Wish this game had auto-advanced dialogue in all cutscenes. Initially, you think it does, but after the first 2 hours, a lot of dialogue needs you to constantly press x to advance.
One thing I do like is that in the skill menu, you can tag 1 skill per character in your party and the game will notify you when you have enough skill points to purchase the skill.
Though, I'm not a fan of the game's lock-on mechanic. I played on manual. It uses an automatic hard lock-on that allows you to switch between targets except you can't turn off the lock-on and your character doesn't face the enemy that is locked on so it is very normal in this sense to attack and miss because your camera isn't always following the locked-on target as one would expect. However, it mostly works out because it's clear that the game doesn't want you to always move around during combat. In that case, doing combos and landing attacks works better because a lot of moves have gap closers. There is still the big annoyance of the fact that the camera doesn't follow the enemy that's locked on nor will it automatically change to the nearest enemy unless you press the lock-on button again.
Combos are handled in a manner where the game encourages you to not just spam the base three-hit combo nor should you spam the same power moves, aka artes. Instead, you want to mix them up because if you spam your base combo, your character stops moving for a full second after it ends and if you spam the artes within a four-combo string, they will do less damage to the enemy and have reduced stagger ability. On top of that, you have the burning sword which allows you to do special moves that deal more damage than a typical arte but at the cost of health instead of AG.
I was not a fan of the balseph boss. Readability is an issue due to the amount of bullshit effects that he does that obscures the screen.
Ganabelt is a tough boss, a very tough boss. I died 5 times back to back against him. The fight has the same issue as Balseph with too many effects happening on the screen at once. Ganabelt uses a lot of projectiles with particle effects and the game also specifically wants you to use boost attacks frequently to break his shield, this leads to a messy mirage of blue, red, & green lights all blocking the screen at once. Far too much visual noise in the game in general. It is disheartening in games like this where you can do 6 back-to-back super moves on a boss and you barely remove 1000 health in his 24000 health bar. This type of game design is not something that I like at all.
It's also from this point onward that I realized that every major humanoid boss will enter their super mode where they can't be stunned and they can spam astral artes once you reduce their health down to 50%, and many of them will typically take 10 - 15 seconds to charge their ultimate move in which they're stationary and you're allowed to do a bunch of free hits on them but you can't interrupt the ultimate move. Ultimate moves typically cover a large portion of the battlefield with a huge damage area of effect attack. The issue with this is that while you can't interrupt them, they can certainly interrupt you because these ultimate moves always play an unskippable cutscene. There are quite a few moves (boost strikes and mystic artes) in this game that have unskippable cutscenes mid-combat that have pros and cons. The big pro with them is that they typically do a good amount of damage, the bad news is that they interrupt whatever the party is doing and reposition the enemy. If you or an AI party member is doing a high damage attack, charging up an arte, trying to heal, or mid-combo, the cutscene will play and completely stop that, and once the cutscene is over, it will move the enemy away and reposition the camera too. The fortunate thing is that it also resets the enemy's movement so you can get breathing room if a group of enemies or a boss is kicking ass. It's shit though if you're doing really well and you have to be forced to stop because an AI party member did a mystic arte. Fortunately, you can disable those artes from AI usage like you can disable just about every other arte in the game. It's just typically beneficial to enable them because of damage and usefulness.
Most side quests are broken up into kill all enemies, fetch items, or heal people quests. They're not spectacular, however, I love the fact that you can complete some side quest objectives before you even meet the quest giver. So if a dragon is terrorizing an area and you encounter the dragon and kill it or if you went to an underground cavern and killed a powerful zeugel - then later on stumble on the quest giver and they ask you to kill a dragon in the field or kill a zeugel because merchants want to use an underground tunnel for quick travel, your party members will tell the quest giver that you already killed the dragon or zeugles in the underground area. Too bad main quests aren't like this, they're more linear and their quest items and objectives won't even appear until you progress in the story. For such a long game, there isn't much enemy variety. I understand this because each party members boost attack directly counters or interrupts a specific enemy type but you quickly realize that you're fighting the exact same enemy over and over and it eventually got annoying. It's not the worst implementation of low enemy variety but directly coming from Kingdom Hearts 1.5, it was a surprise.
