I'm disappointed I didn't manage to get into this game, seeing how positively it is generally regarded.

You really, really have to love platforming not to find the exploration part frustrating. It's just an endless series of jumping puzzles with little direction and plenty of nasty punishments if you mess up (long backtrack, unwelcome fights etc.).

The combat is good and the character building is a nice riff on the old ff system. But it's mainly the boss fights that are great. The regular fights feel a little overtuned. They're doable of course, but tax your attention and resources (potions to refill mana mainly) and the combat isn't quite interesting enough to make me want to do 10 semi-risky trash fights just to traverse some zone. You can avoid lots of fights, but that relies heavily on being good at the platforming parts.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend this. A whole lot of the individual parts are actually pretty good, but they manage to come together to form a massive slog, something that's really far less than the sum of its parts.

For example, individual battles are mostly fun. However, every battle is a steady drain on your very limited resources, so you have the choice of avoiding fights, meaning you'll be underpowered and lacking abilities to fight mandatory fights, or you can grind. It's frustrating, because I chose normal difficulty specifically because it said you shouldn't need to grind. That was an absolute lie. You will need to grind for abilities, and grind for cash to afford better gear and maps, and grind for consumables to sustain your party, either as drops or more money grinding to buy them. You cannot get through this game without a decent amount of grinding, regardless of what the game may tell you.

As another example, the platforming. It's pretty neat in small bouts, and when it works properly it can really lead to an open, intricate feeling world. However, a lot of the jumping paths are long and require many, many precise jumps. And don't think you can savescum these, either. When you reload a save, you're sent back to your last home point, not the point where you saved, which is unspeakably frustrating considering how large some of the maps are. I eventually reached the point where I didn't want to explore anymore because there was just so damn much platforming and it took ages to get anywhere.

Third big example, the job system. Now, I like the jobs I experienced and some of the abilities are interesting. However, many abilities on several classes just felt completely useless. Additionally, because most physical abilities are tied to a specific weapon, you are sorely limited in what abilities you can mix and match. For example, if you level a rogue, most rogue abilities are tied to using a dagger. Switch to a monk, whose abilities use staves or unarmed. Equip trickery as your second ability from the rogue. Now, you can either wield a staff or be unarmed and be able to use all the monk abilities, or waste a passive making yourself able to equip daggers, equip a dagger and be able to use most of the rogue abilities. If you do the first, you have all the monk abilities, but only can only use steal from the rogue. And for the latter, you can use the rogue abilities, but only meditate for the monk. I have no idea why this was designed like this, but it feels awful, and massively incentivizes primarily using magic classes for secondaries, as magic isn't tied to weapons.

Overall, I just got worn out by the game. I set it down to take a break, and realized that I not only had no desire to come back to it, I was really dreading playing more. So no, I can't recommend this one.

I really really wanted to like this game. But there were a few mechanical choices that really brought it down in my opinion.

The first is build variety. Having so many classes implies the idea of having a lot of room to experiment with a character's growth and build. But many martial class skills are locked to a specific weapon, rendering them useless when used as a subclass. Magic does not have this issue. It feels bad to get a new class that fits the stat spread of one of your characters and simply be unable to combine it with anything else you have.

Secondly, while the game boasts no random encounters, they are very hard to avoid on the map. Not only that, but they are rather punishing (at least on Hard mode, which I was playing on). They range between brutal to monotonous, where they are a puzzle that need to be solved and once you do, you simply repeat the same optimized process on them to victory. This isn't really an issue, but this leads into my next issue.

When you save and quit the game, you are returned to a save point check point rather than where you quit the game. Furthermore, these save points do not heal your party. Many times I found myself able to play for short session, I make it part way through a location and save and quit. Only to be ported back to the start with all of my used resources gone. I would replace them but..

Everything in the game is very very expensive. If you buy consumables, good luck getting gear upgrades. Without the gear good luck not getting trounced in fights. Even grinding for the money doesn't feel to be a viable option because the fights pay out so little compared to the costs.

The platforming is fun, but I rarely found the rewards for doing so worth it unless it was the core path to a dungeon or boss. The mount system is fun to add platforming abilities like a metroidvania, but you constantly need to swap between them and doing so through even the favorite menu is a pain.

Again, I really wanted to enjoy this game. but by the time I finished the desert it was just too much of a slog.

Cons: #1. No mouse support (which makes overworld movement obtuse and menu navigation even more obtuse).
#2. Huge lack of information provided to the player, like when creating your party at the start of the game, or when selecting the difficulty setting, there's almost no information provided.
#3. No reliable fast travel to previously visited locations / towns.
#4. A gigantic amount of platforming.
#5. If you save at a savepoint, and load that save, you're taken back to your single 'home point' instead of spawning at the location where you saved. This makes no sense.

If a reliable form of fast travelling was implemented, then perhaps I could bring myself to shifting my overall opinion to slightly positive, but honestly, the lack of fast travel is going to waste hours and hours of your life in the game, and that's something I can't abide by (I'm not talking about the 11shrines in the game, those don't even take you to 10% of the places you'd want to go, like Nan's place or the fishing place, etc.)... I simply value my time too much to spend it backtracking for hours. I'd honestly rather replay Earthlock or FF9 than play this game anymore. I'll check back in a year or so to see if #1 & #3 was fixed atleast, perhaps then I'll give it another go

Ok... I really want to like the game, and find the openness very interesting... BUT (in my short time playing) literally 70% of all my time is just spent on jumping puzzles. It's cute having a couple secrets be tough to jump to, but literally progressing all my quests and areas is based on jumping puzzles (with a map that doesnt rotate). I just spent 45 minutes trying to get a final dog bone that I can see, but never figured out how to jump to it.

It had some clever ideas but ultimately it felt more and more like a slog to get through.

I like everything about this game except for the overworld. There's a job system! There are unlockable classes! There are no random encounters! Unfortunately, none of that matters when you're lost: you're just going to spend hours wandering around on an empty map. I don't have the patience for that. At least give us a hint of where to go, please.

It's to hard for beginner and casual game

Way too much platforming and going in circles tryin'a figure out which way to go.

I'm saying thumbs down. Because it calls itself a non-linear JRPG which sounds great. But really, it's a platforming metroidvania. The JRPG elements are great and I'm impressed when people can skip entire sections, but I just get lost easily in the game. And I wanted the blue mage's abilities to be shared across new blue mages!