I think I'm most of the way through it (I'm on the Erbe scenic route part) and it's felt like a clip show in video game form. I mean, sure, more of the same combat wise, and I'm always up for some more backstory about various characters, but it doesn't feel like a well developed narrative at all.
As I say it seems to me I'm most of the way through it and I don't really have much of a clue what's going on, and I'm confident that I'm not supposed to. I don't know why I am in the setting, I don't know who the bad guy and his right-hand man are or what they want or why all the main characters are involved in it (and I don't think I'm supposed to), the main tension between the two protagonists is still simmering, and yeah, it is quite straightforwardly a series of dungeon crawls.
Spoiler!
Like I say, "clip show" - as if these side stories, as the game unapologetically refers to them, are things from the cutting room floor of the previous two games. I was sort of expecting this "other world" setting to be a temporary thing where we'd be back in the "real world" pretty quickly, but as it became more and more obvious that the whole game (or more or less the whole game, I guess we'll see how the ending goes) is going to take place in it, I was honestly a bit disappointed.
The previous two games had a lot going on at various levels above what our protagonists were up to. In FC, you're going around the country meeting people and trying to effectively graduate from your apprentice status, but then you end up getting cuaght up in a series of small-scale local mysteries. Meanwhile, there's a whole level of political intrigue going on within the country culminating in a coup d'etat, at the same time as there is international political implications, which of course has nothing to do with the real plan by Ourobouros that is lurking beneath it all. There are layers. Same with the second game - the Ourobouros plot becomes front and center, but there's still the question about what's going on with Erebonia lurking behing everything, as well as the internal political fallout in Liberl as a result of the events of the first game.
There's really none of that here. There's a bad guy who has captured everyone for mysterious reasons and we're fighting our way through his weird SAW-like "game boards" to get to him, at which point we'll presumably find out who he is, why he's doing this and what it has to do with our heroes.
It's just a lot more simplistic, when the human complexity (not just manufactured JRPG plot complexity) and nuance of the world that forms the backdrop of the adventures in the first two games was a big part of why they were good. Maybe I'll change my mind by the end but so far it's my least favourite of the three (although to be honest I pretty much see FC and SC as one game).