I have so many mixed feelings about this so I'm just going to break it down into parts, to start I wanna preface with the fact I've played every final fantasy game to completion yes this includes the MMOs where I've done the overall majority of content in both, I only bring this up because I think being a long time fan made me enjoy this entry less instead of more and while I strongly disagree that this game "isn't final fantasy" it could be more final fantasy.

Visuals: What is there to say, the game is breathtaking most of the time, the only kind of drab thing is the art direction, 99% of the villages are ramshackle copypasted shacks but outside of that its a treat to look at, character design and models are nice.... except for most of the monsters whose mechanics and models are ripped straight from XIV, even the Moogle this is the first mainline FF in ages to not have a unique moogle design, its just copypasted from XIV, lots of NPCs share names with XIV npcs and it makes the game feel like it lacks identity.

Story: Both the strongest and weakest thing in this entry, the game starts incredibly strong, but suffers as it goes. Really grand, powerful plots are often interrupted by glorified fetch quests and the pacing of the sidequests is absolutely atrocious there are five hours of sidequests before the final boss, and while yes they are well written most of those sidequests should have been the main story. For example, there is a cutscene midway through the game that strongly hints something is up with Torgal, this is never brought up again in the main plot but is in two sidequests, Torgal is...your only real mainstay party member and all of his development is in a sidequest. Why is he special? Well thats kind of left up in the air too with just small lore tidbits instead of fleshing out a major character. Don't get me started on Jill I know XIV addicts and XVI fans will attack me for this but CBU3 has often struggled with female characters and Jill is no different, her development is stunted and all of her agency is at one point completely taken away and just given to Clive, she doesn't even get to participate in the final conflict or make any meaningful difference on the plot, and all of the other women are either hilariously cartoonishly evil (such as Annabella) or just kind of there to hand out sidequests (Mid). SOME of the sidequests have extremely powerful and good writing even occasionally making me tear up, other ones are boring slogs that have you running back and forth with little lore or reward to show for it. The main scenario has some high highs, some of the highest of modern final fantasy games but the lows are quite dreadful and almost embarassing. Yoshi-P only knows MMO pacing and it shows, but whereas XIV has years of character development to make even more drab parts palatable with lore this game just...has long stretches of nothing and characters I wanted to care for but got shafted by the end.

Gameplay: The actual strongest part of the package, fights feel epic and fun and learning the powers of the different Eikons was a real treat, my only real gameplay complaint are the sidequests that I've rambled about enough and the speed in which you explore the world, Clive takes ages to sprint, you cannot do this on command, and he won't do it at all in the barren, lifeless villages that plague this game making walking through towns tedious. Even the chocobo feels slow so there is something wrong there. That brings me to another problem with the gameplay: the exploration, as I said there are no cities to explore, villages are lifeless and drab with only a handful of charmless npcs each and there might as well be no cities, only showing up as back alley dungeons and in cutscenes. Yoshi-p's bizarre insistence on no minigames to keep the story "dark" (seriously one of his many interviews where he isn't being a weird racist he goes into this) had such a terrible impact on the world the entire world feels free of leisure, stiff and unalive, even the most serious games in the FF series had minigames, moments of leisure and places to explore and other things to do besides combat but here? That is all there is.
Speaking of upgrades are just vertical, the crafting is mostly useless and there is almost no gear variety or rpg mechanics to speak of.

Music: Some tracks, namely Titan's final phase, the final boss final phase, the prelude and the hunt boss music slap insanely hard. However, I feel like Soken was holding back, there aren't honestly that many memorable or experimental tracks and for an OST with over 200 songs you'll be hearing the same like 4 or 5 over and over and over in almost every cutscene and town. Soken has been known for his beautiful music and variety where did it go??

In summary I feel like this game has almost no identity of its own, while FF has always been self-referential (something I normally find quite charming) this game is just a testament to Yoshi-P's ego, as the player gets bombarded with and endless onslaught of XIV references, and a game whose frames drop on performance mode despite yoshida boasting that the game would not need patches. I'm left sincerely hoping CBU3 doesn't do another mainline game for quite some time as this is the third worst game in the series for me barely beating out XIV, and walking over the low, low bar that is II. It's a real shame I honestly truly wanted to love it, most games I love, hell most Final Fantasy games in general I find myself wishing they would never end even on endless replays, but towards the end I was just ready for this to be done, and left kinda mixed on an ending I didn't feel the game earned.