So, huh, where do I start. If you press x for a while, the game starts speeding up in cutscenes and lets you skip all the text, speeding up the slow and boring animations, zooms, pans, and all that stuff that's pure filler and kiseki loves to use. You skip all the text, you skip most battles since they're not needed and you skip most sidequests and that's how you beat the game in under 20 hours. It's merely to unlock ng+, as there is some stuff locked behind that for nightmare. With nightmare you do kinda the same but actually reading, and doing the sidequests. That being said, FC is a 50 hours game at most, the weird part is that it took you 70 hours to beat.
My opinion about the game is not that uncommon honestly. The whole saga has some clear flaws that you may wish to ignore, but they're there. Battles are boring, tedious, easily broken and meaningless; you don't need to fight any battle at all as every kiseki game has a catch up system; if you're underleveled, you will get way too much experience from a single battle due to individual multipliers, not that it matters as a good party and craft composition is better than just being at the correct level.
The music is great, the characters and story are good, but the writing is terrible. It's slow, it's really slow. It takes way too much time for anything to happen, and most things can be shortened without any impact to lore, atmosphere or storytelling. And no matter how good your story is, you absolutely don't need 9 games to tell 60% of it. Heck, this saga should not be RPG games anymore, they should just make visual novels because that's how it feels, like an episodic visual novel that has RPG padding added to it. XSEED's terrible translation doesn't help; flanderized characters, memes, exaggerated dialogue and complete rewrite of some of it that changes the personality of some characters just because every dialogue box has to be 4 lines long for them. I'm glad it's out of their hands, fuck xseed and their unjustified delays.
It's not the worst thing I've ever played, but it's not a good game either, having to play hours and hours just to get a little bit of story every 30 hours just tells me that Falcom doesn't appreciate my time or my money anymore.