Hi, someone who put hundreds of hours into GI here.
It's.. Passable.
Its biggest flaw is that you have to grind up to AR40 before you can fully experience the story n stuff, which takes a dozen or so hours. Not all at once, but forcibly spread across months due to experience being locked behind daily missions, primarily. HOWEVER, once you get done selling your soul to the devil for experience points, it's really fun! For a free game, there's a lot of soul going into the map, enemies, NPCs, and characters.
Though I've yet to address the gacha. If the XP grinding was selling your soul to the devil, then the gacha grind is the second death. You can either spend 100 USD for about 50 pulls, or spend around ten hours grinding for 20. The gacha doesn't concern me much anymore because I got the character I wanted, but before then I spent probably around 200 hours gem grinding alone. New characters aren't that good, either. You can look at them at tell they're just ecchibait.
But, the gacha isn't super necessary. Outside of weapons, there isn't much need to use it. My last team was mostly composed of default characters, with only one or two that I got from gacha.
To break apart from the downsides, the actual maps are enough to make playing worth it. They're massive, expansive, and there's always something to do. I have a lot of good memories from simply exploring it with friends. The multiplayer part is nice as well, but also locked behind grinding.
TLDR: The game is filled with grinding and isn't as good as it was in 2021/22, but if you can ignore the grind and gacha then it's a surprisingly good open-world rpg.
