Ahead of its time, and still an enjoyable gaming experience
During the action scences, the graphics and backgrounds looked great, and the player and enemy sprites were big, colorful, and lively. It felt very cool just moving and fighting; you actually feel like you are an avatar of the gods, taking on these mythical creatures.I looked forward to each boss battle, because the actual designs for the bosses were very inventive. My only complaint is the brevity sometimes of the action scenes; I wanted the action scenes to go on longer then they often times did. Also, being a veteran of some of the more punishing Castlevanias and Capcom side-scrollers (........die, Super Ghouls and Ghosts), I would have liked a bit more difficulty in the action scenes as well (lukily there is a harder Professional Mode).
The sim portions were crucial to being able to take on the monsters as the avatar, and I admire the game design behind this. The sim portions were addictive and interesting in their own right. The correlation between the well-being of these little pixels representing people in their homes and lands and your own fight against evil to further expel evil from the land was not lost in the switch of game modes. The sim portion was light on micromanagment (almost non-existant), which worked well for this game, but also had just enough action and problem-solving to keep you interested. I began to care about the little people of the land, and truly felt like I had to protect them and help them with their requests. The game does this well with bits of story elements specific to the people of each land. It may seem like you are just flying around, shooting down monsters over the houses while people build below you, but by the end of the game, you realize how much you did help these people, through the big things, and the little things. It would have been nice if the people continued to build while your temple wasn't over them, especially towards the end of the game when I was just going from city to city, waiting around for them to build-up the population and increase my stats, but the cities do develop fast, so it wasn't too bad. Also, a little more detail graphically in the sim portions wouldn't have hurt.
Overall, if you really sat down and played it straight though, you could probably beat it in a day, which is another complaint - I wanted more. It could have stood to be longer, which would have been fantastic, but the time you do spend on it will not feel wasted. It will feel like you did bring the continent out of the darkness and and help it blossom into a peaceful land.
This innovative game brings two different genres together very well, and makes for a great overall experience.
P.S. Oh yea and the music is amazing, just like the Gamespot review raved about ;-)