Let's just get one thing out of the way, the battle system in this game is bad. Very bad. There are much too many random battles, a lot of the time you're "drawing" magic from enemies (a HORRIBLE idea on square's part, it makes no sense and is extremely tedious) both to use and EQUIP it to your characters. Since the power of your equipped magic is based in the number you have, and all of your enemies have an unlimited number of the magics they're able to carry, you spend a LOT (a WHOLE lot, HOURS) of time just hitting that draw button and selecting which magic to get from them. Yeah, not fun, at all. Both the equipment and magic systems are bad. The new focus on summoned monsters as equippable characters which level up and gain skills to boost your character, such as strength upgrades or upgrades to themselves which boost their damage or HP, is really not fun at all, since there's zero strategy involved. You just level up and decide which skill they'll learn after enough battles. I easily blew through the first half of this game, killing bosses in a ludicrously low number of hits. I couldn't stand the second half, it was just more of the same, and the story line became very, very stupid. A select few will actually like this sappy love story mixed with something about a summoner going to destroy the world and some other junk that I just didn't care about. The love story was actually the best part, and the rest felt like a filler. There really isn't anything to praise about this game that separates it from previous Final Fantasy games. A sub-par RPG.