when tales started feeling more tales. though the whole evasion mechanic where some enemies just super armor through your moves randomly still exists at this point, so it is impossible to get through this game without getting hit in the middle of your own artes as an enemy decides "it's my turn" by "evading" something you do and hitting you with an attack that has virtually no startup (or literally no startup in some cases). regardless, still fun. The English dub sounds endearingly cheesy and is one of my favorite parts of the game.

needs polish (enemies sometimes throw projectiles before they even show up on screen once, food doesn't always render on top of everything else, doing a running jump fails and comes out as a roll as if I'd instantly landed half the time for me, other minor gripes) but the design choices are at odds with what I want out of the game in the first place so even if they were fixed I don't think I'd add much more than .5 to my rating. I really do not like that special moves can't be used unless full, meaning you have to commit to using them only when you're planning to go in and kill something and limiting the game's sauce potential, and I really do not like that TAGGING doesn't have a separate cooldown timer either. I could go on about other small issues but when it comes down to it the meter only being usable when full is the main thing that makes me not want to play anymore because I'm hindered from trying to figure out what impractical combos I can do during a run

edit: docked another .5 because the game literally refused to let me revive despite having 4x the needed money

judith has no god damn business having that much sauce in a game with some of the clunkiest air movement lmao. god I love this game's combat/combo system so much. some people act like it's so rigid without AC/CC because they think the basic "normal attack, base arte, arcane arte" structure is really all there is to it, but the real fun is exploring all the exceptions and how you can make those things outside the "rules" connect even without ever touching overlimit. man I love this game
https://youtu.be/EjdTbAWik2o

the combat definitely lives up to what I was expecting but the second I have to leave the training room and farm my enjoyment drops.

I love the hell out of fairy bloom freesia and it makes it really painful to have anything bad to say about this game after being hyped about it since its announcement, but the RPG elements are just straight up ruining the game for me. after about nearly 20 hours of playtime I got tired of the tedious farming routine, the night/day cycle, and the way stats work in this game as opposed to the way they do in fairy bloom freesia.

the enemies getting stronger during the night to the point of reducing my damage down to or near single digits earlier in the game was a frustrating time limit, even if you can go back to earlier stages you still have to leave and interrupt what you're in the middle of which can be extremely annoying in longer/multi part stages, and by that time the food meter will have run out for me anyway so I might as well just wait for the next day.

if your stats are not high enough, bosses can take ages, in addition to requiring you to make less mistakes that'll make you take a shitton of damage, but after a single harvest suddenly the same fight will be a 10 second trivial matter in which you can LITERALLY just mash attack and facetank everything the boss and its adds throw at you. it's this annoying seesaw of too weak and too strong that was sidestepped entirely by fairy bloom freesia by you always being appropriately leveled for whatever you were fighting. this feeling of things only being balanced between my stats and the level of the area only happening when the stars are aligned that is the issue for me. (and yes, I am aware of the sash skills that reduce enemy attack/defense/etc., fuck that I'm not wasting my time and sp on that shit it's like waiting at a god damn stop sign and it doesn't work on anything without their hidden poise meter broken anyway)

farming was alright the first few times but after the third or fourth harvest I was getting tired of running into stat walls in stages and felt compelled to go out of my way and look for guides to farm efficiently, as the process of trying to figure shit on my own was having unsatisfying results and the drip feed of instructions from the game itself was FAR too slow to make a large difference in the outcome early on. there's no sense of wonder and discovery at this point, only the tedium of waiting to be able to actually play the game I came for again. learning skills being tied to this chore is even more frustrating when I just wanna learn new shit to play around with in the training room.

I've beaten the game finally after starting to treat it like some sort of 2d musou and abusing the blatantly overpowered specials so I don't have to deal with timer anxiety between night time and the farm requiring my attention. I don't intend to do much more than level my skills and play around in training room now, which is admittedly fun, but I wish this game wasn't so poorly balanced.