Overall though, the game world design and quest structure are very linear - not in the shimmy through tight corners like FF7 remake linear - but in the quest objectives only have one way to complete them and only one area you can through. In the manner that even though the main plot of the game is to kill 5 Renan lords and liberate 5 realms of the Dahna homeworld - you will only do it in the exact order that is outlined in the game. Even within the main quests, you will be obstructed by invisible walls for areas that the game doesn't want you to go to yet.
However, I do like the progression systems in this game. They're divided into levels, skills, and arte proficiency.
You have levels that you progress through by gaining xp which increases your 6 stats. XP is only gained in battle.
Each party member has their skills divided into multiple skill trees. Most skill trees are unlocked by completing objectives like cooking x meals, saving x NPCs, finding x owls, creating x weapons, destroying armor with your arte x times, etc., and individual skills are unlocked by using skill points. Skill points (SP) are gained by winning in combat and completing quests. So they're separate from just leveling up. Then you have your arte proficiencies which is where you increase the efficiency of your activated skills by using them more in combat. The only downside is that you won't unlock certain skill trees till you progress deep into the main story because certain side quests, NPCs, recipes, owls, etc. aren't encountered until then and this is a very linear game.
Then after that, you have combat points and the battle chain bonus. After every combat encounter, you are graded based on how quickly you killed your enemy, what moves you used, whether your party was knocked out, etc. You gain XP and SP, then you get a multiplier bonus to XP & SP if you did well and you get none if you did bad such as winning but having all party members knocked out. What the battle chain bonus does is give you even more bonuses and a greater item drop chance on top of the previously mentioned bonus if you keep on doing well in many combat encounters within a short period. I'm surprised more JRPGs don't have this mechanic because it ridiculously alleviates how long one spends grinding if they choose to do so while also giving an even greater incentive to continue combat. It only sucks that the battle chain isn't unlocked as a mechanic until you reach the 3rd realm of the game. Overall, leveling up and upgrading skills is very slow in this game. You will still gain just enough XP & SP to be roughly the same level as the major boss of the main area/dungeon. Outside of that, even defeating 20+ enemies that are each 20 levels higher than your party won't net you 1 level up. All of this level pacing gets thrown off within the end game. Right about that point you'll unlock side quests that will give up to double XP. Those quests have some of the hardest boss fights in the end game and you'll likely lose them if you aren't on the same level as the boss and if you lack healing items. By that point, all that's left is to beat the game. When you get into the post-game content, however, this game has a good amount of it. You can now fight against all the previous major boss fights except this time they're all buffed to the max level of 99. There are 6 new dungeons in alternate worlds and four new real boss fights in this, the other two are rehashes of bosses in the base game. It is important that I point out that leveling went through the roof in post-game. Within 4 hours, I was able to get 30 levels in the post-game. That's more gains just in the post-game with no farming, just fighting through each area once and their boss. It's a bit ridiculous because this pacing would've been significantly more rewarding for the preceding 100 hours. On top of that, you unlock the "devil arms" for defeating each of the bosses of this area with one caveat. 5/6 of these weapons have worse stats than the next best weapons in the game, but devil arms can be upgraded to 9999 attack, elemental attack, & penetration. They increase in all these values for every enemy you kill. I didn't waste time doing this because by this point I had already beaten every boss in the game and had no interest in farming low-level enemies to increase damage. My only thought from there is, why not introduce devil arms at an early or midpoint of the game? From there, you'd have more incentive to try using a weapon that starts with lower stats but can eventually become one of the best weapons in the game, instead of getting it after you already beat the game. On top of that, there's a new game+ with many difficulty modes. I haven't tried the hardest difficulty mode, just hope it isn't BS with giving bullet sponge enemies even more health.
