Man, I so wish I could've played this game when I was 12 years old. Unfortunately I lived in the sticks and didn't even know what kinds of games were available for PS1.
I'm going through the game now, and while the setting and plot are interesting (and those animated cutscenes would've blown my mind back then), everything related to the gameplay is so aggressively shallow that it's difficult to not grow bored despite the intrigue... As a kid I didn't have any standards and would've just happily mashed my way through the game while being invested in the story, but now this is really difficult to endure when the game part falls so flat.