In regards to lack of monster variety. This seems to be an industry trend with large companies where they try to push extreme details resulting in an exponential increase in time spent doing 1 single model compared to past games. It also results in an exponential increase to file size compared to past games resulting in most AAA games easily hitting 100 or so GB in size at launch and getting bigger as DLC is added later. A number of titles going well beyond 100GB in size at launch as well.

I'd expect FF16 to get at least 1 DLC later due to in game references to lands beyond the Twins and the absence of a water element Eikon when the game lore said there were 8 Eikons due to there being 1 for each element. Typically from looking at the franchise history the missing water Eikon would have been Leviathan. Also looking at random NPCs it shows water and ice aren't the same as people use water crystals to do things like conjure water for wells while they use ice crystals to freeze perishable food. Also it kind of seemed like there should be 1 mother crystal for each element as well.