Even as a party-based action RPG they've been able to severely minimize how much micromanagement you have over your party by giving you a heap of options. You can play the game manually, semi-auto where you don't need to control your movement in combat, or auto where the game plays out combat for your main character and party without your inputs. You can switch to any of your party members mid-combat and take control of them or you can leave them to act on their own. The upside of not controlling your party members is that they have access to all their active skills/artes and can use them as they please, if you control them you only have access to six ground-activated artes and six activated air artes. The AI is good enough to control your other party members good enough to fight on their own if set to manual, however, when set to auto with AI controlling the entire party there are things that aren't good enough. For one, I realized that the AI won't use dodge counterattacks, counter edge, boost attacks, or a boost strike which is weird as fuck. I understand why you wouldn't want AI doing boost attacks because they're more situational and take a while to regenerate, but the player would always want to use a boost strike on normal enemies to instant kill them and always want to do counterattacks and counteredge due to the fact that they instantly cross the battlefield to the enemy and have huge invincibility frames.
They go even further by giving you a strategy menu where you can detail exactly how you want your computer-controlled party to fight with tactics such as "use the skill "steel" once when encountering an enemy that is at least 1 level higher" or "use an ailment removing arte on anyone affected with an ailment while having 25% or more CP". It's great and I'm surprised more of these non-turn-based party-based RPGs don't have this. Dragon Age: Origins did but I wished the FF7 remake had this.
However, the game starts to spoil itself later on after the fourth major region by having a lot of combat encounters back to back. The hitboxes and button presses in this game are imprecise at times, and once you lose Shionne you lose your best healer. Dohalim isn't as good of a healer as Shionne because the game's AI wants him to engage in combat more frequently than her, even if you set the strategy to focus on healing.
Even earlier than that, after the 3rd major region, the game massively inflates the health of every single enemy. Combat now becomes extremely tedious because you need to mash a large series of buttons constantly to take down enemies that don't necessarily require better tactics than what you had in the early portion. It makes combat incredibly tiring and especially annoying. Seriously, you'll fight bosses with 150,000 - 200,000 health where your regular attacks do 90 - 150 damage and they can do 1000 - 2000 damage to your meager 2800 health bar with one hit. Far too many damage sponges as the game progresses.
This is a good time to start discussing healing and the CP system. Healing through artes/spells/skills in this game is done with a shared pool called CP. CP is also consumed by non-combat optional things like breaking scripted boulders, ice, magic barriers, and/or healing people. The only way you can heal without using CP is either sleeping in an inn, or camp, using restorative items that you buy or find in the world - though there are a few of them, and healing in a magic light right before major boss fights. This sort of healing makes you have to constantly consider how much you want to heal because you have a limit to how many healing items you can hold at a specific time. It becomes significantly more punishing mid-game because of the lengthy dungeons with no camps/inns, very few healing item drops that aren't locked behind a CP-required interaction event, and the large number of damage sponge enemies you have to fight. While you can fast travel out of dungeons and fast travel into certain floors of dungeons, doing so will respawn every enemy. This creates a weird loop where you must be fairly prepared before going into one of the major dungeons, you'll kill many enemies and eventually fight 1 or 2 major bosses and a few minibosses, get good item loot, but you can't forge those better weapons and buy the better armor unless you leave mid-dungeon so you're strong enough to fight the bosses. Without doing so, those bosses are an annoying affair with huge hitboxes and massive health bars. So you're heavily incentivized to beat every major side monster boss because they will expand your CP.
As for money, I think the game does a fine job with the economy. You have things you should be buying because forging weapons costs gold, creating accessories costs gold, and buying items costs gold. You have to forge all the weapons in the game since there are no weapon drops. While there are few pieces of armor you can find in the world, most of the armor you wear has to be bought. Same for restorative items. If you don't farm, early - mid-game you'll have to somewhat spend time worrying about not having the absolute best gear because you likely don't have enough gold or you haven't encountered the enemies that drop the necessary crafting items for better weapons. Mid-late game, however, you'll typically have more than enough gold to buy all you need because the lengthy dungeons have huge stashes of gold and items to sell.
So far my biggest gripes with the overall story is how it treats its setting, side characters, and pacing. As I progressed, I realized that each subsequent realm in the game engages in some form of oppressive government between the renans and the Dhanans.
