Almost everything in this game that's on a grand scale is amazing. Almost everything that's not feels incomplete and basic over time.

The world building is great. A fantasy world with different dominions and factions at war. (Aside from the fact that everyone is inexplicably white.) And it created this sense of awe to have these massive eikons from previous Final Fantasies woven into the world, this perfect blend of grimdark and Final Fantasy.

But when you zoom into the world it's ultimately populated by cardboard cut-out heroes and villains. The Game of Thrones comparisons worried me ahead of time, and in playing the game, it felt like they learned all the wrong lessons from GoT. What makes those stories great isn't the bloodshed, the f-bombs, the nudity, or the plot twists, it's that the factions are tied into characters who circumvent the genre stereotypes. This just indulges in them. And these dominions aren't connected to fleshed-out characters. Instead, we get muscular villain, emperor villain, vixen villain. We never spend enough time with them to connect with the emotional stakes that are hinted at but never fully realized. Cid shines mainly because of the voice acting (which is superb all the way across the board). Clive starts off as interesting, with a real inner conflict that he's dealing with...that gets resolved about 20% into the game and is totally replaced with a vague desire to save the world and about nothing else.

The boss battles and Eikon fights are visual spectacles that are among the most jaw-dropping that I've seen in video games. The problem was that they were peppered in between lengthy side quests disguised as main quests. I do think the game needed a breather in between the boss battles, but these were the fetchiest of fetch quests, often not connected to character or plot or any real stakes (I spent 2-3 total hours gathering supplies for a bridge, a workshop, and an airship...as a mandatory part of the game). They didn't introduce new gameplay dynamics, puzzles, or any other twist to the game. And often, they had long stretches of running to one place, talking to a random person, and then running to another place. If you removed any of it, the story, the characters, the gameplay would have remained the exact same. The combat was fun and the Eikon powers gave a fluid feel to it. But that was all that existed as far as mechanics. The skill tree was basic and the crafting unnecessary. And since the game relied only on combat, that combat started to feel dull after 26 hours of my play, especially since everything other than boss battles was incredibly easy.

After the latest Eikon battle and 75% of the way in, I don't have it in me to slog through another 2-3 hours of filler before I get to the next meaningful encounter. Maybe I'll pick it up at some point, but I think I'll probably just end up finding a stream to watch the finish, because even after all that, I still love the world and the peaks of this game. I just don't have a lot of joy left in the playing of it.

Which is a bummer, because there's a fantastic, 4.5 star, 20 hour game in this one. My feeling is that they tried so hard to be epic, to be like Elden Ring or God of War or Game of Thrones or any other comp, they mistook length for scope and buried the real scale of this game in the mundane.