Much better than the GS review... a great RPG where you can mix and match your characters to your playing style.
Let me explain: The story centers around Juto, a man who was washed up on shore with memory loss (of course). He blends in with the people until the war between the north and south forces him to fight. After thinking he has lost his friend Melissa, he joins the Southern Forces as part of the Anti-Sentinel squad. This squad consists of the Princess and her team, who all become close friends. Soon he learns of his part in whats going on in the world and decides to help his squad stop what ends up being a repeated circle of a false paradise. Somewhat of your typical RPG story.
The team can be made up of any 3 characters available at the time. With a total of 6 playable characters, each with their own style of fighting, there are lots of options to choose from. Plus, the game at times will force you to use certain characters for different parts of the story in order to advance. This sounds like a bad idea but in reality it isn't as each character is simple to use and fun to master. You get to learn their traits and battle commands in case they are needed later in the game. I stuck mostly with Juto, Zephie and Rue because it was a nice balance of power and healing.
Battles took place in real time and you can lock onto enemies so you rarely would be striking at thin air. One of the best parts was this wasn't a typical Hack N Slash game where you just bash the A button relentlessly. Instead you had a stamina bar which would make you overheat if you just blindly attacked everything without stopping. So you had to time your attacks or your character would be prone to attacks and killed. But there were bonuses to this as well, called Chain attacks. If one character overheated, you can quickly switch to another character and do a special attack which would release the overheated character and to more damage. That is another part I liked, the ability to switch between characters quickly and control the battles. I wasn't stuck with only one character the whole game. And there is more! Each character had a special attack that would randomly happen if your pressed the B button when prompted for an extra special attack. Rue had the best one, Instant Kill. Other characters just did major damage but she would actually kill any enemy with one hit… so much fun!
The controls in this game were just all in the right places and easy to maneuver. Even using items was quick and didn't disturb the battles. The presetting of A.I. was simple, but the problem was the PC controlled characters didn't always attack. Sometimes they just stood there and watched me do all the work. This was easily rectified as I would switch to that character and bring him into the battle, then switch to my favorite character I was using at the time.
One last thing I will mention is the wide variety of weapons and Enhancements. Each character could use one of two types of weapons, for example: 1 handed sword or 2 handed sword: Bow or Aroma, Axe or hammer. Each weapon could be enhanced with Kan that is found throughout the game. Providing status and weapons bonuses and different attacks to each player. The only attack I never used was the Co-Op attack as this took too long to do and certain conditions had to apply. I was able to defeat all enemies in a shorter time span than it took to reach those conditions. But the one time I tried it, it was mega powerful and I can see how they would be advantageous.
I really enjoyed playing this game and even liked the story and characters. The voices were annoying at times and the humor was somewhat lacking. (maybe a translation issue?) With the many side quests to try and different character types to mix and match, this was one of the better RPG games I have played this year.