I'm actually working on playing through a second time right now. It's easily one of the best RPGs I've played in a good long time, and I recommend it above almost any other RPG on the market right now.

I never felt as if the game was too much like any particular Final Fantasy. It's missing a lot of the staples of the series, obviously, but there will inevitably be similarities. It still is, after all, a Sakaguchi game. The setting is certainly what you'd expect of Sakaguchi--the steampunk blend of technology and magic which permeates through much of the Final Fantasy series. The music is some of Nobuo's best, and to hear many of the tracks of orchestrated (as far as I can remember, this is the first Nobuo-only soundtrack to received such treatment) is wonderful.

Bunny has pretty much covered the other aspects of the game. Some people don't seem to like A Thousand Years of Dreams because it can be a bit of reading, but I found that it was fantastically well written (or in this case, translated), and added an emotional depth to the game that almost every other one lacks. It also manages to deal with a lot of questions that stories frequently try to address; what does it mean to live and die being the most relevant as half the cast of playable characters are immortal. I believe A Thousand Years of Dreams shows the evolution of the characters without forcing in-your-face character development moments which more often than not come off as contrived and cheap as a result.

That's not to say it's not without its faults. The battle system uses a new method of enforcing the use of a front and back row which has been accused of being imbalanced in favor of the enemy. That's never bothered me too much, but the inability to remove enemy buffs before they cast them can become extremely frustrating during certain notable boss fights. Commands are inputted at the beginning of each round, and you can't remove buffs that don't exist, so even if you know the boss will open up with a certain ability which will grant him annoying protections, you can't have one of your characters ready to dispel the effect in question ahead of time (as your casters are invariably slower than the enemies). There's other minor frustrations, but nothing that I can think of as coming close to breaking the game.

Anyway, it's hands down the best JRPG on the Xbox 360. At this point, I'd say it's hands down the best JRPG this generation--not that it has an awful lot of competition at this point. I really don't expect either Last Remnant or Eternal Undiscovery to top it. I don't have the highest hopes for FFXIII, either, but I'll reserve judgment on that for now. If you have the Xbox 360 (and I assume you do, otherwise there wouldn't be much reason to ask the question), you'd be doing yourself a huge favor by getting it.