So purdy....

Wow, this is really the first next gen artistic looking game that I have played so far and it looks incredible! All the previous 360 games I've played were all gritty and trying to be more or less photo realistic (Crackdown was a little stylized but not too much). while a lot of my Wii games so far had stylized looks the system didn't have the power to fully pull them off and even then only in SD. This game though looks like an amine come to life, with some of the best cell-shading I have ever seen and 3D environments that look hand painted, and it's all rendered in real time. Even on just the title screen I saw the main character and his dog and thought "that has to be pre-rendered" and then they moved when I pressed start and I realized it wasn't. Then once the game started the character walked out of the house and you see the street sprawling back like a painted back drop, but as soon as I moved I realized it was 3D models.

The character personalities and voice work is just as good as in ToS, if not better, and it really feels like a true next gen sequel to it ( even though there were 2 PS2 games released between them and 2 others not translated) with the same feel of story and combat and art. So much so that when Estelle (a girl you team u with early on) says some of her post battle lines I'm reminded of the line from ToS "Uh... you're becoming more like Lloyd, aren't you? ".

The plot so far hasn't really started since I'm only a couple hours in, but the setting is that the world is over over run with monsters of various sizes and the only thing keeping people save are magical orbs that do everything from putting barriers around cities to controlling machines, to giving people magical powers. The main character Yuri lives in the slums of a big city and one day the orb that powers the water supply is stolen, so he goes off on a quest to get it back. Along the way he meets a girl named Estelle who's been always sheltered by palace life but now has to leave to track down a friend of Yuri who's life is in danger. So the point I'm at now they just barely left the city and are now in the world map.