Mother of arse, that was a long one. Been quite a while since I played a game of this length. And even longer since I last played a JRPG too.... Kind of rusty at them. This was made by a team that mostly consisted of old Final Fantasy developers and it definitely shows. To all intents and purposes, this was the true Final Fantasy XI. Everything after X started to suck after Square merged with Enix and the teams changed and they kept trying to make them different.

This was very much an old school JRPG. If anything it remineded me of Final Fantasy IV the most. So many nods and references and musical similarities and character similarities and on and on.

A very bitter-sweet tale filled with lots of grief and lots of happiness too. The sound novel elements telling the back story were also a very nice touch and were genuinely moving a lot of the time.

The game-play as mentioned is just like old school JRPGs only simplified a bit. Less equipment and weapons. Each person can only equip a few things. Which I think is better. There were some odd difficulty spikes at the beginning and at the end also. Needed a lot of grinding which I am not so keen on any-more. The plot itself was strange as far as these kind of games go though....I still don't feel it was explained very well even having finished it and it was left almost revealed right up until almost the end. And even at the end I feel it was only partially revealed and never really clarified. Despite this, still highly enjoyable 90% of the time and irritating 10% of the time. Got this back in 2008 when it first came out (5 years ago now). Good to finally put it to bed. And on the topic of bed: this totally and utterly freaking exhausted me.