So I put another two hours into it on the side today (up to 3 now). I'll go over my impressions so far and improve on them now that I have a little better grasp of things. The instruction booklet is pretty useless for the most part too. Which isn't the end of the world, especially when most others are pretty useless as well. However I felt like I was missing something so I skimmed through it looking to see if it was possible to run from battle and it's not as far as I can tell. I didn't gain any other insight towards the game and the screenshots in the manual are horrendous... lol
The battle system seems like a mix of Lunar and Chrono Trigger. Each area will have random 'battle maps' that you will enter like your typical turn-based rpg battle. The difference between this and lunar is that you'll have obstacles around the map that will prevent you from attacking enemies with certain characters and what not. Each character will have up to eight skills that have various abilities that range from small AoE to large AoE to just single target. The Chrono Trigger part comes in with combos. Now that I've gotten a second character, we learned a new skill after a few battles where the second character will enchant my weapon for a large AoE fire attack. It's pretty nice and will of course need both characters turns available and use both characters SP. In this game SP seems a little more leniant so far as it recovers a little bit after every battle and you don't need to go spamming it all the time.
The world map itself is your standard ugly ass FFV standard fair. You can't run across it, but it looks like at some point you will get a boat and an airship based on the map legend that you see the very first moment you step outside of town. Inside areas such as forests, dungeons, towns, etc you will be able to run by holding the A button like many RPGs. It doesn't seem to effect your battle rate when you use it, but I really don't feel like walking around everywhere to compare either. Especially with the high battle rate the game has already.
Story wise, the game has been proceeding really smoothly so far. I have some theories on what I might see ahead, but it's not black and white predictable like some other games. I really didn't see a recent event coming and now I'm left wondering how the game is going to play out from here. Of course it could still turn out to be an easy read, but it's honestly still too early to tell. Regardless, so far it's going pretty decent like I stated earlier.
The characters I've met so far are pretty unique. Their dialogue seems fairly well thought out and well written so far. Their personalities are going to be cliche since we've probably seen everything in the book and then some by this point, but I think I'll still enjoy them based on the dialogue I've seen so far. Character reactions are done pretty well considering the age of the sprites they're using. No, there's not really eye-popping reactions, but they're pretty close and it's pretty funny to see some of the weird reactions they've thought up.
As for backstories on characters, there isn't much outside of your main character which the game is being pretty cryptic about. It throws a lot of hints your way and random NPCs do possess a little bit of background knowledge on characters if you're someone who enjoys talking to every single living and non-living sprite that you come across.
Speaking of every single living sprite you come across... There are a lot of hidden passages and weird difficult-to-see chests all around. The second to last dungeon I ran had a lot of skeletons laying all around and some of them had items in them. The dungeon before that had some ivy covered chests and normal chests. Then towns have your standard fancy chests and i-like-to-blend-in type chests. So it's nice that so far they don't seem to be overusing sprites all the time. Granted an enemy or two so far has been reused from previously fought sprites. Not a big deal, but I hope there's not a whole lot of recycling.
Oh and remember that armor story where that old bitch
ed me over? Yeah, I got the good shit this time. It's significantly better than store bought for some time so far and costs less since you find all of the materials but one which needs to be bought. However the second time you go to get the armor made, it looks like it's timed to completion via story events rather than sleeping at the inn like the first one was.
I do have one negative thing to say so far about the game besides the frequent battling and not being able to run from battle (items may let me) is that the game froze on me once during a transition screen when I was leaving town. I believe I hit a couple buttons during it, which may of triggered it. Although I really hope it was just a unique occurance that won't happen again, but time will tell. So make sure to save often. (Possible at save points or while on the overworld)
From my experiences so far, I think that anyone who enjoys older generation RPGs should enjoy this one. I'll be going through this slowly at the moment, so don't expect me to write out a full review any time soon. It may be a couple weeks if not longer before I complete this game. Hopefully enough will be produced for people to purchase that far down the road considering nobody will really know about this game and will likely just become a cult classic.
