There are a lot of good things in Grand Soul Saga.
The world is interesting. It doesn't take long for the world to feel realistic, as if the places you're visiting actually exist and the people are dealing with their own stuff just as you're dealing with yours. The people and cultures shown are unique and believable. The atmosphere of the game is a lot of fun to interact with, including some of the darker elements such as references to addiction and some choices which, while not perhaps important for how the game ends, does have interesting commentary on choice nonetheless.
The art is good. It's nothing that will blow your mind, but it does its job of conveying the world as intended. Many areas feel rundown and rusted over. There are some small opportunities where the dev gets to flex his artistic muscles, where the player can take some pictures to better see the world as it is intended, and those are gold. Each of these are fantastic snapshots of what the world is meant to be like.
The story is relatively modular, with some major overarching ideas that often sit in the background. Ultimately, much of the game runs on smaller story arcs - quests - that do a good job of fleshing out the world and your character's role in it. Grand Soul Saga tries to emphasize that you are just another person trying to make their way in a harsh world, and it manages to do this with some of the quests. You're given hard choices (although often it seems that many choices boil down to: Will I need to fight more combat encounters as a result of this?) that need to be dealt with to move forward.
In terms of technical parts, the game is okay. I ran into a couple issues, one of which caused the game to freeze after combat. The developer fixed this as quickly as he was able, and I ran into no more issues nearly as severe. There are a few cases where quests can be sequence broken by jumping ahead without any knowledge of what can be done, but thankfully none of these cases seemed to cause any issues with the game.
Grand Soul Saga's biggest weakness is combat. It attempts to follow the same themes that are so clearly evident in the world, the stories, and the characters - harsh, but manageable. Grand Soul Saga manages to hit this goal, for better or for worse. Combat is turn-based, with a couple skill and 'alchemical' magic systems that allow options in addition to the basic attack commands. Many combat encounters are manageable with all of the small consumable items you can scavenge throughout the game world. The problem is that players who do not take the time to find those consumable items scattered around in various places may find themselves completely unable to advance without using numerous consumable items in each encounter.
In fact, consumable items are so necessary that most encounters are probably downright impossible without them. Enemies often do 1/3 to 1/2 of a characters health on any given attack. This is easier to deal with when you have a party of 4 characters and attacks are spread around across the party, but in the beginning when you have only one or two, this can cause small problems to quickly snowball. In some cases, you'll end up in a loop of healing so that you don't die, taking damage, then healing so you don't die, without much option to deal damage. In addition, most of your characters do little damage, and their abilities that can do a decent amount of damage are locked behind one or more resources which are impossible to recover quickly without using more consumables. All of this combines to make every combat scenario feel like a complete slog. Even once a combat encounter is definitely guaranteed not to turn out badly for your party, it may take up to another 5-10 minutes just attacking in order to do enough damage to finish an enemy (assuming you don't want to waste any more consumable items just to refill resources so that you can finish the fight a bit faster). Overall, combat just doesn't feel fun.
This is a pretty niche game. If you're reading this review, then you probably already like the genre this game is attempting to put a new spin on. If you are that person, then I recommend giving it a try - maybe you'll enjoy the combat more than I did, or maybe (since this game is currently in early access) the developer will see fit to rebalance the feel of the combat. Either way, if this is your sort of game, then I recommend this because it really does have some interesting moments in terms of setting and atmosphere.
