Having come back to this later after playing the Dusk Trilogy, I can say that it feels like later games did it better, but this was a fun time.

Synthesizing was fun, there were some interesting characters, exploration was the usual, but I enjoyed it for the most part.

My only major gripes with the game:
-- The soundtrack (the merchants having four versions of the same track I didn't like definitely didn't help)
-- Some aspects of organization and sorting in the UI weren't that intuitive.

Looking forward to playing Totori and Meruru in the future.