Eh. Biggest issue is probably the combat. Most battles are won by mashing X, and most bosses are won by spamming your specials. Specials themselves are severely limited, as you can only have two equipped at a time (Imagine Tales games only allowing two artes instead of eight). The battle is on a 3D plane, but uses 2D character sprites, so depth perception is confusing and you sometimes don't land hits where it looks like it should. You have no control over what target you're attacking and the position in which you attack from, so your player character will constantly be switching between targets mid-attack, and in situations where you need to target a specific enemy, it can be difficult to do so, as you will just jerk back to a different enemy and your defenseless healer is so fucking stupid that they just stand there and let the enemies kill them without taking any defensive measures. AI has no idea how to dodge or block or use even the most basic strategy when it comes to fighting, constantly veering from the rest of the party to take on large groups alone, and accordingly get demolished in a few seconds. Even when you're on top of item usage, there's a delay to when the healing will actually take effect, so you may end up wasting an item if it comes too late. A way to circumvent this is to set characters to not hold back on special attacks, but when you do this, they legit only use their special attacks in every situation. This drains their MP, which means it's another thing you're forced to micromanage that shouldn't be an issue because the AI is actually just dumb. There's no easy way to set the tactics in order to find balance. Suddenly, an action RPG has become all about menu hopping. There is no comfortable flow within the battles because everything moves in real time, but you need to pause the action to heal up at an alarming rate. Couple that with how mindless the actual action is, it creates for an awful experience all around.

And then there's the other side of RPGs: The writing. One of the bigger problems with TtEoT was how heavily it leaned towards fantasy over sci-fi. Sure, the beginning and end were very heavy on sci-fi, but the 85% in between was a generic, medieval RPG world. It was cool to see it from the point of view of a character that lived in an advanced society, but it didn't really explore that very well. FD shows the opposite side, where you're playing as a guy from an underdeveloped planet, who must become accustomed to these advanced aliens.... but nothing really happens. There's a brief moment of confusion, but it soon turns away as Roddick accepts that a more advanced society wants him to join their fleet. There's no drama created. No intrigue. It boils down to, "Oh, so you guys can save my village? Okay, I'll join you." I mean, I get that their promise to cure everyone is lucrative as hell, but you'd think Roddick or his two friends, whose names I don't remember, would have even an inkling of suspicion or basic curiosity. And, of course, you spend like, 20 minutes in this futuristic setting before it dumps you back into a medieval one for the time I spent playing. Maybe the sci-fi elements have more focus later in the game, but, as is, what's the point? They made a story about an advanced society meeting with an underdeveloped one, then proceeded to have a jaunty adventure in a fantasy land without so much as a reference to the clashing cultures beyond the stupid primitives not knowing what some of the words mean.

That doesn't even touch upon how dull and one-dimensional literally every character is, but I'm done shitting on this. What a failure. 2/6