Threads of Fate always remains a basically cheerful affair, though. It's bright, friendly, colorful, welcoming - there's a fellow in a big puffy star suit running around, for goodness' sake, and he's one of the bad guys, at least for a little while. Many of Brave Fencer's mainly Gouraud-shaded polygons have been upgraded to texture maps, adding a new level of detail to characters like the Doll Master. The worlds and backgrounds are often not all that impressive, especially in comparison to the 3D realms of Vagrant Story and Metal Gear Solid, but the characters hold your focus well enough on their own. There are some very nice monster designs as well, from the nippy little Pollywogs to gigantic supernatural bosses.
Prominent characters have their own voices, to a degree, and their dialogue is always authentic.
Threads of Fate isn't an extremely deep game. Neither it nor Legend of Mana are the successor to Secret of Mana that many action-RPG fans have been hoping for this year. It's fairly easy, especially due to the forgiving continue system - you gather coins throughout your quest that let you restart very near where you died, and I never ran low at any time. It takes place in a relatively small world, centered around the single town of Carona. There's no overworld map to explore between dungeon crawls, not near as much of that epic globe-trotting feel, and each quest isn't unusually long.