Great graphics, good characters, ho-hum gameplay
You play through 4 realms, the first is quite long and I found it very confusing. I wandered around forever having no idea what I was doing or where I should be going. When I occasionally found something I had no idea what to do with it. Eventually I made it to the second level which was quite a bit more interesting. You swim around underwater and the mission is quite straightforward. Swimming is fun but the camera keeps refusing to swivel around because it runs into the environment around you. And this is a level where you need to do a lot of looking around, so that's a real pain. The third level was my favorite, you explore this gloomy village with a steel gray sky that's usually dumping rain on you. Very moody. In the second half of the level you are in a beautiful palace - quite a contrast. In the fourth level you're in underground caverns around a volcano. My biggest complaint is that when I was halfway through the game, I had to start over from the beginning because I hadn't saved enough energy gems and there was one area where I absolutely could not make it through without at least one powerup. The combat in the first part of the game was so easy I figured why should I worry about conserving the energy gems. Overall the gameplay was rather dull, I found myself using a walkthrough about 25 times simply because I wasn't interested enough in the story to bother spending a half hour trying to solve various problems / puzzles by myself. The second half of the game is far more interesting than the first, but still a lot of the challenges seemed like more of a pain in the butt than a challenge.
Overall, very good graphics and very imaginative environments. Good characters, though I wasn't the least bit interested in the story. The gameplay is pretty dull, especially for the first half of the game, though it picks up nicely in the second half.