ANOTHERDUCK'S PROFILE

While the difficulty balance of battles was a bit uneven at times, it's good on the whole. In the beginning some areas were pretty hard or downright impossible, but once I got towards the middle of the game it started getting easy enough that battles are over before any gimmicks or special enemy mechanics have time to make a difference.

I should not that I didn't use any consumables at all, since I didn't feel it was necessary to use them for most battles, and while it could've made the harder battles completable earlier on, there was always something else to do instead, and I didn't want to get too strong for those quests/dungeons to lose their challenge.

The variation in the battles made it feel fresh and unique as long as the balance was roughly appropriate. This made the battles never feel boring, and there was never any need for grinding.

The most fun battle was against the eight when the usual suspect finally had collected her seven friends. At that point it was a bit easy, though (I was at 50-60 or something I believe).

The best part of the gameplay is the puzzles. There are a lot of them, they're creative rather than complex, and they have a difficulty ranging from learning basic controls to stumpers. It's amazing how just a simple jump action can be used for so much. I also very much like the push-back against walls in the pushing puzzles, since that both removes the likelihood of having to reset puzzles, and adds one more mechanic you can, and sometimes have to, use to solve the puzzles.

The minigames weren't generally good, though. I'm not sure I enjoyed any of them. Long-winded pattern repetition gets boring, rhythm game style circles that have uneven speed and dubious hit timing are more of a chore to learn, and direction combinations doesn't work as well with tringles that are slower to interpret than clear arrows make me want to stop playing.

On the other hand, fishing and shooting worked, and the dungeon defence was a bit frustrating but was otherwise a good challenge that required thought. The card game and slime avoidance felt more random than skill-based, but weren't so hard they took away from the game. The reaction game doesn't work with a controller, since some inputs are left and right at the same time. I think, anyway, was a while ago.

The sun-moon path riddle didn't have any place to look up what the riddle was so I forgot what it actually was, and by the time I could even access the area, Cyl showed up which also seemed to close the ability to solve it myself (if that was an option). It wasn't much of a riddle once I actually saw the location, though.

The weakest part of the game. I didn't feel it made much of a point finishing the game for the story, since the final confrontation didn't add much depth, closure, or change. It felt weird when Kyme started complaining about no one asking about his past, since he didn't want to talk about it anyway when Sita asked. The theme of starting a new life didn't mesh well with the whole stealing theme. The implication of the final love interest felt like it ignored most of it. Sita said like two lines when she got her memory back, which was all of it for her part of the entire story, while some of the rest of them had a story beat or another earlier on that might have indicated their story was done.

The spider cave was a railroad that assumed the same outcome regardless of what you did. I can understand missing it being possible or being restricted in having a different outcome, but it breaks immersion when it happens.

The different characters do provide different ways of playing, which is always good. I'm not sure how well the other characters played if you focus on them, but I mainly had Sita and Emith do damage, Rick debuff, and Kyme protecting and countering everything. It worked for pretty much the entire game, with Ezekiel supporting with both healing and damage, and Brave Wind with healing and the occasional stun.

Kyme worked well as a tank, sometimes too well as the counter + cover combo killed a lot of things with no risk. Especially the Obsessive(?) snake which killed itself after quite a few attacks. It was fun seeing that tactic as the penultimate boss, though. However, Sita didn't gain crit% from dodging the counters.

Sita in particular worked well with the accessories giving her def buffs when she gets attack buffs, and healing when she gets either, meaning she'd rarely need healing herself (and thus could attack without pause). However, her combos felt a bit awkward as any finisher requires a set-up of a turn of doing nothing special. The small fight-permanent bonuses never added up to anything noticeable since fights didn't last that long. She was probably my most used character, though, so it still worked.

Emith worked well enough. A bit more of a spin on the standard black magician with the element interactions, but on the whole I found the resistances and vulnerabilities on enemies didn't matter as much as just spamming wet + lightning or poison + holy.

Rick in hindsight should've gotten better priority on his agility from my part, since he was sometimes slower than Sita and therefore didn't debuff the enemies in time. Overall I liked his kits (mostly only used dagger + gun, though). He's a bit fragile but can hide, does a bit of condition damage as well as regular damage, so I never had any problems.

Ezekiel probably works a lot better if you actually use healing items (which I didn't), although later when you get more abilities and the last team mates it's less of an issue. A bit basic, but works.

Umbra felt a bit too gimmicky, and I didn't get her to work well enough. Might work for someone who focuses more on condition damage, but I didn't go there.

Brave Wind was for the most part not necessary in his support capacity, and was too weak as an attacker.

As far as the personality of the characters goes, they're fairly basic and don't have that much dialogue, except maybe Kyme and Sita. It works for the game, so it's not bad, but could be expanded upon. I did like several of them, as well as many NPCs. There were a few less interesting ones, like Brave Wind, and I didn't like Cyl. I didn't like Sita in the beginning, but she got a lot better with time, and had the most impact out of any single character.