Fantastic RPG that could be a little longer.
To put it simply, the game blew me away. Despite one or two very minor flaws, it is an excellent RPG that most RPG-goers should enjoy.
Graphics wise, cell shading saves the day again. All the characters and environments look and move beautifully. All the characters have good expressions and emotions throughout the game. There are only two anime cutscenes in the game, however, but they are both done very well.
The voice acting is absolutely incredible, some of the best I've ever heard in an RPG. All the voice actors succeeded in adding emotion and realism to the characters. And there is a lot of voice acting too. Lots and lots of it.
Battling is fun and fast, unlike some turn based RPG's that can just bore you to death with multiple menus and lengthy attack selection procedures. You can also control up to three characters at once, switching in your reserve characters whenever you like to take advantage of certain situations. The Hyper-Mode aspect of battling is awesome, and it works well and is well balanced. You can power up your characters for a certain number of turns, increasing their Weapon Energy Gain, Health Points, and overall power. As a certain green party member might say: "Need more power!"
The Final Strike part of the battle occurs when you deplete an enemies health low enough that it is activated. You can then button mash like crazy to rack up huge amounts of hits and damage that is very unnecessary, but fun to do over and over again.
There are a ton of extras in the game. When you have them all, you can view a multitude of figurines, artwork, and review all the storyline scenes in the game. You can even change the color of X's scarf. That's right, X has a scarf (energy based of course). There are also 10 or so extra bosses that you can fight to unlock abilities for your characters, or just get more extras.
The flaws in this game are few. The game could be a little longer, as it doesn't take more than 20 hours to beat, and there are a few too many random encounters than I would've liked. Still, these two flaws do almost nothing to hurt this game.
I enjoyed, and am still enjoying, this game. You should as well.