[Preventer Wind]

I finally was able to rent the game on Sunday. I didn't start playing it till Tuesday though. But right now I have a little over 9 hours invested into the game. In short it's the best Strategy RPG I've ever played.

You can create your own party members with a feature called Dark Assembly. There are a lot of classes to choose from and you can create monsters as well. How good these characters are depends on how much mana you have (You get mana for defeating enemies). There is a lot more to creating members but if you really want to know then play the game.

Another feature in the Dark Assembly is a voting system. You can choose to vote on what kind of items are in the shops, how good these items are (price) and how difficult the bad guys are. You propose the issue and a bunch of Senatorial Demons vote on the issue. You can bribe the Senators with items to get them to like you so they vote for your proposal. If it still gets rejected then you can choose to persuade them by force by trying to kill all of them (Which is impossible at the start of the game because the Senators are light years ahead of you).

You can level up your items in a place called Item World. You select an item you want leveled up and you go inside the weapon and go through 10 stages of battles. How difficult the battles are depends on how good the weapon is.

The battle system is a lot like Final Fantasy Tactics. I wont go in much here but the battles go at a faster pace then in FFT. You can do combos and there are sphere grids that if you stand on certain colored squares in effects certain stats (extra experience, invincibility etc.) I don't really like the spheres that much but it really doesn't hurt that much (Other then make some stages look like a bowl of fruit loops)

The only real complaint I have with the game is one major bug that occurs when trying to level up weapons in the Item World. The stages are generated randomly so sometimes you get an island off in space with a bad guy or a warp point that you can't reach. Obviously you can see the problem there. The game presents itself as a little kiddy but I actually think it helps the storyline. But when Hell is the currency you know it isn't just for kids.

I really really really like this game and will be buying soon after I have to return it to the video store.