Beat it. ~21 hours with everything completed. Not bad at all.
Pros:
- Great graphics, good music, top notch production values. This is without doubt one of the best looking DS RPGs out there. It easily ranks with FFIV and DQIV, but gets an advantage because it's an original game. It's not often that you see a real attempt to make a PS1-era RPG anymore, and it looks like the DS is the system for it. No complaints at all, it's just beautiful.
- Nice sprites, great animations. The 2D spritework is pretty impressive, with lots of custom animations for certain events, etc. The battle animations are good too, especially with the boss attacks. The sprite art throughout the game is pretty impressive with lots of different enemies. There are enemies that look similar but clearly have different sprites, and there are those which are the same sprite with a different coloring, but even then the coloring is always done in a unique way so they really look different.
- Fun battle system. The battles are extremely fun, even when they're broken, and you always feel really powerful. There are nice attacks, and a really nice special attack for each character. The game also manages to keep battles in dungeons from getting boring by having a good variety of enemy patterns. Even if there are enemies from earlier parts of the game reused in later dungeons, they're always mixed around so you never feel like you're fighting the same tiny group of enemies over and over. Nice touch.
- Great art direction. The art design and areas in the game really impress me. Every area you visit is unique, and looks really good. There are generic RPG areas like forests and mountains that look about as good as they can look being a generic wilderness area, but there are some really outstanding areas that are really memoriable.
- Interesting scenario. It's light-hearted and silly but captivating enough to make you want to keep playing. The setting itself starts off rather silly, so there's no attempt to establish it as a totally serious RPG. There are some really good laughs, and the writing on the whole is rather well done. It's not fantastic, and some of the later twists in the game are really hilarious and lame, but overall it was definitely enjoyable.
- Great characters. The characters in the game are mostly extremely likeable. There's a decent amount of development for each party member in the game, and it does a good job of establishing their positions in the worldview. Toppi and Lia are my favorites, and I would totally buy a spinoff with them in it.
Cons:
- Really poor game balance. The game can easily be broken early on, and with challenge completely removed from the picture it makes customization, money, and most skills totally useless. The number balancing in general seems totally broken in the game. An enemy which is buffed can be doing 100+ damage per hit, while doing 1-2 damage per hit otherwise. If you put on a defense buff, it drops back to 1-2 damage per hit. There doesn't seem to be anything in the game that is in-between, it's either overpowered or totally worthless. A speed buff would make pretty much all attacks miss, but there's no way to debuff an enemy so you're stuck just blocking or waiting until it's over.
- Crappy attack patterns and rather random AI tuning. There are many bosses that simply don't have a pattern or a "trick" to them. There are just a few really overpowered attacks they can do, plus boost attacks that give them extra turns. If they don't do them, you have a great chance of winning really easily by just hitting one button. If they do use those attacks in a certain sequence, then there's nothing you can do and you might die in a single turn. It's pure luck and has nothing to do with challenge or skill. :/
- Mazey dungeons, and really retarded backtracking "puzzles" in dungeons. There are a few dungeons in the game that are pretty mazey, and they can get pretty annoying when you try to figure them out with random encounters every 5-10 steps. There are also some dungeons (especially the final one, which is the worst offender) with inane puzzles that require you to go back through the dungeon to activate/collect shit and then run back to the end of the dungeon to activate something else. Back and forth, back and forth, with random encounters! Lolz.
- No replay incentive. There's no New Game+, no Event Viewer, no Music Player, nothing that unlocks when you beat the game that would encourage some sort of replay. It's pretty easy to see everything in the game the first time through, so there's really zero replay value here.