Riding almost entirely on Studio Ghilbi's reputation...I was super excited when I first heard about this game on the DS, and even more excited when I heard about it basically being remade on the PS3. Early videos seemed very encouraging, and the game looked gorgeous.But alas what was finally released was an awful, shallow mess; at least compared to what could have been.What's good: The locations (cities, dungeons, over-map) are all absolutely gorgeous, lots of beautiful handpainted textures. Beautiful music by the legendary Joe Hisaishi. Features an in-game book that is actually pretty nice read, as fairytales go, and the illustrations are very nice.What SHOULD have been good: Everything else. But I'll just make a list of complaints here.1: The main characters are only mildly likable. And the interplay between them is completely stale and lifeless.2: Sure, the ART STYLE is awesome, (its drawings and designs by Studio Ghibli how can they be BAD?) but the magic and life of those designs is almost completely lost in Level 5's attempt to turn them into 3D assets. The main characters seem a bit dull, the other folks in the world are just boring, but the monsters...(the life blood of any pokemon-esque game) are in their own league of fail. A few of the monsters get a bit of love (the starting mite), but large amount look horrible! Many don't even have blinking eyes, or any facial animation whatsoever! My favorite example of the level of fail is the Splisher. A light green, vaguely humanoid, seal-like creature with horns and a friendly, wide-eyed look on its face...in the drawing. The model however is a neon-green thing, with bulging never-blinking eyes that can only be described as a mutated baby carcass left to bloat in the sun. It's as hideous as it is creepy and looses all of its charm. This sort of complete failure to translate the initial designs into viable game material permeates the entire game.3: The story is just...lame. Sorry. Hell, even a lame story can be TOLD well, but that didn't happen here, so it's just unmitigated lame. Motivations are obtuse, at best. Reasons for plot twists might surprise you at first, due to how stupid they are, but once you learn to think stupid, you'll see them coming a mile away. (Gotta stop my quest to save the world, to get a swimsuit to wear in ONE town for 5 minutes, or else people might start killing each other? Yeah, that seems legit...) (Town in the desert with fountains of milk, that is ruled by a huge lady who happens to be part cow...better hope your kids can't put 2 and 2 together there)4: You will want to strangle the NPC's for talking. Forget that 90% of the voice acting is bad. Forget that almost every character in the game is forced to talk using awful word-play puns at all times. It's that you will have to sit and listen/read while they explain EVERYTHING to you in long, drawn out, conversations that are so infuriatingly un-interesting that you will eventually skip-through ANY communication with characters at all. Because you just can't take it anymore. It's hilarious to think this game took nearly a year to translate from Japanese. I can only assume it was due to nobody wanting to have to parse all that tripe.5: Even though this is number 5 on the list, it's probably the most important complaint. The gameplay is awful. Battles are sloppy, real-time affairs and even though you get 3 characters eventually you can only control ONE at a time. That would be fine, except you cannot give orders, then bounce to another character and give them orders to try and line up any sort of strategy with your party. The second you swap characters, the one you left will immediately stop what they were doing (even if they are mid-cast on a crucial heal) and go do whatever they heck they want. Usually standing in fire, or backing away from the fight, or just body blocking you from getting at the enemy. You're companions AI, that you are FORCED to deal with is so woefully retarded that in certain boss fights, it's best to just let them die. You can adjust that a bit with certain settings (waste mana, REALLY waste mana, just punch stuff, do nothing) but don't expect them to make smart decisions about healing, or buffing, or anything helpful. You won't even get some of the most crucial methods of controlling your party until well into the game. Making the entire 1st 1/3 of the game feel like one looooong intro into how you are supposed to be able to manage your party. The whole affair feels like being tasked with drawing a picture of a horse, while wearing boxing gloves. You can do it, but it will be sloppy, un-fun, and look really stupid in the end.6: Back to those monsters, familiars I guess is the true term.There are tons of them, and you get to evolve them n stuff. Yay. But your characters can each only have 3 at a time. No prob, right? Except they share each character's HP and MP. So they are less their own entities, and more like items with stats and move sets. In that respect, it's not really useful to have 3 critters per character, since they can only have one out at a time, and you can control one character at a time. You'll generally just find one critter with good stats and moves, and stay on that one the whole fight, while giving your other characters a line up of familiars with high defense so they can stay alive through all their idiocy. There is no real strategy towards deploying your familiars, or synergy between breeds, or anything that you would expect from a monster fighting game. The only real strategy to win is simply to sit through mind-numbing grinding sessions to level your crew until their brute force stats over-power their inability to do anything useful.7: The game gets lazy. I know I said the locations are pretty, but they do get pretty lazy as the game progresses, and the dungeon design is as basic as it gets. I realize this is supposed to be aimed at younger audiences, so I'm not looking for impermeable labyrinths, but the simplicity of the dungeons often makes them feel like they were procedurally generated, not hand crafted.8: Just one extra gripe. The game's subtitle is "Wrath of the White Witch". But you will have no idea how she even factors into the story until the game is almost over. The characters of the story won't even know she EXISTS until you are about 8/10 through the story. In fact, her whole plot line feels completely tacked-on. Its like they just shoehorned in the plot to a crappy sequel onto the last bit of the game. If this was EA I would have expected her entire plot to be DLC.So...yeah. Not so good. I gave it 2 stars for the music, the book, and the fact that it didn't crash at any time during play. At least the engine designers did their job, right?My suggestion would be to buy the sound track, find an art book of the game, read one while listening to the other and imagine how good this could have been.If you still want a "babies first jrpg" for your youngins, (momma's don't let your babies grow up to be weebos) I'd suggest any pokemon game. Or for an RPG that is heavily influenced by Studio Ghibli, has good real-time battles, and a quality story...try and find a copy of the original Grandia for PS1.4
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