Overall the system is interesting and enticing - it's a good redesing on the Exalted system while keeping the flavor of Creation intact.

However, this book attempts to cram WAY too much information into a single book. At 700 pages, it is massive and unwieldy to use during actual game play. Plus, in trying to cram so much information into the book, a LOT of details are missing and the examples (of Artifacts, Evocations, Hearthstones, especially) end up severely lacking.

This book should have been broken into two - a Players' Guide and a Storytellers' Guide. Each would have ended up slightly larger than half of the current book, but could have included a lot of information that seems missing from the current incarnation. At the same time, breaking up the material in this manner would have allowed the average player to not have to slog through pages upon pages of rules related to environmental hazards, and other such rules that only apply in specific situations, and the SToryteller could have had more information such as actual rules for applying poison to weapons, more than a scant handful of sample poisons, toxins and diseases, more sample Artifacts and Evocations, and potentially actual rules for creating Evocations for artifacts other than the specific few samples given.

Overall I feel that the system and the world is intact - which is a good thing - but the execution of this first offering in the 3rd Edition line of Exalted is sorely lacking.