I feel like they leaned far too heavily on marketing this as a "love letter to Chrono Trigger" or a "spiritual successor."
The combat timings are horrendous because you rarely encounter the same enemies again after clearing an area, so there's barely any opportunity to develop a learning curve. The timed attacks are also poorly implemented. The hitboxes don't seem to match what feels like the actual sweet spot of the skill/combo attack, and some enemy positions can even end up partially screwing you over when timing them, some skills like serai venom flurry can go outside of your screen depending if the enemies are positioned top and your party below relying on sound cue instead of the visual one. That makes judging distance difficult in a 2.5D environment, instead of just having every encounter with the same distance between your party and the enemies, usually just positioned diagonally. (Sure feel free to call it skill issue instead of bad game design)
Zale and Valere are among the blandest JRPG protagonists I've ever seen. [spoiler] Honestly, I was glad when Garl died; it was the only memorable moment of my entire playthrough, f@ck that guy lol [/spoiler]
The puzzles are terrible. Nearly all of them boil down to pushing an object in 2 or 3 directions or activating a few switches until a platform moves into the correct position. There's little challenge, experimentation, or satisfaction involved, there is 0 actual puzzle-solving elements.
I also hated the fishing. There's no real mechanic, strategy, or skill to it, just press A, then hold A when the indicator lines up.
At this point, I'd rather recommend playing almost any turn-based RPG from Square than putting your trust in another Kickstarter-funded JRPG marketed on nostalgia alone. Sure there is no grind because the enemies scale with you (kinda like the junction system in FFVIII), THEN WHAT IS THE POINT OF COMBAT ? I can just skip the enemies knowing is not gonna affect or punish me in the long-term.
After beating Erlina the final boss is literally a bullet hell shoot 'em up with no difficulty whatsoever, you just keep pressing the fire button and you even get a free shield with barely cooldown so you don't even have to move, what a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ending for the story beating this ''world eater''. Then apparently you find out there is actually a true ending, I ain't gonna look up the internet to tick a list of activities I needed to do for it. I think it's a brain-dead design decision that some developers still lock the true ending of a game behind collecting every collectible. I'm really not a fan of that.
