After seeing a number of comments claiming this was one of the best RPGs ever, I finally got around to playing it recently.
It’s a good handheld game, sure… but it’s certainly no RPG masterpiece. There are quite a number of flaws, beyond the inherent simplicity of being designed specifically for short play sessions. The most glaring of which would have to be the plot structure and storyline itself:
This is a game about jumping around between timelines and modifying the past to change the future, yet it’s just as linear as a conventional RPG with every single decision point having a rigidly right and wrong answer. If you choose the wrong decision you have to immediately re-do the choice to pick the right one, and if you do things out-of-order or miss something you’ll be blocked from continuing until you do everything the right way.
So it has all the negatives of a time travel story (questionable logic, forced backtracking) with none of the positives such as multiple endings. There is only one here, though it’s accompanied by a number of sidequest-unlocked epilogue scenes (only the Conuts one advances anything), and ultimately you’ve gone on this epic journey just to… restore the status quo. The actual progress toward saving the world is put off with a sequel hook.
The combat system is fine at least, despite fundamentally making no sense whatsoever and having a penchant for tossing over-populated encounters at you that basically require the use of magical AOE attacks. And I can’t really complain about getting ~32 hours worth of playtime out of it to see everything, even if some of that did only just amount to running on a treadmill.
