Developed by: Konami | Published by: Konami

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Good use of camera angles. It does a much better job of making you feel immersed in your environment than the plain ol' static overhead view. There's also a wide variety of different types of environments, all composed pretty well. It's scenic.

108 unique characters, each with their own personalities, backgrounds, abilities, and side-stories. There is a lot of detail given to each character.

Pretty good sound track.

Playing through three different interweaving storylines as three of the main characters is an innovative new idea and they manage to pull it off. Each chapter in each storyline is put together well in it's own right, and it all fits in together well with the plotline as a whole. When you play as another character, the same scene in the story can look completely different from when you play through it as a different character.

Towards the end of the game, your castle fills up and fills itself with lots of extra stuff to do that can really keep you busy for long periods of time. Apart from building up all 108 characters, you can also find all the recipies, medal sets, seeds, bath toys, paintings, vases, statues, do the horse races, mess around with play performances, and so much more. This game has a lot of depth, and if you have the patience to do it all, it can keep you busy for quite awhile.

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You spend 80% of your time going through non-interactive story sequences. The very short times when you are actually battling enemies, everything is so scripted that you seldom ever face a real challenge. The battlefield battles are all scripted and there's not much strategy involved in it at all. A large portion of the boss battles you fight you are supposed to lose. The game is all about story sequences and not about game play, or at least not most of the time. Even moreso than Final Fantasy X, although not as much as the second disc of Xenogears.

All 108 characters had a lot of different abilites, but there wasn't enough stuff that you could do with them. You could build them all up and try to make the meanest fighting party, or a party of powerful magic users, but then what do you do with it? Many of the characters seem to just be in there as fluff.

Text instead of voice acting.

Steep learning curve.

Storytelling could really be better. The story is only interesting at a few key points, but other wise it's long, drawn out, and becomes a sequence of seemingly arbitrary events. The theme of the whole story was about what happens when somebody tries to defy fate and the horror it causes, and the plot didn't get into any of that until right at the very end, and even then it just touched on it and didn't explore it thoroughly enough.

Blocky graphics. Frame rate chokes from time to time too.

Manually saving takes away from escapism.

There's a lot of stuff that would be very difficult and tediously boring to find if you did not have a walkthrough. There need to be better ways of establishing the objective the player must reach, besides just randomly stumbling upon what you are looking for.