The first realm was a slave state where the renan lord was cruel and harsh and ruled over every dhanan with an iron fist and kept them in chains. The second realm was more of a police state with a Gestapo in which the Dhanans feared for their lives and snitched on their fellow countrymen for food and safety but the dictator restricted them from owning things and letting his Gestapo run the place arresting and torturing people. The third has a benevolent Renan ruler that liberated the dhanans from slavery and gave them equal treatment and position within his realm 7 years prior. Due to that, the Dhanans don't want to leave the realm nor do they want to support a major rebellion. The fourth realm's rebellion was led by a successful dictator who sacrificed his people to drive out their old lord, but he ruled with an iron fist. The big issue with all of this is that all these ideas aren't explored in-depth and just feel very surface-level because we don't spend too much time within all these areas - just about 5 or 6 hours total - and all the side quests are very simple as previously mentioned and don't aid in large scale worldbuilding or characterization. Each of these realms could be its own game or could be vastly longer, but by the time you follow the main quest and kill the lord of the realm, the only reason you need to go back is typically one side quest that's about the aftermath of liberating that specific realm because the story is urging you to move forward > kill lord > and immediately go to the next region. There should be more engaging side content revolving around the setting because the premise in itself is interesting to require that. Insofar as dialogue and character interactions are concerned, there are 300 skits in this game which are pretty much companion cutscenes where they discuss and comment on the other characters, events, locations, politics, and their feelings toward what's happening within the story. It's great because you get to know more about what your party thinks and it provides large amounts of exposition. Just think this sort of thing would be better if it was done in a side quest or in a more environmental manner from the other characters within the story than short stilted cutscenes from your party.
Ultimately, the game was vastly longer than I expected. I ended at a little over 100+ hours which I didn't expect. I am not a fan of the latter third of the story with all the alien, conspiracy, and friendship nonsense that the game devolved into. It was almost a very expected result according to the battle shonen I've played. I don't know why they didn't just spend more time giving the previous main plot of slavery, Dahna, and Rena depth instead of the whole great spirit manipulating aliens manipulating humans thing. By the end game the game dumps a lot of exposition through many cutscenes and hallway > loading screen dungeons while having a very lame villain in Vholran. I didn't talk about accessories because I don't think there's much to talk about. It's the only real way to build your party that doesn't always have one good choice. It will make you properly strong in the endgame once you start finding 5* ores to create accessories. I ended up enjoying my time with the game.
One thing I do like is that in the skill menu, you can tag 1 skill per character in your party and the game will notify you when you have enough skill points to purchase the skill.
Though, I'm not a fan of the game's lock-on mechanic. I played on manual. It uses an automatic hard lock-on that allows you to switch between targets except you can't turn off the lock-on and your character doesn't face the enemy that is locked on so it is very normal in this sense to attack and miss because your camera isn't always following the locked-on target as one would expect. However, it mostly works out because it's clear that the game doesn't want you to always move around during combat. In that case, doing combos and landing attacks works better because a lot of moves have gap closers. There is still the big annoyance of the fact that the camera doesn't follow the enemy that's locked on nor will it automatically change to the nearest enemy unless you press the lock-on button again.
Combos are handled in a manner where the game encourages you to not just spam the base three-hit combo nor should you spam the same power moves, aka artes. Instead, you want to mix them up because if you spam your base combo, your character stops moving for a full second after it ends and if you spam the artes within a four-combo string, they will do less damage to the enemy and have reduced stagger ability. On top of that, you have the burning sword which allows you to do special moves that deal more damage than a typical arte but at the cost of health instead of AG.
I was not a fan of the balseph boss. Readability is an issue due to the amount of bullshit effects that he does that obscures the screen.
Ganabelt is a tough boss, a very tough boss. I died 5 times back to back against him. The fight has the same issue as Balseph with too many effects happening on the screen at once. Ganabelt uses a lot of projectiles with particle effects and the game also specifically wants you to use boost attacks frequently to break his shield, this leads to a messy mirage of blue, red, & green lights all blocking the screen at once. Far too much visual noise in the game in general. It is disheartening in games like this where you can do 6 back-to-back super moves on a boss and you barely remove 1000 health in his 24000 health bar. This type of game design is not something that I like at all.
