A very fine story if the game didn't get in the way of it.
This game is... hard... it's rediculously hard, and not just because of the difficulty of battle, but because of the time it takes to wear down your enemies enough to progress. It's very RPG like in the classic sense right down to the speechless character played by YOU! The developers reached way back in time to bring you this adventure, and it is a very long, difficult adventure, but it is far to long to be entertaining.
The story itself is quite short, but the time it'll take you to complete it is horrendous. That is because of the battle system. If you had noticed before I said "classic RPG" that means a turn-based battle system; hey it's worked in the past and has been fun. The problem is that the enemies you fight are very strong and the amount of damage you can do is PATHETIC. Before I played this game, I had never dreamed of using characters that start with 25 HP and do 3 points of damage per attack, but here I was. I had never imagined playing and RPG where the first boss could actually defeat me.
I was humbled.
Don't think I threw down the controller and gave up, I saw it through to the end! And I enjoyed playing EVERY part of it, but to tell you the truth, for a great chunk of the time I spent, I was bored out of my mind! Because the bar is set so high in terms of what the game asks of you, be expected to spend, not hours... DAYS in certain spots just leveling up! It's REALLY not that easy, because in addition to the very little amount of damage you can do against extremely tough adversaries, you also need a LOT of EXP to go up just one level, and the dozens of monsters you'll face are CERTAINLY not ponying up! The only real way to increase your level is by hunting rare monsters called Metal slimes. These are indeed rare, and they flee from battle often. Anything else you encounter along the way to finding these will soon become an annoyance.
Also, it's not like one, two or even TEN levels makes much of a difference. There are NO easy one-hit kills in this game. So pretty much all the work you put into leveling up to learn new skills is lost when you are once again reminded how weak you really are.
That all being said, there is only one way you can tackle this role playing game if you absolutely must play it. Even if you fought every monster you encountered along your journey, and kept moving forward you would not be strong enough to defeat the BOSSES you'll encounter without a little extra effort; even with a killer stategy, most of the time, it will come down to who's got the bigger guns. You have to devout a lot of time to make any progress at all. So I say to you...
Do not play this game. There are a lot of other games that have more to offer. Games that reward skill over patience; those are the ones you should be playing.