The worlds of Bionis and Mechonis are incredibly vast and come with much freedom. The first area alone is rather large. You don't have to follow the story straight away which is nice, you can go off and do quests, explore to unlock landmarks and locations or just run around and have a few scraps! You can use the area maps to teleport to landmarks anywhere (think HM Fly from Pokémon!) which makes going to previous areas not so much of a drag.
The quests are not as annoying as most quests on RPGs. Non-story quests are purely optional and often involve what you are already doing (e.g. kill some monsters, collect items, talk to person, etc) however a nice touch is that you do not have to go back and to the NPC from which you received the quest.
The battle system is quite nice. It's starts off seeming a little odd, not the usual turn based combat of the average RPG. However with time it becomes second nature. You control one of the characters in your party whilst the other two do whatever. It is real-time combat, you have to be close to the enemy to automatically attack and using the directional buttons select Arts from a panel at the bottom of the screen.
Arts are special moves which can be used at any time although they have a cooling off period before they can be used again. The cool-off is void when using a chain attack which stops time and lets you chose an art from each party member to use in succession.
Arts can be leveled up using AP to reduce cool-off time and increase damage.
Skill trees and affinity coins (obtained upon leveling up) can be used to teach characters special skills that they would not normally have. More skills can be chosen if the characters have a better affinity (which happens when you use the characters in battle for a while).
A small gripe I have is that there is one type of enemy that appear quite a lot within the story that only the main character can attack and only he has the arts to enable other characters to attack these so he has to be in your party for quite a bit. You can purchase weapons that will attack these enemies with the other characters although they are not as powerful as the other weapons you can find!
You can give your characters various pieces of armour to wear which will reflect their appearance in cut scenes and the overworld. Although you don't have to make them wear any armour at all and can strip them, which is hilarious for cut scenes.
The game has a great plot (which I will not reveal!) which is exciting yet not too overbearing. The cut scenes are pretty nice and the voice acting is just outright hilarious! I find the accents really funny and some of the stuff they say sounds like it was kicked fresh out of google translate. Also how in cut scenes the voices don't match the mouths and it's just too funny. You can switch between English and Japanese voices which is a nice touch. Not like all that's a bad thing, actually I think it's excellent.
Finally the game has an amazing soundtrack (I will be posting some tracks!) which uses various genres of music and bring in a great atmosphere.
I have been playing for sixty hours so far and am still going. I didn't think that I would pick up my Wii remote this year at all until Skyward Sword had been released! I am so glad that I've had my Wii fixed so that I can play this game. I just. It's really excellent okay. If you live in Europe you have no excuse not to buy it.
