This is the kind of game they would force you to play in the underworld.
Oh yeah, I hate this game.
My friend picked this up recently at a used game store for forty - yes, forty - dollars, and I've never seen such an unfortunate waste. You start the game with a nice 2 hour or so intro/learn-to-play section. But once it's over, you still have no idea what the basis for the story is.
Let's begin with the dialog. There is nothing here that makes sense, showing off one of the absolute worst translation jobs I've ever seen. Don't expect to understand the story or have any idea of what to do based on the dialog.
Next is the audio. The first thing you will notice is that the sound effects are atrocious. Loud, screeching noises invade every corner of the menus and battle entrances, terribly voiced layovers shout out during battles, and... oh, how could I forget: a hospital you visit early in the game has a particularly interesting BGM, consisting of what is supposed to be a spooky bassy sound with some screaming people laid over, but sounds more like a bunch of hysterical, laughing freaks. Barely convincing. Oh, wait, not convincing at all. I laughed out loud at this part.
Now, for the gameplay itself.
Well, in short, it sucks.
There are three perspectives that you'll encounter in this game. The first is a top down world map, in which you play as a cursor. Not a person. You can move straight forward on the map, and strafe left and right, but have to use the shoulder buttons to rotate the camera 90 degrees either direction. Also, you're in a city where all the buildings look the same and you can only cross the street at crosswalks. Man. That sucks. Second, we have the 3/4 top-down view, which is also the way battles are presented. In this view, you walk slowly around and actually get to talk to some people. But it still sucks and looks terrible. You usually encounter this view in rooms where other NPC's are, but when you enter a door to get into the dungeon or whatnot, you encounter the third perspective - first person. This controls similarly to the first top-down view, but it's from a first person point of view. You still have to use shoulder buttons to turn. Who's idea was this, anyway?
Now, some other problems - first of all, the loading screen. What is probably the worst loading screen I've seen probably ever (a gold mask with the word "LOADING" under it), is also the screen you see most often in the game. Imagine how many times the screen fades to black in a single game. That's how many times you will see this loading screen. Even encountering a random battle results in a loading screen before and after. Unforgivable.
And before I finish, let's talk about that battle system. You place your five characters on a grid. Sounds strategic. But the farthest people out in the front row can't attack any enemies with physical attacks because they are too far away. That's crap. When you do use a physical attack though, the character slides toward the enemy without taking a step and does a completely random amount of damage. At least that's kinda cool. Except not really. And for the non-physical attacks (which you won't be casting from just the back row, but the outside front as well), you usually get some kind of terrible voice over, ranging from, "Ahhhhh!" to "Persona!" (ranging, in this case meaning those are pretty much the only two), preformed by a minimum-wage payed voice actor.
All in all, well, this game sucks. A lot of things went through my head when I played this game, those being the thoughts above among a few other suicidal tidbits. Don't believe the slightly more shining reviews for this waste of matter, and just pass on this one. You won't be disappointed.