If you think JRPGs are dead, then you haven't played this..
The story, is surprisingly good. A young boy named Oliver sneaks out of his house to hang out with his friend and drives a go kart he made straight into a river. His mom comes to his aide but the stress causes her to have a heart attack and die. In his grief, he cries on one of his stuffed toys that magically comes to life and informs Oliver that he's a wizard and the chosen one to save his world from Volde-er Shadar and somehow this will result in his mom coming back to life. Still the common Ghibli tropes are there such as animal people, adventurous children and a child traveling to a magical realm but the story has charm and humor and enjoyable.
Gameplay is REALLY involved. Mr. Drippy (Oliver's toy) gives him a book full of everything you need to do. This game combines a lot of aspects of many established RPGs. You have the Alchemy of Dragon Quest where you can combine things to make other things. You have a hybrid battle system combining turn based and real time and it also has a Pokémon aspect to it where you can catch and level up "familiars" to fight with you in battle. But with familiars, if they die, you die which is kind of annoying. Familars also get tired and you have to swap them out. Feeding familiars sweets give them buffs and they can even evolve. But also your party members have spells and abilities of their own besides familiars.
The battle system took me a while to get used to. Turn based I can do because the action pauses while you select attacks and western RPGs are fine because you can just go up and wail on baddies but this odd hybrid system takes some getting used to. It's nice being able to run around the fight area but sometimes while you're trying to find what you want to use, the baddie was getting ready to attack. I will say your party members are fairly competent as long as they stay alive. But dying seems to have little consequence other than losing money.
Another thing that does annoy me is it still goes a bit old school by having limited save points in dungeons. You can save anytime in towns or on the world map but in this modern age I don't get why I can't save any time I want in dungeons especially since this was sort of marketed towards kids.
But in the end, I'm being nitpicky. The game is a joy to play. The visuals are bright and really pop. There's always new things to discover and you will definitely get your money's worth out of this adventure.