this has to be the worst good jrpg I've ever played.
I think I said it before but if you're _just_ in it for the story and a quick playthrough it isn't that bad. That probably takes under 20 hours to the ending and you can skip needing any sort of guide since pretty much everything is easy peasy.
the game is standard popular jrpg stuff with random encounters, boss battles, items, etc. final fantasy atb where you can choose between 'active' and 'wait' mode which is awesome (I think active mode will let the cpu take their turns indefinitely if you just hang out on a menu, wait mode will have everyone's atb bar fill up while you're on a menu but no one can act until you've chosen your action).
The garment grid/dress sphere thing is what makes the game good - it's basically the job system from previous final fantasy titles layered on top of stat boosting/mid-fight job changing with the grids. So a grid might hold 4 dress spheres you can swap between and passively gives the 'First Strike' ability or +20 DEF or the ability to use White Magic no matter what dress you're wearing. Then, there's little nodes on the grid that you pass through as you change jobs in a fight that provide additional bonuses - maybe +10 DEF for each one you cross or if you cross all four you get Break Damage Limit. And there's a bajillion of these grids. well I probably ended with 30 or so of them but it felt like a lot of options.
As a side note, there are no equipped items like weapons/armor which I vastly prefer. Only accessories which are stat or bonus granting (+60% HP, auto-haste, etc).
The thing that would suck about just running through the game is you miss out on some of the better/more fun jobs - the dark knight dress has attacks that are high damage but use hp instead of mp. the alchemist at a high level has an unlimited stash of mega potions. lady luck can be setup to nearly 100% crit (and has a 2x exp passive as well as a slew of other entertaining skills). the mascot dress is a tank with all sorts of weird abilities but you have to essentially 100% the game before you can get it in the final chapter. the game is actually fun to play!
all that said, there's no real happy medium between going all in on the game to try to see it all and just running through it. trophies aside, any auxiliary stuff takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r (or feels like it). playing around in the fiend arena? you have to level up and equip up just to make it semi far through the 2nd or 3rd tier. chocobo ranch? to get the fancy chocobo dungeon you have to follow the most convoluted set of steps to 'find' it, and between each of the 5 steps you have to fight 8 or 9 random battles just to be able to proceed. oh and you have to
find enough perfect specimen chocobos just to be able to do the steps in the first place. the post game dungeon (via infinito) with the big bad ass boss is just unnecessarily long - it didn't need to be 100 floors. it didn't even need to be 70. slogging through those last 20 floors to the end boss is such a huge waste of time. you end up running from everything because it's all super tough and it took you 5 minutes just to get through two floors and you haven't saved in forever. the big bad ass boss fight isn't bad though. want to play with creatures you capture on your team? you'll need to level them up!
then, there's last mission - additional content from the 'international' version of ffx-2. it's an overhead roguelike where you go through 80 (!) floors of a giant tower turn based strategy style as one character. I hated the ass off this thing until I understood that the unspoken goal was actually to work the system to become waaaay overpowered early on. because otherwise it's unnecessarily hard. but again, 80 floors was way too long AND I think it's about impossible to figure it out without a guide/tips from someone. after I figured it out and got a bunch of lucky early drops it took me a week of off and on playing (probably ~6-8 hours) to finish my good run. that's kind of my point - how pissed would you be if you found out after spending 8+ hours on a roguelike when you finally get to the end that if you don't have an anti-confusion skill for the final boss you are pretty well

ed? then you're dead and all your previous saves are probably worthless since you need to start working out your anti-confusion real early on.
trophywise, ugh. don't even bother without a guide. there's some (like listening to maechen's stories) where you literally can't touch a button for several minutes or you can void the trophy and need to reload your save. oversouling everything is awful, but fortunately a guy on tt has the single best guide on planet earth for it. I'm going to go thank him now actually. none of it is tough, just tedious.
So, I liked the game. ffx is the better game no doubt. the cheesy girl power/charlie's angel stuff isn't too bad (which a lot of people complained about). but I'm glad to be done with it for sure.