Nice game, but more of a filler before FFT or Fire Emblem comes out.
There is voice acting in this game (and it is actually quite good), but it only happens around advancing the story and maybe only a third of the time. I'll cover more on this in my complaints part.
The story line does not bring a lot of originality in the story telling and follows a pretty typical set of events of a young boy coming of age with no memories of where he came from, raised by the people that he will do battle with and discovering who he truly is. Along the way the story touches on problems with blind faith, bigotry, exploiting natural resources and trusting the ones you love or care about. This would have been a complete wash for me if not for the characters that you are introduced to in the game and the dialogue which is actually quite witty a lot of the time.
The combat in the game was ok but not spectacular simply because of the added steps to complete some actions. If you cast a spell you were asked to confirm, if you attacked you were asked to confirm, if you waited you were asked to confirm, etc. etc. This was not a bad thing all of the time. It saved me from frying a few of my characters sometimes, but it didn't really balance out for the amount of times I had to confirm everything.
The graphics are definitely a high point, but not over the top. The character art is really good and has slight changes to reflect emotions. The combat and background art are equally creative and done with some great attention to detail. There was a bit of a problem though if I had too many active spells on the characters and enemies at one time or if there was too much happening on the screen. During these problem times the game would slow down to about a third of its actual speed and considering that the combat sequences were already a bit tedious due to the amount of commands you had to do to complete for each turn, this made it painful at times to experience.
The game was more about the story and strategy then it was an RPG. It's a game that requires you to do level building to obtain better spells and skills. You also build relationships with your characters and the hero at intermissions after the battles you have. These intermissions are built to help you understand the characters better and also reward you for answering correctly to the characters questions. There are side quests but your only rewards are to the story and no shiny baubles or new weapons. At some point during the story you gain the ability to upgrade your weapons by imbuing them with essence. Fortunately its not necessary to advance the game and while it gives a bit of an edge, I was not patient enough to try and go through and find some worthy combinations. Perhaps someone will post an FAQ later that gives some great essence combo's.
Now my major problem with the game was the dialogue trees. As I mentioned before there is some voice acting and the rest of the game is just text. While this was fine I would have liked it if the game had an option to skip the dialogue forward to the end. If you're asking why then I will give you some examples. If you push the wrong button and enter a conversation tree you already entered you have to go through the whole conversation again. This can be time consuming because most conversations can take a minute or so to complete. Or if you happened to have died in the last battle and didn't save before the conversation tree was completed to advance the story. Also, if you beat the game you can start a new game from the completed game to get a dungeon level and also go back and complete any side quests you didn't complete the first time. My feeling on this is since you already completed the story once, why not add the ability to skip through the dialogue the 2nd time?
Having completed the game I found myself pondering what I really appreciated about it. The extras are nice and the dialogue was actually funny most of the time. The characters were fun but some a bit too stereotypical for me. This game is definitely for those that love Anime as it definitely plays like it is an anime movie. But I think anyone not into anime or strategy games might be turned off by how the game plays. I'm glad I bought it but I'm really just filling a void until the next FFT and/or Fire Emblem comes out.