Awesome sauce.
20 hours in and I've traversed a load of the big monster thang that is the world. I'm on the back and heading towards the head. It's great.
The world is fabulous: the environments are ace, the monsters are varied, the music is just terrific, I'm enjoying levelling up my arts, changing gear, making gems and whacking them in stuff, the story is pretty good too and the voice acting seemed bad but, um, is somehow perfectly fine now for some reason I can't fathom.
The graphics are bloody lovely, the size of the world is amazing, the vistas often spectacular, the cut scenes are few, the variety of the landscape from desert, sea, jungle, plains, floating lands, futuristic city, dungeons, towns, temples ... it's got it all, the variety of characters is great (cept for this cunt called Ricky-a typical Jap character who is just a floating blob that's annoying)(seriously, why do they bother, this game doesn't need a 'comedy' character), the interplay between the characters is nice, and often gloriously subtle, etc.
Story-wise, it's all kicking off. The good guys live on the dead body of a giant monster that fought another giant monster to the death - both died. The bad guys live on the other giants corpse.
Where I'm at now: the good guys world is, somehow, resurrecting. The world will wake up and, presumably, epic catastrophic death for all the good guys. Ace. Also, a bit weird.
I doubt I'll be converted to the RPG genre but I certainly won't shy away from any more of these games if they're as good as this is. And running on ancient technology with a shitty resolution an' all.
The Wii finally has a game to get excited about. Shame it's dead already.