Explore, fight, repeat...

Spent about an hour and a half playing, and most of that was just trying to get to a save point.

I found the forest temple easy enough, but half way through there was a large puzzle section where you had to pick the right path, guess wrong and you get sent to the start of the puzzle. Since the area has the same ridiculous random encounter rate as the rest of the game, going back to the start means almost a dozen more tedious fights with weak monsters. This makes a 15 minute segment in a reasonable game take 45 minuets!

My view so far:
-The plot is simpler than FF1 (evil empire needs 6 magic crystals to take over the world, just for the sake of being evil).
-The characters are cliche (super optimistic hero, spunky friend, reserved "princess", gruff old timer, and various stock villains).
-The combat has no innovation over 16 bit JRPGs.
-Boss battles come in clusters and just drag on.
-Constant random encounters bog down any exploration.
-The graphics look more like it was made for the Saturn than the Dreamcast.

The game needs to do something interesting soon or else this will be a long play through...