I have a love/hate relationship with this game right now. I've logged in 90 hours of the game and honestly I'm getting bored. I'm not attached to any of the characters the way I was in FFX (one of my favorites storyline wise. I thought it was the most creative!)

Storyline: The story starts out great! There seems to be so much energy, so many interesting things and unknowns. And that's where they leave you. After 10 hours, anything "interesting" they bring up isn't talked about again. You go on missions that seem to end pointlessly. You get magical items that are supposed to advance the story, yet aren't talked about indepth. I found myself advancing the storyline, taking an hour to do some sidequests and then forgetting what the hell I was supposed to do next.

Character Development: Penelo who? Seriously, half the characters in this game could just as easily not be there and have the story advance all the same. You could throw out Vaan, Penelo, and perhaps even Fran and have the story advance near the same. None of them play vital roles at all, but are rather "along for the ride". I was talking to my boyfriend as I played the game and asked him what the point of Penelo was and he said he had yet to find a reason. You can sum up the back stories of most characters in 3 sentences. There are no background arks that tell anything interesting about the characters (Minus Fran in one small section, but it's hardly in depth). I didn't feel the characters grew or changed much through the story. Not much character interaction, no romance (which is a good or bad thing depending on who you are), very Star Wars. Characters are killed off and you barely feel a thing.

Voice acting is A+. I'll give it that.

Music is a hit or miss. Depends on what you like. I was "so-so" with it. Some tracks were awesome, others were blah. Very FF:Tactics.

Battle system is fun and open. You'll be doing a lot of hack and slash and little magic casting (besides white magic). By the time you get the strongest spells, they do almost the same DPS (damage per second) as quite simply just having auto attack on the monster. The damage ratio between spells vs. melee is pretty awful. Spells should have been stronger.

Espers have little to no backstory. The first summon you get has some story, but the rest are just there. You get them through the storyline. Half of them are optional with no story. They appear, you fight them. The end. The only "story" you get is from the game's beast log which tells some info on them that you don't get in the game otherwise.

Animation is very nice. Ingame, it's pushing the limits of what the PS2 can handle. It's a step up from FFX. Environments are lovely and the cities are beautiful. Dungeons have a tendancy to be repeat square rooms with lots of monsters though.

FMVs are nothing we haven't seen before. FFX had better, more eye-candy ones, in my humble opinion.

So, comparing FF12 to FF10.

Storyline: FF10 wins that one by a long shot. I was almost in tears at the end of FF10. Talk about unhappy endings!
Battle System: Toss up. FF10 had a larger sphere grid that took far longer to finish than the license board. At the end of FF12 (without much work at all) all my characters were clones of each other differing in only a few STR points or MGK points here or there.
Gameplay: Faster in FF12 by far. Both are good being Final Fantasy games. I'm ok with both honestly.
Characters: Much more memorable ones in FFX. I'm sorry, I really wanted Vaan and Penelo to have points and kept waiting for the points to come, but alas, they didn't.
Music: FF10 wins. The only thing I liked better in FF12 was the theme song. Suteki da Ne bothered me for some reason.

And a final note: FF12 has some oddly long load times. Between using Quickenings and changing zones, there's this slightly longer than should be lag fest.