The gameplay is way better than the sky games but the story isnt as good as FC. It's missing the sense of adventure that game had, moves MUCH slower, and a lot of the story beats kinda feel like rehashes of Sky. I already felt kinda burned out on Crossbell City by the 2nd chapter and found myself really missing the structure of going from city to city, exploring new areas and meeting new people. There are a handful of really great moments though, and the game plays its small scale to its strengths by allowing you to get very close to the main party and the city's inhabitants. It's also probably due to the lower amount of overworld maps that the dungeons have MUCH better design and feel like proper JRPG dungeons for the first time in the series, but sadly there aren't very many of them.

The combat is fantastic but it is an absolute shame how little it's used. The dialogue:gameplay ratio is WHACK compared to the Sky games, and theres a lot of time spent where nothing is really happening. For reference of how much time is spent out of combat this time around, in my FC playthrough (50 hours) I fought 720 battles, and in Zero (70 hours) I fought 690 battles. Like always, exploring and talking to every npc, keeping up with their stories and getting to know them is a blast and one of my favorite parts of these games, but it was made a good bit more tedious now that they're all centered in one big city.

Despite my grievances, I still had a lot of fun playing it and never really felt bored despite feeling underwhelmed sometimes. The best part of this game is the main cast, Lloyd, Randy, and Tio. There's also some boring girl that follows them around but we don't have to talk about her. Supporting cast doesn't really live up to Sky's (Grace is far less fun than Nial and Dorothy for example), but there are some really fun characters like Ilya and Lechter. Excited for Azure and hope it has better pacing/more interesting things happening.

(Btw this would prolly be a 7.5 rather than a 7 but ya know 5 star rating system)