very very beautiful story with really great ludonarrative integration and strong development for characters that were already interesting (mythra, jin) but benefitted from more time. the way torna is able to make this grand quest to save the world feel extremely personal and down to earth is just wonderful. it's rare to see a JRPG actually want to make the little people matter, and i think the execution here with the community system makes the player feel attuned with the ideals of the party. from minute one, we see how compassionate lora and addam are, and how, to them, the detours on this path are just as important as the (massively existential) goal. most of the sidequests here are genuinely thought out miniature plots that add character to a world that we weren't shown a lot of in XC2. imo, takahashi and the gang made a really strong decision in realizing that the core plot here has already been shown, and doesn't need a 10 hour long playable exposition dump. instead you get this very chill, very homely experience, and it's awesome. these little moments hit home even more when the player remembers the state of the world in XC2; we know that addam and lora's compassionate attitude does not save these people. we feel the guilt they feel. i have to wonder why these complaints about the sidequests exist in the first place, considering these quests are much more considered than anything in XC1, which is a game intentionally balanced around expecting the player to do lots of sidequests. at least here they're actual stories and tie in well thematically!
if there's anything that really holds torna back from being perfect to me, it's the simplified combat and overeager tutorialization. i think the combat is still good, but in comparison to xc2's lategame, this stripped back approach just isn't as interesting to me and it didn't really feel as though the game wanted me to optimize it much at all. the tutorials are really obnoxious imo, explaining everything in the game (much of which is based on mechanics taken directly from xc2) to the player again, in more detail. i get that the combat's complexity and lack of tutorialization was a common complaint with xc2, but i cannot imagine why they would want to correct it with a dlc attached to that game, which depends on knowledge of that game's story. anyone who got through 60+ hours of xc2 and bought the dlc would surely have grasped the gameplay by now, right?
oh yeah also gort's presence in the story is really stupid and worthless, the boss fight against him after malos is literally unloseable but still a chore because it's a moment with like 0 emotional investment from the player that amounts to absolutely nothing. feel like they would have been much better off cutting him entirely and replacing that boss fight with an unwinnable story fight showing lora's death, but idk maybe just me. don't know what's with monolith and throwing in occasional secondary antagonists that don't contribute in any real way (looking at you gael'gar)