A game made for people who enjoy a deep story and well developed characters.
GAMEPLAY - For RPGs I put this into two categories: Battles and Story. First the good. This was a fantastic story that involved a lot of deep issues and provided a tremendous amount of character depth. If you are the type of gamer who does not care for movie scenes and wants continuous gameplay, ala Baldur's Gate, this game is honestly not for you. It did devote a large amount of time to movie scenes, but I felt these scenes were very well done and enjoyable to watch. Now the bad. Personally I did not care for the battles, but I admit this may be due to the fact I'm an old-time gamer that still prefers the basic sword and sorcercy as opposed to futuristic concepts. The battle scenes to me were rather dull, and was not helped by the fact that in general the monsters were not interesting and the same background music was used for all of the battles with the exception of the last one.
GRAPHICS - Overall I felt that the graphics were very well done. Obviously Namco was going for an anime look, with many of the female characters and a young male character having ridiculously large eyes that were a distraction for me. Most of the cut-scenes used the in-game engine, and that worked out fine as you could see the emotion in the characters. Considering the fact that much of this game takes place on spaceships, they actually did an excellent job of giving the environments an interesting look. I should also mention that the final movie scene was exceptional, and it may have simply been a money issue as to why this quality was not used throughout the game. The down side was the battle scenes and monsters as I mentioned before. The monsters had very little detail and simply were not interesting, and I felt that more could have been done with the battle sequences to make them more interesting to watch.
SOUND - Another case of good and bad. The voices were very good. There was a lot of speech in this game and it sounded believable, which was important because this game heavily relies on its movie scenes. The bad would be the music. As I mentioned before the same tune was used over and over for the battle scenes, and during most exploration there was no background music at all. This was a shame because there were points when background music was used during movie scenes and it was of good quality.
VALUE - Decent value for an RPG. The average gamer will take between 40-50 hours to complete this game, though a lot of time can be added on to this total if you take advantage of the numerous mini games available. I would have enjoyed having the option to watch the movie scenes again after the game was completed, but unfortunately most games do not offer this bonus.
SUMMARY - It could be said that this is a movie that occasionally turns into a game, but I feel that the experience was worth it. This is a case where the weak battles are more than made up for by a top notch story and characters that you will care about.