It's also from this point onward that I realized that every major humanoid boss will enter their super mode where they can't be stunned and they can spam astral artes once you reduce their health down to 50%, and many of them will typically take 10 - 15 seconds to charge their ultimate move in which they're stationary and you're allowed to do a bunch of free hits on them but you can't interrupt the ultimate move. Ultimate moves typically cover a large portion of the battlefield with a huge damage area of effect attack. The issue with this is that while you can't interrupt them, they can certainly interrupt you because these ultimate moves always play an unskippable cutscene. There are quite a few moves (boost strikes and mystic artes) in this game that have unskippable cutscenes mid-combat that have pros and cons. The big pro with them is that they typically do a good amount of damage, the bad news is that they interrupt whatever the party is doing and reposition the enemy. If you or an AI party member is doing a high damage attack, charging up an arte, trying to heal, or mid-combo, the cutscene will play and completely stop that, and once the cutscene is over, it will move the enemy away and reposition the camera too. The fortunate thing is that it also resets the enemy's movement so you can get breathing room if a group of enemies or a boss is kicking ass. It's shit though if you're doing really well and you have to be forced to stop because an AI party member did a mystic arte. Fortunately, you can disable those artes from AI usage like you can disable just about every other arte in the game. It's just typically beneficial to enable them because of damage and usefulness.
Most side quests are broken up into kill all enemies, fetch items, or heal people quests. They're not spectacular, however, I love the fact that you can complete some side quest objectives before you even meet the quest giver. So if a dragon is terrorizing an area and you encounter the dragon and kill it or if you went to an underground cavern and killed a powerful zeugel - then later on stumble on the quest giver and they ask you to kill a dragon in the field or kill a zeugel because merchants want to use an underground tunnel for quick travel, your party members will tell the quest giver that you already killed the dragon or zeugles in the underground area. Too bad main quests aren't like this, they're more linear and their quest items and objectives won't even appear until you progress in the story. For such a long game, there isn't much enemy variety. I understand this because each party members boost attack directly counters or interrupts a specific enemy type but you quickly realize that you're fighting the exact same enemy over and over and it eventually got annoying. It's not the worst implementation of low enemy variety but directly coming from Kingdom Hearts 1.5, it was a surprise.
Overall though, the game world design and quest structure are very linear - not in the shimmy through tight corners like FF7 remake linear - but in the quest objectives only have one way to complete them and only one area you can through. In the manner that even though the main plot of the game is to kill 5 Renan lords and liberate 5 realms of the Dahna homeworld - you will only do it in the exact order that is outlined in the game. Even within the main quests, you will be obstructed by invisible walls for areas that the game doesn't want you to go to yet.
However, I do like the progression systems in this game. They're divided into levels, skills, and arte proficiency.
You have levels that you progress through by gaining xp which increases your 6 stats. XP is only gained in battle.
Each party member has their skills divided into multiple skill trees. Most skill trees are unlocked by completing objectives like cooking x meals, saving x NPCs, finding x owls, creating x weapons, destroying armor with your arte x times, etc., and individual skills are unlocked by using skill points. Skill points (SP) are gained by winning in combat and completing quests. So they're separate from just leveling up. Then you have your arte proficiencies which is where you increase the efficiency of your activated skills by using them more in combat. The only downside is that you won't unlock certain skill trees till you progress deep into the main story because certain side quests, NPCs, recipes, owls, etc. aren't encountered until then and this is a very linear game.
