It's my first Sakura Wars and maybe a weird jumping on point for these games. I loved the sprite work and quickly locked in on Sumire she's so fun. Only takes a couple of hours for one run and there was a decent amount of event variety for how short the game is. The story never actually goes anywhere there's no melodrama and you never really get to see any character really go through anything, but its more than enough for a gameboy color game since the events are still cute and there are a lot of really well drawn pixel art CG's.

The more I sit with it the more I think it has the best combat in one of these I've ever played. It also deserves a lot of credit for how much it sticks to the Pinnochio thing, it squeezes every last drop of possible theming and aesthetics from the story when building its world and story. It has some great twists too in both its story and gameplay its a lot of fun.

stray thoughts:

- I really prefer the more straightforward story telling here than what we usually get in these sorts of games. I was really invested in Pinnochio as a character and the ending hit way more because of it.

- Absurd amount of enemy and weapon variety. They will throw more unique movesets at you then you'll know what to do with, and will begin introducing 2-3 new enemies at once in an encounter.

- Parrying feels really rewarding when you can do it but the timing felt too strict for me to do it reliably during some of the more frantic fights, they apparently loosened the timing on it in a patch afterwards though.

- The reusable oil that lets you apply free elemental damage to your weapon once per life is a great way to get people to engage with that part of the combat, I feel like a lot of people play these games without considering elemental weaknesses at all which is a shame.

- I struggled a lot on the second to last final boss but I'm willing to admit it was a skill issue... still a real shake up that came out of nowhere.

- I have an issue where some of the side plots with some of the hub npcs turn out but thats spoiler territory.

- It has what might be the greatest post credits stinger is all of video games.

this is such a step up from p1 its crazy. maya rules. I liked how they narrowed down the broader themes of self-discovery in p1 and focused on each party member's relationship with their parents and how it formed their sense of self.

the combat is still holding it back, these games are easier than p5 even. But its a bit of a blessing in disguise cause the encounter rate is so high if you weren't able to auto battle through the entire game and actually had to make decisions and stuff during fights it would be like 3 times as long lmao.

also why no yuka ayase cameo they brought like everyone else back

Exceeded my expectations, still doesn't hit the highs of the og or even remake though and I feel like the open world stuff really doesn't do it any favors. But man this is the best combat final fantasy is ever gonna get and it did right by the characters, I enjoyed basically all the new story stuff (any story issues really come from how it adapted scenes from the original). Wasn't expecting cannon Yuffie to be as fun as it was its nice to see her actually be part of the story and have interactions with the other party members. I also ended up really enjoying the ending which I was little worried about going in to the final act of this game.