I've got this game, and at first I tought it was really good and cool, and that I made a awesome purchase here. Until I reached midgame... The dungeon in midgame was HUGE, and there was nothing to do on it but walk and fight, and the fights even if they are easy take too long, some fights would take several minutes of me just bashing the enemy until it dies, without even taking damage or using mana, utterly boring... To make things worse, your characters start to miss a lot of attacks, and you start to get large groups of weak enemies, meaning that before is your turn, you watch LOTS of animations, and while animations are playing your turn does not advance. But the story was reasonable and I decided to continue playing... It was when I noticed that the game was degrading fast, the dungeons got more and more huge (and empty), to the point that I would spend 30 minutes walking on a dungeon that could not even make me think or fear dieing in battle (even the boss was utterly easy), the characters even advancing levels get all their skills mid-game already, most of the magic is available, and most of the equipment too... Yet there are much more before the end... So as you can guess, the closer you get to the end, more and more padding is thrown in, in the form of huge dungeons (yep, not even sidequests, or people to talk...), about 75% of the game almost all dialog options in the entire world are exausted, you have nearly everything, and the only thing to do is visit more and more humongous boring labirynths (they are not mazes, because they actually are linear, about 95% of dungeon puzzles involve flipping a lever to open a passage somewhere, or fetching a key, to open a passage in another map, because levels don't work between maps... and all these levels and keys are usually in a way that forces you to visit the entire map). So, if you have money and time to spare, buying it is not much a problem, you will enjoy the start. But know that you may stop playing later... Technical aspects: The game design tends toward boredom, because enemies are too hard to skip (you can try to sneak past them, but the level design suck and make this almost impossible), the animations are LOOOONG and impossible to skip either, and dialogs you can skip it entirely, or not. You cannot make it go slighly faster... Example: You have a dialog with 10 characters that talk 3 times, you can only skip all 30 screens, or none of them, if someone is saying something that you already know, you are forced to wait them finish before seeing what another person will say. The graphics are good, but they have some flaws, to start you see black outlines around several sprites, like if someone did a bad work removing the background of the sprites file, some animations are nice, but some plainly suck, some are so bad, but so bad, but so bad, that you will facepalm when seeing them... The sound effects are more or less well done, they did had an effort, the problem is that some sound effects can run "out of control" (if you kill several robotic enemies at the same time, the explosion sound may be so loud that will scare your mom in the other room...), and that like I said, the game start to get more and more padded toward the end, meaning that you will tire of hearing the same sound effects again and again... Character design: Sometimes it is awesome, but most of the time it suck, and it suck because they take the awesome characters and repeat them over and over and over... Some cities you will see in total 3 different sprites, in various different colours, but the same 3 different sprites... Even their heads when talking to you are the same, even sprites with the intention to represent age, sometimes are just a middle-aged person with hair painted white... Also women (not grandmas, or girls) have mostly 2 sprites, one of them look like a secretary, and the other like a whore (in fact the whore sprite is used in a whorehouse...), meaning that in some locations you will see the same women over and over and over and over again. Also the same applies to monsters, they quickly use all the new monsters sprites in the first 25% of the game, then all mosters are the same but with palette swap, even bosses are palette swap monsters or edited sprites. The character personalities are usually bad, they are too flat, there are almost no character development, the antagonist is a idiot (he spends the entire game saying how he is going to save the world, while destroying it...), the protagonist have no motivation to be protagonist (I even don't know why the protagonist is the protagonist...), and this pattern repeats with major characters, they are really flat, the few characters that are actually good, actually are secondary ones (including one that has a really cool voice, and the actor ended voicing Master Chief also... and I dislike Halo, but that actor is awesome). The music is almost non-existant, and when it exists it is crap, boring, or irrelevant, with one exception (the track that plays when you are in the map, near a city called World Bazaar, since there are nothing else on this map, you go on it so fast that some people probably never noticed the music there...). The replay value is zero, there are NOTHING to see by playing again, not even secrets, the linear nature of the game means that every time you stray from the path, it is because it is a secret or bonus thing... There are no proper secret areas (there about 3 that are well hidden... unless you press TAB and see the map, then you can see clearly them...) Basically, at the start the game is worth a 5/5, but the farther you go on the game, the worse it gets... Probably being a 1/5 when you are in the final boss.
