As a longtime gamer, I place a real premium on originality. Folklore is definitely it's own thing; many aspects will remind you of other games, some parts have rarely if ever been done in other titles. There's nothing else exactly like it, and it works remarkably well for a total gameplay experiment so early on in a console generation. The vibe and feel of the game is tremendous: part Fable, part Nightmare Before Christmas, part murder mystery graphic novel. It's far from perfect, but the warts never really get in the way of having a good time.
Gameplay is key, and Folklore really shines here with some original ideas. At the core, it is a basic third person action game. Attacks however, are anything but standard: rather than having traditional skills and techniques that grow over time, the characters have dozens of possible attacks based on defeated enemies mapped to the four action buttons. The way it works for example is that you start with one basic melee enemy that the game kills for you. The soul (or Id, as they call it in-game) is absorbed, and your characters can use it to go after other enemy types. Other absorbed enemies can then be mapped onto other buttons so that their unique attacks can be used.
Over time, the true nature of the gameplay reveals itself as a puzzle beneath the overlay of third person action. All absorbed enemies have a particular elemental affiliation, and those become the keys to breaking down barriers to new areas to or being able to damage and capture even more creatures. These relationships are often revealed through storybook pages discovered throughout an area. You're never told explicitly what to do, rather they're presented as a series of pictures, and you draw your own conclusions. It plays and feels like a reasonably challenging action game, complete with targeting, strafing, dodging and so forth, but the puzzles and elemental relationships are at the heart of it.
The core gameplay was fantastic and really unique. There were a number of negatives, however: the game switches between characters and covers the same ground, which became repetitive after a while; there are fairly mundane RPG elements of gathering experience for your characters and powering up your attacks; the side quest system is more or less a waste of time. Not big quibbles, just missed opportunities.
The graphics and presentation are really excellent. The graphical fidelity is well behind modern standards, but the mood, variety, and some of the set pieces were really astonishing. You travel between a number of distinct realms, and each one just felt impressively unique. Every little detail seemed thought out and well conceived; while there were surely repeated textures and objects, I never noticed. The character and enemy designs were uniformly excellent. With around 100 different enemy types to capture, there was very little palette swapping and other typical developer laziness. All enemies were animated well and felt like they had their own personalities. The boss designs were impressively bizarre, some of them particularly creepy.
The story is told mostly through some cool comic book / graphic novel style cutscenes. It's fairly slow paced, but is even enough and picks up well at the end. While there are a few telegraphs, it is overall very smooth, stylish, and subtle. There are layered mysteries that play out from ancient history, recent history, and the present all at the same time. It became a little annoying / confusing swapping back and forth between characters and treading the same sequences, but overall I really enjoyed the dark story and the commentary on human nature and the afterlife. The narrative got a little heavy handed towards the end, but you can't have an RPG, particularly one coming out of Japan, without needing to save the world at some point.
The music was lacking in variety but was almost always excellent. It always captured the spirit and mood of different places and events vey well. Battle sequences had a real bombastic, brass heavy tone that was pretty cool and would fade in an out as you'd actually approach foes.
So that's a wrap. I figure that my play time was about 18-20 hours for the full narrative with a good bit of the side content. Overall I was very impressed with Folklore. Total gameplay experiments usually end up being garbage, but this one really came together nicely. The character swapping narrative wasn't my cup of tea among a variety of other quibbles, but nothing that would keep me from recommending this as a solid four star experience to anyone out there.