I liked the visuals and the battles; the Empire is really as powerful as it's supposed to be. An entire rebel fleet was held off by two Star Destroyers and could only win through a totally random "tactic". Stormtroopers were not ROTJ-level incompetent, and there's nothing I have to say about Vader that Flying Ace already did. One of the best parts of the film nobody else has mentioned was the TIE swarm, IMO. TIEs are supposed to swarm, but we haven't really seen that in any movie except the brief scene in ROTJ.
It was pretty odd but welcome to see Red Leader, Gold Leader etc. Ponda Baba and the death of Red Five had my sister and I grinning. Tarkin was, as said many times previously, done very well, but could have been better as a hologram. But the Leia was pretty bad.
The setpieces were largely generic rock planets except Scarif. That was something very new to the Star Wars franchise, IMO, and I absolutely loved it. The tropical island design and the inexplicable M1 helmets of the Rebel soldiers did give it the WW2/Vietnam feeling I believe they were going after. It's also nice to see the logistics side of things (I'm a logistician, heh) through Juggernauts, AT-ACTs, cargo shuttles and the Imperial ground crew. Different variants of Stormtroopers and Imperial stuff add depth to the universe, though I'm still waiting for the generic Imperial Army Troopers to make an appearance.
I can say all that about the visuals, the sets and the worldbuilding, but to me most of the main characters were flat tropes that were difficult to really care about from what we see on-screen. I don't have much to say about them, except that Krennic is one of the major exceptions. Nothing more to say about him that hasn't been said already. I was very excited for the Chinese actors initially (being Chinese myself), but their characters were really not all that interesting and did some really senseless things, and did not bring in the in-universe diversity I had hoped for, unlike Tassu Leech and the Kanjiklub in TFA. It's possibly a bit hard for them to portray the characters uniquely here in Asia since we have certain stereotypes of them already - for example we didn't actually know Chirrut's name and kept referring to him as
Ip Man.
Something about Jyn annoyed me. I think it was her idealism - ham fisted at times - and how she could just go into a room full of superiors and give some disrespectful speech about 'hope' to them without any consequences. First one may be because I am a hardcore Imperial, second one may be because of my job. =P
Her buckteeth were also pretty distracting to me for some reason. =P
I love China, I love Japan, I love Vietnam. (I'm very fun in island dispute discussions.)
Take everything I say with a bucket of salt.
Perpetually hungry and searching for cheese and pineapples.