How are game systems like these still a thing nowadays?
They had beautiful visuals, an engaging story and interesting characters to fill their world with. It turned out incredibly bland, boring and actually the game actively pulls every fun out of the experience the further you're in.
It starts out great until you actually have to do something to progress the story. Movement is very slow and every city & dungeon has chests planted all over them with items you don't need 95% of the time. Every side quest in the first hours is a fetch quest combined with a tougher encounter. My passion to play this game skyrocketed when the trailers came out and decreased every hour of my playthrough.
The following points hold this game back tremendously:
〇 The story heavily revolves around the mechanic to change the time period to the past or the future. You can also do this in combat. The design of enemies and most bosses actually discourages the player to use this mechanic. How do you develop this mechanic and then make every bossfight harder when used is beyond me. And then an NPC who is always with you can jump to either times in most cities. First of all this is executed so slowly and secondly it has a max range of about 3m. So you probably sigh harder every time you have to use it.
〇 The enemies in this game are weak to either physical or magical attacks and that is all you need to know about how to approach every encounter. They get more boring the further you go and have no variability. The combat also lacks any momentum to motivate the player about the time travel skill, as it's just faster and more effective to perform standard moves.
〇 Also random encounters as a concept is bad.
〇 To trigger mandatory or optional events the player has to follow the very specific route to do that. Dialogue, collecting items, jumping to another time etc. So if you want to do any quests in this game it has to follow a -> b -> c and cannot be done any other way. There is no real freedom to anything and no playthrough is a meaningful experience. It could have been a visual novel with no combat, though.
〇 The max party size is three and there are more playable characters beyond that. Everyone not in combat doesn't receive EXP and at a certain time a character has to leave the party for a little while and when he comes back he is the same level as before.
〇 There is no way to see all of your items. If equipment cannot be held on to by any character then you don't know it exists. Also equipment is poorly balanced, because you get access to very powerful parts about 1/3 into the story and afterwards you just stomp over every encounter.
〇 It's way too long and dragged out with a carbon copy of quests and cities beyond the first hours. I was eight hours in and realized there was about 24 more to go. At this point I already lost all motivation to continue.
〇 Achievements block each other out so you cannot master this game in one playthough. This isn't that bad, but noteworthy because why should you play this game twice.
They had beautiful visuals, an engaging story and interesting characters to fill their world with. It turned out incredibly bland, boring and actually the game actively pulls every fun out of the experience the further you're in.
It starts out great until you actually have to do something to progress the story. Movement is very slow and every city & dungeon has chests planted all over them with items you don't need 95% of the time. Every side quest in the first hours is a fetch quest combined with a tougher encounter. My passion to play this game skyrocketed when the trailers came out and decreased every hour of my playthrough.
The following points hold this game back tremendously:
〇 The story heavily revolves around the mechanic to change the time period to the past or the future. You can also do this in combat. The design of enemies and most bosses actually discourages the player to use this mechanic. How do you develop this mechanic and then make every bossfight harder when used is beyond me. And then an NPC who is always with you can jump to either times in most cities. First of all this is executed so slowly and secondly it has a max range of about 3m. So you probably sigh harder every time you have to use it.
〇 The enemies in this game are weak to either physical or magical attacks and that is all you need to know about how to approach every encounter. They get more boring the further you go and have no variability. The combat also lacks any momentum to motivate the player about the time travel skill, as it's just faster and more effective to perform standard moves.
〇 Also random encounters as a concept is bad.
〇 To trigger mandatory or optional events the player has to follow the very specific route to do that. Dialogue, collecting items, jumping to another time etc. So if you want to do any quests in this game it has to follow a -> b -> c and cannot be done any other way. There is no real freedom to anything and no playthrough is a meaningful experience. It could have been a visual novel with no combat, though.
〇 The max party size is three and there are more playable characters beyond that. Everyone not in combat doesn't receive EXP and at a certain time a character has to leave the party for a little while and when he comes back he is the same level as before.
〇 There is no way to see all of your items. If equipment cannot be held on to by any character then you don't know it exists. Also equipment is poorly balanced, because you get access to very powerful parts about 1/3 into the story and afterwards you just stomp over every encounter.
〇 It's way too long and dragged out with a carbon copy of quests and cities beyond the first hours. I was eight hours in and realized there was about 24 more to go. At this point I already lost all motivation to continue.
〇 Achievements block each other out so you cannot master this game in one playthough. This isn't that bad, but noteworthy because why should you play this game twice.