I tried to like 12, but I found it painfully tedious. I couldn’t carefully ration my MP the way I wanted to with gambits, and I don’t want to automate the game anyway, I want to actually play it myself. But manual takeover just felt way worse than a normal turn-based system too, the way it grinds the pacing to a halt and takes forever made it apparent that the game isn’t designed to be played manually.
It’s not like Square Enix doesn’t know how to make good turn-based games. They’ve been hitting it out of the park with their smaller budget projects like Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler. So I don’t know why they’ve rejected it for FF, imagine what they could do with a big budget title if they tried.
I joke about how halfway through development, someone at Square Enix must’ve realized that Bravely Default was actually a good game, and thus too good for the FF name. So instead they had to throw darts at an English dictionary to rebrand it.