Yeah, vocal animations for side quests are off, some are saying this is the aftereffect of the pandemic. They also didn’t lipsync for Japanese dub, so you might want to stick with that
As per overworld map, it’s similar to FFX
Side quests are very sparse around the beginning of the game, by the end of the game I was complaining at how unevenly distributed they are that they just drop large number of them before endgame. They are there to flesh out the side characters
Not sure about graphics, but the music is by same composer Masayoshi Soken
Is it really Kingdom Heart’s combat? I played 90% of KH games and DMC games, and I’d definitely say that it’s more DMC combat than KH, considering they hired Ryota Suzuki who designed the combat system for DMCV and Dragon’s Dogma as the combat director
If you’ve played FFX, XIII, 7Remake, Crisis Core, then you’d be less shocked by how linear it is.