There's really a lot to like in this game. There appear to be a lot of viable classes in the game, you get a choice of 3 classes for every character you recruit, you can and you can still just roll your own NPC if you don't like your choices.
The battle system seems pretty good to me except that nobody but the BIG bosses do much damage compared to hit points, making for long battles. I don't mind long battles too much, though, as long as I've got something interesting to do through it all and that has been happing regularly. Difficulty seems pretty good.
I'm thinking about quitting half way through, though, because there's a lot of things that aren't so fun.
First and foremost are the stories. The main quest is pretty interesting where you're trying to follow this supposedly-mostly-good god as he kills countless people. Unfortunately, I'm finding that I spend very little time on it. Instead, I'm doing things for a bunch of factions, none of which I like at all. The stories that go with them are pretty uninteresting, too.
Another is that I keep getting to the bottom of dungeons and finding I'm not high enough level for them. I've set the game so that encounters scale upward but not downward (I didn't want trash fights) and that could well be behind this problem but it sure hurts. I fight my way down, sometimes against pretty nasty groups, finally get to the climax - and I find I have to trudge back out again with a mental note to come back after I've earned another level or two.
The isometric system isn't so great, either. Sometimes a battle will take place where my characters are north east of a building, which means I can't see them or the enemies around them (though sometimes I can see their weapons!?), which is a major pain. If a battle takes place at the very bottom of a map, I run into trouble as well because I can't pan the screen down past the edge - leaving my character behind part of the GUI! This form of gaming is decades old! Why am I dealing with problems like this in a $60 game!?
I haven't gotten into a ship vs. ship fight yet so no comment on that aspect. I haven't got enough money to beef up my ship yet.
I haven't seen any problem with overly-powerful items for sale, either - or at least none I could afford. My poor paladin had to give up on the pike as there seems to be no magic pikes in the game at all. Sure are plenty of magic swords, though.
EDIT: Typical. I looked up where I could get a good pike. There's one in the very first ship bounty.
Grrrrr