An excellent take on old school RPG gameplay. Deffinitly a must play on the PS2!
The story then ends up with you, the only person besides the respected leader/mayor of each respected town who hasn't been sealed away (OMG surprise!) and the fairy king has given you a special orb to give you extra powers and the ability to fix the world.
Gameplay- In each town there is a dungeon that suits the style of each town. The first town has the very basic dungeon, that is a dungeon (cave). You must go into the cave to retrieve spheres which contain all the pieces (people, houses, items, pets) and you must get all the pieces. Each dungeon has multiple floors, each floor will have pretty much at most 8 spheres down to none (boss levels, lol, no prize!). So once you have all the spheres on a level (at the dungeon menu it will tell you how many spheres you have to collect on each floor) you must then get the key to the door to the next floor, this will change to each respected dungeon's style, first dungeon its known as "Dran's Crest" and in the second dungeon which is forest themed you have to get 1 of 3 nuts/seeds and take em to an owl at a gate and see which one he'll take for that level. In order to obtain the key you must slay enemies, and hope when they die, they drop the key or a key.
A cool feature and some times annoying is the hunger/thirst system. When in dungeons you have a thirst meter and it will be constantly depleting so you should have some water bottles with you or look for a pond to refresh yourself. And to heal your HP you simply eat foods, most commonly bread and cheese. You weapons also have an HP (WHP, weapon health points) meter and for every hit your weapon does to an enemy (if you swing and miss it won't take away WHP, only on hits) it will do damage to your weapon. The health bar is fine, but the WHP and the thirst get really annoying. Especially in the second dungeon (forest level) where for some odd reason, your thirst meter deteriorates really, really, really, really, really fast. To just get the spheres and get out I had to take drink like 5 bottles of water. Then had to get more water, then go back in and look for the key. This gets annoying and adds some difficulty that isn't nescasary.
Fighting in this game isn't turn-based. Its real time, thus you always fight enemies in the dungeon. You can throw cool magic items and weapons (bombs, I'll go into bombs a bit more later, for a story...) at enemies, and its nice not to take turns smacking each other. However I found the control response when hitting the attack button to be a bit slow. And your in deep trouble when only 2-3 enemies are on you, because your attack pretty much is only good for hitting one enemy, and at that its not very effective. At times fighting can be brutal.
You have allies, which you can switch between in the dungeons, and use their special power to your adventure in the respected dungeon. The first ally you get can leap over large gaps, whilst you can't, but only you can obtain the spheres and rebuild the town, so your special too : )
The gameplay is all real time and theres day and night, which kinda goes by fast, but doesn't really matter.
Graphics- The graphics in the game are nice, the cut-scene and gameplay graphics are the same, so that means the game looks better during gameplay. Your character looks pretty good, but the animation is a little, slow. By that I mean the characters motions are slowish, probably due to frame rate.
Now I will talk about the first boss in the game called "The Divine Beast". Unlike other boss fights, which are like DDR where you press the buttons to a sort of beat, to watch a cool sword fight! This one is real time with a beast that looks like a goat, bear and a dog made a dragon thingy. It looks kinda dumb for something thats divine. It flys around burpin out fire balls at you, use your first ally to shoot em with the sling shot and when he sits down you run up and attack him. After beating him I'd say he has 200 HP, now this is interesting, when hes hit by the sling shot it does 1 damage, when hit by your sword, it does 2 damage, and of course your thirst is running out, you sword and the sling shot have WHP, so you may not have forever to fight this stupid thing. So I went out and got a bomb, previous use did like 120 damage, to the "Divine Beast" it does 10 damage, so I bought 15 bombs and use a stamina drink and it took a while to take em down, I had like 20 WHP healing bags, 20 water bottles, and like 15 pieces of bread. It was still long and tedious even being cheap and spending thousands on bombs. Thats kinda how the rest of the game turns out.
Very Repetative.
Lots of negative comments aside, thats just nit-picking at its flaws, the game is very fun and addictive to play, the dungeon exploring is great because every time you enter the dungeon its changed because its always randomly generated. And building and interacting with the towns is great. I strongly recommend getting this game, because of the new generation the game is like 10 bucks at EB games, and is totally worth the pocket change.