A massive and amazing RPG
It consists of a lot of towns and talking to lots of people in them. Running errands for a lot of those people that in turn result with an item for you. Going through dungeons. Fighting bosses at the end of each dungeon, collecting items. And of course turn based battles and a lot of leveling up and character customization. Its not going to win any innovation awards, but I don't think thats what it's here to do, it's here to provide you with a great story and solid gameplay; and in that sense it delivers.
This game can either turn out fairly difficult for you, or not very difficult at all. It depends on how you spend your time. Personally, I like it to be somewhere in the middle so after every couple of dungeons I would spend some time just leveling up my characters to make sure I could comfortably make it through the next area. I'm sure I could have gotten through the game without this, but it would have been a bit more difficult.
The monsters in the game are just plain sweet. There's a huge variety of them and none are like anything you'll come across in other games. They are extremely creative, they have very interesting attacks and they are very colorful and nice to look at. They are also challenging (as I mentioned above). You'll get a kick out of traveling around just because of these monsters that you'll find.
The battles are turn based as I said above. You pick what actions you'd like each character to do, then they are all carried out in an order that depends on how certain stats are in comparison to the enemies. When you level up your characters you'll have a choice of which category you want to level them up in, each has their own set of categories. There's no way you could level each of them up in all categories and hope to get anywhere, so pick one off the start and get it up nice and high. That's the only way you can learn the best abilities by the end of the game. You'll also be able to level up certain abilites for each character which help out a ton when fighting bosses.
The abilities, alike the enemies, are extremely creative and some make you feel super powerful when you do them. You'll know what I'm talking about when you get them.
The story in this game is huge. There's always something going on and you always want to know how it's resolved and whats going to happen next. There's never a time when you wish that you could just skip over the story and play the game (at least there wasn't for me). Once you get going on this game you won't be able to stop. The beginning can be fairly difficult, but don't let it stop you. It's worth it in the longrun.
There's plenty of places for you to explore, plenty of treasures hidden throughout the lands, plenty of sidequests, and plenty more for you to discover through this huge quest. It took me not 93 hours to complete the game with a moderate amount of extra work done and a decent amount of time spent leveling up to gain abilities and whatnot.
If your an RPG fan I don't see how you could not like this game, so do yourself a favor and pick it up. Just make sure you've got some free time to dedicate to it because it won't hesitate to take it. Enjoy.