systems I got the impression I was expected to do a lot of that extra content in order to decently level my classes and get good enough stats to win consistently against tough opponents. I really don't like the idea of tying the "good" ending of a game to MISSABLE side-quests - especially not early-game side-quests - and I think if that is the "intended" way to play the game then it should really be communicated somehow in-game. The few times I ventured off the path of the main story I was met with road blocks telling me to come back later, so I eventually just powered through Chapter 1 without going to most of the areas on the map. Learning afterwards that I was now locked out of the true ending was what made me put down the game for good.
As for the story... I can't comment on much since I dropped the game shortly after it seemed like the "real" story might be starting, but what I got was boring and felt completely pointless. And the music is fine, but it's a real step down from X in my opinion.
TL;DR: I really did not enjoy this game. I found the characters and tone insufferably dumb and annoying, I found the core combat and progression systems boring and unengaging, I found the story/mission structure unclear and frustrating, and I found myself annoyed by a world I normally love. I'm glad that some people love it, and I have no ill will towards those people, but I thought this was a terrible game, and I have no desire to play any more of it.