While Jude and Arnaud are racing back toward the village, the game happily throws some basic enemies at you, slowly working you into the battle system. It seems like a fairly standard setup at first; seven hexagonal spaces appear, and normal attacks can only be used against enemies in adjacent hexes. You can move to another hex – including one occupied by an ally -- but then you forfeit that turn, and if you are in the same hex as an ally, both of you can be hit with the same attack. The same works in reverse, of course, and often enemies will bunch up a bit into the same hex, making for some easy double damage.

The HEX System isn’t just some arbitrary set of guidelines for movement and attacks, though. A ton of effort went into crafting skills (Original Skills) that the characters learn that influence their attack range, how much they can move, or even if they can move and still attack. When a battle starts, three elements called ley points are randomly chosen and scattered around the edge of the field. These hexes are imbued with fire, water, wind or earth, and they in turn influence what kinds of attacks can be used.

For example, Yulie can summon elemental monsters to attack all enemies on the screen, but what type she calls forth – complete with a pre-rendered summon cinema that you can thankfully skip – depends on the hex color. If she’s not on a colored hex, she performs a summon that heals the whole party. The ley points oppose one another, and since they’re chosen randomly, you can use this to an advantage if an enemy, say, crosses onto a fire LP and you use someone’s water attacks.

These special attacks are directly linked to the Force Gauge on the right side of the screen that fills as you attack or take hits. Once it hits a quarter full, a section is locked in, allowing any character to perform a force attack, which then chews up that quarter and resets the meter to zero. These attacks are different from the Original Skills that consume MP, and often times they affect more enemies and deal far more damage than OS.

Experience, too, is handled in a very cool way. All the characters that participate in the battle get a baseline amount of exp per fight, even if they don't actually participate. If they do participate, either by making the killing blow on an enemy or dodging an incoming attack, it adds a small multiplier to the total amount of experience gained.

This makes for a fantastic way to build up characters that are lagging due to being killed. Simply weaken enemies and then have that lagging character make the final hit. Since there aren't really any "weak" characters (even magic users like Yulie are great at attacking most enemies), the battles are incredibly quick yet still strategic. It should also be noted that your health does refill completely after every battle, which takes some of the post-fight tedium of refilling everyone's HP and juggling healing items or spells)

The skills themselves are added and upgraded via the skills menu using points you’ll earn every time a character levels up. Most early skills only take a few points, but they scale up as you progress. The same screen not only lets you pick what skills to learn, but allows you to shift the ratio of HP to MP at any time, giving your fighters more health or magic at the expense of the other. The creativity, though, in what the developers built into the game is what’s so intoxicating. Bonuses like being able to move and attack in the same turn or jump to any hex, taking all the people in the same hex with you, are just invaluable and it makes leveling incredibly addictive.

There’s a kind of refinement in the way the game presents things, and it’s not just the fact that it all runs as a silky smooth 60 frames – something that still throws us when we boot up the game after long stretches with other current RPGs. It’s in the way the dialogue with every single character in the game is met with a gorgeous high-res picture of the person – and so far no two have been even remotely similar – or the way multi-person conversations with the party have the borders between characters flipping, dividing, branching out and pulling back together all the time.

A perfect example of this refined presentation is in the way Jude interacts with the world. When you’re not fighting (and encounters are indeed random, for those wondering; they crash into the game by shattering the screen into tons of little rectangles), actually moving around is a simple affair filled with plenty of double-jumps. It almost feels like a platformer, but there are handy little indicators in the form of color arrows to tell you what screen you just came from, which screens are the exits and which ones you’ve never been to yet. It’s such a small thing, but it helps immensely.

Jude can also tap something called an Accelerator that’s his innate ability to slow the flow of time around him. This not only opens up a myriad of puzzle opportunities (we’ve seen a couple now that involved invisible bridges becoming solid and collapsing bridges that can be crossed), but highlights things like chests and bonus items that extend the amount of time he can stay sped up or add some cash to his pockets.

It’s hard to put into words how excited we are for this game. Previews are supposed to be objective, never straying too far into the realm of praise or admonishment, but it’s just impossible when we see how well the translation and the new direction for the series has come together. XSEED has done a phenomenal job in picking this as their first release, and there’s little doubt in our minds that this will be one of the best RPGs to hit the PS2 in 2006.