>>3773479
>that only sags a bit in chapter 6.
*chapter 3
6 at least goes pretty fast 3 has the fucking horses taking forever just to go around places

Sky stuff

>The first half of the story is boring
This gets thrown around so much but I really never had that feeling while I was playing the game. You're still doing a lot of shit in every region.
>The combat and character building is unengaging
I'd say yes, but also at least in my experience since sky fc was my first game in the series I didn't figure out the system as quickly, so it still worked out pretty well (for example I don't think I started realizing how good earth wall was until SC so I wasn't taking advantage of that at all in FC. You're also in smaller parties for most of it - usually 2 or 3 people at a time as compared to having a full team almost ubiquitously in the latter games - that does have an impact in making even the simpler combat a lot more challenging.
>and it is a top down game where you are staring down at a lot of rocks and grass and dirt
And like... pretty cities and ancient temples and beaches and fortresses and etc all with little details everywhere that you can look for because you can rotate the camera. This never was an issue for me - I like the Sky maps a lot, the loss of camera control going to Zero was a pretty jarring thing that took a long time to get used to.
>The OST isn't as good
That's pretty arguable - it's more a matter of personal taste. Both are very good. There's a lot of Sky pieces - even just from FC - that are favorites. The Zeiss theme for example