Finished the game.
Hmm.
It's pretty much everything that I felt early on.
Yes the open city is kinda cool, but it has an obscene amount of backtracking, Probably more than the three Skies games put together. Aaand... most of the story beats are not interesting. No, the mafia is not interesting for several chapters in a row. Yeah okay corruption and shit, foreign powers using them... okay, I don't need 20h+ spent on those them.
I want more of the life of the average person, but the police angle ends up neutering any possible subtlety. They're bad guys, they do harm to the country, nobody asks why, let's arrest them and throw our hands in the air when they're protected by politicians. But wait, our heroes will miraculously stop the corrupt politicians too! Maybe but since they've done fuck all to stop the reason why, it's just running around in circles.
Crossbell feels like Japan in a nutshell... it's "shikatanai" the game, things suck, can't do anything to deal with it for good. It's pretty creepy how everyone in the game was right, the police is fucking useless and the Bracers, a paramilitary organization with little oversight is their only hope. Yeesh.
But the big issue lies in the characters. Lloyd isn't very good and takes most of the screen time... and indeed, it makes Randy feels like a boring duplicate, he's very underwhelming. Elie is not much of a character, she feels more like a deus ex machina bringing her connections into play as soon as the team needs something.
The side cast is mostly boring, but that's true of TitS too, except that they had a third game to develop them at least.
Tio is the only saving grace, she is interesting and surprising with a more nuanced personality than expected.
That's quite a problem, the world gets dull, the cast is not great... and then there's combat.
Which is a MASSIVE regression; not that the older games were fantastic, they also had a limited amount of skills for such long games... but here it's completely ruined.
Buffs only last three turns now (mostly), and it takes two of them to cast a buff spell. They're pretty much useless outside of that one burst turn once in a while (and Lloyd STR buff I suppose, if you just need to faceroll squishy stuff - but magic is always far superior in the series anyway). Same thing for debuffs, as they get progressively unusable when everything resists everything. Outside of slow in the last dungeon, maybe they remembered that they had fights at the last moment?
So yeah.
Ultimately, I'm mostly negative.
The game is pretty much worse in every way, more backtracking, more dragging along, less interesting chapters, much worse cast, bad combat. It just isn't an engaging RPG.
