This review contains spoilers
I love the job system in this game, the potential to set a secondary job moveset for every character, and select any unlockable ability from any job, not only encourages trying out multiple jobs on multiple characters, but ends up giving you so many ways to mix and match the traits from them. There's "only" 24 jobs in the game, but the decisions the game gives you for how to use the DNA of each job results in hundreds, or even thousands of combinations.
The titular mechanic adds a small bit of extra strategy, use bravely to risk a burst of power to end a boss fight, or even slice through mobs easily, or default to skip a turn but save the action for next turn, while acting as a regular block in an RPG. In fact even some classes are built on using turns for their move cost rather than MP or some such.
The soundtrack is fantastic, if a little repetitive.
Many of the towns look absolutely fantastic, though dungeons can be somewhat bland in appearance.
Gotta give the game credit for making the tedious part of JRPG's (grinding) so much more player friendly. Either the ability to set random encounter rate to 0, or the ability to fast forward battles and use "auto" mode, which will repeat the last actions each character was manually commanded. The latter includes the use of brave so you can just brave x4 attack everything with every character when going through generic enemies.
The story of the game is a way too close to how JRPG's are represented in basically any parody ever. Protagonist whose small childhood home was destroyed, with an obvious romantic connection to the leading female, who has a unique role in this worlds religion. Story is centred around crystals. Last boss is some kind of universe-destroying being. It's all some of the most derivative plot I've ever seen.
Luckily the characters make it all worth sitting through. I enjoyedall most of them. And each job even has a corresponding villain, each with a memorable personality and a variety of roles in the story. The biggest problem I had with the characters was the 2 who spent 90% of their dialogue being perverts. Luckily this trait does kind of fade away as the stakes are raised, but it takes way too long. What really saves them is the fact that both of these characters have some of the better backstories in the game.
The elephant in the room is the Groundhog Day portion of the game. In theory I think it would be fun, but they do so little with the idea. Every old boss is fightable again as a side-quest during these portions, but there's only very brief dialogue that changes how these encounters happened the first time, and by the third loop sometimes they don't even change the dialogue at all, and your player characters are reacting in shock to things they've already been told 2 loops ago. Loops 4 and 5 do change things up a bit more by moving the bosses around and teaming them up together, but that mostly just results in a small cutscene where you get to see charatcers interacting who never did so in the first part of the game, and then a harder than usual boss fight. Not the worst extra content, but it really shouldn't have been 4 extra rewinds long just for that.
At least if you don't care about these optional rematches you can do the entire section in just a few hours, with the main story beats at least offering more palpable progress. It's pretty much due to this that I didn't lower the rating any more, because I could honestly have given the game a 10 at first, even with its unoriginal story, I found the rest of the game extremely fun and addicting. But the latter half was too drawn out and did way too little with the concept.
The titular mechanic adds a small bit of extra strategy, use bravely to risk a burst of power to end a boss fight, or even slice through mobs easily, or default to skip a turn but save the action for next turn, while acting as a regular block in an RPG. In fact even some classes are built on using turns for their move cost rather than MP or some such.
The soundtrack is fantastic, if a little repetitive.
Many of the towns look absolutely fantastic, though dungeons can be somewhat bland in appearance.
Gotta give the game credit for making the tedious part of JRPG's (grinding) so much more player friendly. Either the ability to set random encounter rate to 0, or the ability to fast forward battles and use "auto" mode, which will repeat the last actions each character was manually commanded. The latter includes the use of brave so you can just brave x4 attack everything with every character when going through generic enemies.
The story of the game is a way too close to how JRPG's are represented in basically any parody ever. Protagonist whose small childhood home was destroyed, with an obvious romantic connection to the leading female, who has a unique role in this worlds religion. Story is centred around crystals. Last boss is some kind of universe-destroying being. It's all some of the most derivative plot I've ever seen.
Luckily the characters make it all worth sitting through. I enjoyed
The elephant in the room is the Groundhog Day portion of the game. In theory I think it would be fun, but they do so little with the idea. Every old boss is fightable again as a side-quest during these portions, but there's only very brief dialogue that changes how these encounters happened the first time, and by the third loop sometimes they don't even change the dialogue at all, and your player characters are reacting in shock to things they've already been told 2 loops ago. Loops 4 and 5 do change things up a bit more by moving the bosses around and teaming them up together, but that mostly just results in a small cutscene where you get to see charatcers interacting who never did so in the first part of the game, and then a harder than usual boss fight. Not the worst extra content, but it really shouldn't have been 4 extra rewinds long just for that.
At least if you don't care about these optional rematches you can do the entire section in just a few hours, with the main story beats at least offering more palpable progress. It's pretty much due to this that I didn't lower the rating any more, because I could honestly have given the game a 10 at first, even with its unoriginal story, I found the rest of the game extremely fun and addicting. But the latter half was too drawn out and did way too little with the concept.