The combat engine was very nice. Intuitive and also a nice change. But combat itself was pretty boring. All monsters had only one or two types of attacks, and since everything was turn based, fighting the same monster again became a matter of routine. Combat was way too deterministic and lacked any variety. The encounter avoidance feature and auto-battle are nice ways to get around this, but combat is still very frequent and sometimes you can't use auto-battle to implement the best attack.

The developers did not make use of the analog stick. This meant one button was wasted on walking, and another button wasted on running. That is not too bad, except the run button is also the action button. This means when you want to perform an action, you might instead run. Or, also bad, after you complete an action you will start running. This is a real problem when they let you fall off cliffs.

Being able to fall off cliffs is quite annoying. They worked it in as a test of reflexes but it became very frustrating at times. Especially since some of the reflex puzzles had no margin for error at all. I don't mind a reflex puzzle if they don't expect it to require perfection to complete it. I did like the thinking puzzles, but the problem was they came up with one type of puzzle, and then would make you go through variations of it several times. No really harder so much as longer. Thus more tedious and both boring and annoying.

Another disappointment was the summoning action sequences. The summoned creatures look like something out of Zoids, only they move a lot worse. And the damaging summons are absolutely worthless. It was more efficient to cast magic or just attack than to bother summoning. I never summoned anything after I'd seen it once, and those sequences were painful to watch.

Magic itself was kind of stupid too. One character is very good for magic use because he can target multiple enemies and has a strong magic stat. But rather than making him the magic user, you have to make everyone magic users because you equip the magic sources. So magic becomes kind of useless for those other characters, because they can't target multiple enemies and also because their magic is very weak. You can rearrange equipped magic during battle but it is a hassle since you also have to reassign the skills associated with the magic sources if you move them between characters, and because it is just faster for all non-boss battles to just use regular attacks than to waste time rearranging magic. This also makes the ability to target multiple enemies less valuable, since that character only has a few elemental magic attacks at his disposal during any given battle.

In fact, there are only a few spells worth having at all. Heal, Valiant, and Fragile are about the only spells I used at all. Unless a boss required a specific spell to defeat it. I only used Permanence during one battle, and Reply only during one battle. I never used anything like Shield, Protect, Reflect, and rarely used elemental attacks because it would have to by chance be equipped to the one character who could target multiple enemies.

I did not want to move magic around a lot, depending on which enemies I was fighting, for a couple of reasons. First, in any given location, there are a number of different elemental weaknesses you could exploit. But, I always want to be able to target all my characters with heal, so that limits one choice. And then the stat boosters and personal skills associated with the magic sources make it undesirable to move magic around too much or to use certain combinations. Once I'd gotten Valiant, all battles because a mix of Valiant and Heal. I didn't even make a lot of use of the personal skill enhancers that I found. You can use these to add personal skills to magic sources, such as resistance to elemental attacks. But I didn't care about getting hurt, given Valiant, and I didn't have a lot of spare skill points to make use of them anyway.

Targeting multiple enemies was also handled badly. Enemies can only be targeted in groups of two to four, depending on how that battle was laid out. So, even though there might be 12 enemies, you could only target 4 of them. Plus, you could only target enemies of the same type. So you could not cast the same spell on all the enemies even if wanted to. This isn't necessarily bad, since different enemies have different weaknesses to magic, but sometimes even with the same enemy type, they weren't grouped by the combat engine and so you couldn't multiple target anyway.

This game would have been much, much better with a better implementation. The non-linearity, character development, and story were great. But the boring and tedious combat, bad magic system, and annoying puzzles made me not want to explore or spend time on things. I was just trying to get through as quickly as possible, and this meant looking things up in GameFAQs when I got stuck for more than 15 minutes.

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