Alright, finished this game earlier this week. Great game, fantastic gameplay.
Ending was awesome(ly bad). I loved it. In addition to the hilariously awful acting, the best part is that the devs really delivered in fan-service there; it did what pretty much everyone who played this game really wanted to do
. Man, the story was so bad, and I enjoyed it for that. So bad it's good.
I quite liked the music throughout the game, actually. Some very nice tracks overall.
Performance-wise, it was fine when installed. Loading was negligeable, texture pop-ups were minimal, and framerate overall was decent; the slowdowns were pretty rare, and didn't actually affect the gameplay.
Gameplay was fantastic. One of the more innovative turn-based battle systems in recent years. I really liked how they were implementing a large number of party members while making it manageable. I really don't see the people complaining about this not having depth. Customizing party/union configurations was a lot of fun, and I changed my party setup radically on multiple occasions during the game (when I got new soldiers to recruit, when I got new leaders, when I was trying to optimize my current setup, etc). Going for more unions to allow more flanking maneuvers vs aiming for higher hp unions in order to tank better, going for balanced unions vs specializing some of them in order to get access to the bigger union-group spells. Good options all-around.
I quite like how the actual system itself was implemented. I quite liked how deadlocks and flanking worked; it quite affected my tactics in boss fights where the enemy was capable of multi-deadlocking (holding unions back, waiting to backup heal, going for the kill, etc). Essentially, it was a WEGO (both sides implement their commands, and then orders are carried out in terms of initiative) system, but with a more JRPGesque presentation. I could see them really expanding and improving it.
Good pacing, too (you can run through dungeons without fighting anyone, you could engage enemies as in standard JRPG battles, or you could group everyone together for massive encounters). Never needed to grind. Never needed to powerlevel. I just did most of the sidequests (some good boss fights here and there) and the main story. I avoided most single-enemy fights and would group up a bunch of enemies together when the opportunity showed up. Game was a good challenge throughout, never too easy or overwhelmingly hard.
I'll replay it again at some point. I will admit I'm a bit jealous of the PC version getting that turbo 5x animation speed feature. Unlimited leaders doesn't sound good, though. The restricted leader setup played a significant role in how I configured my unions. Balance would potentially suffer for it.