1) Do the other Ivalice games actually progress the story at all, or did Ivalice just become a generic name for Final Fantasy's world somewhere along the line? I never really saw anything more than superficial connections

2) FFT:A was pretty sad, not just story wise, but also mechanically. The whole mechanic of gaining abilities from items killed what was the most fun part of FFT for me; now instead of being able to play through and customize characters how I want, I am constantly gated by which items are available, and many of the items are only obtainable through weird roundabout sidequests (I don't remember much more about it than that, but I remember being very irate at finding out several items with key abilities required a large degree of RNG to obtain).

Besides that the Law system was pretty meh as well. I understand they meant well by it, the idea being that the laws would force changing up gameplay, so you couldn't just spam the same tactic in every fight. In practice it never really changed that much, and felt more like a contrived annoyance than something that added real depth to the game.