Well, I'm willing to try it out, but the reviews generally pan the game. I'm afraid this game might suffer the same fate as Last Rebellion, another low budget game published by NIS America that even they were quite ashamed of it and swept it under a rug (BTW, I thoroughly enjoyed Last Rebellion, since I didn't expect much going into it, though yes it's not what you would expect in terms of quality from a PS3 HD JRPG.).
You know what's the best "HD Anime" JRPG? Ni No Kuni, and I am not alone in praising it -- it has been the best JRPG on the PS3 since... since there have been JRPGs on the PS3. (Of course there was Valkyria Chronicles and Resonance of Fate but they're more like tactical games. RoF technically was a JRPG but its limited commercial success showed that few people appreciated its ultra-hard default setting that required you be a masochist to play it. I myself had to grind for 115 hours up to level 115 just to beat the thing.)
So Ni No Kuni is successful because it had the budget and foresight to push through with its vision. Tokitowa (in Japan at least) -- not so, because as the reviewer said, it felt like an Alpha.
Anyway, the reason I like to keep tabs on third party Japanese games on the lower end of the budget spectrum is because if you cut their development budget any further, they would be making visual novels. In my opinion, VNs are the lowest budget rung Japanese developers typically inhabit, and the more successful they are (if they aren't VN specialists), the more they branch out into more gameplay such as RPGs.
The way Tokitowa was made reminded me of how I was a game-maker in the past... full of "innovative" ideas but without enough budget (nor effort) to fully flush them out.
I should also mention, the Nintendo 3DS with all its eshop releases sure is positioning itself as the haven for small cheap quirky third party Japanese games. I've been diligently studying the game offerings trying to find out how these games... made on a shoestring budget... still are engaging enough to be able to command higher price tags compared to free-to-play celphone offerings. By all intents and purposes they are cheap to make, and yet they seem to provide value.
Providing that perceived value is the only way I'd survive as a game maker if I seriously pursue continuing to make games past completing the current projects. There is no way I'd want to design microtransaction or gambling mechanics. The only thing I can provide... coming from a VN background... are interesting characters, stories, explorable gameworld.
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