I'm not really an RPG gamer, but this is how my personal experience was (I finished the game yesterday):

I thought the combat was well done, the game is quite polished in general. I used the "classic" setting for combat, so you're occasionally fighting against the AI in who you target. The active character you've chosen to control has their ATB bar fill up faster, so you can use abilities more for them, so your party is generally doing the standard weak attacks until their ATB bars fill. The party doesn't automatically use abilities/spells/items (there is an auto cure spell though), so you have to regularly swap between the various character menus to do that. I found the action and switching characters a little awkward, I'd have preffered a turn based system closer to the original. Or a system to give your party AI so I could just focus on using the character I enjoy doing the actions for. But on classic/easy, you generally don't really need to use the other characters much anyway, I basically just used cloud for most of the game, with occasional use of other characters when their bars were full (Barret was actually the most fun to use character for me).