this is good i don't understand why people are so down on it. i get that it feels a little arcane but like... that... is... the point? it's not even that hard! game overs are common but also pretty inconsequential, you just lose a bunch of gems which are not difficult to earn back later.
more to the point, the systems offer a nice amount of flexibility and feel interesting to play with. early in the game i breezed through a dungeon and then got blasted by the boss, so i thought, well, i'll just swap my crowns and see what happens. then i came back and totally destroyed him! it's fun when you can do that. the game encourages you to mess with the crowns and try different party setups to see how you can synergize everything, it's really fun to figure out a party that can slam right on through battles that seemed difficult before.
the story and writing aren't, like, phenomenal, but i think they're meant to work in tandem with the world design and the gameplay. it would be nice to see the characters develop more explicitly in the first half, but i did buy the party's growth when they eventually reunited because i had played as them and tried a lot of different stuff. the character development in rpgs should work as a combination of developer intent and player input, and i think it does so here; having tackled challenging bosses and learned new spells and gotten through some truly ridiculous battles (e.g. i had a random encounter with an enemy who was resistant to my weapon element type but also did hilariously low amounts of damage, so i got into a 50-turn war of attrition), i bought their development into worthy heroes, because /i/ had been developing them into worthy heroes. the game isn't about feeding story to you, it's about giving you the space to construct the story within its guidelines.
it's not perfect. i think a game that's so built around switching classes should actually allow you to switch classes in battle if it's not going to let you run away as a default option. (which is essentially how ffxiii handled the idea, and it's funny that these two games have such different aesthetic/narrative approaches evolving out of similar battle concepts.) and it feels clear that a lot of the mechanics are still experimental/hadn't been totally developed; the ap mechanic throws off the game balance in a couple of ways (making healing items totally useless, for instance), autotargeting isn't too bad but does feel kind of needlessly restrictive, tying spells to held items allows for cool class customization but the inventory is so tiny that it's annoying, etc. but it's an interesting game, and even if it hadn't led directly to the bravely games it would be clear to me that there's something really good here, with a lot to iterate on. it feels generative.
more to the point, the systems offer a nice amount of flexibility and feel interesting to play with. early in the game i breezed through a dungeon and then got blasted by the boss, so i thought, well, i'll just swap my crowns and see what happens. then i came back and totally destroyed him! it's fun when you can do that. the game encourages you to mess with the crowns and try different party setups to see how you can synergize everything, it's really fun to figure out a party that can slam right on through battles that seemed difficult before.
the story and writing aren't, like, phenomenal, but i think they're meant to work in tandem with the world design and the gameplay. it would be nice to see the characters develop more explicitly in the first half, but i did buy the party's growth when they eventually reunited because i had played as them and tried a lot of different stuff. the character development in rpgs should work as a combination of developer intent and player input, and i think it does so here; having tackled challenging bosses and learned new spells and gotten through some truly ridiculous battles (e.g. i had a random encounter with an enemy who was resistant to my weapon element type but also did hilariously low amounts of damage, so i got into a 50-turn war of attrition), i bought their development into worthy heroes, because /i/ had been developing them into worthy heroes. the game isn't about feeding story to you, it's about giving you the space to construct the story within its guidelines.
it's not perfect. i think a game that's so built around switching classes should actually allow you to switch classes in battle if it's not going to let you run away as a default option. (which is essentially how ffxiii handled the idea, and it's funny that these two games have such different aesthetic/narrative approaches evolving out of similar battle concepts.) and it feels clear that a lot of the mechanics are still experimental/hadn't been totally developed; the ap mechanic throws off the game balance in a couple of ways (making healing items totally useless, for instance), autotargeting isn't too bad but does feel kind of needlessly restrictive, tying spells to held items allows for cool class customization but the inventory is so tiny that it's annoying, etc. but it's an interesting game, and even if it hadn't led directly to the bravely games it would be clear to me that there's something really good here, with a lot to iterate on. it feels generative.