This review contains spoilers
What I liked:
- Music and artstyle are very nicely designed, but also have their flaws
- Overdrive system is fun and brings variety, but unfortunately also forces me to use skills that make no sense in the current situation : /
- Reward board is simple but super cool to motivate me to play a lot of optional content
- Exploration is mostly very rewarding
- Building Hermit's Isle was a lot of fun, I love that
- There were no boring side quests, all of them had their own interesting story and sometimes there was content here that I would have expected in the main story, really good
What got on my nerves:
- In general, the story starts off promisingly, but becomes increasingly stupid as the game progresses :/ Here, I often had the feeling that the story mainly relies on blatant twists and surprises, but that these weren't really organically integrated into the plot, but just happened randomly. Scenes like Frederik's death are supposed to be tragic, but I honestly had to laugh out loud because his "explanation" for his misdeeds was so incredibly stupid and pointless, but it was really taken seriously in the game as his motivation, what nonsense...and that happens quite often towards the end
- Tonally the game is so inconsistent, I don't know what to feel :D It's basically rather lighthearted, but then jumps into topics like mass suicide, human experimentation, religious wars and much more...but deals with all these topics rather superficially, maybe less would have been more?
- The level with the flying islands -> fuck that :D just stand around and wait for a flying platform != fun.
- Many to almost all ideas of the story are at least inspired by other games or anime, which would be fine. What I find problematic, however, is when entire story sections are copied 1:1 from other media, such as the machinations of the church in this game and in Xenogears, which is simply copy-paste with virtually no ideas of its own. The fact that the church produces monsters here to unleash them on humanity is simply the plot of Solaris/Ethos stolen from Xenogears, that's quite brazen. And the fact that the priest likes boys is also an old cliché...AND IT'S ALSO IN XENOGEARS WTF!!!! :D Kylian and Glenn are 1:1 Delita and Ramza from FFT, Nysa is Lea Monde from Vagrant Story....it's really cheeky
- You can almost completely ignore the class system (with the emblems), you learn enough skills as it is and can only use a handful so it's rather annoying
- Hardly any character moments between the party members, there's no real sense of companionship
All in all, this game left me a bit disappointed. I was really looking forward to this one since there was universal praise from game critics and people, whose opinions I respect. The first half was very promising but to me, it just falls apart in the second half due to bad writing. It is charming though. If you like the JRPGs of old, give this a look but maybe don't expect the best in terms of story, world, and character writing.
- Music and artstyle are very nicely designed, but also have their flaws
- Overdrive system is fun and brings variety, but unfortunately also forces me to use skills that make no sense in the current situation : /
- Reward board is simple but super cool to motivate me to play a lot of optional content
- Exploration is mostly very rewarding
- Building Hermit's Isle was a lot of fun, I love that
- There were no boring side quests, all of them had their own interesting story and sometimes there was content here that I would have expected in the main story, really good
What got on my nerves:
- In general, the story starts off promisingly, but becomes increasingly stupid as the game progresses :/ Here, I often had the feeling that the story mainly relies on blatant twists and surprises, but that these weren't really organically integrated into the plot, but just happened randomly. Scenes like Frederik's death are supposed to be tragic, but I honestly had to laugh out loud because his "explanation" for his misdeeds was so incredibly stupid and pointless, but it was really taken seriously in the game as his motivation, what nonsense...and that happens quite often towards the end
- Tonally the game is so inconsistent, I don't know what to feel :D It's basically rather lighthearted, but then jumps into topics like mass suicide, human experimentation, religious wars and much more...but deals with all these topics rather superficially, maybe less would have been more?
- The level with the flying islands -> fuck that :D just stand around and wait for a flying platform != fun.
- Many to almost all ideas of the story are at least inspired by other games or anime, which would be fine. What I find problematic, however, is when entire story sections are copied 1:1 from other media, such as the machinations of the church in this game and in Xenogears, which is simply copy-paste with virtually no ideas of its own. The fact that the church produces monsters here to unleash them on humanity is simply the plot of Solaris/Ethos stolen from Xenogears, that's quite brazen. And the fact that the priest likes boys is also an old cliché...AND IT'S ALSO IN XENOGEARS WTF!!!! :D Kylian and Glenn are 1:1 Delita and Ramza from FFT, Nysa is Lea Monde from Vagrant Story....it's really cheeky
- You can almost completely ignore the class system (with the emblems), you learn enough skills as it is and can only use a handful so it's rather annoying
- Hardly any character moments between the party members, there's no real sense of companionship
All in all, this game left me a bit disappointed. I was really looking forward to this one since there was universal praise from game critics and people, whose opinions I respect. The first half was very promising but to me, it just falls apart in the second half due to bad writing. It is charming though. If you like the JRPGs of old, give this a look but maybe don't expect the best in terms of story, world, and character writing.