That's basically how I felt. There was a huge world of stuff going on, and I was participating in it, but not a part of it. I also felt the "open world" was a vast region of nothing interesting going on, the combat system was infuriating due to system limitations, the spell effects were some of the worst I've seen in a FF game, and my pet peeve, unexplained magic. Even in the beginning of the game, you have Mist and such, so you're this random kid, Vaan, who is fighting with a sword, but can also make dimensions collapse in a series of explosions sometimes. Uh, okay? It's never even talked about. Apparently everyone can just cause multicolored backgrounds filled with explosions to appear. I say everyone because every character pretty much had the same Mist attacks with slight graphical variations, and they were all terrible save Basch's.
On the note of Basch, he was the only good character. If they made the game about his redemption as a knight, like they originally planned, it might have been salvageable. Instead we got a kid who can't shut the hell up about "I wanna be a sky pirate!" Guh. The plot in general was predictable. I didn't even raise my eyes on an occasion. As soon as I met the main bad guy, whose name is not worth remembering, I thought "Ah, he's going to kill his father and try to take over the world - he seems like that type." Of course, it took the game 2/3rds of the way to get there and meet my expectation. I honestly don't even remember what was happening for most of the game. It seemed like a long path of nothing.