The storyline is epic, the characters well-defined and the gameplay, at it's core, a lot of fun indeed. I personally love this game for it's abundance of in-game text; click on a house and you'll be rewarded with a paragraph explaining how your party go about knocking on the door and the way you get a feel for the unique personalities of the characters through this sort of thing is as immersive as any novel or piece of interactive fiction. In addition to the writing being good; the character graphics are also quite well done: a combination of traditional pixel art and photographed actors wearing high school drama department quality costumes gives you easily identifiable, and likeable, faces for the people you interact with as you travel through the world. Another great bonus is that the game has one of the best, and most aesthetically pleasing, turn-based battle systems ever conceived... unfortunately the way it's utilised is one of the games few weaknesses: the battles are few and far between which may seem like a good thing for players who don't enjoy combat but it means you rarely get the chance to level up; wrecking the games perceived non-linearity. Often as you're walking down a path on one of the games many side-quests you'll come across an unskippable battle that simply cannot be won at the level you're on; the only solution is to backtrack along the path and try other side-quests where you might meet easier enemies and then go al the way back to where you were previously; add to this the gameplay mechanic of having to buy rations for your party which are not only depleted as you travel but GO OFF if you buy too many at once and the fact that the (admittedly revolutionary for RPGs at the time) pseudo-3D environment you travel through looks uniform throughout; making it easy to get lost if you don't attention to your compass at all times and you have a sure-fire recipe for annoyance which really marrs the experience of this otherwise fantastic (and highly influential) game.
