Got about 4 and 1/2 hours in now. Game dramatically picked up from the 2 hours mark to the point where when I look at the starting areas I swear they were made by some outsourced team in a shack or something.
Once you hit the DUNGEONS and not just the overworld a lot of the problems like "big bland areas" get fixed into "nicely detailed hallways" and "I can't see where I'm going" goes into "I can see down this hallway"
The map system is still useless and down the line when dungeons get big and complex you might have to be drawing a map out on paper like the old days, but we'll see where that goes.
The battle system also picks up around then as once you start getting a decent bit in several jobs, the system really shines. It's a fantastic mix of FF5 x Grandia w/a touch of SMT. Monster interactions add to old school elemental interactions, job mixing can let you create highly damage attacks (for instance if you have "flame fist" which is a physical + fire attack, if you are the monk job and do a perfect charge you'll get about 2x damage. So if you do a monk job flame fist on a flame weak enemy you'll be doing about 4x damage). The timing bar is also an excellent addition as you can plan out strategies because due to enemy reactions to certain attacks or enemy "phases" you might want to hold your attack off until someone else has a turn and the bar lets you set it whenever you want. Also being able to charge and increase the effectiveness of you attacks/magic is a neat touch. Overall the game is already making great use of Blue Dragon's battle system by the 3-4 hour in dungeon and it's really good.
The game is also a lot more fun when enemies start doing damage
Until about 2:30 in enemies would do about 2 points of damage per hit when I had 80+ HP... yeah, zzzz. But around 2:30 in they start doing 30-50 points of damage and coming in large packs and then...yeah, fun
The graphics are pretty nice looking, though there is still tons of screen tearing (basically any time you do an elemental attack with a dragon since you have the added elemental effects), but at least the tearing doesn't rear its head outside of battle besides for maybe 1/2 a second in a cutscene or two. I'm still really anti the over-use of the depth of field effect though, the village in those first two pics is JAW-DROPPINGLY GORGEOUS. But you can't really see anything past the building in front of you without it being a total blur >_< They should patch the game and let you turn off the filter if you want (though I guess it would kill the framerate since detail loads in like GoW as you approach things).
Music is still totally awesome. Despite what some may say, the boss battle theme is very fitting and quite the enjoyable piece
So yeah, now that dungeon-design is in place, the battle system is getting challenging and is very nice, and the areas are getting more colorful and detailed...it's definitely an enjoyable rpg. Story is still in the air, but at this point I can at least say that Sakaguchi still knows how to make a turn-based battle system
