Once I looked past how uncomfortable the title Shepard made me, and learned to accept that I may be above the age of the target demographic and it shows in the writing, I had a lot of fun with the combat system in this game. Also worth noting that with the fan mod this game ran great at 1440p, 60fps.

The system in this game all feel over-engineered like they had people just adding systems on top of systems and you know what? I missed that.

I've spent a lot of time in this game trying to understand what makes it tick.
Basic attacks apply buffs,
Special attacks apply debuffs,
Enemies all have elemental weaknesses and resistances,
Physical/Magic resistances as well,
Equipment has modifiers which can be fused and combined and stacked with other modifiers,
Transformations,
A bunch of other minor details

There's a lot of poor writing and general design mistakes made within this game, but if you're willing to look past the flaws, you can have a lot of fun in Zestiria. I highly recommend the Japanese voices with subtitles and of course, the fan patch for better shadows and 60fps. The subtitles are likely directly from the localization so the main draw for Japanese audio is the much better sound leveling and line delivery.

I also recommend you brace yourself for internet memes if you have an aversion for those.

7/10 Writing
6/10 Design
4/10 Localization
9/10 Gameplay