As someone who's played a ton of Ivalice games and The Elder Scrolls, I have to strongly disagree with Pike. If you've never gotten far in XII, you're not exactly at liberty to say how far the lore goes. The Advance games were not developed by the core team, they were intentionally created so as not to interfere with the canon of the main entries. While they might not deal with space or alternate dimensions, that actually forms a very small subset of TES' in-game lore and intersects with almost none of the gameplay. Philosophically, it's not even close, Ivalice absolutely destroys TES. I would say Ivalice surpasses TES to the extent they not only explore a different region in each game, they also experiment with a fundamentally different gameplay system.

You should probably give XII's combat another shot. It's the WRPG "Real Time with Pause" system but executed 100x better, with Gambits preserving all the strategy of a turn based game.