I think the main cast and story at the core of this are excellent and very compelling. It's a sweet narrative and the kind that's important to share and feels like it comes from a personal place. But my problem with ASFTU is that you mostly see those develop at the start and end of each chapter, and what's left in between is really tedious and mundane adventure game gameplay that becomes very frustrating after a bit. By the end of chapter 3 I had to look up a guide because I couldn't fathom wasting any more time running from one end of the game's word to the other in vain, having missed an important item or conversation necessary to continue the main path.

Unfortunately, on top of being tedious, the "filler" feels like it kind of ruins the cohesion between the main mechanic of the game and its main story. "Space diving" as they call it, is the protagonist's ability to enter the mind of NPCs to see a manifestation of their lives and struggles, as well as the power to manipulate what's inside in order to help them move forward with their lives. This works extremely well when it's used for actual key events of the narrative, but when it's part of a mundane fetch quest... Not so much. In fact, some of the less important space dive segments ARE very good, but the disparity in quality and seriousness can be bonkers: One moment you'll be helping a martial arts' teacher realize that his passion and vocation for passing his knowledge to vulnerable kids in order to improve their lives is more important to him than pursuing a more stable, but less fullfiling office job, and the next you'll be breaking apart a guy's alarm clock so that he falls asleep in real life and you can steal his step ladder. The tonal shifts aren't great and usually come from content that feels like a complete waste of time.

And yet, again, I did like the core narrative very much and can't just chalk off this as a bad game. But definitely one you're gonna need a lot of patience with. And it's a real shame because I believe it could have been a phenomenal, say, 4 hour long gem. But they went for 12-ish hour one instead with a lot of wrinkles.

A heartfelt story about identity and belonging with an immediately lovable found family cast.

Time loops aren't exactly a novel theme for games anymore, but ISAT still surprised me several times with its take on it and how it integrates the whole thing in its gameplay. The permutations that the time loop introduces to the classic command based RPG formula are genuinely impressive, especially considering this is an RPG maker game, and add variety and depth to what looks like a fairly straightforward adventure at first. You'll have to juggle elements such as being able to travel backwards /and forward/ and time, specific save points recording the current state of your party (including every member's level as well as your inventory at the time), a time travel currency that allows you to travel back or forward to specific floors of the main dungeon, with the option of selecting the version of it that has all normally locked doors opened, etc. And that's without mentioning the clever and sometimes harrowing ways time traveling is addressed in the story proper. It's brilliant stuff all around.

The premise itself is quite novel too. You're Siffrin, a mysterious, wandering rogue traveling with a party of heroes accompanying a chosen heroine tasked with defeating a villain that's been freezing the population in time. You're at the end of their journey, starting the day before the final confrontation, and the party has been traveling and getting closer to one another for some time now, so the group dynamic is already established, but all of them have their own struggles and secrets, which makes it so you'll continue unraveling new things about them as well as helping Siffrin break out of their own shell.

The cast is also racially diverse and predominantly (completely?) queer, which makes the found family aspect of the group hit all the harder. My favorite character was Odile, a japanese old lady (this is a fantasy world, but the story clearly takes place in fantasy France and a couple other real world countries are referenced as well) that's the defacto mom of the group. Always sarcastic and a bit jaded, but she'll never hesitate to put her life before the rest's at a moment's notice.

The combat uses ATB and a rock, paper, scissors system that's deceptively versatile and fun, and the dynamic character portraits you see at all times during battle help add further characterization to an already fairly charming cast.

The game does get a bit tedious and repetitive after a certain point, but never by accident, if that makes sense (your mileage may vary on how good of a justification the game's themes will be for that). It worked for me, personally, and honestly, my one gripe with the game would be that it allows you to ignore the critical path at almost all times, but exploring can often be a waste of time because some elements that will become important in further loops have no use before their respective story triggers come into play.

All in all, though, I thought the game was wonderful. It's clearly very inspired by Undertale, but it tackles very different topics, and those it shares with it are handled surprisingly differently. It has one of the most lovable casts I've seen in game in years too. Can't recommend it enough.