Square Enix delivers an incomplete and mediocre game with Innovative gameplay and a great story.
Each Final Fantasy game tries to change some aspects of the game. Sometimes it is for the good, but sometimes definitely not. To start off with a nice novelty: the fighting is really well done. With the WII controls, you are able to push mobs, pick them up, throw them around or throw other items from the map into the monsters. Although it is far from the turn-based tactics it is fun to do to wave around your hands, pick up a mob and smash them into a wall!
Unfortunately it's not all good: the battles come and go at timed intervals. Imagine yourself strolling a nice field, you look up, and a strange vortex appears. When you look down again, all your friendlies (NPCs, shops) are gone and the area is infested with monsters. Buying goods will have to wait for 5 minutes or so until time is up or the monsters are all cleared. After spending 4 minutes hammering that giant mob, you have 1 minute left and then the vortex disappears just as suddenly as it appeared: all the monsters are gone, and the NPCs and shops have made their comeback into the field. Even if you manage to clear the area of monsters, they will always make their reappearance and the entire circus starts all over again. There is little to no tactics involved here, but feels much more like some arcade game, where in my opinion Square Enix has made a mistake, since tactical battles were always a strong point in their games.
With Easter you have these nice big chocolate bunnies that look like there is a lot of chocolate in there, but when you take your first bite, it's all empty inside. This game kind of feels like that. It looks really nice, and once you start playing you find out that you understand the entire game after 20 minutes. No tactics, no strategy, just straightfoward walking through a series of battles and storylines, and even the "hidden" monsters are so obvious that someone needed to mention separately it was a hidden monster else i would have thought it was just part of the normal storyline. The character customization is the worst in all Final Fantasy games: you only control 1 character, and that one character can equip 3 different things which slightly affect some stats and sometimes have a mediocre special effect. Again, no big tactics involved and no deep character customizations possible.
Still, the game is nice to play, but since you can only spend your money once, there are certainly much better games out there. The game also doesnt last as long as most final fantasy games do, so then it's not so bad that some things are lacking. A mediocre game with a few fun elements: im sure you will enjoy it, and hopefully also until the end of the game....