Truly ambitious, gorgeous visuals and sentimental story. Dizzying and somewhat disappointing combat mechanics
-The animation is spectacular. As a long time Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki fan, I was ecstatic to hear they would be using their talents in the gaming world.
-Characters are as you would expect, totally ingratiating and lovable like most Ghibli films.
-Big open world to explore
-Deep sentimental story, it's really like your playing a part in a Ghibli film.
-Huge array of monsters you can choose from to fight for you.
The bad:
-The worst part for me was the combat. Although interesting and very ambitious, there really isn't enough control to battles. There are a myriad of creatures at your command with all kinds of skills yet unfortunately using them in a way that feels gratifying eluded me. The timing required to pull up your menu, scroll through it and read what ability you want to use while chaos takes place all around you it usually ends up not working. I usually ended up feeling like all I needed was a strong tank character 90% of the time and just have him hack away without much input. I found having less skills more beneficial so I wouldn't have to scroll through my menu as much so I could actually time moves with proper timing. If anyone has played Tales series games may understand the confusing combat, but this game felt even more chaotic than those.
-Tiresome backtracking to your original world ends up being...tiresome.
-Although challenging at times, for a veteran RPG fan, the game can be easy.
-Although I mentioned in the 'Good" section that the game presents you with tons of options of pokemon like monsters to choose from, the game leans towards having you use your main ones and the time it takes to capture, level up, train, feed and bring the others up to speed ends up making the process less fun.
Bottom-Line: With so many things done right, the gameplay kept me from playing more.