--insert clever/funny comment here-- *shrugs*
The setting is in the past, but has some future technology. It has some elements of steampunk. You are appointed to vanquish the villians, save the princess, restore order. RPG players know the gist of it. Theres still the villages and the traversing of the environments as there are in your typical RPG. Fight enemies, get upgrades to your equipment and magic, fight bosses, talk to townspeople. All that stuff. Now one of the things that makes Brave Fencer such a great game is the battle system. I find that I play RPGs for their system and hope that theres a decent narrative to go along with it. Being that this is an action rpg all the enemies are free roaming and will attack you on sight. Gotta love that right? There is your typical sword play. And you also have a neat weapon that you can throw at enemies to get their abilities. So there is some blue mage stuff in here too. That was a nice addition as some of the abilities are necessary for you to progress. The regular magic you get later on in the game is fairly effective too.
There is a great day/night cyclical system in place that adds so much to the gameplay. One of those you can only do certain things at a certain time or only during the day or only during the night. I appreciate that kind of stuff in games, and its' not used often. Musashi gets tired. He has to eat to keep up his strength. And when he's really tired you can't even fight well and your moves are limited because his energy level isn't high enough. So you have to rest, and fairly often since the day/night system is in place. Fortunately, you can literally rest almost anywhere. It works well here considering that your a Ronin. Its' all accelerated of course so it isn't a hindrance.
There are a nice amount of puzzles that can take some considerable thinking to solve. Well its a puzzle so that makes sense. There will be times where you will be running around trying to figure out what to do next. And it happens more often than you would think. But then it wouldn't be a great action rpg if it didn't have moments like that. I think stuff like that adds substance, instead of just having you go from here to there with no challenge. If you get frustrated easily and have little patience with open ended games I wouldn't recommend Brave Fencer.
The tone of the game is fairly humorous with serious elements. Even a lot of the enemies are laughable. There is a good deal of voice acting in here and most of it is good. You can tell that they got into their characters. Some of the voices in here are just classic. Its' like they put humor in wherever they could.
Now as far as graphics go well it was made for the first Playstation so your not going to be wowed. There is some blockyness like alot of playstation games of the period, but thats to be expected. I think the graphics are fine considering when this game was released.
Brave Fencer is class-A and it is definetly one of my favorite releases from Square. There is no set recommendation. If you are interested in video games that will hold your attention then pick it up. One of the more off the radar releases that is well worth playing.