This is a great final fantasy game. It's doofy, has some reprehensible dialog and some painful trophies, but the actual mainline story is serviceable and the gameplay is solid.
It is definitely pokemon-esque in presentation, but I like the formation of stacks in parties. Basically it works like this:
You have one L(arge), one M(edium) and one (S)mall in a stack. Your two player human characters can be either the M or the L in the stack and the other two slots can be filled by monsters you catch in pokeballs. Monsters become catchable based on certain conditions (reduce their HP, inflict blindness, heal them, etc) and the more you fulfill that condition the easier they are to catch - usually you'll have to fulfill the condition three or four times on rare/bigger monsters before the rng will let you snag them.
Once in your party and in your stack, the abilities of the monster (which are increased by filling out a typical FF grid with points earned leveling) become available to your stack. Additionally, some abilities combine between monsters - ex. if two monsters in a stack have Fire, then Fira will become available. There's a lot of weird combinations and some are useful and some aren't. Additionally, the resistances/weaknesses of your stack combine, so if you have two monsters that are weak to water magic, expect your stack to take a beating if anyone throws water on you.
On top of all that, your stack has 'stability' - you can be de-stacked via attacks from enemies and if that happens, the individual members of your stack fall over and separate, stunned and with separate HP/AP bars. 9/10 times the enemies will zero in on unstacked party members to go for the kill. There's certain items/magic that'll fix a wobbling stack so you can burn a turn trying to correct it. All of that adds some uniqueness to the usual FF turn based gameplay versus other games in the series. It's also fun and pretty fast. One thing that's nice is that you can make pretty much any stack overpowered so you can really just pick whatever you want. By the time you get to the final ending you'll need to have some dark resistance and you'll probably want some healing skill, but otherwise you can just do whatever you think is fun or looks cool.
Total playtime was just over 99 hours. The trophy for 100 mastered mirage boards was a pretty big time sink as well as collecting the one minigame based monster (Maduin I think was his name) and getting every treasure chest (FOLLOW VIDEO GUIDES). The 100 mastered mirage boards has to be unique, so mastering the same monster twice doesn't count but mastering multiple transfigurations of one family does count (i.e. silver star vs gold star). So when you hit 100 you probably have 55-60 gold stars.
The vita version is totally serviceable - it's not nearly as fun to look at as the ps4 version, but it works and plays great. No crashes or anything like that and load times are mostly bearable.
So, if you like older final fantasy games you'll probably get a big ol kick out of this game. If you like trophies it's mostly easy albeit time consuming. I'm glad I played it!