May be premature because I'm only at chapter 6, but I'd say the game is a success.
Pros (so far):
-Once you get the hang of it, the battle system is a blast. If you're like me, you'll backtrack to find more battles so you can practice your battle "technique"
-Story and characters are surprisingly well-written up this point. On the surface the characters might seem cliché, but that's only because other games in the genre don't utilize their characters this well. The narrative moves along briskly and there is little to no extraneous bull:bou::bou::bou::bou: interrupting the action (FFX).
-Graphics and music, of course. But this is true of any Final Fantasy game.
Cons (minor):
-As has been said, the levels can feel a BIT sterile at times. They are so gorgeous that you want to peek around, but you can't really, even when there's a nook that looks like your team can enter (they generally can't).
That's all I can really comment on so far, since most of the rest requires playing through the whole game to experience (leveling up, pacing, etc)
To contextualize my perspective, my favourite games in the series are VII and XII followed by V and VI. Most of the rest I generally enjoy too, with the main exception being X, which I quite dislike. Not sure what any of this might be worth.
