Put another couple hours into Breath of Fire IV and it's pretty great. The graphics are pretty good for the time, with lots of nice and detailed character animations. The music is pretty great too. I like how the front and back lines are handled in your party. It's nice that swapping out characters doesn't waste a turn, and it's also nice that characters in the back can also temporarily regain AP for use in that battle. The minigames aren't annoying (not yet at least), and are actually kinda nice to break things up every now and again. The enemy encounter rate isn't too high, nor is it too low as I haven't needed to level grind at all yet. Because of this, the game keeps good pace which also helps keep me interested in playing more.
My only complaints are that the controls for moving your characters around feel a little stiff and are a kinda annoying. Because you need to press two buttons to move diagonally through the isometric view outside of battle, I often find myself walking into walls instead of through doors or up ladders like I intended to. It would've been nice if it only took one button to move diagonally, like your cursor in Disgaea, where down on the directional pad moves your cursor down and to the right. The isometric view also causes some problems, where you need to adjust your view often to see around obstacles. That's more of an annoyance than anything.
The good more than outweighs the annoying, and my minor complaints aren't going to stop me from enjoying the game.
