A fun RPG with good stories and characters (well, some better written than others), but held back IMO by some really inexplicable design choices which detract from the experience.
In every dungeon are purples chests which can ONLY be opened by one character, which essentially forces you to keep them in your party all the time or be forced backtrack through every dungeon with them, as getting every chest is an achievement for this game. You can also NEVER swap out the character you choose to start with, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why they chose to do this. This pretty much guarantees that your main character will be over-leveled relative to the rest of the party, and for the life of my I can't figure out why they chose to add this restriction.
The game is also slightly grindy. I am doing nearly all of the side missions and optional dungeons, and yet I still find myself constantly underleveled and needing to grind for whatever story section I am on. You are constantly swapping party members in and out and needing to keep them levelled up to keep up with the rest of the party. Also, when buying equipment at shops, it only lets you buy equipment for your current party and not any of your standby characters, so I find myself constantly having to swap out active party members just to buy equipment and rearrange who has which items equipped.
The writing style is also this weirdly stilted, formal-sounding medieval-fantasy English. The worst offender of this is H'aanit, who speaks in a dialect of pseudo-Middle English. I've read a bunch of Shakespeare, so I know what Middle English sounds like, and this ain't it chief. Instead she is written in some kind of made-up "ye olde Englishe" writing style which to me is more annoying than cool. Once again, I am left asking myself why they wanted this, for what should really be a gimmick for some random NPC and not one of the main story characters.
Despite this, the combat system with the weakness and "break" system is fun and works well, if a bit repetitive, and the graphical effects look nice. Sadly, I had trouble running this on an iGPU without lowering the resolution to 720p because of this.
