[relentlessflame]

I'm a bit late to the party in that I'm only about ~10-15 hours into the game now, but have some time off the next few weeks to hopefully make progress.

To be honest, there are a lot of things in this game that remind me that the staff from FFXIV (and Heavensward in particular) worked on this, so in that sense it does feel very much like a Final Fantasy game to me so far -- although in fairness, it's been quite a long time since I played another single-player FF game. In particular, the "dungeons" are structured almost *exactly* like FFXIV dungeons, with trash mobs, 2 mini-bosses, and a final boss, and then sometimes a trial after the boss. The open field maps are also feel like FFXIV open field maps, including the progression as you go to a city to do the MSQ, and then unlock a bunch of sidequests in that town. Plus, of course, the music -- you can absolutely tell it's Soken in both the music and sound direction. The dungeons where you seamlessly switch from normal music to combat variant are just like Alliance Raids in FFXIV. The combat is obviously different due to being action-oriented, but even then... if you just imagine the exact same enemies, but it had GCD, cast bars, and tells on the ground for their upcoming attacks, a lot of it feels like FFXIV there too. The enemies and NPC party members all seem to use the continued evolution of the Gambit system from FFXII.

As for the combat itself, to me it feels much more comfortable once you advance a bit further in the story. When you have more powers it becomes easier to stagger, which then makes it easier to do damage. The first few dungeons/bosses felt sometimes like intensive training on dodging and it took a bit of time at first to get into the rhythm of it. Meanwhile, it feels like you're just not doing much damage except during stagger (and you want to save up all your powers for stagger, so you're just doing basic combos). But then when you get more powers, you can afford to be more balanced, and take advantage of partial staggers to limit break and get to stagger more quickly, so the rhythm of combat changes. Plus, some of your later abilities help you restore HP, so you can play a bit more risky (and you also get used to the timing for dodging, of course). All in all, to me it feels good. I know a lot of people out there are saying it's too easy... but to me so far it feels like about the right balance considering that this isn't a series known for action combat, so you'll have a lot of newbies (or people who have only mediocre reflexes like me... lol). The only special accessory I'm using is the one to control Torgal because that's one level of micro-management that I don't need.

Anyway, so far I'm liking it. We'll see how it goes...