While the back of the jewel case touts it as a "Real Action RPG", there is nothing RPG-ish about this game -- unless you call being able to use magic enough to qualify as an RPG. It's basically a puzzle game with some action. The only game I've played that is somewhat similar is ICO (PS2).
You play as a princess who got abducted and brought to a castle in the middle of the sea where a demon god had been sealed away long ago. She is to be a sacrifice to resurrect the demon god. The king sent an army to rescue her, but they all got wiped out with the leader of the army dying in a final battle against the resurrected demon god. The game opens with the hero dealing the deathblow to the demon god and him succumbing to his wounds immediately after. For some reason, this breaks the chains that were holding her. With no one to rescue the princess, she grabs the hero's sword and starts to escape the castle.
The game is broken into about a half dozen areas, such as the castle, demon god's temple, catacombs, etc. One really nice thing about the game is it employs an auto-save feature, where it appears to save after every screen transition. So, if you die, you can reload from that screen. You can also reload at the beginning of any area you have cleared. The areas require you to simply find the path to the next area, with maybe one or two contraptions to activate in order to open op the path. There are monsters along the way to fight, but you don't have to fight any of them, except what could be called bosses at the end of the final two areas in order to activate what's needed to move to the next area, plus the end boss.
The princess can cast two spells, a resurrection spell and a fire spell. The resurrection spell allows you to revive some of the monsters you defeat (if the monster doesn't disappear when killed, it can be revived) to fight alongside you. With how few enemies there are in the game, and with how pathetically easy they are to defeat, this is basically a useless spell. In order to use the fire spell, there has to be fire on-screen to act as a catalyst to cast it. I don't know if you can actually attack monsters with it, as there usually aren't any where you can cast it, and while you can control where the fire dragon that is the spell goes, it's pretty hard to do so. It's mostly used to burn down doors.
For what really dragged the game down for me:
The game is entirely in the rotated 45 degrees view, meaning you always have to move diagonally, which is not pulled off well with the controller.
There are several places where there is some really bad slowdown, especially in the abandoned mine with all the moving conveyor belts.
I had many freezes in screen transitions, where it would take 15 or so seconds to load up the next screen (it normally takes about 1-2 seconds), with a couple times where it completely crashed after about 30 seconds in a screen transition, requiring a hard reset of the console. Thankfully, with the auto-save feature, you can get right back to where you were in about 10 seconds after powering the console off and on.
The enemies are pathetically easy, including the end boss, making fighting them simply a waste of time.
It has one of those really annoying areas with a ton of teleporters.
There is next to no language barrier, as there are only a few cutscenes with text, as well as a bit of text at the beginning of the game’s intro.
Considering it took me about 4.5 hrs to beat (I then replayed it again to record it and it took me just under 1 hr to beat), I would not have been too pleased if I bought this when it was released and paid full price.
