It's hard for me to complain too much about my issues (glacial combat speed, massive RNG influence, questionable class balance) because I still mostly had a good time with this game. Early on it's a multilayered resource management game; proper attack placement and spell management is necessary both to avoid falling victim to attrition, and to make sure you don't spend so much money on healing that you can't afford the next set of gear. Once your party becomes strong (and rich) enough to break this dynamic, it shifts into a globe-trotting dungeoneering adventure more focused on labyrinthine dungeons, trying to blow through encounters as quickly as possible and not falling prey to that one encounter that can stunlock your entire party if it feels like it. It’s satisfying to realise that you aren’t actually in as much danger as you used to be, that your fighter can hit multiple times for some reason and blast any enemy into low orbit when they feel like it, and that there’s nothing stopping you stuffing 99 potions in your back pocket to make your white mage really sad for the rest of the game. The stripped-back presentation and story lets these mechanics bring your own personal triumphs and failures to the forefront as the driving narrative. Even something as simple as watching one of your party members hit level-ups a bit slower than everyone else can call back to that one time where they got instakilled or stunned for eight turns in a row three dungeons ago.

While I didn’t find the game incredibly engaging once the earlier parts were over since the combat itself never gets any more interesting (or faster), it's still hard not to respect it. Almost everything weird, dissatisfying or ‘loose’ makes a whole lot of sense if you consider there’s a good chance it’d be one of the first RPGs you played if you had it back in the day, and was likely designed around that idea. The fact that I was measurably underleveled despite fighting everything I saw is uniquely interesting if considering that failure could have been intended in its design - losing characters and running back to revive them means gaining more experience on everyone else in the process. And while it’s not a particularly hard game - speaking as someone who *was* measurably underleveled - a lot of the friction it threatens is probably far more present for someone playing an RPG for the first time. While I can’t say if the whole ‘built for new players’ assumption is actually true or not, operating under it makes the game come off as extremely confident in how it can make itself approachable without compromising the experience it's trying to provide. It’s a beginner-friendly game built to be able to onboard people into a simple RPG system, but it’s still a heavily player-driven adventure with a lot of room for failure and discovery.