I got it right before my vacation ended, and have been playing it off and on. It definitely has a feel like an old school JRPG, although it has voice acting... but you can turn the voice acting off, which I did.

I think the characters are pretty good. They each have their own story, and are fairly well fleshed out. They only really get progression when you're playing their part of the story, though. I've been playing for 20+ hours or so now, and I've gotten through the first chapter of each character, and chapter 2 of 2. It seems like you gotta do some grinding in this game, and the grinding takes a really long time, because you can't really one hit kill anything until you're like 15+ levels where you you're suggested to be in a given area. And then the boss battles take FOREVER to get through, seemingly regardless of how much you've grinded beforehand. The last one I did took a half hour. I was never in danger of losing. It just took for freaking ever.

So yeah. Has a good feel, but is SLOW.