I started playing this game about 5 am last night and the general direction had me playing today as well. However after about 1 hour of this game I realized, "This is one of those games...", where everything is slow paced and slow moving, so I immediately used a speedhack to play the game on five times it's normal speed. I was hoping that this would keep me from getting bored with the standard JRPG combat system but it didn't. Eventually all those "old and beloved RPG ingredients" that you don't see around anymore because they really do suck, dragged the game down. First is the combat system of random unavoidable encounters with a static percent chance to just leave the fight. This is unforgivable. In a game that has a terribly boring JRPG combat system that literally consists of pressing a button to select things off of menus you NEED a means of letting players skip that combat. If you can allow me to press start or enter and skip the text which is the strong point of the game then why will you not let me skip the weak point of the game as well? If anything you would want that reversed so as not to cause massive spikes of boredom. Large dungeons with fairly easy to challenging puzzles do not help this. They make it ever the more irritating. Several times I wanted to strike my monitor because of this random battle bullshit popping up in the middle of a puzzle. This also made me dislike the puzzles because I had no means of just simply bugging out of combat and indeed when you fail it uses a turn and lets the enemies take a turn. So several times I died simply because I ran out of healing items and mana because I didn't want to fight enemies anymore as it was boring. This of course leaves you injured a lot of times so you run through everything you have by the time you get to the boss. Xenogears is what the rate of encounters reminds me of and it's ridiculous.

That being said about the atrocious combat aspect of the game. I really wanted to meet the mother of Mint and Ivy. I also liked how distinctly childish they seemed but were not. The grandfather often getting irate with them for their lack of understanding. The execution of the story was awful as though. It had the worst use of side quests I have seen since 1984. You didn't meet mom immediately, you never saw dad, and you often stopped to help others because you felt it was the right thing to do. The only gripe here is the inability to say no. You are forced to help people on side quests that often feel so forced you don't want to do them. It's always on the whim of the daughters too. They give no reason other than "I want to!" or "It's the right thing to do!" and while that's cool for a personality trait, it's a little annoying when EVERY town you stop in has a predictable formula of helping someone. With multiple endings you would think this game would allow you to just skip all of it and move along. It's literally forced side quests and it doesn't just slow the story, it stops the story. If you can give me these side quests and force them down my throat you can let me see Gram, you can instead give me sequences of the mother and how she feels at the time. Instead you give me Moira's pointless quest that you cannot actually "complete" because the bad guys wins anyways. The strength of the story seems weak until far into the game because of this and can give the illusion of being a very weak story.

Now my favorite part...the grinding. Oh yes you need to do a lot of this just so you can have a decent time going through dungeons and bosses from the inception of the game. You need the levels and the stat ups that come with them like a lush needs rehab. And you need to fight because gold is handed out in such pitiful amounts it will take about 100 fights for you to afford a decent chunk of supplies around the third dungeon with the orbs of light. This is not the only flaw with the gameplay however, the game decides to focus on yet another terrible aspect called "trolling". Yes as if the Xenogears level of random encounters is not bad enough the screen does not show sufficient information for some of the puzzles (room that goes dark when you use the green orbs) meaning it's guesswork and even giving you empty paths that there is no point in exploring, they are just dead ends. Nowhere you stand will show enough about the next area for you to memorize it. You can memorize maybe half the path because that's all you see with most of those rooms. So this makes both of those extremely annoying.

All in all this game is actually bad. It's not even decent. The good parts are able to be skipped and when you don't they are short in comparison with the bad parts. Because of this emphasis on everything awful in the game the overall game itself comes across as poor.

Final Words - There is a reason games like Final Fantasy haven't been good since the early 90's. It's true the original had many dead ends and side quests but the pace of the game was not STOPPED for that or even slowed. This is something that only emerged in the mid to late 90's and continued for some time in most general RPG releases. People are tired of things that do nothing for the plot, exploration, or character development. This game has two characters who know who they are but do you need to take every other location in the game to show us this? I understood damn well at the start that they did things they thought were right with the mayor scene in the starting town. Instead of using this knowledge to further flesh out the world you continually show us the kind of characters that are in the game, over and over. I understand how the people think by the time I get to the second town, I do not need the crash course every time. You did an amazing amount of setting up but never deliver on it in regards to character building. The fact that I forgot most of the game because of this and only remember the painful parts shows that you need to work on delivering your promises. There was a lot that was cool in this game but ultimately it got slogged down in your focus on everything else that you didn't personally touch and improve. The recipes for one were cool as was the drops to make them. The fact that when we did quests like the market place blue bear quest we saw actual changes in the map, such as the vendor sprites move. Was cool it added a feel of changing the world through your actions. I'm going to continue playing this game but I don't think it will get any better as there is simply not enough focus on the good parts you created in the game.