There was too much to do. They pulled a Dragon Age 2 before DA2 did. The focus was so much on the side quests and leveling up with those, that the actual story was few and far in between. The story itself was fantastic and many parts were amazingly done......for what little you got to see, because again, they focused on side content instead of main story content.

The characters were decent for the most part, but many don't do a whole lot or even show up very often (look at both Cid's, they have major story impacts yet appear so late and hardly get seen doing much while they are are around). It also doesn't help that you could drop out Vaan, Fran, and Penelo (also known as half the main party) and they game would be pretty well unchanged. It doesn't help they changed the main character of the game during production (it shows) then decided during the game to shift who the main character was at any given point during the story.

While the game started out really well, the later story ideas and many scenes were pretty cool (but very underwhelming in build up), it just fell flat, you can only visit a few areas (granted big and beautiful areas) as opposed to how in every (good) FF that lets you explore the whole world. Not to mention there was no real impending doom, every FF involves you saving the world in some fashion from some immediate threat, this just involved some politics and preventing some geopolitical upheavals.

It wasn't a bad game (there's far worse, and I'd argue those in the FF series that deserve to be ridiculed far more), but it wasn't a great game either. It had a lot of potential, but it failed to deliver.