It works a lot like the other Final Fantasy games. Making a party of fighters of different races and classes, equiping weapons and armor. Except in FFT the battles take place on tiled maps and involve moving, attacking, and casting spells in a turn based fashion.
There isn't much town exploration, but the maps are generally good-looking, as are the attacks. No, you can't just walk up to people and talk to them or interact with objects. All traveling takes place over a big map. But it is just a portable system!
The game is a sort of semi-linear. There are tons and tons of sidequests, but the story only moves forward once you accept and complete the next main quest, which you can do whenever you want to.