Old recipe done right.
The combat system is kinda like wow mixed with Gw2, you have a skill bar like in wow and enemy will have area of attack like in gw2. There is no level scaling on maps like in gw2 so you can comeback and take revenge on ole enemies. There is also events quests like in gw2 but in FF you can choose to sync (scale) your level down so you can fight along with newer players.
If you want to fight in party but don't know anyone, you can use a duty finder to automatically provide a balanced team for you, which is very neat. You can screen your party search base on language you use.
Your character can also have many class. The class (along with its level) will change depends on type of your main weapon. You can quickly change between class instantly using weapon save slots.
The story is also very interesting with backgrounds stories and cool characters. I think it is at least better than Gw2 in dialogue and story telling.
The JP Ultima server i play have no problem at all since pre-launch. There is also a surprisingly large group of English speaker in this JP server.
Whatever the first version was like, this game is very solid. While there is not many new things, they did improve very much on an old recipe.