Like tactical RPGs? Like really cliched dialogue? Like mushrooms with ridiculous voices? This game has all three!
So then, I hear this game is like Disgaea *Shrugs* I don't know, I haven't played it, but if that comparison helps you sure. For those who have played neither, perhaps you have played Final Fantasy Tactics or Ogre Tactics? Vandal Hearts? What I'm getting at is this is a Tactical RPG which means you're gonna be moving your characters around the board and strategically placing them for the maximum damage. Something I really liked about this games combat system is the ability to team up attacks. For example, you could put one character on each side of an enemy, telling them all to attack, but they would wait until you hit "Battle Begin" to actually fight. At this point a seperate 2-D field comes up and the combat gets played out here with awesome little critical bonuses getting thrown on your character in the midst of the fight (One of my favorite things would be the big enemy dying when he attacked a weak characters of mine who just happens to totally block their attack and get a critical hit. So satisfying) But this method of combat allows a lot of combat strategy as you'll have to decide whether you want the character to expend SP and use a big nasty attack like "Redemption" or "Demon Blade" or "Tulip Spear".... Okay, the last one kinda sucked... OR if you want them to attack head on! The other interesting thing about combat is the purification system. See, there are these dark portals, and they each have a different element that they send out as a directable stream. The best way you can use these is by combining the different element streams into one and then enclosing the enemies within a box of the stream. After this you purify one of the portals which sets off a chain reaction along the stream, either healing or dealing damage, until finally, if you made a square, causing an extra big summon-esque event to occur which causes either massive damage or healing. Its hard to pull off most of the time and really rarely worth it to work it out to that extent. But sometimes an opportunity presents itself. You feel clever when you pull it off. You can also recruit monsters for your party, a practice which is essential early in the game, though less so later as your party roster fills out with characters more useful than your monsters with their very strange arsenal of mushroom attacks and cuteness influence. In that case you just send them to the dark world, which honestly I never find out that much about since I never seemed to get the dark energy index up terribly high. Ah well.
So yeah, the gameplay is definitely solid and enjoyable. Its mainly other aspects you might worry about. Music is iffy. Some of the tracks I liked, others just keep looping and looping and you eventually avoid certain areas for training because you hate that song. Also I think there are only like.... 10 at most different field musics. It unfortunate really. I would say the only wortwhile bit of music I can recall is the end theme which is a pretty good, if standard, anime-esque Japanese RPG type end theme (A kind of slow, but not too slow, emotion filled piece that borders on sad but maybe like smiling through tears? I dunno, you'd know it if you heard it) Graphics are borderline PSone. If the polygons weren't so jaggy free I'd swear it was. Of course thats not a prblem since if you can find this game it'll probably be el Cheapo. But the battle effects are well done in my opinion, and I do like me some 2-D sprites on 3-D landscape (Though this has been done better in many other games, the original Final Fantasy Tactics for example) Pretty much all the enemies are ridiculous and that is good and bad. The main problem is that you're storming the final place and these same stupid hippo creatures are there next to the awesome flame spirit. Ah well, you get used to it. Oh, finally voice-acting. Ummm.... Yeah. Reminds me of early anime dubs. I guess they hired whoever happened to find the audition. I would say that the poor voices (And not that they're all poor) adds to the atmosphere though. I would say that pretty much all the character's voice actors were told what their characters were and then took that to an extreme that was unnecessary. Of course there is always the Japanese voice track, but then you won't understand what they're saying during their attacks, which I got tired of.
Finally, the world map.... I think they just put lines on there for fun, you might as well just have a list of location names.
Good stuff:
+Fun and quirky
+I like me some anime story
+Solid tactical RPG gameplay
+Father Salade
Bad Stuff:
-Looping music of an annoying kind
-Goofy enemies in the final dungeon
-The anime story is too much like other anime stories
-I've seen better graphics in a PSone game
-Culotte