I started out really liking the battle system, but by the halfway point found it to be tedious, which is why I took about a 3 month break from playing it. I like the idea of the system where the more you use spells and skills, the faster they get, as well as being how to level up each type of magic or weapon skill, which in turn unlocks more spells and skills (magic level seems to level up some of the spells as there were ones I definitely didn't use enough to max them out). However, if you want to try to unlock everything, you'll need to cast a lot of unnecessary spells, sitting through their somewhat lengthy spell casting sequences, all of which include the character saying a line of dialogue before performing it. Since everything stops while characters perform attacks, be it magic or physical, it would have greatly benefited from having an option to turn off these sequences -- it probably would have chopped off several hours of play time. Thankfully, due to how tedious I ended up finding the battle system, monsters are seen on the map and they don't respawn until you either enter a new map location (you can exit to the world map and re-enter, and they won't respawn) or reload a save file.
Due to attacks stunning the target, with the chance of an attack being canceled and knocking that combatant back in the action queue, this removed all challenge from the game. Once you start getting offensive spells and weapon skills to the 4-star level (with maxed out weapon skills being instantaneous), they get cast/performed so fast that you can keep all the enemies almost perpetually stunned. The final 5 or so bosses in the game ended up doing almost no damage to my party, since they almost never got any attacks off, with most of them getting zero attacks off.
If you like talking to NPCs, I think you'll like this, as there are a lot of them to talk to, and they have multiple things to say, as well as seemingly changing what they say after every plot progression.
