JRPGs are a genre that is divisive in part because it has some built in give and take. The often excessive length makes you care more for the characters, the world and the story being told. The simple mechanics provide a very low skill floor, but there's often room to display mastery.
First Departure R kinda turns all of that on its head.
The 20ish hour campaign has about 20 minutes total of character development and story combined. It's full of complex systems that don't get explained in the least, are extremely prone to failure(love that even a skill that you have leveled up to 10 on a character that has specific talents for it still fails like 30% of the time), and yet the gameplay never goes beyond mashing X and hoping the AI companions don't act too stupid.
Both the length/story problem is massively exacerbated by the fact at least a third of the game is backtracking, and yet you're expected to keep on leveling up as if you're climbing a progression curve. If you don't, you get stat checked into oblivion.
I eventually did a cheese quick level strat and the latter half of the game was mostly a breeze, despite continuing to be annoying(worth saying that the encounter rate is ridiculous, even with the Lv10 Scouting skill lowering encounters it's still like 3 a screen).
Another hilariously frustrating thing is how some enemies have movement skills that make them effectively impossible to hit, so there's a bunch of battles in which my option was to trigger the 10sec long escape function or take the gamble and spam X and watch as my entire party chases around the enemy and hope that turns out quicker. Since I'm a stubborn idiot I almost always did the latter... It almost never turned out quicker.
Overall... It's not a good experience. If it wasn't for the level strat I'd probably have dropped this, and it made me commit a major JRPG sin - knowingly skipping sidequests.
First Departure R kinda turns all of that on its head.
The 20ish hour campaign has about 20 minutes total of character development and story combined. It's full of complex systems that don't get explained in the least, are extremely prone to failure(love that even a skill that you have leveled up to 10 on a character that has specific talents for it still fails like 30% of the time), and yet the gameplay never goes beyond mashing X and hoping the AI companions don't act too stupid.
Both the length/story problem is massively exacerbated by the fact at least a third of the game is backtracking, and yet you're expected to keep on leveling up as if you're climbing a progression curve. If you don't, you get stat checked into oblivion.
I eventually did a cheese quick level strat and the latter half of the game was mostly a breeze, despite continuing to be annoying(worth saying that the encounter rate is ridiculous, even with the Lv10 Scouting skill lowering encounters it's still like 3 a screen).
Another hilariously frustrating thing is how some enemies have movement skills that make them effectively impossible to hit, so there's a bunch of battles in which my option was to trigger the 10sec long escape function or take the gamble and spam X and watch as my entire party chases around the enemy and hope that turns out quicker. Since I'm a stubborn idiot I almost always did the latter... It almost never turned out quicker.
Overall... It's not a good experience. If it wasn't for the level strat I'd probably have dropped this, and it made me commit a major JRPG sin - knowingly skipping sidequests.