8/10
Very good game. Would recommend.
My two complaints are, that it's either hard. I guess you can try lowering the difficoulty and skip optional stuff, I havent tested that, becouse I was so set on stealing from Elmdore. So maybe thats just an issue specific to me. But mugic numbers don't help. After playing the game for 40h I still have no clue how hit chance and damage are calculated, and the skill descriptions are quite poor too. I know that the deal damage in specified radius (it's good that at lest says that much), but supposedly it has a chance to inflict status effects but whats the chance? What does it do? I don't know I either guess or look it up on a wiki. There might be a good way to learn about the mechanics of this game, but I just haven't found it. Anyway my second complaint would be that this game is a bit grindy. And by that I mean it expects you to spend some of your precious time on doing random battles just to increase your numbers a bit. Don't get me wrong you probably can only do the story battles and still beat the game, but mechanichs I saw in the game kind of suggest to me that it is an intended way to play. As an example to this I will use the fact that at certain points in the story you get named characters to join your party. Which is very cool, but the problem is that they only get a bit job experionce in their unique class, and have nothing else. So each time a new character joins you, it requirees a bit of a grind to unlock abilities you want for them. For me it ment I just never used them, becouse i did a lot of grinding with my randos in the early game, and it just didn't make sense to me to repeat this process few more times, when my starting randos already have everything I would need for all the battles. I'm only a bit worried I missed some unique dialog that you can get by fielding named characters for story missions. But I'll never know.
So anyway even thou I spent 70% of the previous paragraph on complaining I still think it's a good game worth playing (thou I would recommend to wait for a discount. Even if the remake was made in 2025, the core game was made in 97, and I don't think remake adds enough to justify price tag. My good Square Enix want's more money for this game than kepler interactive for expedition 33. I bought it on a discount for an equivalence of 35USD, and I think I still overpayed a bit.) I just wanted to tell about the downsides, if some of those might be a issue to you. If you can get over the stuff I mentioned, like i did, you will definitely have a good time in this game.
Also as a side note. I felt the age of this game, not only in ui and graphics but in gameplay as well. I'm pretty sure that this game would be very diffrent if it was made today and not a remade from almost 30 year old title. I would love to try a modern game with this style of gameplay. I know that there probably is a game like that out there, but this was my first experience with this genre.
I hope this reviou helped you a bit decide if you want to play this game or not. Good luck to you.
