Great characters, great fresh comabt system and epic story make this game near perfect, except for the annoying music.
Story: 10/10- The best part of the game. The story makes you want to play the game no matter how hard it gets. The characters are mostly moody teenagers that have everything we have today, cell phones, our clothes, and even the hot dogs. The characters are also easy to like, it's hard to not relate to any of them if you are a teenager playing this game since they are in your age group. Basically, your character is dead, and he's playing a game called the reapers game to get a second chance at life. You have 1 day to complete each mission, and the game last 7 days.
Gameplay: 9/10- Fresh and new compared to most RPGs. Though this is an RPG, it's not turn based like old final fantasies and pokemon. It's more of a beat em up with major RPG elements. To attack, you use pins, and you control your partner on the top screen. One problem is, you do this at the same time. You can set a computer to play your partner for you, but the computer sucks and you get better results if you just rapidly press the control pad. Also many of the pins have the same, or about the same way to activate it, so you may get some attacks jumbled up. Other than those 2 minor flaws, it's easy and it's fun. When you are not fighting you walk around buying stuff and talking to people. To earn money, you take pins you earn from fights and stuff and cash them in on the menu, most pins you make money from will say "10,000 yen" and such.
Music: 6.5/10- I know whoever reads this will bash me, since on the boards people praise the music in this game, but I have reasons for disliking the music.
First of all, i'm a big fan of classic rock (stuff like Led Zep and Aerosmith). Rock music from 60's to 90's is about all I listen to, and some modern stuff. Very rarely do I stray out of that genre. Because of my musical taste, I found the music in this game highly annoying. It's Japanese pop music, only it's actually original. Theres only one or two track that sounds good, and they rarely playss for me. I had to turn down the volume everytime the annoying tacks came on, which was ok. They don't have much voice acting in this game anyways, only during a few really cool cutsceens. Next time please have an option to turn down the music. Also this one very annoying track plays ALL THE TIME when they are talking. I know that my musical tastes sounds narrow, but this sorta ruined the game for me at the begining until I realized there is no reason to even have the volume on.
Graphics: 9/10- This game would be odd in 3D, so these graphics are great. Everything looks good, it looks better than a GBA game.
Overall this is a really really really good game. Everything is new and fresh and awesome. If you have certain taste in music then you might want to keep the volume down. The music is the only bad thing about this game in my opinion. Buy this game no matter what, it's fantastic and a good game to play during the summer video game drought if you don't have it already.