I wanna reply too. =P
1) You play as the reincarnation of the Japanese Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, and are charged with defeating the eight headed demon Orochi, who Amaterasu had fought and defeated in her pervious incarnation one hundred years ago.
That’s the basic premise. The storyline unfolds and expands in the same way if you were watching several seasons of an anime series, and has multiple actual linear storylines that tie in a bigger arch.
An general theme I thought made the game better was you’re playing as a God, in a time in which most people have lost faith in gods due to blight upon their land. In addition to slaying evil, you can inspire faith in people with much smaller things. There’s a point early in the game where you use your power to make the sun come out to help an old woman dry her clothes faster, and feeding the various animals spread across the land restores faith. (Which acts as the games form of XP)
2) Most of the gameplay is the standard adventure affair. You fight monsters, collect items and money, solve puzzles, help people with their problems, fight bosses, and get more powerful, yada yada.
The big standout gameplay wise is the Celestial Brushstrokes. As the sun goddess Amaterasu you can use the brushstrokes to “paint” on reality. When you use them, it freezes the actual game action. You can adjust you camera however you wish, and you use a cursor to draw symbols on the picture. You gain more brushstrokes and gain a wider variety of things to do; which are used from puzzle solving to combat. You draw a circle in the sky; you make the Sun come out. You draw a crescent, and the moon rises and the night falls. As you gain more complex strokes this general makes you (or me at the very least) very empowered as you can do a great deal in any given situation.
