Let me preface this review by saying that despite how much I enjoyed the game it is very much held back by being released on gba. The game itself has a very interesting and colorful world and lore much beyond what I expected from many other games released at the same time, that being said the short length of the game makes a lot of the more interesting elements go by very fast without as much care as the deserve. Shorter dungeons are nice and make completion of the game easier but it also causes the game to often jump between plot points without much warning and makes the world feel much smaller than it's meant to. Sidequests in the game barely matter and aren't really tracked but can sometimes provide a brief respite from the main story if they involve anything other than grinding enemies in a specific area for a 10% drop, which is what many of them end up being. I enjoyed the combat system but sometimes-especially later in the game- it felt like there was never any reason to fight anything but the bosses due to how much damage even normal enemies did (not to mention how easy it is to just run past them). If you choose to play the game using a magic build like I did then most of it just boils down to figuring out which spirit does the most damage to the boss (which often ends up being the most recent one) and then hitting them maybe 10ish times at most with it due to the tiny health pools all of them have. The short boss fights help contribute to the fast pacing of the game but I personally would've enjoyed a slightly longer, more fleshed out experience which likely wasn't possible due to how much content this game actually does have for gba.

The very first of many 3D nis games, as someone who has played a lot of their previous 2D games I can safely say that this is definitely on the lower end of quality and much less polished or enjoyable than its spiritual sucessor which is in my top 5. As in any nis game the characters and story are charming but not enough to keep the barebones grindy gameplay any more fun. All of the mechanics you unlock throughout are gained early on and never become any more in depth than they are from about the 4th chapter and even the story, which I found to be the most enjoyable part, takes a turn in the last three chapters of the game when at the end of the 11th chapter there's a surprise twist into a full chapter of just lore dumps which almost made me stop caring about finishing the game entirely. This doesn't even take into account how stupid the requirements to get the true ending are, with you needing to grind for hours to kill three optional bosess scattered throughout the game's areas only one of which is likely to be found during a normal playthrough due to how dissuaded you are from exploring because of the game's combat system. Add to all of this the frequent crashes of the ps3 edition and I quit actually playing the game before the conclusion of the 11th chapter, choosing to view the cutscenes on youtube instead. I cannot give this game more than two stars and if you value your sanity I recommend only playing a bit of the game yourself and viewing the rest online.