There was potential here for a fun Civilizaton-meets-JRPG, but tedious gameplay and bad combat make this game a miss.
General Gameplay:
You are the leader of a country, and with it, you're also the tax collector, a farmer, a resource manager, a general, and an errand boy. As Months pass in the game, you spend each month dealing with one specific aspect or another. You may have a chance to trade, buy/sell commodities, play with the tax rate, fight, etc. during your month/turn. The game has a pre-set rotation of these actions month-to-month, so you don't get any freedom there -- you do whatever you're supposed to do that turn. It gets very bland, very quickly. Why not make it more SimCity or Civilization-like, and let you actively change everything each turn?
Combat:
Combat, which occurs infrequently and at basically pre-determined intervals, is real-time, with some "thinking time" for you, as things like spellcasts and powerful attacks animate on screen. You control three generals in each battle and their armies against 3 enemy generals. The battle plays out in a rock/paper/scissors fashion, where you basically figure out which general's strengths work against which of the enemy generals. Unfortunately, the strength of your army is largely determined by the starting country you pick. But unlike a game like Risk, in Spectral Force, you're pretty well set once you pick your country -- your units won't change in strength much as you play. You can buy bits for your armies, but for me there wasn't a lot of effect on the battles.
Visuals/Audio:
The sounds are decent, and the music is generically epic. There's no voice acting. Some of the cut scenes (I played about 8 hours of the game and didn't see more than 3 or 4) were very well done, but sparse. The on-screen graphics are VERY small, and even character portraits during conversation are very tiny and not very colorful. Animation is more like animated still images, sliding, panning, zooming -- not genuine animation outside of the movies.
Overall, Genesis is a very bland game, and the hard part is that there are so many areas where the game SEEMS like it should be fun, but the restrictive and predictable gameplay boils down to a tedious experience.