This is an incredibly flawed game. There are way too many random encounters and there are so many balance issues that I won’t even bother listing them. Combat is fairly boring.

Despite this, I greatly enjoyed my time with this game. It oozes charm. The music and character design are amazing. It has a real sense of adventure. While it might not have much of a story, it can create great stories. Here’s an example for what I mean by that:
My Warrior and Thief were poisoned, I was out of antidotes and barely made it to a tavern thanks to the healing from my white mage. Nothing special. But the way I decided to remember this was that Glitz dragged an almost dead Morgan and Arael into bed, their bodies ravaged by the poison, while Aeneas prayed that they would make it through the night.

I played this game to prepare for playing Stranger of Paradise later this year, but I ended up loving it so much that now I want to play through all of the mainline Final Fantasy games. This game lays an amazing foundation and I can’t wait to see how other games expand on that.