A visually beautiful game let down by repetitive encounters, unrewarding grinding, loosely-knit stories and many QoL problems.

The encounters are based on how far you travel, and there's a LOT. You can take a perk to reduce the frequency they occur which takes up one of your only four upgrade slots. Only four perk slots for a game that allows you to level up to 99. The combat is very repetitive and about half way through my playtime I ended up skipping most of them because they're a chore at best. For a game that has so much focus on combat to only have a few options for character upgrades is really disappointing.

The grinding is just as prevalent. There are so few areas for you explore on the map suitable for your level, and the chests mostly contain consumables and nothing otherwise interesting. A good portion of them are class-locked so you have to make a note of where you found them, travel back to a tavern, switch character, then travel back, because you can only fast travel to settlements. And if you take a secondary job as a thief, you still can't unlock the chests to save you running back and forth. There's so much downtime between quests that you're forced to go through the same filler-content of farming hordes just to be met with a boss encounter at the end of each. And the boss encounters are just as bland as the trash mobs. You'll spend a solid 20 minutes - at least - hacking away at their health pool and spending all of your consumables... and the health bar: none. I found out that when their nametag is yellow then it's at 50% and red 10%, and you can only see it once you target them rather than always being able to see it. So many poor UI design choices.

The main quests, again, are so loosely tied together that I found myself not caring about any of the characters because I was spending all my time fighting the same mobs of monsters ad nauseam. And finally, the QoL problems: the map barely has any useful info, the success % is badly coded; the amount of times I've spent 3+ attempts on an 80% success chance just to fail, I can't even count how many instances. When you're trying to barter for items, there's no comparison table. There's many more than these examples.

Very let down by what seems to be a highly-acclaimed series to be met with such a hollow experience. I will say that I've heard that the second improves on a LOT of the problems with this one, but at this rate I'm still on the fence about whether to get it on sale or not. £20 on discount is a huge ask when you compare it to other far more fulfilling JRPGs which are a fraction of the price. Sadly, it's just not for me.

Juego recomendable, pero sabiendo que hay que dedicarle muchísimas horas. Sobretodo combatiendo, para coger experiencia y subir de nivel.
En 43 horas llevo unos 300 combates, y se me está empezando a hacer pesado. La curva de subida de niveles es lenta y la dificultad de los bosses muy alta. Meten unas ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ espectaculares y las armas potentes para intentar equiparar la contienda son escasas y carísimas.
Al final no hay más remedio que irse a alguna gruta y combatir, combatir, combatir, volver al pueblo a dormir y reponer brebajes y volver a la gruta a seguir combatiendo. Se hace repetitivo.

A pretty good game that I would normally recommend if I wasn't getting "Fatal Error" on trying to launch it and seemingly nothing I can do to fix it even after scouring forums. I'm a bit upset because I really like this game's characters, especially Primrose.