After months of on-and-off gaming, I finally finished the main quest last night. My overall thoughts on the game are very mixed. I liked the battle system (even if I wussed out after endless random battles and switched the difficulty to "easy"), the general world and a lot of the play mechanics.
On the other hand, I thought the story was ridiculously bland (even by the standards of the genre) and the characters were either annoying at worst (Asbel, Pascal) or inoffensive at best (Malik, Hubert). It was hard to care about anything that was happening, especially when the themes were so blatant and applied with the usual JRPG subtlety. It also took the characters a ridiculous amount of time to put the pieces together, when I was pretty sure what had happened to Richard about ten hours before it was made clear. But then, I've played far too many JRPGs.
Also, the music sucked. They really need a new composer for this franchise. I wanted to tear my ears out during the Barona Catacombs and while the rest of the music wasn't as horrid, it wasn't especially good either.
My thoughts on the Lineages quest are much more favorable. I'm not sure if they switched writers but the skits are MUCH MUCH MUCH better and actually do a decent job of showing that these characters have affection for each other. They tried to do this in the main quest but it ended up feeling unnatural and forced. I also find Asbel a lot more tolerable now that he's less obsessed with protecting everyone else. He has other things to worry about.
