Full playthrough review:
General structure.
The game generally works in day cycles. Each day you have allocated activities, like studying, exploring dungeon and special studying courses. The other half of the day you can run around town, listen to people’s chatter, spend time with friends using allotted friend points and using action points you can either progress more of the dungeon or engage in activities.
To study you allot cards from a deck to classes. To put simply you’re just trying to maximize the multiplier bonus of exp you get for each class. Exp from studying feeds into your three main stats. (basically - Courage, Knowledge, Humanity) Leveling up these grants you points to spend in a skill tree.
Special studies work basically the same, but they unlock more valuable functions, like extra health potions, moves and new cards.
Each chapter you have an allotted amount of dungeon to explore, about one floor. You can usually easily clear it all, way before the end of chapter, esp. if you go for extra runs. Dungeon side quests are three types on a repeat - go kill recolored monsters, gather recolored resource nodes, and rescue a person.
Using action points on activities just gives you related exp. There’s just a little dialogue, not an actual mini game or anything.
Using friend points eventually unlocks a “mini story event” you can view.
Before going to bed you can manage cards or do a part time job for money. Not too much use for money here, you can buy food and some accessories but general equipment can be easily crafted.
Combat.
To put simply, this is “worser Ys”. It’s not terrible, it works, but combat feels very bare and not really fun at the core. You have a three step combo, “heavy” attack is considered to be more like a skill. You get a different skill after each step of a combo, these skills have effects like being better against flyers, reducing defense, etc. Then you have, parry / block, dodge and super. That’s pretty much it. There’s no special attack when switching party members. (Aside of kinda with one character) Also there’s no particular difference between party members. Their skills have all the same effects (except one).
You have a ranged attack that you probably will be always holding when attacking. There are different types of it, like a beam and lock-on fireballs, but I honestly didn’t see a point in using them at all.
There’s also a “soul accel” gauge, when it’s full you can activate it for a heal, enhanced stats and easier parries. It fills very fast which makes the game way easier. On highest difficulty the only real trouble is that some attacks can one or almost one shot you randomly and before you stack resists, debuffs activate on you in one hit.
One of the annoying parts of combat is the strange auto launcher when you are attacking an enemy that is in the air, which puts you in the air too. The problem is that in the air you only have a two-four hit combo, which doesn’t allow you to utilize skills. So if you want to use skills on a flyer, you will likely just launch yourself in the air.
Also all a lot of enemies do is just launch tracking elemental balls at you. Wide shining telegraphed swings made for parrying and copious amounts of balls is pretty much all you are gonna experience for the whole game.
Enemy variety is extremely low, you are mostly gonna be fighting same three enemies using same three attacks. After some upgrades, while you are in soul accel, parry basically not even parry anymore, activating by holding block way before the attack.
Equipment is generally pretty basic stuff. Weapons can’t be changed, but you can equip spirits into them. They change an element of your attack and give bonuses while you are in soul accel. You unlock new ones, but there honestly doesn’t seem to be any difference between them, aside elements.
Exploring.
The dungeon itself is a 2D action, it’s metroidvania-light at best. You do unlock abilities that help exploring, but there’s not too much backtracking utilizing that. Platforming is just a means of traversal, there’s no real challenge here, obstacles are minimal. Being in a dungeon gradually poisons you. To combat that you wear a special flask that gathers this poison into itself. It has limited capacity. This accumulation is not time based, it happens when you gather resources. When a flask is full, it has a chance to break. When it breaks it kinda becomes time based, as the longer you spend in this state the more severe debuffs you get, eventually draining your health. You can usually pretty easily get to the closest save point and leave the dungeon. Accumulated poison is also a resource that you can spend on upgrading your characters stats and other perks. While most of the dungeon is a fixed layout, there are so called “unstable regions”. These are small rooms to explore, which, I think, have certain amount of layouts for each one. They have a challenge door with a fight. Inside these doors and other boss battles it switches to a 3D style arena battle. These doors reward you with resources and you can choose from three random effects that you can put on your weapon spirits. You can farm these, but it gets boring pretty quickly and it’s not really that important.
Story.
The story starts strong in the first half. There’s character introduction arcs which are pretty interesting, somewhere in the middle there’s a part that feels almost like a filler, but it picks up right away. The main problem here is that due to the day cycle structure, you always have to pass a certain amount of days for the “main story” to start. So when you are done with exploring dungeon, which happens pretty quick, all you are left with is cycling menus and talking to people. While the main characters are good enough, most of the side characters honestly felt pretty boring and flat (with exceptions), which doesn’t help. You can skip stuff and advance days faster, but if you wanna do most things it will start to feel dragging after a while. When you finally hit “the story part” it's fine though.
Presentation.
The town part looks pretty good and detailed. Dungeon on the other hand is weak. The “front part” is basically just one texture pattern copy pasted all over. Some backgrounds look cool, so it doesn’t look too bad. Character models look sharp in 4k, but they do feel a bit lacking in detail and random NPCs with shadowed faces just look bad to be honest. In the first half of the game there’s a bunch of pretty cool fully animated cutscenes, but they become very sparse toward the end of the game. The game definitely lacks some eye candy compared to Trails games. I feel like they played too safe on designs here. Of course the setting is more grounded, but, for example, inside the dungeon everyone could have a unique spirit clothes set, instead of just the same haori on everyone. Basically, aside from the town, everything starts to look very monotonous.
Conclusion.
The weakest part of this game is related to combat, it is very repetitive and fighting same enemies whole game doesn’t help. You unlock most of the actual meaningful abilities in the first half of the game, making everything after feel pretty stall. Music is good, but there’s a lot of repeat tracks from other Falcom games, which cheapens the experience in an already budget entry. The story is the strongest part, with the protagonist carrying a lot of it, but it is kinda soured by the fact that it doesn’t seem to be a complete story ([spoiler]it basically omits a story related to a crucial character, with a setup for a sequel[/spoiler]). I was kinda expecting it to be a contained story within one game, but I guess we are supposed to get the second part. I would give this like 6-7 out of 10 and a neutral opinion, but it is hard to recommend after breaking it down like this. It’s not a bad game, it is especially enjoyable for the first half, while everything is fresh, but honestly it’s the weakest game I have played from Falcom.
