At the moment you can pick it up for about £5 and it's free to play still I believe, so no monthly fees right now. I picked it up myself recently, I was going to get it after playing the Beta but decided not to after reading forums. The servers are kinda lonely, lots of non-English speakers so I'd advise finding an English speaking linkshell as soon as possible, or a group of people you can play with.
Disciplines of Magic have been fixed, there's a new battle system coming soon which removes various things like the stamina bar and introduces an auto-attack system of some sort, or so I've heard from Japanese people. As mentioned above, the gathering and crafting jobs are crazy, but that's to be expected when they are implemented as actual jobs, as opposed to side professions from other MMO's.
For me, it's a game I can play whilst playing something else. If you get it, don't expect to be playing all day long doing quest after quest like other MMO's. You can only do 8 levequests, then you're locked from doing any more until they're reset. You can group up with people and take down harder mobs for SP or share your levequests with them, but if you don't have anyone to do that with then you're gonna be either grinding fucking Dodos or levelling another job in your downtime.
I personally like it, it's different than other MMO's and I appreciate the fact that it's fairly unforgiving, takes a while to level up, and makes you do things*, for £5 you can't really go wrong.
* An example would be travelling, you can only teleport so much and to unlock teleport nodes you've gotta manually walk to them, so that means walking to every main city or camp at least once, assuming you have the anima to teleport back.
