Western take on the Secret of Mana-gameplay, and it. Is. Awesome!
The game starts with a scene in 1995. The hero and his dog walk home from the movies, when the dog notices a cat. He starts to chase the darn creature and winds up in an abandoned mansion. The hero follows his dog in and stumbles upon a big machine. When his dog starts chewing on the wires, they both get transported to the fantasy world of Evermore. On your journey to find your way back home, you meet other humans that have been stuck in Evermore for 30 years.
On your journey, you are being accompanied by your dog. A very useful dog I might add, because it can bite the living hell out of monsters, and it can find items and ingredients with his nose. Ingredients? Yes, there is virtually no magic in Evermore, just alchemy. You can equip a couple of spells and you need the corresponding ingredients to cast those spells. It's a simple system, and the small variation on the stale magic-using system is actually quite brilliant.
You can also use you weapons to wipe out the enemies. There are 4 weapon types, which get improved during the journey. You start your journey in a prehistoric world, so you start out with prehistoric weapons (most memorable a big bone to give your adversaries a good whackin'!). When you advance to the next world - which is a roman world - your weapons eventually wind up being upgraded to bronze weapons. Your dog gets "upgraded" too by the way. Every time you visit a new world, your dog looks different.
The gameplay is quite similar to Secret of Mana. Whenever you use your weapon, your energy bar depletes to 0% and it quickly charges back to 100%. It's obvious you deal much more damage when your bar is full. But you can always move around to avoid blows and such. The battle system has proven itself, it works and it's fun to play with. It has a higher pace than Secret of Mana, which sometimes had trouble to keep the frame rate up. And I might add, this game looks as good as Secret of Mana, maybe even a little better!
All in all, this game is a great one. It tweaks some of the fixed features usually found in these games. The world differs, the magic differs, your companion differs. It's combined with a great gameplay in the vein of Secret of Mana, so there really isn't any reason not to like this game.