Shirokun said:
Damn, you're really tempting me to import this. What is the level of kanji like for this game? Anything out of the ordinary?
It's pretty low level with a lot of the usual JRPG language subsets. Nothing beyond say Tales or Baten Kaitos. It's not like Xenogears or SMT.
Status update, about 12+ hours in.
Story: It's really similar to Baten Kaitos in formula and worldview, and some of Chrono Cross' setting. It's definitely a Masato Kato scenario, if you're a fan (or just familiar) with his scenarios, it's very telling. It's filled with the usual Kato build ups, RPG "pacing", and "shocking" twists. The actual game tone is very lighthearted and definitely somewhat self-concious of the fact that a lot of what's happening is totally ridiculous and wacky. The characters know a lot of stuff is silly, the writer knows, but everyone just accepts it. It's almost like 30 Rock or Ally McBeal, but maybe not that far off in satire.
Graphics: Fucking amazing. Everything about the game screams really high production values. From the towns/fields/dungeons, to the artwork and designs, to the sprite animations. Everything looks great, and runs really smoothly. Pretty impressive stuff. It's definitely comparable to a late PS1 era RPG like Grandia or Xenogears in terms of graphical quality, just on a smaller screen.
Sound: Lots of voice, lots of music. Pretty good stuff all around. The cast is pretty high profile, and they do the job pretty well. Kyrie is a total dork, so Miyano really fits as his voice. You might hate him, but you hate him because he's doing a good job! The female cast in the game is really awesome. Both Morte and Lia have top notch voices. There are voices in battles, voices in many of the cutscenes, etc. The music ranges from very noticable Mitsuda tunes (in a REAL original RPG!) to pretty good non-Mitsuda RPG music. The music usually fits the areas really well too.
Gameplay: Many of the dungeons are well designed and rather short. Some have interesting puzzles but don't take too long to solve. There's one really awful dungeon a few hours into the game with the most inane sidequest ever in it. Once you're done with that there's nothing in the rest of the game so far that is anywhere close to being as annoying. Lots of the gameplay is stock RPG stuff, but the battle system is pretty interesting at first. Unfortunately after about 5-6 hours in the game you can easily break the battle system completely. That's both good and bad. It's good because then you don't really have to worry about random encounters for the rest of the game because it's so easy. It's bad because well, aside from looking at nice animations and cool new enemy/boss designs for the rest of the game, the battles will be rendered pretty much pointless. Once you hit that point exp/cp/money are all worthless since you'll be getting tons of it from battles that are totally easy. There's definitely a balance issue with the game, and it's something that Image Epoch will have to work much harder at in future.