One of the complaints I heard for FFIV: TCC was that it looked too much like an RPGMaker game. I kinda see where they're coming from as far as the field sprites go, but I thought the battle sprites for that looked gorgeous and the spell effects were especially impressive.
This whole look they've gone with for the iOS meshes better with the backgrounds but it feels like they just ran the sprites through one of those smoothing tools in photoshop and cleaned it up a bit.
I agree it looks way better than that crappy job on FF5, gonna wait to see how it looks in motion I suppose. I feel like I should buy it just to support it but I hate playing games on the iOS, just makes my damn fingers hurt.