Cool concept, the controls take some time getting used to but once you do it's satisfying. Unfortunately there's an unpolished feeling that permeates the experience, for one the stages are sleep-inducing with a lot of dead time, the difficulty curve for them barely move I feel like and when you die it's usually because you got shotgunned out of nowhere. That fact is contrasted with the bosses, although they are the highlight they are very overtuned compared to the stages that precede them, cranking up the difficulty to the max which creates an annoying whiplash. Past the second stage, a lot of their attacks have Psikyo-like shotgun patterns, nothing wrong with that initially except there's a confounding lack of audio cues for those (and a lot of patterns in general), it's very hard to avoid them through visual cues alone as you're already busy dodging the other slower patterns so you end up getting surprise blasted by the very fast bullets a lot of the time which is frustrating.

It's definitely a fun game and one I'd consider a hidden gem, too bad it's marred by the annoying aspects I mentioned.

I'm a big fan of action games, in fact that's about the only type of game I really enjoy playing whereas I can't for the life of me get into RPGs. Yet I adore Final Fantasy Tactics and its clones. There's a reason for that that I noticed right away and it's Final Fantasy Tactics being an action game in tactics form. In fact there isn't much tactics going on in FFT, 99% of the time you'll give orders based on instincts and feeling rather than thought. There's a real tactile quality to FFT and it comes from multiple sources: the aesthetics, the small maps and rosters, the brutal "kill or be killed" approach to combat and its overall flow, the powerful spells and abilities, the customization and the grounded and gritty narrative elements.
Where other TRPGs put a stronger emphasis on puzzle-oriented scenarios, FFT likes getting into the thick of it and channel the pugilistic qualities of the battles it illustrates, it's very compelling in that regard, and while it is a simpler and more straightforward game compared to many other TRPGs of that era, I think it works to its advantage. To me it does anyway.