S E V E R A N C E

Avoid this. Enemies level with your characters, My second character was quite under leveled, and my third one was immensely under leveled. Had to fight a 4 man boss fight, killed the third guy quick, second one went down without me able to do much, even after their special, and they stun locked the first one. I thought that maybe this is intentional. No, no way for me to grind and even if I did they level with me. Garbage design, and you should feel bad, this game is disrespectful to jRPGs.

After some decent mapping and the start of some kind of story, I was intrigued enough at first. But then, the battles came into play. I actually liked how you could just grind via crystals in each area. I was hoping that my party would at least be strong enough to take on the enemies in future areas as I don't mind grinding. The enemies scale with your party. Which completely negates grinding, because you can't grind enough to get over that level curve with the enemies. I don't know why the dev made this decision, but it honestly took pushed the positives of the game's experience out the window for me. And honestly, this game had some promise when I first started it up, which is frustrating as there might've been something decent here. I wish I had refunded it when I had the chance, but I had went onto better pastures.

This was not playtested. The game sometimes crashes, especially when interacting with the quest log but it's very rare. The biggest issue is the part when the first three characters reunite. You play as one character for the 1st time and he has the same encounters as a group of three. Playing as that sole character is a slog. Overall, the encounters are a slog. I turned them off wanting to rush to the part where I get more characters. However, not all crystals allow you to turn the encounters on/off. So what happened is I turned off encounters with the main character and then when I went to play with another one, I could no longer turn them back on. There is a boss fight where the group reunites and it's quite hard when you have a character you've not levelled and have no option to go back and level. TLDR: You can turn off exp and get softlock.

It's a nice change from the traditional setup these sorts of games tend to have. It also seems in ways a bit like what's going on in our time so it has a bit of a real world feel.