I must say, I'm glad I have it and I'm really enjoying it, but this is exactly the sort of game that the phrase "old school" was created to describe. You slap together a party of four adventurers (7 classes to pick from, take 4 characters of your choice), divvy up their skill points (game is directed by the same guy as Etrian Odyssey, so the skills work similarly), and then hit the road a questin'.
The game looks fairly nice - not amazing sprite work, but good. Some things look better than others, naturally. Monsters so far are not animated, but you do see little animations of your characters attacking. Battles are turn-based. Difficulty is medium-high - both you and your foes do a lot of damage. I don't know how you'd get along without a healer (but the game will let you go without one if you really want).
Storyline - the world is being persecuted by a bunch of dragons. Kill them. But first, do a bunch of menial quests to get stronger.
Music by Yuzo Koshiro. Nuff said.
Game is linear so far but I've been told it opens up later on. Whole thing is very "quest focused" - you get quests from the guild and do them. Lots of optional quests later on, but to be strong enough to do the "missions" (storyline advancing quests) you need to do a lot of them.
I'd highly recommend this game to RPG fans. People who grew up on 8 & 16 bit RPGs will dig it. I really doubt it will change anyone's mind if they're not a fan of the genre already. Other random side note - one of the producers of pre-online Phantasy Star and Skies of Arcadia is a higher-up on this game as well (apparently it's her first RPG project since Skies). No idea if an English version is going to be released or not; as with all RPGs, I would not recommend importing it unless your Japanese is at least decent (preferably good).
I've been doing every quest (or at least, pretty much every quest) that has come up though, so that's been keeping me busy.
