Silly story, uninteresting cast, poor AI, boring battles, tedious exploring.. this game went wrong on so many levels.
But let's start from the one thing that's often praised as the most important aspect of an RPG: the story. I wish I could tell how it's a tale of love, of friendship, of betrayal... or anything like that. But no, instead it is a naïve little story about a boy, Leonard, who sneaks into a royal castle just to witness an invade of a foreign army. The king will be killed and it's up to Leonard to save the mute princess from harm. As they escape the tunnels to reach a safe haven underneath the castle, the fleeing couple stumbles into a treasury, where an ancient armor lies waiting. Of course, Leonard just happens to be the only person in the entire world to be able to possess the knight and naturally his dear princess is also the only person able to awaken the knight for him. Despite their amazing luck, the princess is caught and Leonard is soon sent to pursue her with a mysterious old man, Eldore, and his (a completely unnecessary girl) child time friend, Yulie. So they set out to travel around the world, visiting a few town and collecting some new friends along the way in search of the princess. This is really all there is to it, unfortunately. Yes, the game does bring up far more interesting themes, but sadly they all are one after another pushed into background. The ending is especially disappointing. They are almost saying "Hey, the real game starts now, but for you, it's over. See you in the sequel!" C'mon!
If the story was the only thing wrong here, we'd be doing quite fine. But we're nowhere near being through with all the troubles of this title. As soon as you've left the capital, you'll be thrown into the world map. And yep, this is literally map, so no exploring on your own. After you've gone to the only viable destination, you're gonna find yourself out in the beautiful wilds. Indeed, the visuals are the best part of the game. From beautiful environments to breathtaking (although rare) videos. But back to topic. The areas you'll have to wander through are long. And I mean it: they'll just go on and on and on, filled with a few different monster (seriously, there's like 10 different monsters in the whole game), which you can't really avoid.
So, it's not bad with a good battle system, right? But yeah, you guessed right. The battle system is simply awful. There is no strategy required whatsoever. If you're a melee user, you can fight through all the battles with randomly pressing X on your gamepad. No special moves requires, no positioning, no nothing. If you're a mage, it's pretty much the same story, although to be effective at all, you have to add your spells to combos to cut their casting time by alot. Theoretically the battles have a huge potential. There's a variety of different classes from destruction spells to spears to bows etc. Every class boasts a variety of moves and other bonuses, which you can add into fully customizable combos. Unfortunately the super dumb AI never ever uses any combos or any other advanced strategy to that matter. Your AI melee fighters stick to basic attacks and mages burn through their MP in mere seconds. But that's quite fine, since none of the enemies have any tricks in their sleeves. All they do is stand there and hit you. You could target different parts of their bodies, but that never really matters as they always take the same damage. So you'll be targeting their legs to make them briefly fall on their knees for some free damage. It should go without saying, but the battles quickly become extremely tedious.
From every monster you slay, you keep collecting loot. In addition, you can collect some loot from certain gather points. Some of these items you can use to craft better weapons, armors etc. in towns, but most of it is useless junk (well I guess you could use that in the town building mini-game, but does someone really play that?). Talking about armors, there's not very much to choose from. All the characters can wear every armor in the game, so you'll be seeing your group always wearing similar armors, if you want the best outfits. I picked some variety, using poorer armors on some of my characters, since the battles are so easy, you don't really need the extra protection. There's also armors for that give a little magic resistance, but I failed to see what's the point of giving away so much defense to get a few magic resistance points, when there's only a handful of casters in the whole game. Also, an annoying thing when finding armors and weapons in the dungeons is, that every single time when you'll open a chest it's either yet another useless crafting item or an equipment you just purchased from the last merchant. Not once did I get (from a chest) a weapon or armor that was good enough to be equipped.
There's also another major annoyance in getting items: the inventory system. Every character in your party has an inventory of their own and in addition you'll have a general inventory, which can hold like 10 items. To make matters worse, there's a separate Equip-menu, so you'll need to switch items and jump from menu to menu a great many times within the course of your journey.
I could go on and on with this list, but it should already be clear: don't waste your time on this game. I'm actually quite amazed I made it through, but I admit I really wished it would just end already. It's almost spectacular how Level 5 was able to fail this tremendously.