Shining in the Darkness

The Good
Ok so the game's "overworld" is micro-sized. There are exactly 3 places to go to!!! The castle, the town and the labyrinth. BUT the labyrinth is HUGE. Multi-leveled, underground and overground. And the town and castle, small as they are, are fun to revisit to see if the people have something new to say, something new to sell or if there's been some other change. In fact, I think the "socializing" i.e the game's story, told through the characters you meet (there is no narrating, I don't believe) is the best part of the game. I think the characters and the English translation of the script is great. Darksol (Mephisto in the Japanese) is a great villain with lots of humorous arrogance and dramatic language, especially when you fight him at the end. There's a strong dose of family humor running through the story.

As for the first-person, dungeon crawling with turned-based battles (your party of 3 against parties of monsters), well admittedly you need quite a bit of patience to cope with the repetition, but I think that the finding entrances/exits, learning strategies, leveling up, earning and equipping is fun, helped by the nice graphics and animation and great music by Masahiko Yoshimura.

The Bad
As I said the game requires a lot of patience. The dungeons are very long and repetitive. Of course the game is like a modernization of early American RPGs like Akalabeth: World of Doom and Wizardry, with most of the game being in a dungeon, with returns to a castle or village to recover. Many people loved those sorts of games of course, despite that many would've found them unbearably boring. I think that Shining in the Darkness fixes some of the problems with those early RPGs (while no doubt displeasing fans of those RPGs), but it still heavily tests the patience of someone like myself, who I still consider to be a non-RPGer at heart.

The Bottom Line
I think it's great for people who like a good, anime-style story and also like a bit of old-fashioned RPG dungeon crawling, leveling, and equipping.