After about seven hours (and 16 chapters?) I can't put up with this game anymore. The combat feels bad, the story is bland, the characters are mostly unlikable. There are plenty of interesting ideas and things that I want to like but none of it was coming together so I had to tap out. Seven hours oscillating between boredom and frustration is a lot more than I'd give to most games but The Last Story wouldn't give anything back.

The combat wants to be tactical but has too many limits on it for it to really give you the ability to think about engagements. You can order your allies to do specific actions but only when your meter has charged up enough so oftentimes they'll just hang out and maybe do something useful if they're feeling generous. You can use Gathering to draw aggro but I found that usually just results in death because of how limited healing is. The automatic attacking feels bad and makes it hard to move but manual makes it hard to dodge which became more and more necessary the further I went. It all felt so clumsy and like it needed some more refinement to make it all come together properly.

The characters. I wish I liked the characters. But Zael is just some bland guy, Calista is a generic love interest, Syrenne is 50% jokes about alcoholism and 50% sexual innuendo, Yurick is a jerk, and Lowell is a misogynist. Dagran and Mirania seemed alright, at least, but they weren't enough to salvage the cast.

The main plot is a pretty generic JRPG story, for better or worse. I've played more than enough of them to see this and have a solid idea of how it's going to play out and it wasn't enough to make me want to put up with any more of the un-fun combat to see it through.

Also, it is very funny to me that the title of this game is just a synonym for "Final Fantasy". They wanted it to be a Final Fantasy game so bad that they even named the dang game after it.