This game looks fantastic, the music is charming and catchy, and it comes with an overall laid-back vibe that I found comforting and adorable.
The combat involves auto-targeting (i.e. you don't get any say in who your characters attack), and that is going to turn a lot of people off right away. There also is no MP in this game; instead, you operate with five "Action Points" that determine what type of attack/ability/spell you can use, and each action takes a specific amount of action points depending on the strength of the attack. Spells are determined by tomes that are kept in your frustratingly tiny inventory, along with your equipment and accessories. These two things greatly simplify the strategy, until you start messing around with crowns. Crowns are this games version of job classes, and they're very important for boss battles. Buffing and debuffing are extremely important in this game, as are equipping your characters with armor that has specific element resistances. You can easily get wiped by common scrub enemies at the beginning of the game if you're not careful, and some of the bosses can be downright nasty for the same reason.
There is a ton of backtracking in this game (basically every dungeon), and while the story beats at least attempted to try and mix things up when you revisited towns, it did nothing for having to traipse through full dungeons again. This, along with a certain boss sequence at the end of the game, left it feeling very repetitive. There's a lot of fun character interactions and party dropping/swapping/moving, but as someone else mentioned your party basically becomes mute halfway through the game and all of those fun interactions just vanish. It takes a lot of the life out of what was already a mediocre story, and I wish they'd kept those interactions going.
I don't regret my playthrough of this game, but a middling story and tedious re-treading of areas ultimately kept it from being anything memorable.
The combat involves auto-targeting (i.e. you don't get any say in who your characters attack), and that is going to turn a lot of people off right away. There also is no MP in this game; instead, you operate with five "Action Points" that determine what type of attack/ability/spell you can use, and each action takes a specific amount of action points depending on the strength of the attack. Spells are determined by tomes that are kept in your frustratingly tiny inventory, along with your equipment and accessories. These two things greatly simplify the strategy, until you start messing around with crowns. Crowns are this games version of job classes, and they're very important for boss battles. Buffing and debuffing are extremely important in this game, as are equipping your characters with armor that has specific element resistances. You can easily get wiped by common scrub enemies at the beginning of the game if you're not careful, and some of the bosses can be downright nasty for the same reason.
There is a ton of backtracking in this game (basically every dungeon), and while the story beats at least attempted to try and mix things up when you revisited towns, it did nothing for having to traipse through full dungeons again. This, along with a certain boss sequence at the end of the game, left it feeling very repetitive. There's a lot of fun character interactions and party dropping/swapping/moving, but as someone else mentioned your party basically becomes mute halfway through the game and all of those fun interactions just vanish. It takes a lot of the life out of what was already a mediocre story, and I wish they'd kept those interactions going.
I don't regret my playthrough of this game, but a middling story and tedious re-treading of areas ultimately kept it from being anything memorable.