Googleshng:
Overall I'm pleasantly surprised. After their last several games, the last thing I expected to see out of Square was nice, simple, easy to navigate menus, and hotkeys for stuff in battles. Also nice to see that the freakish dayglow menus from FF10 are history.

The new incarnation of the job system here is pretty spiffy, although irksomely lacking in Red Mage goodness. The ability to switch jobs mid-battle in lieu of secondary abilities is an interesting twist, as is the giving of new abilities to the suckier classes. Alchemist came out just plain disgusting though. 0 MP abilities that max out your entire party's HP have always bothered me.

Of course, on the negative side of things, completely recycling all graphics from FF10 save for your characters and a handful of NPCs bugs the heck out of me. When you're wandering around in the exact same world, pixel for pixel, texture for texture, enemy encounter for enemy encounter, it's a wee bit insulting I say. Much like it bugs me how the "Play as a Belmont" option in all the SotN style Castlevania games give you the exact same experience, as you have the same abilities and are effectively exploring the same castle.

So I suppose my point here is that while I can't hold it against a company when they churn out a quick sequel off the cuff, at the least I want to see the artists and level designers pulled off their vacations for the occassion.

The overblown pandering to hormonal teenage boys doesn't really bother me all that much personally, but I have to comment on the strangeness of the fact that people are griping at skimpy costumes in FF12 lately, but nobody seems to have any problem whatsoever with, say, this.