I picked this up a few days ago. My honest opinion is that Sega should've merged/bought Typemoon and made this into a 'legendary dramatic visual novel' or whatever the current euphemism for porn games is. Sega has the gameplay know-hows, as evidenced by the fact that although the game is utterly frustrating to play on many levels I have played it more than 2 hours (I rarely play any game over 2 hours if it doesn't interest me early). But the gameplay isn't good enough like say Grandia or FFX where the engine is the game itself so they need something to spice it up, and the story certainly lends toward such a setting. After all, the story is about Xion, your average 17 year old loser who is surrounded by 4 girls who are all exactly 17 (I'm sure Elwyn is 17 in elf years) and I don't think I need to say anything more about that.
The combat system is a mix of Legend of Mana and Diablo 2, except you only use one button instead of sometimes 2. Your AI partner has an IQ of about 2 which is more than enough to overcome the enemy AI which has an IQ of 1. The weapon creation is a mess where you basically throw 3 items together and hope something good happens (like Legend of Mana), though usually something good happens as opposed to not, unlike LoM. Armor is straight out of Diablo 2 with a bunch of random stuff with equally random mods.
The tiny town areas that require you to load whenever you go to a different area is rather annoying. The graphics look like pretty outdated but still pretty good on the eyes. Ryuna looks more like a maid than a priestess, but that might just be me.
With all that said, the pace of the game is surprisingly fast which I like. Although it seems like at the beginning you're going to end up using the world-destroying powers of the Twin Dragon Rings to help pay off your debt at a tavern things got going pretty fast (even if it's a bit sudden).
The combat system is a mix of Legend of Mana and Diablo 2, except you only use one button instead of sometimes 2. Your AI partner has an IQ of about 2 which is more than enough to overcome the enemy AI which has an IQ of 1. The weapon creation is a mess where you basically throw 3 items together and hope something good happens (like Legend of Mana), though usually something good happens as opposed to not, unlike LoM. Armor is straight out of Diablo 2 with a bunch of random stuff with equally random mods.
The tiny town areas that require you to load whenever you go to a different area is rather annoying. The graphics look like pretty outdated but still pretty good on the eyes. Ryuna looks more like a maid than a priestess, but that might just be me.
With all that said, the pace of the game is surprisingly fast which I like. Although it seems like at the beginning you're going to end up using the world-destroying powers of the Twin Dragon Rings to help pay off your debt at a tavern things got going pretty fast (even if it's a bit sudden).
