Okay, this will be a short and not as impartial review. I'd have posted a previously written review, but I don't have it on hand.
I unfortunately checked this game out again. The pain returned. This game is one that for the longest time garned my description as "The most perfectly mid range game ever" it wasn't good enough to be called good, annd wasn't bad enough to be called bad. Now I wonder what I was smoking though as on replay it clearly stank from the get go.
The fighting system is an odd attempt to increase the strategy side of the first in the series, which had it's own flaws, but resulted in something far worse. The one on one fights had two great flaws.
Flaw 1: if you lost for some reason your other three party members standing there would do nothing.
Flaw 2: By random chance you could get incredibly powerful moves early on in the game.
There's nothing like suddenly having one of the last techs for martial arts at the beginning to make challenging fights go away.
The music is average to poor throughout most the game, a big disappointment considering there were some considerably good songs in the first game in this series.
The art is....different. It's stems from the brief fling all game makers had with pastel type art. It's nothing particularly spectacular and occassionally is quite poor.
It's plot would be good, but they skip 90 percent of what's going on around the protagonists they introduce.
You might have notice me using a plural there. I stopped playing this game after the storyline killed about fourty main character or associated characters. This is a game that would indeed spend an hour of your time introducing a character, giving him in depth cutscene backstory, and making you sympathize with him....before killing him off five minutes later.
In conclusion, no one should ever play this game, ever.
Fearless Leader
....You were nice to this game.....
It deserves far worse of a roasting. It's one of the few games I didn't take to at all, and I'll play almost anything RPG.