My review of the US release holds for this, the Japanese, release. It's realistically a 4-6 hour game, even on a first time play. If you know exactly who to talk to and the correct paths in the dungeons, I'm guessing it can be completed in 3 hours or less.
The biggest change to the US release, gameplay-wise, is the removal of the Warp spell, which warps you back to the entrance of the dungeon you're in. Working Designs also tweaked the enemy stats, with the most notable being two bosses: Garuda (Guruda in the US release), which has 6x the HP in the US release; and the end boss, which has 2x the HP in the US release. What really makes the end boss more difficult in the US release is that in the Jpn release, it does almost no damage if you're level-maxed and have the best equipment, both of which are easy to accomplish. I haven't machine translated (or looked up a non-WD translation) it yet, outside of the place names. Almost all of the location names were changed, as all the locations, except the starting town, are real world locations. WD also changed the menu item "DRUG" to "TONIC".
The rest of the game seems to be about the same level of difficulty as the US release, which is rather low, but those two bosses are enough to knock my rating down a tad from the US release. The cutscene dialog is much easier to hear in the Jpn release, though. Like Cosmic Fantasy 2, the save file can be loaded in either version, as it
