Great story, great characters, great art direction, and a great battle system make this game one of the best and most underrated RPGs ever to grace the PlayStation.

+

1) Good blend of sprite graphics with polygon backgrounds. The animation sequences were also nice.

2) The voice-acted cinematics are nice, although somewhat choppy and abrupt because of CD-ROM loading.

3) The style, and overall feel of the game is very cute, yet dynamic. Each characters has a very well-defined personality that is fun, unique, complimentary to the story, and likable. In the cutscenes it becomes fairly clear what the different characters are feeling at any particular moment, and the emotions dynamically change during conversations, as opposed to having flat characters that have the same emotion all the time. The type of feel that this game generates is sure to have a strong appeal to women, especially in the child to teen range.

4) The battle system is new. That is a major advantage, because it presents RPG players with a new system to use instead of the old, normal one that is overused so much. The battle system is also pretty well done.

5) Seeing enemies before you run into them, and having to devise a plan to attack them so that you have the initiative and don't get ambushed is much better than random battles.

6) Plenty of save points all throughout the game. The save points also allow you to restore your health, which is convenient, and also gives you hints on what to do next.

7) The hint system is pretty well done. You have the arrow in the corner that points to where you're supposed to go, and the hints at the save points.

8) Having the player choose which character should speak next during meals is nice. It gives the player more control over the dialogues. If the player wants to hear what this person has to say, then she will just select that character.

9) The artwork and scenery seems very professional. There are things moving, things shuffle and move when you touch them, sound changes as you walk by fountains and other things, there are different wonderous areas to explore, the architecture has an aesthetic appeal...

10) The main characters all have a love and lust for adventure. This is a very good idea for RPGs, because adventuring is the main thing you do in RPGs (other than fighting monsters and collecting stuff, which was lusted after by the characters in Pokemon). By playing through the game you are helping the characters fulfill their dreams, and relating to them at the same time because you like adventuring too, or else you wouldn't have bought an RPG game.

11) Having to build each character up with each type of ability (ie upgrade fire, earth, whip, sword, etc.) in order to gain new special attacks during battle gives the player a steady stream of goals to accomplish.

12) For turn-based console RPGs, this game offers one of if not the most realistic and fun battle systems to date.

13) The way that all the girls in the game slobber over Justin is great for desperate male players with no social life and/or girlfriend.

14) This game does a much better job of emotionally hitting the player than most.

-

1) Too much movie-watching, a common problem with RPGs.

2) The artistic feel is a little too... saturday morning cartoons. The marching band music and simplistic sounds lack depth. The artistic feel of the game seems more suited for twelve year olds.

3) Although there is voice acting for important dialoges, the normal dialogues still lack voice actors.

4) Cutscenes cutscenes cutscenes. Too much conversation watching, not enough game playing.

5) A lot of times the voice acting sounds really cheesy.

6) Having to manually rotate the camera all the time gets annoying.

7) The battle system is difficult to figure out at first, in terms of what the strategy should be.

8) Navingating the world map like it's a menu is a bad idea. It makes the player feel more confined, as opposed to having a world map that you can freely roam around on.

9) The game play is very repeditive. All you do is go to the next area, fight monsters, collect items, build up levels, beat the boss, go to the next area, fight monsters, collect items... There should be more variety. Adding in several mini games more often would be better.

10) The frame rate gets slow in many areas.

11) It would be nice if I could turn off the animations.

12) On the first disc, all of the girl characters in the game slobber over Justin: Feena's always saying, "Oh Justin, I love you, I can't believe I'm telling you my most intimate feelings," and Sue's all like, "Oh I can't believe I'm leaving you, I promised I wouldn't cry. Waaaaahhhh! I'm going to be so sad without you Justin," and then when you meet Feena's sister she says Justin's great too. This is very unrealistic and just plain bad. If there was a love relationship between two characters, that might work, but not when it's all the girls in the game slobbering over one guy.

13) On the second disc, the plot starts to go into the same old thing that happens in all RPGs: one man must gain the courage to protect the world and all the people he loves by destroying the ugly evil monster that is made of pure greed and wants to destroy the world.