This game was a blast, the PSP version holds up super well. I played this right after Grandia II and it feels like a perfect follow-up. Both are relatively short (by JRPG standards) due to a lack of sidequests, which was appreciated. It had a story it wanted to tell, and, like Grandia, the NPCs had a lot of flavor. The story itself is nothing to write home about, but the voice acting is great, the writing is fun precisely because it doesn't take itself too seriously.
Mechanically, the game is pretty interesting. There's a strategic layer, which I'm always a sucker for. You can move your characters around on the battlefield and moves have areas of effect. There's an AI battle if you want to speed things along, it performs well enough for the amount of time saved selecting actions. One thing I really appreciated was that Nall, a pet character who you start with, is always along in battle and will heal statuses and revive fallen characters after every fight. He'll also do this in combat, although less reliably. This, combined with healing upon level ups, makes grinding fun and easy.
While I really like the game overall, I do have to mention some choices I didn't care for. The first 10ish hours contain a lot of fat jokes, as there's a playable character who's mostly around for humor and to serve as the butt of jokes in general. These got old pretty quick. There's also a lot of "haha, gender" sorts of jokes. And one really odd decision to include items you can purchase that unlock little 5 second clips of the girl characters (I think they're all under 18?) in their beds with little clothing on. I'm no stranger to fanservice in games, it just feels weird to have the player pay a merchant for this reward.
Mechanically, the game is pretty interesting. There's a strategic layer, which I'm always a sucker for. You can move your characters around on the battlefield and moves have areas of effect. There's an AI battle if you want to speed things along, it performs well enough for the amount of time saved selecting actions. One thing I really appreciated was that Nall, a pet character who you start with, is always along in battle and will heal statuses and revive fallen characters after every fight. He'll also do this in combat, although less reliably. This, combined with healing upon level ups, makes grinding fun and easy.
While I really like the game overall, I do have to mention some choices I didn't care for. The first 10ish hours contain a lot of fat jokes, as there's a playable character who's mostly around for humor and to serve as the butt of jokes in general. These got old pretty quick. There's also a lot of "haha, gender" sorts of jokes. And one really odd decision to include items you can purchase that unlock little 5 second clips of the girl characters (I think they're all under 18?) in their beds with little clothing on. I'm no stranger to fanservice in games, it just feels weird to have the player pay a merchant for this reward.