Fantastic game. Better than Lost Odyssey even. I'd tie it with Mass Effect at 8.5. A must play for JRPG fans, and the story isn't as bad as you guys made out, imo.

...well the story is, but the character development(what matters) is all there.

Could someone explain the battle system?

 I saw the commercials but the only times I actually saw them were on Adult Swim.  ToS is a shining example of how to advertised a game.

I've seen tons of advertisements on Teletoon, YTV, and several other places...

It is a fantastic game! It's gotten somewhat lost in the storm of awesome games for me, but I love the story, characters, art style, and battle system. It IS somewhat linear, but it's so well-paced that it doesn't really matter.

 It's a hybrid real time and turn based system:

 When a battle begins, each character's turn is ordered via speed/agility (or whatever stat it is), like any turn based game.

 When it's a players turn, they have a limited amount of time (that varies by party level, and items) to perform whatever actions - attacks, items, magic, ect. Once the time is used up (about 5seconds), the turn is over for that character, and it goes to the next character.

 When an enemy attacks, you have an active blocking system - by pressing the B button, you can guard against the attack, reducing the damage by 60-80%...Very helpful at mastering. 

Attacks are pretty much button mashing, usually followed by a special attack. As the game progresses, and you reach various chapters, you can increase your party level, which eventually allows you to chain together various player attacks, called "Harmony Chains"..When you attack an enemy, each succuessful hit builds up an "echo" meter, that allows for more damaging special attacks. Later on, if you build up enough echos, you can unleash ultra-powerful harmony chains that usually involve all 3 characters performing 2 special attacks each - doing upto 500,000 on one enemy. The hits are scored in the chains, and combos, so you can pretty much use a harmony chain every single attack later on in the game, making the game incredibly easy...I think I beat the last normal-game boss in 3 turns. 

It's a fun game but it has its fair share of problems.

The first thing is that it's just ridiculously easy. You eventually this one chick with a bow and she can just do everything by herself. She can kill most non-boss enemies in one turn, she can melee, she can range attack, and she can heal. She makes everyone else worthless.

Also, you get money in the game but it's just worthless. It may be worthwhile later in the game, I don't know because I got like 10 hours into it, but for those first 10 hours it's worthless because you never have a place to spend it. Also, you can make a stupid amount of money in the first hour by just spamming pictures of one of the bosses.

And the thing that finally made me stop the game - Fort Fermatta. This level is like a study on how not to build a level. I'll try to find my rant on it from when I was actually playing the game but that level was just one of the worst levels I've ever played in a game.

Other than that though, the game is beautiful and worth a look.

Thanks for the info, sounds like an interesting battle system, though if you can defeat the boss in 3 turns it does seem on the easy side. At least in FF XII it took some time even if I was never in any danger of dying

Well I found one of the things I wrote, but not much different then from what I said above.

About the battle system though-- it seems really interesting and deep at first at first but it's actually just a button masher.  Sure, you can do more with it but there's no reason to.  Just mashing the button works perfectly find and you can still kill just about every enemy in one round.

And still hate the chick with the bow.  She can kill anything and heal your entire party in a single round. 

You guys have got to be kidding right? ES is not better than LO, not even better than Blue Dragon.

The battle system is fun for about the first hour or two then it get really boring and repetitive. (This is because you fight the same enemies over and over with different colors shade on them). The story is a mess (if you can call it story). The characters started out interesting then they evolve into cardboard stand-in. There is really no sense of characters growth whatsoever. And if you make it to the end, you will sit through 45mins of gibberish and non-sense speech which seems like the dev. team themselves don't even know what the story was about.

However, the game do have some redeeming quality, the battle system is fun especially if you have another person play with you. (you can co-op battle with two other perons) I finished this game with the help from my kids and it's quite fun to pull off the combo and do giant damage with harmony chains. Graphics and musics are top quality and the game is really beautiful in both sight and sound.

It took me over 6 months to finally finish the games (and only because my kids keep bugging me because they want to see the end boss,oh let not get start on that...) In the end, even they got bored with the final dungeon and I was the one that finish off the games.

Yes the chick with bow (Viola) is pretty much make most combat easy mode. (though her healing is not quite enough for the end dungeon boss, and you need to use Polka) oh that's another the thing, Polka is the "man" character but we didn't used her at all (unless we had to) untill the final part of the game because the game is so unbalance.

If you find the game for sub $20.00 then pick it up, it will be nice for killing times here and there. But don't expect a masterpiece.

If you want real good old fashion JRPG, try Lost Oddyssey or even Blue Dragon.