Fun battles and great anime presentation make for a worthwhile, but not superb, experience.
You are most often interacting with 2D anime scenes and character portraits with moving mouths and blinking eyes. You choose some of your dialogue options and perform timed button presses to move the story along and affect your relationship with the different characters.
Occasionally you will have a little free roam to go to different location via a map with the different city sections and are then able to move around in 3D in each of the sections. This surely helps make you feel like you are actually playing a game and not simply a choose your own adventure visual novel. However, the change between the anime style 2D graphics and the 3D graphics is a little off putting, but no big deal.
The third act will generally involve a turn based strategy battle. The battles also take place in simple 3D environments. The battles seem to usually have two sections, a ground section and an air section. The battles are enjoyable and rewarding. For me, this is where the game shined the best. The battle play out in a typical grid based format, while actually being grid free. That's right, you actually move your character around in free movement, but they are still limits on distance and actions able to be performed based on their meter. You have access to regular attacks, super moves, and link attacks with other characters.
There is no leveling of stats, which have been very welcome had there been more emphasis on the battles. Instead, your interactions with the characters during the story that effect their relationships with you also give them stat bonuses during the battles based on how happy they may be with you.
The story and characters aren't anything too special, but interesting enough to make you want to play through to the end. Luckily, the game is pretty short, but with this style of gameplay, you won't want to be picking dialogue options for too long anyways. Again, the battles were my favorite part of the game and I just wish there was more of them and that they were fleshed out a little better. Overall, fans of anime should find this game well worth their time. But turn based strategy fans should also give the game a look.