The embodiment of a game contradicting itself.
Indeed the use of your abilities, or the acquisition I should say, is all based on finding these little random items and applying them to the appropriate sockets. These items don't drop often and rarely drop from the same monsters twice. Finding them, to start with, is pretty annoying and random, and later on they're just available in shops as natural as can be. If you resist the urge to develop your character during the meat of the action of the game, you won't have any trouble in finding most of these things, but it's also unwise to rush through this game as the strengths of enemies from one world tot he next pretty much increases ten fold. If you don't put int he time to level up, which subsequently will get you these random items, you'll get owned. But if you put in the time to level, you'll get bored fast, but end up with items. Eh?
The game also pretty much just throws characters at you, not all of them as useful in a fight as others. Jaster is the strongest because both his blade and ranged abilities are fast, and weapons come faster for him in the form of plot items and gifts. Though, really, everyone is pretty much a bruiser in this game. You can't go wrong on party combinations, though if you do neglect a character and bring them on a hunter later on, they will most certainly deplete your healing and resurrection potions quickly. All of the items of this game either end up aiding you in battle, helping your special powers, or a combination of both, which means stocking up on them at any opportunity is a good idea. However, this makes you poor, and being poor doesn't allow you to buy weapons which you will need to kill things, the basis of the fast pace combat. And there is no abundances of money unless you grind, negating the fast paced part of the game. Of course, if you do spend all your cash on items and not weapons, you can always rely on Toady, a weapon-barfing frog, for your upgrades, but it's really hit or miss. He gives you a load of suggestions when you max a weapon which you can then transform if you happen to come by the proper ingredient but sometimes that transformation is more of an minor improvement than something appreciable, and also sometimes you end up having some kind of weapon drop that is better anyway. These weapons also come by very fast, and you may find yourself changing them out long before you even master them.
And that's something that bothered me. Yeah, there's loads of options for weaponry, but really to get to those options you have to max out the weapon meaning you have to use it in about a dozen battles. This gets tedious very quickly. Then you realize, you can MASTER these weapons as well which can actually melt out your brain. Each weapon has a certain amount of elemental properties as well as damage. Once you have MAXED the weapon, these elemental points then start adding up, one point at a time between six or seven elements. So lets say there 50 fire points, 22 ice, 33 wind and so on,, you have to fight as many battles to MASTER the weapon (50+22+33+13+15+6=139battles to MASTER) which ultimately doesn't really do anything for you as far as i can tell. It does, however, slow down the fast pace of the game to a crawl if you so decide to commit to this mental suicide. That and there's literally hundreds or thousands of possibilities per character to make weapons, MAX then MASTER them. Have a social life? Yeah, I'd hang onto it rather than losing it here. I love the fact that Steven Blum plays Zegram's voice in the game. Yeah, that's Spike form Cowboy Bebop. OMFnG that dude is awesome. He's also in another 200 (and more) tittles, movies, and cartoon so it's hard for him not to be included I guess. The Incectoid mini-game is pretty neat. Kinda like chess, but not, kinda like Pokemon, but not, and kinda like... well it's interesting. Bugs aren't always easy to catch though. That's a bit aggravating. They say there's 100 hours of gameplay in this game, part of its contraindicative nature I'm afraid. Play it through on a fast paced basis to begin, is my advice. Go back in a year and play it again and spend the 100 hours on it, after you know the plot already.
Despite its contradictory nature, this is an overall fun game. Funny too. If anything this should have been a full length anime series. That would have worked really well. I would have watched that.