Underrated to the annals of the universe.
This game reminded me of two great (if not perfect) animes:
1.- Eureka 7
2.- One Piece
It reminded me of Eureka 7 for its superb story. The way the story develops and twists itself so many times till the point of the final conflict. Yes, it has a lot of cliché points here and there, but really, what kind of game does not have lots of cliches now? In this gaming era, probably EVERYTHING was been thought about, so doing something without ANY cliché is practically impossible. The story starts like our every classic rpg, a young boy (usually blond) with a sword, but plagued with plot points, the game starts to twist itself way beyond what anyone could possible imagine biasing ourselves in "cliché".
About One Piece, well, I think it's pretty obvious, here's the story of a group of people who gather themselves with a common objective, all aiming for different roads in the future. And the ending of this game gave me an idea of what I can await in One Piece.
That's all about the story.
Game-wise... this game is VERY, and I mean, VERY easy, I've never had any problem whatsoever with any monster or boss, not even the final bosses. In-depth, it's just hack and slash with your classic item-skill usage distribution system (but a little fast paced compared with other RPGs, and that's a good thing). It's a tad easy yes, but it's never near boring, on the contrary, you never get old fighting in this game. All in all, the gameplay is like an upgraded version of Kingdom Hearts (a VERY upgraded one).
The weapon, factory, insectron and revelation systems are nice and cool add-ons, serving as a good rest of the constant fights and a method to make our gameplay a little more diffcult than just "hack your way through the game buying everything in shops". The factory system is a little annoying at times, even more when you want to have something RIGHT NOW... BUT you need to waste 10 minutes of your precious time playing "Rogue Galaxy Ticoon" in a console Action-RPG. Luckyly for us, there isn't even one moment in the game that we don't have certain item, the drop rate of "almost-rare" items is very high, and the chests provide enough item supply to go through the revelation trees and factory blueprints very easily.
Graphic-wise... I felt this game like I was watching anime, so my opinion may be a little biased about this. The graphics are very very neat and nicely drawn. The terrains and backgrounds may not be something as wonderful as Valkyrie Profile 2, but they're not bad at all, some sightings are beautifully designed, just like what you'd expect of an adventure story.
The voices are very well done. As always, they can't compete with the Japanese (original) ones, but they're very good overrall. Kisala's voice is a little least focused than the others, she sometimes sounds like some rich and stupid kid with no cares about anything, but thorough the game, the voice actor evolves her way of interpreting Kisala in a way that her voice reaches you in a very strong way. The only thing that upsetted me a little was the rough Scottish accent of Simon, but that's just a biased opinion, because they needed to give Simon a special pronuntiation like in the Japanese version.
All in all, this game is one of the best RPGs I played in these years. What makes the most out of an RPG in this gaming era is not the gameplay (action, turn, etc.), nor the lenght... It's the story, what makes the core of an RPG game is a superb story, with a dull story, the gameplay, even if it is something near "revolutionary" or "god-like", you'll just wore yourself out with boredom if the story doesn't keep up with the rest of the elements of the game. Final Fantasy series comes to mind...
Really, the ones who say this game's story is pale or something not near to excellent, are Final Fantasy fanboys with no taste abour good stories or are people that do not understand what a good story is.
This is just a useless commentary but this was the first game ever to bring tears out of my eyes, this story and the ending are so beautiful that I couldn't hold myself.
Finally, this game has a nice Extra after beating it, not too long, not too short. Just as easy as the actual story gameplay, but a beautiful add-on to those who loved the story and maybe wanted more (that's not my case but anyway, I enjoyed the ExGame).
Wrapping this up, this game deserves a real compliment, and so does Level 5, for making such super story in this game.