Square keeps tumbling.
So lets get to the game itself. The plot starts out being cookie cutter and boring, oh noes, my sister is gone. You get some uninteresting henchmen to come around and find her. It goes into this plot with the Remnants which are all powerful and too good to be true. Now, if you've ever played RPGs before, you can fill in the blanks for the rest of the game. That's it. You have the story.
Now gameplay, is different, but not completely terrible. Instead of having multiple characters and controlling exactly what they do like in typical RPGs, each character has a "Union" or squad they command. You basically position them in whatever formation, tell each squad to attack, or flank, or cast however, and let the game play itself out. There is strategy that can be pulled from this, however this is where it gets the down points. There are about 15 different scenarios you can find yourself in, each with their own things that dictate what you can do. Deadlocks, Raid Locks, Intercept, Intervene, etc. It happens so fast that usually, you don't even know what just happened. You just see it flash and your there in that situation. In fact, I've played through the same battle, multiple times, making the same exact moves and ended up in completely different situations. The whole system is confusing. While I like the strategy aspect, they should just remove the unions all together and make it just regular characters, with more individual control.
Which brings us to control. The good thing is, that you can control how your characters on how they wield weapons (Dual Wield, One Hand/Off Hand, Two Hand). You can two hand a one handed weapon for extra damage/different style, or pick up another for other attacks. Or use a shield for more defense. That part of the control, is GOOD. The bad part is, in battle you rarely control what happens. You have Attack, Combat Arts, Mystic Arts, Standby/Recover. Now, you'd think under Combat or Mystic Arts, you'd get an array of choices that would vary by situation and be really cool. But you don't. Its pre-chosen spells/styles that you get as you progress. Nothing special.
Graphics and Audio are fine. Nothing special. I'd give up a few levels of the graphics if I could get better load times though. However, on every level of graphics, load times were the same. Sometime between forever and infinity. Which brings us to the final issue.
Load Times, the nail in the coffin for this game, are the ridiculous. I'm running a top of the line machine that can play Crysis on High at over 30 FPS, and this game takes 20-30 seconds to load each battle. Every door opening, every zoning process etc. I honestly believe that 25-30% of my time playing this game, has been waiting for loading. It got so bad, that I had to put the game in windowed mode and started playing solitare in the background as I waited. Or speaking on IMs. This loading time is what took the game from what I think was a 5 overall, to a 2.5. Square has time and again failed at properly coding things for the PC and they continue to alienate a large portion of a great market.