He can watch youtube videos.Some sites have players playing the game and posting long episodes of their gameplay that you can watch.
So that's more than sufficient for him to get an opinion of the game.
As for FFXII..the hunts aren't sidequests in my opinion.
The sidequests were the silly fishing game, the silly running game, trying to recover those silly chicken like things that had run off, and a few others.
All of them of dubious value with not much return imo.
You can argue that FFXII gambits took away a lot of the choice as once you knew what to plug it that was it.
As others have pointed out there are limits in FFXIII on what characters you control and what they can do.
shrugs.If that's not limiting then what is ?
If people such as arcane are satisfied with the game then what's the point in posting in a thread about its flaws ?