I put in another hour this morning before work and the way the battle system works is weird. I've only really played as the main character so I can't comment on other party members, but I believe it's similar.
Each character has two styles of attacks, assault and burst. Both sets of attacks consume CC, which is based on your characters weapons and some other aspects such as earning CC bonuses through the 50 or so titles that each character can equip and then level up to 5 Star. For the assault attacks, you don't seem to actually set any skills up like the old Tales of games and through various attack combos (Up + X -> X -> Right + X) you can perform various combos that lead to artes like Tempest Strike, among others that are performed in succession. burst attacks are a bit more like older Tales of game attacks where you can equip artes and use them in a standard fashion. However they of course use CC much like assault attacks and switching between assault and burst isn't always the way to go.
There seem to be enemies that make use of "nova" that shields them from assault attacks entirely until you use burst attacks of the game (I think it was?) element and bring down the shield. Then assault attacks begin working again. Though burst attacks do more damage, they may not be the best to setup longer combos with your party.
About CC, your weapons will say something like 5-8 CC. What this means is you will start the battle with 5 CC and can unlock up to 8 in that battle by performing well timed blocks, dodging, attacking, etc. I'm not entirely sure what causes these to specifically happen but they have a brief tutorial window that covers it. You gain CC back in battle by not attacking. You lose CC by dodging/attacking/running around manually when holding R2 (and once out, you slow down). There are also bonuses in the middle of battle that can instantly restore 8 CC and allow you to continue attacking that I've seen, however I don't know the exact triggers.
There's a lot more stuff in this game than Vesperia and it seems they're handling the side quests far better. Of course I haven't made it far enough to really say much about the side quests, which are catalogued in the book menu (which you can toggle to once opened). There are also Requests that vendors take from local residents for item gathering. These gain you SP, which help level up the assload of titles you obtain and give you some gald as well.
The crafting system is called dualization, where you combine two items you've found in the field or bought. This is also used for cooking and seemingly can only be done at Merchants. Most of the stuff I've been able to craft so far have been vendor fodder that is meant to be sold to merchants to obtain gald. I know there's some weapon crafting and this could be part of it, I'm not sure. A friend of mine beat the game and said the crafting was pretty nice and he's usually pretty stingy about things like crafting. However I've forsaken him from telling me anything on the game.
There's also another thing that I just recently acquired that I'm not entirely sure what it does. It has three slots and uses some kind of material that I can't remember the name of. It seems to allow you to put items in and they have a chance at being duplicated after an hour based on a percent. I'm not sure if this uses real time or in-game time (I'm assuming in-game because I got a few apple gel back pretty quickly). [This is called an Eleth Mixer. Read the in-game user's guide on it. It's very important.]
Oh and there's also an arena you can use save files to attempt from the main menu before you load a save. It will award you items for winning that transfer into your saved game which is pretty cool.
I'm a bit positive on the way things are progressing now and after a certain point shit seems to get serious for a bit and I'm still in the middle of a large transition in the story. At least if the story is a bit typical, there seems to be plenty of gameplay to be had that will be thoroughly enjoyed from the looks of things.
EDIT: Fixed improper names/terms.
ing Bamco and choosing crap release dates. 
k
That game had better come here.
