I wanted to like this game, but I hit so many roadblocks. Making an overworld movement speed increase tied to an accessory slot is entirely needless. Just let me move that fast in the first place. The combat is not fun, nor is it particularly strategic. This led me to primarily hit the "auto-battle" button in-game - however, auto-battle prioritizes max damage so I'd frequently run out of mana because the game decided to just use the AOE bomb spells every encounter. Mechanically, this game is needlessly complicated and it's QAL improvements actually are a detriment to the experience.

A few other aspects of this game that really bothered me: It may just be the localization, but characters in this game range from less than one note to Tumblr post circa 2013. The magic system is poorly explained, the "RTS" battles are in real-time for some inexplicable reason, and the first 15 hours are filled with back-to-back cutscenes (that give you control for ~5 steps before thrusting you back into the scene). Occasionally there were stealth sections that I broke by getting to the location in question, but not doing so the intended way so the cutscene flag didn't trigger.

I hope that people who loved Suikoden love this game, but that is not me. I love JRPGs, but this is unfortunately a strong contender for the worst game I've played this year.