As far as JRPGs go, this is... okay? It's easy to enjoy, but hard to finish. The lack of well-developed central characters and its terse dialog style mean a lot of the typical JRPG appeal just isn't present here. I enjoy the way the world incorporates different cultures and imaginative scenarios, but it feels like I'm reading an outline rather than a stage play.
No, this is a game you play for the challenging turn-based combat. I would say it aims for a mid-point between the streamlined fights of the Dragon Quest series and grid-based tactics games like the Fire Emblem series. Your control in battle is picking an attack per character from a menu and watching them play out. It's simple and fast enough that you can play dozens of random battles in a typical session, but with enough complexity that things can go wrong and make you stop to think about equipment loadout, damage types, status effects, formations, etc. The game does not feel "grindy" per se, because you always want to be working towards quest objectives (to unlock new classes and improve your empire's income) but the distribution of battles in the way is pretty dense. Like combat, character progression likewise has a simple bottom line--if you use your weapons and spells to win battles, you will gradually get stronger and wealthier--but the precise details make it tricky to optimize. A great deal of this is opaque to you in the game itself, and I can't tell if the game wants you to experiment and analyze or just rely on intuition. Regardless, there's an excellent technical guide by Nicolas Codron that you can refer to if you ever feel stuck or want to look under the hood.
A big factor in whether you will enjoy this game is its UX, which is unfortunately very 1993. The good news is that in its remastered form (I played on the Switch), the game is forgiving enough to autosave at the end of every battle victory. You'll basically never lose progress. Huzzah! The bad news is that this game wants you to change your party to adapt to the challenges of different dungeons, but provides no way to kick people out of a party you have formed. You have to intentionally get everybody killed, and that feels awful. When you're forming a new party (you'll need to, several times) there's no way to start from a previous loadout. Let's say you're forming a new party and want to add an archer similar to their deceased predecessor. You first need to talk to the NPC associated with that class--this might be the ranger in your home castle, or it might be the hunter in a remote village half-way across the world, which you access by fast travel but need to walk to a nearby port to escape. Then you have to talk to the NPC that manages your item storage to pull out the bow, armor, helm, etc you want them to use. (I hope you remember which ones you like, and don't forget that gloves impose a huge accuracy penalty on bows.) Then you have to talk to the NPC that lets you learn weapon techs mastered by previous generations. THEN you have to talk to up to three different spellcasting NPCs to load up the eight support spells you want your archer to have, one spell at a time. At no point in this process can you say, "give me this bundle of spells I used last time." Multiply this by five, and you have a huge block of mandatory prep work you need before heading back out into the field.
There are other UI quibbles--it's hard to determine attack effects from reading a scrolling marquee, there's no clear value that shows how powerful one move is relative to the next, armor only shows "slash defense" and hides its defense against the three other physical damage types. The remastered game runs at 30 FPS, which makes moving around and handling menus slightly less responsive than it ought to be. These are annoying flaws, but they're forgivable if you can accept the big process of setting up your characters. I wouldn't call RS2 a must-play import classic, but there is a lot here to enjoy for the right kind of player.
No, this is a game you play for the challenging turn-based combat. I would say it aims for a mid-point between the streamlined fights of the Dragon Quest series and grid-based tactics games like the Fire Emblem series. Your control in battle is picking an attack per character from a menu and watching them play out. It's simple and fast enough that you can play dozens of random battles in a typical session, but with enough complexity that things can go wrong and make you stop to think about equipment loadout, damage types, status effects, formations, etc. The game does not feel "grindy" per se, because you always want to be working towards quest objectives (to unlock new classes and improve your empire's income) but the distribution of battles in the way is pretty dense. Like combat, character progression likewise has a simple bottom line--if you use your weapons and spells to win battles, you will gradually get stronger and wealthier--but the precise details make it tricky to optimize. A great deal of this is opaque to you in the game itself, and I can't tell if the game wants you to experiment and analyze or just rely on intuition. Regardless, there's an excellent technical guide by Nicolas Codron that you can refer to if you ever feel stuck or want to look under the hood.
A big factor in whether you will enjoy this game is its UX, which is unfortunately very 1993. The good news is that in its remastered form (I played on the Switch), the game is forgiving enough to autosave at the end of every battle victory. You'll basically never lose progress. Huzzah! The bad news is that this game wants you to change your party to adapt to the challenges of different dungeons, but provides no way to kick people out of a party you have formed. You have to intentionally get everybody killed, and that feels awful. When you're forming a new party (you'll need to, several times) there's no way to start from a previous loadout. Let's say you're forming a new party and want to add an archer similar to their deceased predecessor. You first need to talk to the NPC associated with that class--this might be the ranger in your home castle, or it might be the hunter in a remote village half-way across the world, which you access by fast travel but need to walk to a nearby port to escape. Then you have to talk to the NPC that manages your item storage to pull out the bow, armor, helm, etc you want them to use. (I hope you remember which ones you like, and don't forget that gloves impose a huge accuracy penalty on bows.) Then you have to talk to the NPC that lets you learn weapon techs mastered by previous generations. THEN you have to talk to up to three different spellcasting NPCs to load up the eight support spells you want your archer to have, one spell at a time. At no point in this process can you say, "give me this bundle of spells I used last time." Multiply this by five, and you have a huge block of mandatory prep work you need before heading back out into the field.
There are other UI quibbles--it's hard to determine attack effects from reading a scrolling marquee, there's no clear value that shows how powerful one move is relative to the next, armor only shows "slash defense" and hides its defense against the three other physical damage types. The remastered game runs at 30 FPS, which makes moving around and handling menus slightly less responsive than it ought to be. These are annoying flaws, but they're forgivable if you can accept the big process of setting up your characters. I wouldn't call RS2 a must-play import classic, but there is a lot here to enjoy for the right kind of player.