If you buy Minimae with the assumption that it will be just like your favorite 80s or early 90s RPG, you are going to be let down. Youll find that the battle and item systems are bare-bones, and there is no magic system at all. You can consider this a failure or a feature, depending on whether you consider the game an attempt to completely recreate the feel of a retro RPG or an attempt to create a new kind of game that is an homage to retro RPGs. I prefer to view it as the latter.
The exploration aspect of the game is very strong. There is a huge overworld to explore, containing a number of towns, caves, and invisible piles of gold. The game keeps track of how many piles of gold you have found, and they are hidden on suspicious-looking tiles (such as a tile of grassland surrounded by forest), so hunting for all of these can be an entertaining exercise. Inside towns, there are sometimes hidden pathways, leading to NPCs and --in one case-- a minigame.
Speaking of NPCs, I found the NPCs lines quite entertaining (ocassionally hilarious -- I literally laughed aloud at a number of them). You seem to have at least one of every kind of NPC here: the plot dispenser, the instruction manual, the Engrish guy, Sir Talks a Lot, the inside joke, and --of course-- the guy whose line has nothing to do with anything...among others.
The music is excellent. The graphics are, for the most part, very good; however, some of the enemy sprites look like they are a completely different style from each other and the rest of the game. The basic controls are excellent, though some of the more complex controls added in v1.2 are not explained in-game (a little TOO retro for me!) The auto-save feature is a spot-on insertion of modernity.