To cut a long story short: besides its gorgeous art and great music, the characters and their stories fall so flat that the rest of the game kind of falls with them. It feels more like a chore to play when all you have to look forward to after the battles is more wordy cutscenes where very predictable plot points feel stretched out with meaningless dialogue. Said battles were fine, nothing too stand-out about them, they work well, but those stories take a lot of emotional punch out of the music and make every town feel like it has no soul under the beautiful exterior. I still managed to finish all eight stories which shows there’s enough fun to be had to push through, but what’ll stick with me after finishing it is how aggressively basic these stories were and very little else.