This is not a gamer's game.
I have mixed ideas about this game. First of all, this is NOT a gamer's game. By that, I mean that it's among the games that are way too easy and the kind of thing you can sit down and play for a few minutes and walk away feeling accomplished.
I'll start with the graphics. It's easy enough to say that the graphics are quite beautiful. From the emotive characters to the colorful orbs (color is a plus in my eyes) to the rocks that actually look wet in the tattered spire, it's hard not to be impressed on this front.
Combat is a bit strange in this title. I mean, being able to do a powerful slash with a great axe or shoot someone in the groin is fun, but after a time, it becomes monotonous. It ends up being more of a button-masher than anything else. And magic is annoying sometimes as well. You can have up to four or five levels of a magic attack, and you can order them in a column to be charged up. The problem is that it's not easy to switch your magics. You can either hold a button while still being attack to rearrange things in your column, or you can save yourself the HP and open up the snail-slow and glitchy pause menu to rearrange there. Either way, it's fairly jaunty.
Oh, and if you die, you are instantly brought back to life without question-at full health too! The only things you sacrifice are the experience orbs you failed to pick up while you were fighting and your perfect beauty, because scars are SO much worse than game overs .
The quests are simple too, which is part of why it's not a gamer's game. Back in the day, games were difficult because the developers weren't able to do so much with graphics. The difficulty gave us a certain level of challenge that we MUST succeed in. Now, with high-end graphics starting to look more and more like real life, games are becoming easier. I believe that saying that graphical presentation is inversely proportional to gameplay difficulty would not be a false statement. But back to my point, you can finish most quests in a few minutes, especially with the ability to warp around the world at the will of a button.
As for the story, there is very little. You need to find three heroes to avenge your sister-that's it. It got more interesting when I went to the Tattered Spire, but there should have been more sections like that to keep the game interesting. And the ending.... I can't say this eloquently at all so I will refer to the words of Comic Book Guy: Worst. Ending. Ever. I won't give it away, but I'll just say that you could beat the final boss in your sleep. Literally. Try it sometime.
I enjoyed this game in the beginning, but when I found out I could beat it before school and still have time for cereal (if I were in school), I was just disappointed.
My final words: If you consider yourself a real gamer and/or are looking for a game with a challenge, don't buy this. Try it if your roommate or girlfriend's brother has it (like me), but don't spend your money on it. On the other hand, if you just want to flesh out your gamer score, rent it, because it won't take long to beat and get a good number of achievements along the way.