This game honestly surprised the crap out of me. I picked it up for $30 as I was dumping a finished dusty DS game with zero replay value.
The opening movie was cleaner than past SquareEnix efforts so I actually bothered to watch the entire bit, and it was cleaner both in audio visual so it got me curious. I remembered the rants of the FF4 Remake quality, and I'd swear this game is the testbed.
Upon entering the game opens up with a massive fully spoken run of dialogue and in game animation of the characters getting basically a first lesson in life. From there you end up doing that first mission and the detailing everywhere in town, your home, the caves, whatever is notably more detailed than what FF3 DS offered really showing off the revisions of that engine from FF3->DQM Joker->this game. Every monster motion is fluid, lots of fluffy magical things going on with intricate detail you'd expect out of a very late era Playstation game say like Final Fantasy 9. The music, the sound effect, and the already mentioned verbals are very clear, crisp, no hissiness to it at all which is nice.
Gameplay quite excellent for sure, controls are smooth and top notch, but the one thing that is a bit odd is the need at times to touch the magicite and drag it into the open area so you can toss it as you got to keep that stylus in between two fingers as you play. Unlike most games it's not clunky and as of yet 3 stages into it (in the mountains I am now) it hasn't got me slapped around yet. The unholy crap that made the GC game so miserable with the inability to keep magics in each stage and items, the bs of carrying the miasma jar, the overly random wretched random waste of time scenes on the map, and the rest of it...all dead. It basically is like Final Fantasy light...handled much like the bigboys, but done in an action-rpg mess more like Zelda but with a lot more depth you'd get from FF in items, gear, buy/sell, magics, etc.
I highly recommend it...and also for those who can wrangle up some friend codes, it has a 4P online multiplayer that while I hear has a bit lower of a framerate so it can be played it supposedly is pretty damn fun as a mix of a feel with the items/upgrades/quests of say Guild Wars(very lite) combined with Zelda 4 Swords mentality of group work.
