Too long, great combat.
Honestly, the start of this game was final fantas-tic.. The combat system is a lot of fun and feels great. The game looks and sounds amazing, loved the soundtrack.
The two major issues for me boil down to two things:
About half way through, I said to myself, I must almost be finished. Then this game opened up to another new region and I was broken. I'm making a real effort to finish games I'm starting these days. I'm getting super old, and finding it hard to juggle life, work and games, so it pains me to say I found this game massively disrepectful of my time. Things started to grate on me, something as harmless as the animation of getting off the stupid buggy thing, to the stupid chocobo stuttering after running into a rock animation. Lot's of small time wasted == big time wasted kinda shit, kept entering my mind. I decided to give up on the priate treasure stuff and just focus on finishing all the on land stuff and the amazing Queens Blood quest line.
Secondly, I don't think I can handle the writing in this game. Look, I understand, it's akin to that shonen-style dramatic anime style.. but I just couldn't handle over 100 hours of it. Some stuff was hilarious, I'll always have time for Dio and his Arnie style of pumping and posing through conversations, fantastic!!. But, most of the conversations between Tifa, Aerith and Cloud made my eyes roll so much they started hurting.
I'm happy I finished this before the third part comes out, but I'm certainly not going to start that new game at least for another year. I've stopped playing new games, so that doesn't really bother me.
3 out of 5 stars primarily for the amazing combat, beautiful world and wonderful soundtrack