I played and finished this game for the first time last week (after not liking it a whole lot the first time I started playing it).

Buttom line: It's a good game, but not as great as people make it out to be.

The cutscenes were great, I loved the Laguna sequences, I thought some of the characters were cool (Zell, even Squall) and the for the first 70% of the game or so the story is interesting and action packed.

However, the gameplay mechanics in this game are just flawed. Use the card command to get AP points after battle but no EXP and you can have characters with 9999 HP that do insane amounts of damage with their limit breaks (at 2500 HP or less and with Aura magic) and end up fighting freakin' Level 12 monsters in the game because the character itself doesn't level up and so neither do the enemies. It's absurd to have a game that let's characters become stronger than any Level 99 character in previous FF games (in 1/5th the time), yet still put the player up against some of the weakest enemies there ever were.

There is no point in leveling up in this game. None. You can draw stronger spells from higher level enemies? O boohoo, you can get those from bosses later in the game anyway or just refine items. This makes the gameplay really unsatisfying me thinks. It's almost like the designers included a Gameshark utility in the game, putting people at the temptation of using it around every corner. Another problem is that spells and physical attacks are so weak in this game by default (without abusing the junction system) that the only way to play the game normally is by spending an 1 hour or so hammering away at every boss you come across with weak physical attacks or spending the same amount of time summoning guardian forces over and over again. Not very exciting, even less so than doing 10,000+ damage points total with Renzokuken and 255 Strength later in the game and killing every boss in a few minutes.

The story also takes a nosedive later on. The time compression stuff makes no sense whatsoever (well, it makes a little bit of sense if you spend an absurd amount of time analyzing it and creating assumptions based on the unsatisfactory explanations in the game).

Once again, this is just MY OPINION. The game was still fun though.