I adore this game, it's a very unique RPG. It's familiar JRPG turn-based combat but rather than fighting with a small party of 4 characters you can recruit over 40 units and arrange them into battalions. Your battalions will then move around the battlefield individually and take general orders from you like you're the commander of the an army. Despite fighting on a bigger scale, they still make the individual units that you recruit interesting and likeable with their own questions and personalities.

I also love a lot of the games design - the character models can be a bit iffy but the locations are gorgeous even after 15 years, and the monster designs are incredible. Even though the game's story is fairly standard JRPG-spiel, I really like the world they created with all the different races, politics and mysterious remnant creatures that nobody seems to understand.

HOWEVER! Despite playing this game through several times to completion, I don't think I could recommend it to anyone else. There are so many little design flaws that get on your nerves, for example:

• For some reason the game only gives you access to really basic skills for the first half of the game, then you start unlocking all the cool unique spells right near the end. It takes a really long time to level up your skills so it just doesn't feel worth it to start levelling something new when you're most of the way through the game. Even when I did a 100% completion run there were several different skill types that I just never explored because it wasn't worth it.
  
  
• You give your battalions general commands and the individual units within them will decide based on that which ability to use in combat. Early game I really wanted to level up some of my unit's magic skill but they would only use it like 10% of the time so it was agony and I ended up just dropping them for units later who already came with strong magic. Later in the game a unit choosing one ability over the other can make a huge difference in a fight.
  
  
• Similar to the above point, the game only generates 5 possible commands you can pick from each turn (for each battalion). Sometimes the one you really want just isn't listed. Several times I lost a difficult boss battle because my battalion with several healers in it just didn't generate the "Heal Yourself" command despite being near death. You might want to use your super powerful Omnistrike skill against a particular enemy, but for some reason the option only generated for a different enemy. Etc.
  
  
• There are hundreds of side quests in the game if you enjoy 100%ing, but many of them are just pure torture. E.g. there are lots of quests to kill bosses that spawn rarely within a particular location. So you might have to pick a location, load in, run for several minutes through the location to get to the area where the boss might spawn, and if it didn't you run all the way out again and repeat. A lot of the bosses I found relatively easily, but some of them genuinely took me HOURS. So for hours I am not playing the game, I'm just running in and out of a dungeon a hundred times. There are also lots of quests to farm particular materials from a particular enemy, and that can be similar. Run into a dungeon to the exact location this type of enemy spawns, though sometimes it doesn't. Kill that enemy for a 5% chance to get the material, if not run all the way out and back in again. Oh and you need to get 3 to complete the quest... Sometimes I would be killing a Demon to get a Demon Tooth for a quest, and it wouldn't drop for hours. Only to look it up on the Wiki and it turns out that for some reason only the Demons in one particular location drop that material, not the exact same Demons in a different location. WHY
  
  
• As above, so much information is not given to you in the game - you need to refer to the wiki. How to change a units class, how to unlock high level formations for your battalions (gives them a huge buff), how to learn the strongest magic, how to find rare enemies. You spend about as much time reading the wiki as you do playing the game.
  
  
• Managing your units can be a pain. You don't manage their equipment directly, they just constantly ask you to give them materials so they can upgrade themselves. When you have 40 units in your army the popups are endless. Often they will be asking for a material you can't even get right now because it's locked behind 2 hours of side quests. And you can't give them materials you already have for some reason - If a unit starts asking for Iron Ore, and you already have 20 of them in your inventory, you will still need to go out and gather the extra ore for them and can't just hand them what you already have. If you find a cool accessory units will randomly start asking for it, but you can't control who. So you might want to give it to a particular unit but they never ask you for it and other units ask you for it 500 times and never stop no matter how many times you say no. There's no "No, and don't ask again" option.