Before you continue reading this review, I want to make it abundantly clear that I haven't started the second chapters of any of the characters as of yet, and I haven't unlocked an 8th character either. If you want a simple "recommended" or not, I'd say... ...I like it, but I don't like it enough over other games that could fill a similar gap in my library, such as Suikoden or other JRPGs. If I could, I would give this a rating between Recommended and Not Recommended.
The game is basically LIVE A LIVE, but more JRPG. It's not something I would recommend to someone who hasn't played a fair few other JRPGs of multiple series. The game has a moderately slow pacing, but not slow enough that I would say it is agonizing. It really wants you to explore a little bit, as well as grind for money/items/exp. That said, it does have the equivalent of a Metal Slime like in Dragon Quest, called a Cait.
The battles are... battles, to say the least. It has a weakness system that you exploit to remove Shield Points from enemies. Once all of their Shield Points are gone, they enter a "Break" state, which makes them take critical damage from everything. Upon entering this state, the enemy also cancels their current and next turn, and this system feels a lot more fleshed out than Terra Memoria's, which uses a similar system, but makes it easier for enemies to regain control of the battle in comparison to Octopath Traveler.
The music is really good, and I do like the visuals. But the visuals aren't as good as newer HD-2D games Square Enix has published. But this is pretty much one of the first games they made heavy use of it, so I'll cut them some slack when it comes to that.
