Why would you run? Y'know, besides being a little nancy boy, of course. Simple answer? Everything you do in the Alterworlds counts down on an ever-falling hourglass. Spend too much time there and it's back to the real world for you, and this includes the time spent during fights, so there's some strategy to employ. Luckily, if you can spank the enemy fast enough, you'll not only get out of the fight quickly, but you won't actually lose any time. That's a good, thing, since you're constantly pushing to get to whatever objective you've been assigned by the Awesome Power of the Bulletin Board.

So you finally decide to jump into a fight. Cool, dude, you're a scrapper, we get it. What's there once the game switches from the 3/4 isometric top-down view to the familiar side-angle battles will probably be familiar to all sixteen Atelier Iris fans. Basically battles are turn-based, with turns and pauses represented as cards at the top of the screen. The spare cards between icons for enemies and your party are important, because they're a visual representation of just how much time you have to totally beat the crap out of some cute (but totally evil) blob of goo. All of your attacks add to a meter that grants you the ability to use... well, uh, abilities, but it also adds to a Burst Gauge.

Let's tackle the Burst Gauge first. Bigger hits -- or more appropriately ones that deliver more hits per turn (like special attacks) -- fill the meter at the bottom of the screen faster. When it's full, all enemies are suddenly dropped into "Break" status, and all your attacks do a whole lot more damage. Normally, this would just mean whooping the shit out of enemies and then the fun would be over, since broken enemies can't attack, they can just suck up damage like a sponge. Ah, but there's some strategy here too. See, more hits equals more Burst Gauge Meter ticks, right? Right, so if you have attacks that do multiple hits and big damage, you can keep things going for quite a while longer. As an additional bonus, your special attacks meter is kicked up to nine slots.

Them thar slots actually come in handy, since all your special attacks -- y'know, the ones that do multiple hits and lotsa damage -- use up chunks of that meter, usually a couple points at a time. It's filled when you get hit or do big damage, thus it powers your ability to keep the Burst Attacks going, thus it behooves you to keep things going as long as possible, though it's more or less impossible to keep it going for ever. Balance! It also keeps you from using the word "behooves" around people too much, because that leads to getting punched in the face, and often.

While Burst orgies of beat-down happiness are fun on regular enemies, they're actually the key to beating up bosses in a timely manner. Remember, the clock is always ticking, and boss fights aren't exactly speedy affairs, so learning to stock up on special attacks (and remember, your Burst Gauge drops if you get smacked around) is the key to really working the battle system over. And oh, what a lovely battle system it is.

Then again, we've only played about a half-dozen hours of the game so far, so something could change. Given that we actually enjoyed Ar Tonelico, another Gust game that sported an interesting -- but ultimately shallow -- battle system, that may not matter terribly, but we don't want our genuinely excited impressions of the game now to be an indicator of how we'll feel 40 hours into the game. For now, though, things are looking up. Visually, the game is Gust's trademark mix of slightly meh sprites with some solid 3D visual effect, and NIS America's fantastic localization and voice work. So long as things hold up for the release, we could be looking at yet another game to keep the PS2 going strong for those of us that still cling to our JRPG hit machine.