I sincerely wish they would do something about this franchise‘s character/enemy design. The quality of the animation and visual effects is top notch yet consistently ruined by hideous and/or cartoonish faces, with the contrast being especially glaring in this most recent installment.
Visuals aside the gameplay is standard JRPG turn-based battles combined with semi-linear area exploration. So nothing to complain about (or praise) there. Leveling is a mix of ‘classic’ automatically unlocked abilities and skill points that can be spent to unlock additional options or stat boosts in a manner similar to the systems found in FFX and FFXII (though greatly simplified). It’s an interesting choice and fortunately there’s a repec option available to promote experimentation. There’s also a crafting system… which is cute but sort of extraneous.
As for the storyline and a good chunk of the character behavior, sadly they fall in line with the character design issue. Which is to say they’re godawful. Painfully so. As of the start of the second half of the game only one or ~maybe~ two plot developments didn’t involve hardcore railroading and/or illogical deus ex machina. It’s been a real struggle not to just look away and button-mash through any cutscene dialog. Oh, speaking of buttons, the PC port of the game is pretty decent as far as control schemes go (though I do wish you could bind both the movement and D-pad commands to the same keys) and doesn’t appear to have any glaring issues or system settings-related omissions.
So can I recommend playing this game? No, not really. It doesn’t do anything new and some of the things it decided to revisit were better off buried.
