The battles are a little bit of a bummer, mostly because the time aspect of the battle really takes something away from the game I think. It doesn't encourage you to take your time, buff, debuff, or do anything other than do a mad dash to staggering your opponent. Additionally, there are times where you switch over to heal, and all the sudden you are stuck in a healing/defensive formation for entirely too long. If your characters are a little too close together and you're getting hit by strong AOE, then it's nearly impossible to get out of the defensive formation.

The AI for the NPCs is just not impressive. They rarely heal properly, or when they are a defensive type of character use the right techniques.

The Crystarium is fine, although outside of the Medic, Ravager, and Commando skill trees, the game doesn't give you many opportunities to play around with the other ones, because of the whole timed battle aspect.

At some point the cut scenes get to be a bit over the top. When they have a cut scene to show you cresting a hill and nothing else...it seems too much and breaks up the pacing of the game a bit much.

The loss of towns is a bit depressing. There is essentially no interaction with anything in the game that isn't a battle.

I'm having plenty of fun playing, but there are plenty of things that could have been done to make what is a solid and good game into an absolutely great game.

I've just gotten to Gran Pulse, I'm not sure how far along that is in the game, I'm guessing a bit over 1/2 way done, so maybe some of the things change, but I doubt it for some reason.

Here's to hoping that with their next game they go back to what made the series so excellent and popular in the first place.