I never played the original, my only interaction with the series was Children of Mana (?) on DS which I enjoyed quite a bit. I'm going to assume some of the drawbacks are the result of it originally being a SNES game but I'll still state them plainly because this is a 50 dollar game when it's not on sale. The game is a pretty simple Action RPG, characters will play very similarly until you get your first class change, where you get some more interesting build variety. You can choose a party of three characters out of six, which changes how the story unfolds as well as how much of the story you see. I've done one playthrough so far as well as some of the post game, but the game is designed around multiple runs. If I didn't know this was based on a pre existing game, I would say it plays a bit like a gamecube era tales game, though there are a fair amount of convenient features sprinkled in. I think the visual style is one of the stronger points of the game, the art itself is pretty and the game stands out a lot on that front from other games of its kind. Enemy designs are great, there are a lot of weird little freaks for you to fight. Some of the designs remind me of Dragon Quest, it's not entirely Gameplay for the most part is pretty straight forward and samey until your first class change, the basic combo flow of characters is completely identical regardless of who you're playing, but they have access to different spells and buffs and their character skills can be pretty different. My first party was Angela, Charlotte and Hawkeye and Hawkeye carried, possibly because he had the best straight combat skills and I don't really like playing a spellcaster. The variable party is a neat idea on paper, but I don't know if it justifies playing the whole game again to see 10 percent new content. The other party members you don't pick just being around in the story world is kind of cool and I think it's interesting to see other plotlines resolve without you being a part of them. I think the biggest issue this format has is it really screws with the pacing. Almost all of Hawkeye's backstory (which for my money is the best of the three I picked) takes place over the course of ten minutes. It's very hard to feel for a character dying when you've known them for approximately 30 seconds before they do. Some of the mechanics, like the day night cycle, don't feel like they're ever paid off, they're just like tacked on as a feature for some reason. It mildly changes enemy spawns sometimes, or changes when a shop is open, all really superficial stuff. I also don't like the item ring much, mostly because you have to bind utility items to use them even outside of combat, I think a shortcut for the utilities or letting us use them from the menu would have been a better option vs losing a potential combat item because you need to fly somewhere. This game has a class change mechanic where most of the character building takes place, I think all the classes are strong and make sense and are well defined, but most importantly you get new outfits which are permanently unlocked for the character, so pick the cool one. This game isn't that hard. I do like that they add some level of exploration to the remake, as well as the seed mechanic, which is basically an item and equipment gacha. You actually need it to get your class items above the second class, but that's not as bad as it sounds, you get quite a lot, and it's always the correct ones for your party. One thing that isn't well defined are the stats, I still don't know wtf they do and the game doesn't explain it, there are reddit post that make guesses, but it would just be nice to know. Again, the game isn't hard, but there are harder difficulties where you may want to know what stats in an rpg do. The music is wonderful, I mostly played with the remake soundtrack but toggled the original every once and awhile and it sounds like it's trying to be completely faithful. I like the woodwinds and a lot of the dungeons have nice beats. Music loops are very short, and a lot of tracks are repeated but I think that works in its favour for situations like being in a town with cheery music but something isn't right with the locals. The story is by a country mile the weakest part. The most interesting part of it to me is the dub, which is famously pretty panned. I think Angela being a valley girl is really funny and people who don't like Charlotte's Engwish dub awe incapabwe of feewing joy. Hawkeye was largely competent. Some npcs are laughably bad, some sounding like they recorded their lines over discord. I don't think a better dub would save the story, it's just very paint by numbers. The only thing that stopped me from skipping half the cutscenes was to hear their delivery, which is sometimes stilted as a result of the narrative being pieced together with like 20 different potential party combinations (order matters too, leader determines the final boss) The plot justifications for backtracking are weak and I'd say the final chapter kind of just quits trying. It has the most interesting bosses but that isn't saying much. It's actually weird how none of them were used as the dungeon bosses, which are largely forgettable. I think this game was probably really groundbreaking and the story design being weirdly paced and fragmented was a necessary evil to try a new thing, but the game would have probably been better if you just had a party of six people and you experienced the whole plot. tl;dr Pleasing character designs, I like the modeling, the dub is funny, and the combat is okay. I think most tales games are more fun and have more interesting combat and story than this. This all sounds damning but I enjoyed my time with it, if I didn't I wouldn't have finished it.