This one was bit of a bummer, because there's a pretty nice SRPG core here, but the pacing just kind of kills it. I've gotten like 5 hours in, and a bunch of the battles end up feeling very samey (bar one escape map that was kind of neat).

This feels compounded on with how slow the battles are. Waiting for each enemy to cast their little buffs on the side and such gets old pretty quick. Especially in the case where the buffs are an apparently uncapped amount of an extra magic health bar to whittle away at.

This game's main strengths are mainly in its foundation. The combo system, where your melee units get to join in on attacking when someone else hits adjacent foes to them, is fun to pull off and helps give them an edge over the ranged units. There's plenty of skills and buffs to try and give to your allies as well, especially since you get access to most of the tricks of your enemies by summoning them. The element system was fun enough too.

I also think this game approaches worldbuilding well enough. It's got a bunch of fantasy species and locales, and it avoids the usual pitfalls of dumping fifty proper nouns for you to memorize. I think anchoring the different species with allies turned recruitable characters you fight alongside in some story sequences helps with that.

Overall, this was kind of fun, but the process of spending 50 minutes or so on one quest, with a large amount of that just being waiting for the enemies to get through their turn, got stale pretty quick. It's better in small doses, but it seems like there's a lot of content, so it feels like it's hard to get through it all that slowly. There's a game I like here, but it doesn't feel particularly worth it to play to that point.

Reviewed on Aug 26, 2022


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