First of all it's 480i so that means it looks soft and blurry or sharp with scanlines.
2nd of all it's happy 12 year old animu that makes you stick forks in your eyes
Now for the good, the battle system is actually pretty solid. It has that whole suikoden "everyone acts at once" thing and it totally works here. The battle system is also interesting cause you can have one character move 3 times or 3 characters move 1 time. You have a set AP every round and various actions eat up different AP (special attacks are 3, fight is 2, level 1 spells are 2, items are 2, move is 1, etc...). The reason this is less abuseable than "hey why not just have the best attacker attack 3 times" is that 1. Turn order means there will be enemy turns between his attacks instead of everyone attacking before the enemy. 2. The best attacks are SP attacks you can only do 1 every few turns, so it's better to have 2 people use SP attacks, and 3. Magic is limited by uses like suikoden so umm, this might factor in down the line but I can't think of how that would balance it right now.
Positioning is also a little important as spells have area of effect and you can choose MOVE for 1ap and move to various spots on the board (or just choose attack for one character and anything other than ATTACK for the other and they'll split up for free!).
Sub-systems are solid. Weapons have skills imbedded and after enough use they become unlocked and can be removed and put in any other weapon. Skills take up physical space on the weapon and the more you use the weapon the more the available space to put skills expands.
Magic is like suikoden. You have slots to put magic balls in that contain spells. You can buy more slots for money. Then you buy uses like suikoden. Like 4 lvl.1 uses, 2 lvl.2 uses, 1 lvl.3 use, 0 lvl.4 uses. You recharge them at inns.
Cutscenes are mainly short (yay) or told through 2d picture people (spoken) and so you can skip through it fairly quickly.
Load times are good, but not instant off a disc. About 3 second black screen before any 3d cutscene and in towns people fade in as they are loaded. Off a hard drive the game is instant and very smooth and quick with no loads anywhere. But the game also has occasional crash points when transitioning from a cutscene to a battle off the hard drive which can be fixed by just skipping the cutscene or playing off a disc.
You get guest characters and you can't do anything with them but they fight in battle and usually help and don't tend to die.
So other than shitty graphics and lame jrpg story it's fairly solid at the start. The battle system makes it worth playing.
