PROS:
Length. This game is long, roughly 80 to 85 hours if you do all the side missions.
Character skill tree customization, levels.
Certain decisions in the game have very different outcomes.
Alchemy system that you can use to make potions of varying effects. Lots of different alchemy ingredients.
Decent variety of enemies.
The music adds atmosphere.
Mini-games such as fist fighting, dice (automatic dice sadly) and drinking games.
Books you purchase from merchants are required to learn about monsters, in order to unlock alchemy ingredients and sometimes quest items. Which I thought was an interesting touch, as it adds a bit of immersion and depth to what you're doing in the game.
CONS:
The game starts very slowly, which can lead the player to feel very uncertain about what to do in the early stages of the game.
The voice acting is not great.
The dialogue interaction between the pc and npc can be quite terrible at times.
The graphics obviously, but it is an old game in defense of that.
Sword combat feels a bit too simplistic, even on hard difficulty which is what I played on.
Not an open-world game. Area's are large which gives the illusion of it being open-ended but it is not, sometimes area's can seem quite linear in design.
Little to no loot in terms of equipment. I think there's a total of 3 body armors in the entire game. There are a few different swords but not enough to even worth mentioning in terms of this being a loot-based game. It's more like how you build your characters skill tree rather than the character depending on gear, which technically isn't a con, but there isn't much loot in this game though.
If you can get past the cons and the first few hours of the game, the story starts picking up speed and starts getting good. Decisions you make have varying consequences. It is a decent RPG, it's just one of the more slower RPG's that I've played. Certain NPC's only appear during the day, where others only at night and can only be interacted with at certain times which can sometimes get frustrating. Certain quest npc's can walk around and won't always be in the same location. The game definitely doesn't try to hold your hand at all regarding this, it leaves you to figure out how you want to proceed with your quest order and how to figure this kind of stuff out, which is a good but can also be a bit frustrating at times.
All in all the story is good and gets better as time goes on within the game, just some parts of the game are extremely slow and dare I say, a bit painful to get through. It's good but there is no doubt it could have been better. 7/10. It's worth playing at least once if you're a fan of RPG games.