Visuals, atmosphere, characters, all of this is really great. The story, while not being incredible or anything, is quite enjoyable because it really feels like one long adventure with many different little stories, ton of different locations etc. The amount of different cities / villages with different themes is impressive.
However, the soundtrack is kinda bad, though apparently that's improved in the S version (visuals are downgrade though...), and most importantly, the gameplay is absolutely horrible.
It's really the the most basic / classic (in a bad way) turn based system you can have. There's nothing strategic in the combats (the game can even play by itself if all characters are set to auto, and it can handle most combats like this, with the exception of bosses), it's just long and tedious without any kind of depth or strategy involved.
Even the boss fights, which could be some of the few interesting combats, are terrible because they never allow you to build any long term strategy. You have some attacks / spell that are completely useless, because they take too many tries / too much time to be worth using in regular combats, but they also don't work on bosses, so... And the bosses will always wipe out every buff / debuff on the field every 2 or 3 turns, so you can't build any big combo or stuff like this, it's like the game only wants you to play in the most basic way, and it's quite frustrating.
So yeah, great adventure, nice cast to follow and interesting world, but bad combats. Depends what your level of tolerance is for gameplay.
