Every time I look up dungeon crawlers this game comes up.

[Haitian Zambe]

Is there a randomized loot system in this game?
also, is class progression linear or open ended? I read from the review the combat is great and the story is great, but flexibility/freedom of character progression is more my type of concern.

[Marukoban]

This game has no class system and the progression is pretty much linear.

Every party member already has template what they can be and what they are good at.
You are given some customization option in the form of quartz, which function like magic materia in FF7. However, it's not possible to change character focused towards casting magic to be good at physical damage and vice versa.

Each character has set of slots that you can play around.
Some of the slots has restriction on element or type of quartz/materia you can put, and this varies from character to character.
Every character also has set of skills that is unique to each others and this skills, called crafts, is the primary driver whether a character is suited to build damage, focus on support or cast arts.

Having said that, you'll still have some fun customizing each character. The choice you have will be more to subtype that the character can be.

For example, Rean, the main character, is primarily a physical damage dealer. You can choose whether to make him hit hard, focus on delaying enemies, be the evasion tank, debuff enemy or be the speedy damage dealer. You can make him do all of those, but you have very limited slots, so focusing on 1-2 aspects will yield much much better result.

1 late game Master Quartz in this game basically allows any character to be God-tier support character.

Also to answer your other question, this is not a dungeon crawler. This game puts huge emphasis on story (and by huge I mean this is part 6 of ongoing series within set world and interconnected characters, some of which appears across all 6 games). The loots drop is by RNG, but you get quartz that can sort of guarantee the drop. Each monster has maximum 2 different type of loots and it's rather easy to make sure you get better loot as I think the chance is quite high.

[何かしら…]

I wouldn't call this game a 'dungeon crawler'. It is pretty strict in character and story progression, you don't have big choices but there's a decent stat/"magic" customization system, so you can build characters in several ways, although each one has its own weapon and set of skills/"crafts" that favor a specific playstyle. The balance is pretty bad though (easy). The only loot you get from enemies as 'potions' is randomized, but everything else you can find around the map from chests is static.

[Gin-chan]

Yeah as above said this is not exactly a dungeon crawler kinda game.Though that said Trails in The Sky The Third is as close as the game can be to a dungeon crawler imo with the amount of party members to choose from each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You're still gonna be confused as hell as to whats goin on unless you've played Trails in the Sky FC and SC though..

[Monterossa]

Dungeon crawler is the only sub-genre in JRPG that I can't stand. It sucks and boring, especially those games that only have real dungeons (like... underground dungeons with brick walls, traps, and monsters) and the battle system is that you can't see your own party members.

[LrdDimwit]

This game is not a dungeon crawler. It is pretty much the opposite of a dungeon crawler (plot heavy, relatively short dungeons that you can't revisit, loads and loads of dialogue).