Recent reviews by Star

A very faithful RPG of a mid 90s SNES style, similar in veins to "Final Fantasy VI" and "Chrono Trigger".

Before playing this game I went through the reviews here and saw people complaining about the progression system being locked to story battles and this being a bad thing in RPGs, what I say to that is simply: Get good. The game when played on hard + aggressive enemies, in my opinion, is a great challenge and really makes you want to use your full skill set. Not being able to grind much to alleviate this makes it far more satisfying when you do take that victory as it comes down to your skill.

Now for a summary of pros and cons 👇

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🟢 Pros 🟢

- Really good soundtrack.

- Really good character and level art.

- A unique "Overdrive" system in combat which promotes the use of all abilities.

- A huge character cast with a range of abilities.

- A fairly decent story.

- The map design is complicated enough to reward exploration but not overly convoluted as to require heavy backtracking for goodies. (I had a big problem with this in "CrossCode")

- The game awards you many things through the "Reward Board" giving you different objectives than just the story.

- A good challenge if you set the game to "Hard" and "Aggressive".

- Very fair price considering the 50~ hour gameplay length (I played on hard and completed most side content)

- Game is fully playable on the Steam Deck.

🔴 Cons 🔴

- Crystal system for fusing weapon/armour buffs is a menu slog and the purity system actively punishes you for trying to put them on early game weapons; might as well late until the endgame before using them.

- Some characters join too late in the story to build them and make them useful among your primary party. I would appreciate a New Game+ and harder difficulties so I could play more with them through the full game.

- There's no archive of the tutorial tool tips and the game often throws a bunch of new info at you at once when teaching you a mechanic so it can be easy to forget. I had to Google a lot of them afterwards when I forgot things.

- The Class system feels somewhat tacked on as the stats given by the classes feel far more important than the abilities for the most part as each character has their niche acutely defined.

- The optional characters seldom show up in story cutscenes which can break the immersion. I hope this could perhaps be fixed up in future updates so they appear and make small comments in said scenes ala the secret characters in "Final Fantasy VI" and "VII".

- A few bugs here and there, but they are being patched.

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All in all, I had a blast and it was a beautiful breath of fresh air in this day and age. I eagerly await any new content/sequel in the future and want to thank all those that worked on this game! I recommend everyone to grab it if you even have a slight love of RPGs.