Then after that, you have combat points and the battle chain bonus. After every combat encounter, you are graded based on how quickly you killed your enemy, what moves you used, whether your party was knocked out, etc. You gain XP and SP, then you get a multiplier bonus to XP & SP if you did well and you get none if you did bad such as winning but having all party members knocked out. What the battle chain bonus does is give you even more bonuses and a greater item drop chance on top of the previously mentioned bonus if you keep on doing well in many combat encounters within a short period. I'm surprised more JRPGs don't have this mechanic because it ridiculously alleviates how long one spends grinding if they choose to do so while also giving an even greater incentive to continue combat. It only sucks that the battle chain isn't unlocked as a mechanic until you reach the 3rd realm of the game. Overall, leveling up and upgrading skills is very slow in this game. You will still gain just enough XP & SP to be roughly the same level as the major boss of the main area/dungeon. Outside of that, even defeating 20+ enemies that are each 20 levels higher than your party won't net you 1 level up. All of this level pacing gets thrown off within the end game. Right about that point you'll unlock side quests that will give up to double XP. Those quests have some of the hardest boss fights in the end game and you'll likely lose them if you aren't on the same level as the boss and if you lack healing items. By that point, all that's left is to beat the game. When you get into the post-game content, however, this game has a good amount of it. You can now fight against all the previous major boss fights except this time they're all buffed to the max level of 99. There are 6 new dungeons in alternate worlds and four new real boss fights in this, the other two are rehashes of bosses in the base game. It is important that I point out that leveling went through the roof in post-game. Within 4 hours, I was able to get 30 levels in the post-game. That's more gains just in the post-game with no farming, just fighting through each area once and their boss. It's a bit ridiculous because this pacing would've been significantly more rewarding for the preceding 100 hours. On top of that, you unlock the "devil arms" for defeating each of the bosses of this area with one caveat. 5/6 of these weapons have worse stats than the next best weapons in the game, but devil arms can be upgraded to 9999 attack, elemental attack, & penetration. They increase in all these values for every enemy you kill. I didn't waste time doing this because by this point I had already beaten every boss in the game and had no interest in farming low-level enemies to increase damage. My only thought from there is, why not introduce devil arms at an early or midpoint of the game? From there, you'd have more incentive to try using a weapon that starts with lower stats but can eventually become one of the best weapons in the game, instead of getting it after you already beat the game. On top of that, there's a new game+ with many difficulty modes. I haven't tried the hardest difficulty mode, just hope it isn't BS with giving bullet sponge enemies even more health.
Even as a party-based action RPG they've been able to severely minimize how much micromanagement you have over your party by giving you a heap of options. You can play the game manually, semi-auto where you don't need to control your movement in combat, or auto where the game plays out combat for your main character and party without your inputs. You can switch to any of your party members mid-combat and take control of them or you can leave them to act on their own. The upside of not controlling your party members is that they have access to all their active skills/artes and can use them as they please, if you control them you only have access to six ground-activated artes and six activated air artes. The AI is good enough to control your other party members good enough to fight on their own if set to manual, however, when set to auto with AI controlling the entire party there are things that aren't good enough. For one, I realized that the AI won't use dodge counterattacks, counter edge, boost attacks, or a boost strike which is weird as fuck. I understand why you wouldn't want AI doing boost attacks because they're more situational and take a while to regenerate, but the player would always want to use a boost strike on normal enemies to instant kill them and always want to do counterattacks and counteredge due to the fact that they instantly cross the battlefield to the enemy and have huge invincibility frames.
They go even further by giving you a strategy menu where you can detail exactly how you want your computer-controlled party to fight with tactics such as "use the skill "steel" once when encountering an enemy that is at least 1 level higher" or "use an ailment removing arte on anyone affected with an ailment while having 25% or more CP". It's great and I'm surprised more of these non-turn-based party-based RPGs don't have this. Dragon Age: Origins did but I wished the FF7 remake had this.
However, the game starts to spoil itself later on after the fourth major region by having a lot of combat encounters back to back. The hitboxes and button presses in this game are imprecise at times, and once you lose Shionne you lose your best healer. Dohalim isn't as good of a healer as Shionne because the game's AI wants him to engage in combat more frequently than her, even if you set the strategy to focus on healing.
Even earlier than that, after the 3rd major region, the game massively inflates the health of every single enemy. Combat now becomes extremely tedious because you need to mash a large series of buttons constantly to take down enemies that don't necessarily require better tactics than what you had in the early portion. It makes combat incredibly tiring and especially annoying. Seriously, you'll fight bosses with 150,000 - 200,000 health where your regular attacks do 90 - 150 damage and they can do 1000 - 2000 damage to your meager 2800 health bar with one hit. Far too many damage sponges as the game progresses.
