Graphically, this game is a gem. Mapping is lovely, atmosphere is great and while there are some maps that have a few passability errors, the rest of them were just great. You wanted to explore the maps and take all the treasure you could find.

Treasure that you could interact with was clearly marked, NPCs and main characters fit in well with the setting and everything just looked so nice. It was a feast for the eyes.

Battle animations were RTP but that wasn't much of an issue - especially when one's eyes were presented with the beautiful battlers that were used. The only real graphical downer was that the HUD in battle was pretty much default. It's a pity but time crunches can be hard on the details. That said, I especially adored the icons used in the menu for artefacts. They were lovely.

The writing was solid and there were very few mistakes. I enjoyed the characters and their interactions a lot, even if I couldn't remember their names, and quite liked the story as a whole. There were a few things I didn't like as much - namely that Rashida seemed to only care about drinking and getting drunk (I don't mind a drunk or getting crunk but it seemed that that was her whole character and it was a pity as she could have been pretty cool if she'd had some more depth beyond reluctant drunk nanny bandit.)

Otherwise, the written aspect of the game was really well done.

Sounds could be a bit better implemented - footsteps on sand would be awesome to hear, even if it's only across quicksand and there are other various places where sound effects could be implemented to great measure, but what was there fit quite well and added to the atmosphere.

Music was great bar the battle tunes (especially the boss one) which were a bit dragging and not quite epic/boppy/actiontastic enough. The other music fit very well with the scenes in which they were used and it added a lot to the general atmosphere.

Gameplay was, unfortunately, a very mixed bag. While on-map interaction with the world around you and exploration in general were a lot of fun, battles were a chore. They dragged on for far too long. I go into it a lot more in the video.

I will say that I loved the skills, the way they interacted with each other and that you were forced to think about what you were doing, but I do wish you'd had more power behind your attacks so that battles weren't such a large drag.

There was also some slowdown/lag on larger maps with events - notably the one with the floor that appears when the torch was lit and the maze with the dropped balls. Otherwise the game played fairly smoothly.

One last issue I had was the forced on-map battles. They were very unwelcome, especially with how long it took to complete battles. Often I just wanted to get to the next area and skirt around an enemy, only to find the path ahead blocked - and this happened very, very often. There were under ten enemies that could be avoided - all others were forced encounters if you wanted to progress or grab treasure. This wouldn't have been too much of an issue if the battles weren't so terribly slow and boring. Which is a pity, because the rest of the game was very well polished and a lot of fun.

All told, the game was fun, but it had some issues that just destroyed the fun factor a lot. I would recommend people to play this game, even despite it's glaring issues, because it's a good experience and a good example of how much gameplay issues really affect the enjoyment of a game.

I played on Normal, got every artefact and took 6 1/2 hours to complete.