Holy crap! Why didn't someone tell me about this game sooner!?!

At some point I overheard someone saying this was a good game, so I picked it up and had it on my shelf for some time. I had absolutely no idea what the game might be about; all I knew about it was the cover. I finally got around to playing it last weekend, and it only took a couple minutes to realize this was a winner. The rest of the game did nothing but reaffirm this notion over and over and over again.

This is the best game I've played since Xenogears, and I'm not even sure how to compare it with Xenogears. Xenogears was all story whereas this game does a huge range of things and does them all well.

Things this game has:

• Story: Intriguing, engaging, emotional, and powerful, yet the dialog never gets in the way or becomes boring or annoying. Most of it is voice acted, and pretty well.

• Puzzles: Most of the gameplay takes the form of Nintendo-adventure-game-style puzzles, but unlike Zelda they move very fast. A lot of the puzzles involve sneaking around, trying to accomplish things without being seen, which is incredibly fun.

• Action: The main character fights with a staff. Fights often involve her beating down a swarm of enemies. The controls are extremely intuitive; it's easy to make her look like Neo fighting the army of Agent Smiths. Which is freeking awesome.

• Varied gameplay: In addition to puzzles and fights, there are several mini-games, including various forms of vehicle-based gameplay. All of them are done extremely well. Usually mini-games have crappy controls because the game devs don't spend much time on them, but this game's mini-games were all perfectly polished. I actually liked the racing scenes better than many actual racing games.

• Directed treasure hunts: I hate treasure hunts... unless they are directed, e.g. by marking the general locations of treasures on a map. Then I think they're lots of fun. This game is full of interesting side-quests, all of which were easy to find by just going for the marked spots on the map.

• Originality: The game is set in its own detailed world. Everything is original; nothing is borrowed.

• Art and Music: The art style is not as unique as Wind Waker or Okami, but is still interesting and generally pretty. The music integrates well with the gameplay and there are even a couple of very memorable pieces.

Basically they mixed together a lot of things, nailed them all, and integrated them beautifully.

The game only took me 13 hours or so, and I pretty much cleared out all of the side quests. I wish it were longer, but apparently a sequel is coming soon!