This is a good time to start discussing healing and the CP system. Healing through artes/spells/skills in this game is done with a shared pool called CP. CP is also consumed by non-combat optional things like breaking scripted boulders, ice, magic barriers, and/or healing people. The only way you can heal without using CP is either sleeping in an inn, or camp, using restorative items that you buy or find in the world - though there are a few of them, and healing in a magic light right before major boss fights. This sort of healing makes you have to constantly consider how much you want to heal because you have a limit to how many healing items you can hold at a specific time. It becomes significantly more punishing mid-game because of the lengthy dungeons with no camps/inns, very few healing item drops that aren't locked behind a CP-required interaction event, and the large number of damage sponge enemies you have to fight. While you can fast travel out of dungeons and fast travel into certain floors of dungeons, doing so will respawn every enemy. This creates a weird loop where you must be fairly prepared before going into one of the major dungeons, you'll kill many enemies and eventually fight 1 or 2 major bosses and a few minibosses, get good item loot, but you can't forge those better weapons and buy the better armor unless you leave mid-dungeon so you're strong enough to fight the bosses. Without doing so, those bosses are an annoying affair with huge hitboxes and massive health bars. So you're heavily incentivized to beat every major side monster boss because they will expand your CP.
As for money, I think the game does a fine job with the economy. You have things you should be buying because forging weapons costs gold, creating accessories costs gold, and buying items costs gold. You have to forge all the weapons in the game since there are no weapon drops. While there are few pieces of armor you can find in the world, most of the armor you wear has to be bought. Same for restorative items. If you don't farm, early - mid-game you'll have to somewhat spend time worrying about not having the absolute best gear because you likely don't have enough gold or you haven't encountered the enemies that drop the necessary crafting items for better weapons. Mid-late game, however, you'll typically have more than enough gold to buy all you need because the lengthy dungeons have huge stashes of gold and items to sell.
So far my biggest gripes with the overall story is how it treats its setting, side characters, and pacing. As I progressed, I realized that each subsequent realm in the game engages in some form of oppressive government between the renans and the Dhanans.
The first realm was a slave state where the renan lord was cruel and harsh and ruled over every dhanan with an iron fist and kept them in chains. The second realm was more of a police state with a Gestapo in which the Dhanans feared for their lives and snitched on their fellow countrymen for food and safety but the dictator restricted them from owning things and letting his Gestapo run the place arresting and torturing people. The third has a benevolent Renan ruler that liberated the dhanans from slavery and gave them equal treatment and position within his realm 7 years prior. Due to that, the Dhanans don't want to leave the realm nor do they want to support a major rebellion. The fourth realm's rebellion was led by a successful dictator who sacrificed his people to drive out their old lord, but he ruled with an iron fist. The big issue with all of this is that all these ideas aren't explored in-depth and just feel very surface-level because we don't spend too much time within all these areas - just about 5 or 6 hours total - and all the side quests are very simple as previously mentioned and don't aid in large scale worldbuilding or characterization. Each of these realms could be its own game or could be vastly longer, but by the time you follow the main quest and kill the lord of the realm, the only reason you need to go back is typically one side quest that's about the aftermath of liberating that specific realm because the story is urging you to move forward > kill lord > and immediately go to the next region. There should be more engaging side content revolving around the setting because the premise in itself is interesting to require that. Insofar as dialogue and character interactions are concerned, there are 300 skits in this game which are pretty much companion cutscenes where they discuss and comment on the other characters, events, locations, politics, and their feelings toward what's happening within the story. It's great because you get to know more about what your party thinks and it provides large amounts of exposition. Just think this sort of thing would be better if it was done in a side quest or in a more environmental manner from the other characters within the story than short stilted cutscenes from your party.
Ultimately, the game was vastly longer than I expected. I ended at a little over 100+ hours which I didn't expect. I am not a fan of the latter third of the story with all the alien, conspiracy, and friendship nonsense that the game devolved into. It was almost a very expected result according to the battle shonen I've played. I don't know why they didn't just spend more time giving the previous main plot of slavery, Dahna, and Rena depth instead of the whole great spirit manipulating aliens manipulating humans thing. By the end game the game dumps a lot of exposition through many cutscenes and hallway > loading screen dungeons while having a very lame villain in Vholran. I didn't talk about accessories because I don't think there's much to talk about. It's the only real way to build your party that doesn't always have one good choice. It will make you properly strong in the endgame once you start finding 5* ores to create accessories. I ended up enjoying my time with the game.