Game made enjoyable by a great battle system, entertaining characters and decent story though it hides the many flaws.
While it is very helpful to be able to load up to just before the battle and reconfigure the skills, the game would have been better if it had been slightly tougher. As long as the player level ups properly, the battles are easy and only in the casino and a side quest tower does a challenge emerge. Even the end bosses were fairly simple, I rarely had to heal and often it is simply a case of boss battles taking longer then normal ones. It is a pity as the game has an excellent battle system that manages to avoid being repetitive. Placing everyone on a grid, enemies on top half and player on bottom half, in random order means the player has to adjust his tactics depending on where everybody is on the grid, making no two battles the same. A system that requires thought, mixes things up, it was very enjoyable and well worth a go.
The levelling up system could be better for most of it, managed to get 90% of the main quest done with only up to level 32, Ubisoft seem to have been aware of that flaw. So the characters can then use skills that double their experience and skill points (which are spent boosting health, ranged ability, direct ability, that sort of thing), going through the sidequests before finishing off the final stages can end up at level 71 or so. Each character and golem gains experience when the party fights but only those in the four person party while only those within said party gain sp boost from battle. That bit works fine but once you gain all four main characters, there is little need to swap them out, indeed it is better to just stick with the four main characters to that get them sp rather then swap them around. Vitality points, which drop the more you fight and hamstrung the character if it gets to 0, is a nice idea to counter it but refresh stations are so liberally placed that rarely is VP a problem.
Besides, the four main characters are so good, well mostly, that there should be little wish to dump them into the reserves. Though at first glance pretty much everyone is one type of stereotype and even can be annoying at first, give them time and they become very intresting characters. They develop and evolve, having weaknesses and strength, wandering off the stereotypical path and make the game enjoyable. The minor support characters can be memorable, complimenting the main characters nicely with their own personalities and problems while the villains also leave an impression. These very good characters, combined with a good sense of humour from the gamemakers help lift a decent, though weak near the end, storyline from merely average to one that makes it very enjoyable.
Not everything is perfect though on the character front, the voice-overs reflect the erratic quality of the sound. Sometimes the voice acting is superb and gets the right tone, other times it seems blank as if the voice-actor was bored and that happens far too often. The rest of the sound is usually good, while the music in the cities can be annoying, usually the background music is pleasant to listen to. As for graphically, the characters faces can seem a little blurred the further the game goes on, something that happens to the buildings as well the further the game goes on. Graphically, the game is at it's best early on as it done becomes erratic, while during cutscenes the faces can be all wrong for the scene, like the voice-overs superb when gotten right but annoyingly wrong too often. A rather more severe problem is that the main character, the one you can never swap, Atsuma is a very unlovable moron who constantly grates and even the other characters remark on his idiocy. Going for an idiot was brave but he lacks the charisma or anything loveable to make up for his flaws, does get the odd flash of insight but usually only after blundering into much trouble.
Yet for all the flaws, erratic voices, erratic graphics and so on, the battle system, the humour, the characters from the minor to the major lift it above the flaws into a very enjoyable RPG that is well worth playing.