i have a lot to say about this game but i dont know how to word a lot of it, to start l3 fast forward hurts my hands doubled with hard coded gamepad controls leaves a bad taste in my mouth, you have to work to get strong and the way they make you work also gets you to incentivize doing sidequests to get more students to in turn get trade shop and training rooms which feels a lot better but once you get there the flaws in the system really show the boss is too weak to really be engaging or its too hard ie the final final boss. (i could talk a while about just the final boss but it boils down to, can kill your whole party or like wipe you in 2 three actions, has an attack that brings you to 1 hp and spawns 7 adds with 70 thousand hp while he has 700 thousand hp so i did about 400 thousand damage via s crafts and the two offensive lost arts and then didnt have time to recover from going all in and just wiped or almost wiped and never recovered.) the narrative in this feels better too, infernal castle is a really cool dungeon even if the way you fight everyone but they werent going all in and people step in so you can continue feels bad they way the fight at the end (vita and crow) feels like the most well designed in terms of they are just strong enough and any of the valimar fights feel really well balanced even if i could easily play it safe and never lose the loop itself is just really fun. it does the same after the "final dungeon" theres an epilogue with the real final dungeon but this one left less of a bad taste in my mouth because of how cool zoa luciferous is and how its the big sendoff to the characters excluding rean and gets the brain thinking about where some of these characters went like i know fie shows up in kuro along with walterand renne the same way bleublanc show up in these games but where does everyone else go and like when we get the north ambria based game will we see luciola and more sara plus maybe schera. also i played the very beginning of hajimari to make sure it works and when i say scarlet mention she trained at the church it dawned on me that she shows up with wald and wazy to liberate crossbell and i think thats neat :), also mcburn is really cool even if his disinterested nature lets rean and co progress more than they probably should because it fits mcburn so well and how he mentions loewe really gets the brain juices going about how things interconnect but mostly it just gets me really excited to play 3 4 and hajimari especially with what ive seen of the updated graphics and uis.

really good for a first game in a series, gameplay systems are big improvements from everything before this game because of them going away from quartz only being stuff with affects that when combined right make spells into special quartz and spells being quarts themselves, it made it so much more fun to build physical characters even if it made magic builds kinda lacking because with the options being so expansive it makes you want to have your cake and eat it but that only results in the build being badly done like if you tried to make a healer that also has every final level spell like i did. the master quartz are also a lot more useful compared to azure where i only wanted to use 4 specific ones and no others in this i could see myself building using other master quarts if i were to do another playthrough. the story is very ehh the whole way but the ending is good even if everything inbetween the last dungeon and final boss really drags, it sets up the next few games really well and answered questions i had after finishing azure, all in all good gameplay ehh story with a good ending that sets up the next games really well which makes me really excited to play the rest of the series