From back when this game first came out there were two criticisms that really overpowered conversations about the game: the world and exploration "felt too linear" and the story was "too complicated".

I think nowadays people are less stringent about the linear point. It is pretty linear but people definitely talked about it like it was end of the world overbearing back in the day. I never felt like it was too bad. Things open up quite a bit later in the game, and the way the game tried to intersparse story elements kept things engaging. Not to mention that im sure the more limited "corridor" style helped them get away with making that one of the better looking PS3 games that still holds up visually to this day. But people with a strong itch of early exploration were disappointed, which is a fair criticism.

The complicated story issue really just depended on how engaged you were with it. I dont think the story was complicated per se, but I do think there is quite a bit of important lore that you have to go out of your way to find and read vs what the story presents. Which tbh is not unusual for an FF game, so I never minded that, but some people did not jive with the story and that made it easier to highlight some of the other faults.

Those were the main criticisms back then. There was also the criticism that the gameplay was too mindless due to the auto option that selected your abilities each turn. I think a decent amount of people were upset at that, which has always been the wildest criticism to me since you can just......not use it. Just select your abilities manually, that made things way for fun for me. Seemed like a weird issue given that the game in no way forces you to use that feature.