After 20+ hours of playing this, it's good, not great and slowly losing my interest.
I have to admit that I'm not always the biggest fan of mash-ups, but this seems to be the lesser of evils as far as that goes. You start with 2 characters, and slowly make your way up to over a dozen, however you can only use four at a time, and that's probably my biggest beef with this game. In battle, you are given from 1 to 4 main attacks based on what weapon your character has, and each character also has EX skills, think of them as limit breaks. There seems to be room for up to 3 EX skills per character, however most of my characters are level 25+ and haven't gotten any different ones, which is extremely lame, and I can't figure out how to get more.
Which leads me to the whole learning curve thing. In your first battle, you're given a barebones tutorial and you're more or less on your own from there. And every single battle you get into from there until about 10 hours in could result in instant death for your party, so be cautious.
Oh, and another aggravation.....you can't just up and buy new weapons and armor, you either have to find them, or upgrade the ones you have, or synthesize one out of raw materials that are either found or made from max-upgrading a weapon or armor, but you lose that weapon or armor if you do that....neat. Oh, but of course once you synth it THEN you can buy it...I thought that was pretty pointless too.
And of course, the story is run-of-the-mill drivel. English voice acting is so-so, but you can tell the same guy is voicing at least 5 different people. The story is that apparently people from 5 worlds were thrown onto this single world that's held together by captured souls from each world. These three little gender-ambiguous wizard children apparently created this world for reasons that escape me, and they have 13 somewhat evil people trying to stop your ever-growing crew from releasing the souls that bind this world together....or something like that. Lots of plot devices that make no sense to anyone except the hardest of the hardcore anime fans.
And this is only a personal opinion, but in this gaming generation I think it's insulting to have character stills pop in and out to speak in the foreground. I like to think the PS3 is a little more evolved than that, but hey, that's just me, as I do see the old-school appeal of 2D RPGs. But there is slowdown in bigger battles, which to me is absolutely inexcuseable. 2D sprites with flat-textured backgrounds experiencing slowdown on a PS3 is a joke. While the slowdown is pretty minimal, my main point is that there should be NONE whatsoever.
The overcrowding of charcaters in this game makes it hard to build up an appreciation for any of them. They all level up after battles, but the ones in battle will get more exp. You'll find yourself using a certain set of characters, only to get into a boss battle that requires you to use a character you don't use.
In the end, while the battle gameplay is good, it gets old far before the end of the game, and the story is extremely hard to care about at all. The gameplay alone got me along for a good 20+ hours, but then I just started not caring. The story is pointless, and after the gameplay gets old, there's nothing left for me to put effort into. Keeping your characters equipped with good weaponry and armor alone would take hours of me upgrading other weapons and creating materials to make better weapons.
This game does take a lot of time and effort, and to the right people, this can be very rewarding. As for me, I have a full-time job and no longer have dozens of hours a week to put into a game like this, especially since it has lost my interest, and I'm pretty into JRPGs.
My final thoughts are that if you're REALLY into anime, and REALLY into anime stories that require little thought and tons of pointless dialogue, then this game is right up your alley. As for me, I think I'll go another round of some freshly-downloaded FF7. I'm keeping the game, as it has that quality that says "10 years from now, this rare game'll be 100 bucks on eBay."