• Obvious tuning and quality-of-life issues. Magic was consistently underwhelming; the sidequest system was largely annoying padding; performance was just straight-up bad.
• Lots of clever ideas that didn't quite bear fruit. I really liked the idea of weight as a system but it culminated in me just not really caring about equipment after the first few chapters, for instance.
• I went in assuming some meta-ness, since I had played the original, and the two ways it bore out (I will not spoil them because it is unnecessary) were cool, but not quite as cool as the predecessor.
• The game was gorgeous. I understand not liking the player models but the backgrounds were amazing.
• Lots of folks did not like the dungeons, but I liked the fact that I could actually get lost, and I had to evaluate my own personal heuristic for exploration vs. getting the hell out of dodge.

At the end of the day, it was flawed and I was happy to be done with it (I didn't deal too much with the postgame) but it was a JRPG with a job system that I liked and had a

★★★★