As someone who just got into the game a couple weeks back (currently just short of level 50) it's really hard to say.
Positives:
- FF style on everything. Enemies, character design, status effects etc. As a big fan of FF13 it's nice to see the same aesthetic carried through.
- The music is great when it doesn't decide to stop playing randomly. Though, disable mounted music after the first hour or so, as you'll miss out on a lot of zone-specific soundtrack otherwise.
- Good variety of quest mechanics - while many are just "kill 5 things" or "interact with thing" there are also a bunch of unique ones like taming wild creatures or getting npc to follow you etc. so it's not all samey samey the whole way.
- Lots of things to do all the time - quests, dungeons and duty roulette, fates, logs - I've never yet sat there going "what do I do now?"
- mount customisation is really nice. the whole thing of feeding your chocobo to give it different colours, and being able to customise what it's wearing etc. plus then having it fight alongside you. that's a nice touch, not sure where i've seen it outside dragon's prophet, which did it in far more detail
- the mainstory, while starting slow, does eventually get more and more interesting i'm finding. to begin with it's just so... inconsequential... but once you're in the 30s-40s things are really kicking off and increasing in grandure. people told me the story was great, and I didn't see it at first, but now I'm noticing it's going that way. the point where i'm at now, story is basically starwars: the evil imperial guys have made a superweapon and we have to stop them using our newfound magic abilities...
The negatives:
- NGP loot system is cancer (coming from a every-gets-own-loot system in guild wars and diablo)
- unable to summon companion while in dungeon queue or solo missions, i.e. 95% of the time. very frustrating
- unable to remap main mouse buttons
- only about 3% of cutscenes are voice acted
- dungeon timers: http://i.imgur.com/LpmyLvc.png and i've had them go much longer
Overall, if your friend is a fan of FF games, there is a lot going for this one. Big world to explore, not just through quests but also all of the logs which will take you pretty much everywhere. Having all classes on a single character is nice too since you can really get attached to your one guy instead of "healer alt #3"
