Sakaguchi tries to combine Final Fantasy and Resident Evil, with varying levels of success.
The game takes place over six days in Manhattan over the Christmas season in 1997. You control one character for the entire game, a 25-year-old female rookie cop named Aya Brea. She feels the urge to see an opera at Carnegie Hall, and as RPG luck would have it the villian of the story is there. And as RPG luck would have it, Aya is connected to the villian in a special way, resulting in her being the only living being that won't spontaneously burst out in flames around the villian. Hence, she makes up your entire party for the whole game.
The battle system is pretty simplistic, and contains the then-standard random encounters. In an unusual move for the time, the fight took place right on the field map, no battle screen came up. You could run around the screen trying to evade enemy attacks. Attacking pauses the game while you pick your target, but there's a bit of luck involved as an enemy could jump out of your gun's range by the time you aim up and fire, resulting in a high miss percentage. Regular bullet reloads (each gun has a certain bullet capacity) could leave you a sitting duck for a few seconds as well. For magic, you get Parasite Energy, and you get skills at certain levels. Your PE regenerates at a decent rate initially in each battle, and the rate slows as you cast more spells in battle. Other than the occasional heal and status cure, I hardly used the abilities though, except for the ultimate attack on some of the end bosses to speed up the fight. Since your PE regenerates pretty well during battle, I simply healed after the battle, let it regen during my next fight, healed, repeat, and was able to sustain myself pretty easily for the whole game that way. In fact, the only time I died was on the final boss while learning the attack pattern of all the various forms, so this game provided little challenge for me.
There are a lot of different kinds of guns to collect in this game(rifles, shotguns, handguns, machine guns, etc.), with a decent but simple crafting system which gives you a lot of customization ability. However, the best upgrade strategy was to just pick a good trait off of another gun (like first strike, double attack, multi-target hit, etc), which destroys the old gun in turn, to make a great gun and just pump all your bonus upgrade points and items into that one gun. It was also a little funny that they had you collect ammo for your guns, sure it's more realistic, but I collected so much through chests and random drops that by the end of the game I probably had more bullets in reserve than I shot in the entire game.
And on that note, the game was short. The Gamespot review says it'll take less than 15 hours, but it took me under 10 in my first playthrough. When it takes 3 hours to complete the first 3 days in a 6-day story, you know there's something up, especially when the sixth day is just the final boss fight. After the game you can start a new game and access a 77-story dungeon, the Chrysler Building (on a random note, it's kinda neat to have places like Central Park and the Museum of Natural History as dungeons), the end of which contains the "true final boss". However, I just couldn't muster up the desire to play through again just for that, there were other games that I had lined up that seemed a better investment of my time. The first playthrough though was probably worth it, especially when you consider how used PS1 titles are very cheap these days.
I found the music to be pretty decent, set the mood very well and a tune or two was rather catchy, but there's nothing you'll remember a few days after you're done playing. The graphics are pretty good for the time, a lot closer to Final Fantasy VIII than VII. Being a Square PS1 RPG, of course it was loaded up with FMV's, which again were much closer to the quality you'd find in FFVIII. Having a Navy carrier launch a jet attack against a monster in the streets of NYC was pretty nice looking, and seemed to portray NYC itself pretty well. Of course at the end of the game they go through an FMV overload, but such is expected.
While I enjoyed the time I put into the game, I also got the feeling that there was a lot of potential left untapped. The short length of the story, the lack of much character interaction (being relatively alone in an evacuated Manhatten makes that difficult), and the relatively simple "move and attack" battle system is enough to hold your attention but not make a huge impression on you. If you see it cheap in a used game pile, then it's a nice diversion over a weekend, but it's not worth actively seeking out.