What a weird game. The first in the series since Sky 3 that doesn’t really belong to an arc proper. Actually, this game suffers from several of the same problems that Sky 3 did. It’s this weird, vestigial epilogue stapled onto the end of an arc that already had a pretty satisfying conclusion, both narratively and ludically. As a result, the game kind of has a hard time justifying its existence. It wants to spend more time with everyone in this dauntingly huge cast, but it doesn’t give any of them (with the exception of C and his party) anything interesting to do, say, or think, because all of their character arcs were completed in previous games.

Speaking of the cast, this game is also the poster child for power and scope creep. A big part of my enjoyment of RPGs comes from the characters growing stronger over the course of the game, learning new abilities that add new layers of complexity to combat. Every character in this game starts at level 100 with all their abilities already unlocked, so combat ends up feeling really stale by the end. Add onto that the fact that you’re pretty frequently switching back and forth between entirely different parties whose equipment loadouts require constant management, and you wind up with a game that just feels like a chore.

I think the game would have been so much better if the devs had simply cut out Rean and Lloyd’s completely extraneous storylines and just focused in on C and his gang. I’m hoping that the switch to a new setting and cast in the next game does just that.