I was a little hesitant about this one since it didn't seem particularly well received in Japan, but Duomazov gave it pretty glowing praise and they didn't steer me wrong about Tenshi no Uta or Anearth. Anyway, the introductory bits are pretty standard -- you start off playing as a girl waking up on her 16th birthday. She's tasked with going to a nearby shrine and trying to wake up a legendary hero who'd been locked in stone after sealing away some demon a thousand years ago. Naturally, she's the chosen one and wakes up the hero. The bad guys immediately sense this, raid the girl's town, and kidnap her parents.
Naturally she sets off to save them!
... And promptly gets kidnapped herself, meaning you get to play as the legendary hero.
Who's like eight because he didn't really come back right. Erm... Anyway, he heads south to try to find help, promptly gets knocked out when some slime thing lands on him, and is awakened by a princess, and her two companions, and elf and a robotic centaur guy name (who has a brother named Sadness). There are some other fun characters in Aleph Base, such as Nick Tesla, a bird guy who's trying to install a railgun on the roof of the fortress, Mobile Monroe, the newscaster with a marked lack of regard for personal safety, and Misinformation Bobby, who doesn't give good information.
Very Phantasy Star-ish in style, but the battles are really fast, the dungeons are more reasonable, you have a run button which *really makes you move fast,* and there's this interesting magic system where you get a kind of secondary currency from killing enemies that works like shared party MP. Spells so far are all in the 100-200 MP range, and you get about 170MP per battle so far, so you have plenty of room to use magic fairly freely, which is refreshing.
Also there's voiced party chat, which is nice.