Ok, I've been playing this a little bit over the last couple of days, I'm not too far into it due to my limited play time in general. But so far my opinion is that it is alright. Only alright. The visuals when you are in a town or dungeon are quite pretty, but when you go out into the world map, it is pretty boring to look at with the basic mountains, forests and towns depicted in the most basic way. There is nothing to do in the world map apart from walk to the next destination, pick up sparkly bits or reveal more of the map by 'magic', which is disappointing and boring.
The story so far is pretty poor, I'm hoping that its going to start picking up soon. However, the characters, I don't think they are going to get any better. Tanaka and Lumina are basically there to dump exposition on the player, Van is mysterious and grumpy and exists almost entirely to be foil to Locke. Oh my God, Locke. I hate him and every stupid word that falls out of his mouth. It is obvious that he is supposed to be the comic relief and he falls into the JRPG trope of being the over earnest, headstrong and stupid character and it just doesn't work. I almost cheered when he nobally sacrificed himself, but it seems that he is going to be ok, unfortunately. I don't know if the story and the character dialog has been badly translated from Japanese, but that might explain a lot as well as explaining why I don't seem to be forming any attachment to these characters.
The combat however is pretty good fun and I have enjoyed it whenever the game has let me free to fight the bad guys, it just doesnt seem to be much of it. Its basically restricted to dungeons and other little places and maybe a town every now and then. You walk into a battle, you can take them by surprise, slightly by surprise or not by surprise at all and then you spend the fight waiting for various bars to fill up so you can give the enemies a smack. You can move around to give you a bit position to hit the enemy or multiple enemies and if you have your momentum meter filled, you can hit them a bit harder. Its fun, but like I say, not enough of it.
Going to play it a bit more and see if I can get the story and the characters to click with me, but if it doesn't, then I don't see me finishing it. Is anyone else playing this game, I'd like to see if anyone else has similar thoughts.
