[Dire]

Ok. Just finished playing for the evening. First impressions:

The character development (skill/magic/etc development) and battle system rock. The turn based combat mixed with timing based charge attacks and unlimited possibilities for character development make the fights and leveling up your characters very fun and very rewarding. The music and graphics are also top notch. The music is Nobuo Uematsu and it shows in all the right ways. As far as the visuals - they look just simply beautiful. They do abuse the heck out of depth of field effects, but it looks nice so more power to 'em. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

Seems the main complaint in the reviews is the story/compelling characters, or lack thereof. Can't say anything about the story yet as it is still very rapidly advancing and is pretty entertaining. As far as the lack of compelling characters - unless something changes, this is definitely a legitimate criticism. Your characters so far are pretty generic: the brave rebellious protagonist, his more intelligent friend always being convinced to go along with the protagonist's schemes and "the girl". Remains to be seen if they do much with the characters or not - but as is, you're tossed into the heat of the moment so quickly that you really don't learn much about the characters.

So far this game seriously delivers.