Everything was going so well ...

It is necessary to temper the enthusiasm of everyone, because if a lot of things in this game are exceptional (especially music), the story is fairly simplistic, and without spoiler second part of the game is absolutely outrageous in terms of game design. Even if the story warrants it (and still do), that's not a reason to spoil much the player experience. Dungeons are also extremely bland or laborious for some and unfortunately far below the graphic quality of various places traversed (probably a matter of budget and space on the cartridge). Finally several translation problems in the menus come tarnish the experience (description of objects & erroneous skills, be sure to press X for a complete description which is often different).

All this does not make it a bad game but I think we should take a step back although RPG of this caliber are rare.

A quick summary of the good and bad points:

The pros:

- The fantastic music, written by Revo, the composer of the Japanese symphonic metal group Sound Horizon. For me the best OST ever written for a game, just ahead Baten Kaitos.
- The graphics out dungeons, in the tradition of SaGa Frontier 2 or Legend of Mana, kinds of beautiful watercolors enhanced by 3D.
- The job system, further improved compared to Final Fantasy V, comprehensive and highly scalable.
- The French translation which is a real location, with expressions homegrown, despite errors in the descriptions of objects / skills (eg the Growth Egg).
- The Brave / Default system that provides combat tension lot.
- Full setting which allows to adapt the game to his expectations (setting random encounters, difficulty, all changeable on the fly and not early in the game like Persona 4 for example).
- The story as a whole.
- The humor of some skits, and many jokes below the belt Ringabell.
- The reconstruction of Norende is a nice and well taking thread unfortunately ended too quickly.

The -:

- The second part of the story prohibitive (I forced myself while previously I hung a lot).
- The map of the world quite unreadable (a simple zoom would have been nice).
- Design dungeons uninspired, with sometimes painful mechanisms.
- Translations of blunders in the menus.

This should not prevent you from buying the game (even if only to encourage Nintendo to keep the location of niche games), but know that this is not the perfect RPG that some have. This is a welcome return to the sources, but not flawless.