Hits the perfect middleground between the more serious high fantasy fare of stuff like FFT and Tactics Ogre, and the focus on customizability and malleable RPG mechanics that the FFTA games had. Feels like your decisions genuinely matter and impact the story here. Also really feels like positioning and direction facing is balanced to matter a lot more here than in its sister titles, which is an adjustment I had a lot of fun with.
I think the most genius game design decision here, though, is to save EXP and levels gained from failed attempts at chapters. The game is, in response, balanced such that you'll easily become underleveled if you don't die much and if you don't do the optional challenges, but if you die enough times the game will be clearable for most anyone. I love it. It allowed me to have a fun, constantly exciting time with this, and I also know that my 10 year old self wouldn't have been stuck at one of the later chapters for hours and hours on end before restarting the game entirely because it would have gotten easier with each subsequent attempt.
The game ultimately starts to get slower and more monotonous towards the end, unfortunately, though. Well, kinda. I actually realized that this isn't as big of a problem as I initially thought when I reached the final boss and remembered that it has the option to speed through animations which makes that much less of an issue. So it's probably still a bit of an issue, but really what happened is that my dumbass sat through hours of repeated battle animations for no reason. Ah well!
I think the most genius game design decision here, though, is to save EXP and levels gained from failed attempts at chapters. The game is, in response, balanced such that you'll easily become underleveled if you don't die much and if you don't do the optional challenges, but if you die enough times the game will be clearable for most anyone. I love it. It allowed me to have a fun, constantly exciting time with this, and I also know that my 10 year old self wouldn't have been stuck at one of the later chapters for hours and hours on end before restarting the game entirely because it would have gotten easier with each subsequent attempt.
The game ultimately starts to get slower and more monotonous towards the end, unfortunately, though. Well, kinda. I actually realized that this isn't as big of a problem as I initially thought when I reached the final boss and remembered that it has the option to speed through animations which makes that much less of an issue. So it's probably still a bit of an issue, but really what happened is that my dumbass sat through hours of repeated battle animations for no reason. Ah well!