The plot seemed pretty good as far as I got. But, the combat is a combination of dull, unrewarding and can also be stressful.
The dull comes from the enemies having tons of hit points. You have to spend several rounds of all characters attacking even the weakest enemy encounters. You heal HP and MP after every battle so there's not much risk of dying nor any reason not to use your abilities it's just time consuming. Your abilities don't seem to do all that much damage often it's 1.1x your base attack power or something like that, even your Ultimates only do a little more than any regular attack you would do.
The unrewarding comes from the progression system. You don't get XP you have to wait for the game to decide to give you a level either with side content or more regularly just beating bosses. This means that fighting enemies gets you very little and with this going alongside you getting fully healed it just makes it seem pointless. The other progression system is a upgrade of equipment and equipping of gems. Both are overly complicated and require a lot of farming of materials to only increase your attack power by a little bit.
The stressful comes with the system that makes it so that a bar fills up throughout the whole battle and if it gets full you take more damage, you can only decrease it a few ways. Most commonly this means that you have to use specific abilities at specific times, for example, you may need to steal to decrease the bar even if you know the enemy has no items. This doesn't make the battles more interest, it's just annoying to have to juggle this on top of everything else.
So, while I was interested in the story. I wasn't interested enough to have to deal with every other mechanic that the game comes with over and over again.

i'm not a big JRPG fan but really enjoyed this. the writing is better than most AAA titles today. the art style doesn't manage to be as pretty as say, secret of mana or the SNES final fantasy games but it's still quite appealing

I can see why some might enjoy this game, but it just wasn't working for me. It's too basic/simple for me... I might have liked it long time ago when I first started gaming and playing RPGs, but i think I might have been spoiled now.