Cities populated with tons of NPCs everywhere, even if you can't talk to every one of them. It made the cities feel like actual cities.

I also liked the game's approach to open world design. Even if it wasn't seamless, it allowed for such a broad spectrum of distinct locations. I was always amazed on my second, third, and fourth playthrough how much of the game world I had never seen before.

But most of all the gameplay. For the JRPG genre struggling to adapt to the High Definition era, this is how you make real time combat that the player can actually control. I couldn't get over how terrible the party AI in FFXIII could be and wish they would just let me set presets like XII's gambits. When I play Bioware games with similar systems, I can't help but focus on how poorly balanced they are in comparison. Hiroyuki Ito is absolutely one of the most brilliant game designers in the industry and it's pathetic how many years have gone by without him working on a AAA console RPG.