cute game. the style and graphics are great, not to mention the music. the combat is kind of a hard sell in my opinion and i can see why people might not stick to the game because of that. for one, it takes you a pretty long time for you to be able to capture monsters in this monster collecting rpg, so your starting team across multiple playthroughs is pretty samey until about an hour or two into the adventure (!). second, the combat feels kind slow, and once you gain more party members, it's more of a battle of making sure to keep them alive during boss encounters rather than fighting the actual boss, because i found that before you get a command to make everyone defend, none of your party members have any semblance of self-preservation.
i shelved the game during the final boss encounter due to another issue i have with the game. now, i might have missed this (but i feel like this should not be a thing that is missable), but i don't think there is a spell or item that lets you leave a dungeon. i'm at the end of the long ass final dungeon, lose because of the problems with the combat (the sluggish movement and speed of doing actions and suicidal teammates, felt more unfair than challenging), so i want to exit the dungeon to use all the money i got cutting through the dungeon to upgrade equipment and restock items, but i can't without manually going back through the dungeon and THEN doing it all over again. uh... yeah...
so, my plans to return and finish the game will be when i mentally prepare myself to do that, but i feel like it shouldn't be this way. unfortunate...
still, if it werent for stuff like that that makes playing the game kind of tedious, i'd love this game a lot more. i really like the story and characters and the monsters are super cute :,)

considering i am not a massive rpg person, i really enjoyed the gameplay of this. the fast paced combat keeps you on your feet but also allows you to plan out your next move and assess what the enemies are doing. the story is also really solid, no spoilers but i cried in the first 30 minutes. the characters are really likeable and interesting (mr drippy is a real one). the ghibli animated cutscenes are absolutely breathtaking, each time one came on i was transfixed by the gorgeous hand draw animation. only reason im shelving for the time being is i like to play it with my partner (hi lyd !! <3) and we just havent played it recently. will pick this back up in the near future for sure though.