I found the world to feel more real than previous ones, I liked the focus on a relatively minor event compared to "WE HAVE TO SAVE THE WORLD," I thought (Vaan and Penelo aside, since they were dead weight who didn't really add anything) the characters were interesting, and I think the translation and voice acting were fantastic. Like really, really fantastic.

I sat in on a panel at PAX with the translators where they talked about the process and there were all these tiny nuances which my subconcious had picked up on but I didn't realize concerning the level of accents and what they entailed, some of the words from conquered lands filtering in, various other things. It was a wonderfully interesting talk. The one thing I didn't pick up on which I thought was fantastic: the Occuria speak in iambic pentameter. In the Japanese version, subtitles were turned on by default or something, so they just had gibberish to be otherworldly, with the translation written on-screen. In the American version, most of the people were expected to have subtitles off, so they needed to come up with something to make them completely "different" and feeling "above". So they wrote it in old-ish English and iambic pentameter. Fucking awesome.

Also, the translators are ASoIaF fans, did the PSP FFT translation, and totally stole the "Ser" title from Martin.