Surprisingly amazing! Fantastic fighting style and tons of recruitable characters. Highly recommended.
Back to the fighting. This is by far my favorite part of the game. You are given the ability of give commands to your party (commands that you learn by reading books). You also learn what are called "links". I suggest learning these early, as with a strong group, you can use various links to cut through enemies like butter. The more you use links, you learn new and more powerful links as well as learn various skills depending on the characters in your party (each character has a given skill).
The only reason I gave this a 9 is due to small items list, and the path system used for traveling around. If the game was a bit more wide open it would be an easy 10.