If you like fantasy JRPGs at all, if you like more "table-top"-y RPGs, you should go out and play the Ruina translation when you get a chance: https://dinklations.wordpress.com/2021/01/30/ruina-fairy-tale-of-the-forgotten-ruins-english-version/

I'm sure there are other games like it (some aspects remind me of what I kind of understand about Unlimited Saga), but Ruina feels more approachable than that.

Light Spoilers:

I love the prose in Ruina - as you inspect points on hand-drawn background maps (e.g. a illustration of a town, a forest, a dungeon), it describes the area and you sometimes fight or choose to press on, and it shows more of the map. So it's kind of in-between a text adventure (think colossal cave?), a D&D session and a typical JRPG. Battles are pretty hard and you're encouraged to try to set "EXP High Scores" via clearing events/battles, which will give you skill points for your jobs. This gives the game a really interesting texture - you prep at the surface, then warp in to whereever you were exploring and try to make it through like 3-4 events without dying.

Of course this has some frustrating moments of dying after a cutscene and having to sit through it again later, but I think it mostly works. It's nice when you manage to chance it through more battles than you expect. And there are some great twists with this map traversal that are worth playing for!

Basically, because the game 'zooms out' to a view of a whole realm or dungeon, you get this storybook sense of place/time. Where you're scaling a snowy mountain, but through these brief vignettes and glimpses, rather than a literal, build-out mountain space.


Complaints:

This is an RPG Maker 2k game, which means a few things - for one, the fonts and resolution are gorgeous. Like Nepheshel there's some great atmosphere to the limitations this engine has.

My main issue with Ruina - which I'm not docking any points for, but just be advised - are how fiddly everything is. I don't know if this is just RPG Maker 2k (Nepheshel was like this I think), but there's no visual feedback as to why your attacks are doing zero damage vs 150 damage. It's clear there's SOME elemental system and maybe slash/bash system at work, but you basically have to take notes to figure out whether this is the case for a given encounter. Because of the way the game's progression is set up, this can get really tedious. If I want to try a new party layout, I have to reload and walk back to the encounter.

So usually dungeons feel a bit random, almost? I'll steamroll through some fights, hit a wall and be stuck for a while. Usual JRPG fare, but RPGM2K's menus are terrible - they don't clearly show elemental or weapon type info (some character skills are locked out unless using certain weapons). Every item is just dumped into this gigantic list. When you want to craft a new item, there's no info shown on it. So you have to craft the item, check the stats, then reload if it's useless... crafting materials are also fairly random and it's hard to know if one material you're using is also used somewhere else. So it makes any kind of real planning a huge slog.



Big Spoilers:

So I didn't actually clear Ruina yet. Despite the fiddly difficulty, there are just great moments - the way that the races' towns reveal themselves to be inside artificial domes, or how you warp back and forth between past/present exploring the "Present ruins" of a city and the "past version" of a city experimenting with some dangerous alchemy. As you do this you have to sleep and save down in the ruins, and when you do finally return to the surface, there's been a time skip! Everyone in the town is surprised you're alive, and the political situation has changed, the air is weird. It's a cool game.